the people at GHX had not asked the big question of “What if we did business differently?” they wouldn’t be tracking to take billions of dollars out of healthcare for the foreseeable future. If Richard Reese had not been open to asking how the internet could be useful to his traditional wholesale supply business, he would never have become the obvious choice for Amazon. If Clarence Saunders had not been curious enough to not only explore other ways groceries could be bought, but even go as far as to design a contraption to enable those other ways, shopping would be a very different experience today. And if Homeplus had not asked how it could take the converging disruptions of the internet, shopping behaviors, and cultural norms, it would never have discovered how to create whole new shopping models for the next generation of grocery buyers.
If you have the decision-making authority to make investments, invest in the curious questions, rather than proving what you already know to be true. Anyone can prove that their assumptions are correct. History generally provides plenty of data for them. But in our opinion, paying to have history researched and restated is often a waste of time and money (although we see it happen all the time). Instead, put your resources toward exploring the unknown, the ideas that challenge those very assumptions you may want to prove.
When you are ready to invest to satisfy your curiosity, take a page from Homeplus and put your money where it matters. Homeplus could have commissioned a study on how to drive more people into the grocery store after work and then launched a splashy subway campaign promoting the value of hitting the store on the way home. Instead, it chose to explore something new and different, unlike anything people had seen before, and the value it got out of pushing to a new edge of disruption has been ongoing for years now, far beyond the original investment in the pilot.
Interestingly enough, for Homeplus, despite staggering adoption numbers at first, the subway experiment was not a complete success, at least not initially. It turned out that there were some serious flaws in the initial model, and customers quickly fell off after the first experience with the new shopping approach. Homeplus still had to spend some time learning about what was happening on its edge of disruption, so it could anchor its position as the leader in the online grocery shopping experience. We’ll dive into that in more detail in the next chapter when we unpack the challenges of learning about your edge of disruption. Even Piggly Wiggly continued to tweak and develop the shopping model that rocked the world in 1916 (earning multiple patents along the way). That’s why defining your edge of disruption is step one on the journey; learning about your edge is the next.
Bring It to Life . . .
1. Develop a “disruption chart,” listing or visually plotting the most likely disruptors your industry will face in one year, three years, and five years. Think in terms of macro-trends (social, political, economic, community, and cultural), internal developments (workforce, products, geography, structure, and leadership), and outside developments (competition, customers, regulation, technology, and supply chain).
2. Using your disruption chart, select the top five disruptors and develop three possible scenarios of how your industry will evolve over the coming years.
a. Host a diverse team of creative thinkers to engage in debate over the scenarios you have developed. The goal of the discussion should be to challenge assumptions and produce specific outcomes that the group believes are viable.
b. As you debate, compile a list of the assumptions that are the strongest in pushing you to accept or reject potential scenarios and opportunities that exist within them.
c. Do a quick “alternative assumption” on each of these that is both optimistic and future oriented.
3. Using your new assumptions, refine the scenarios.
4. Based on these new possibilities, and coming from a place of optimism, what is the one edge of disruption that you believe offers the best opportunity to evolve your existing capabilities in a way that creates more value for your team, your organization, your company, and your customers?
5. Take that edge of disruption and identify three unanswered questions you could explore in a more intentional way.
6. Identify the people and process you could engage to explore these unanswered questions.
7. START exploring!
LEARN: Establish Your Point of View
WHEN HOMEPLUS DEFINED the customer shopping experience as its edge of disruption, it invested in a six-week pilot that had remarkable success. The pilot was designed to interact with shoppers in a new way, and once an order was placed through the app, within three hours, Homeplus would have the order at the customer’s door, guaranteed. Brilliant, right? The pilot sparked a massive public reaction, and Homeplus saw a spike in sales, but consumers overwhelmingly indicated that a three-hour delivery time was too long, and the spike quickly died down after the “first impression” bubble burst.
Before you become distracted by an internal soliloquy about the state of modern society and our impatience, it’s important to understand that it was not that three hours was not an extraordinary logistical achievement, but rather that it was too long a window of time to not know when the Homeplus delivery guy would be at your home. It is understandable that the Homeplus team assumed customers would be wowed by the three-hour delivery window, and that they overlooked the effect of the length of that window on customers’ lives. This is why Homeplus’s willingness to take an intelligent and controlled risk—and actually test the concept in the market—was such a strong way to learn at its edge of disruption.
TAKE INTELLIGENT RISKS IN THE REAL WORLD
Homeplus had found a new edge of disruption—e-tailing. But it had to learn more about it to elevate its perspective and fully solve the challenge. Some investigating turned up interesting results. The company took a deep look at the market demographics for its targeted consumers. Residents of Seoul already work some of the longest hours on earth.1 When they aren’t working, they generally prefer to spend time in their neighborhood rather than at home. Given those cultural norms, three hours was too long a window; it did not offer enough flexibility to accommodate the typical lifestyle of the customers. So, after the initial six-week trial, Homeplus began tweaking the approach, looking at different delivery options and pickup stations, gradually growing its presence in the e-tailing space based on what it had learned. The original idea was ultimately a market failure in some ways, but what it taught Homeplus was invaluable. The knowledge helped Homeplus to develop a strong point of view on the future of the customer experience in buying groceries and the role Homeplus could play in that space. Thus the Homeplus leadership team invested in a relatively controlled, intelligent risk in exchange for valuable insight, without betting the farm. It shows the value of courage, optimism, and curiosity in defining a company’s edge of disruption, and the need to push further into learning about the edge for a fairly traditional industry.
If a grocer can do it in the face of massive legacy real estate and capital investments, so can you. Think about your team, your region, your function, or your company—wherever you have line of sight. What controlled risks could you take to learn how you could matter more to your internal or external customers?
You might be thinking that grocery is one thing, but your business is far more complex than selling fruit to people (and trust us, so is the grocery business). The truth is, everyone has these challenges, but exceptional companies
