BREAKING AND REBUILDING
Ayse Birsel
Time of crisis is when you deconstruct and reconstruct.
Leadership in crisis is a moment of forced deconstruction. Whether you like it or not, the crisis now is forcing you to deconstruct everything you know. You can either let it happen on its own or you can do a controlled collapse and rebuild.
Mark Thompson, Americaâs No. 1 executive coach for growth companies, calls this emerging leadership behavior âburning down the house,â inspired by Virgin founder Sir Richard Bransonâs account of rebuilding his house after it burned to the ground.
The times call for transformation, but none of us can afford to let it just happen. Rather, hereâs how we can do it intentionally.
Great American designer Charles Eames saw constraints as opportunities. When he was creating the winning entry for the Museum of Modern Artâs 1941 design competition, he did more than 450 permutations of potential ideas, until he hit on the winning one. This kind of logical yet creative thinking is whatâs called for at times of crisis.
âDesign depends largely on constraints.â Eames said.
The method I want to share with you is Deconstruction: Reconstructionâą. It is the proprietary process we use to help leading companies generate disruptive ideas that use what they know to arrive at fundamentally different outcomes.
Step 1 is to map out what your business is made up ofâits main functions, services, strengths. This is Deconstruction.
Step 2 is to view these parts in the context of the transformation or crisis youâre in. This is forming a POV.
Step 3 is putting the parts back together in new ways and generating as many permutations as possible. This is Reconstruction.
Following this process, you and your team can take the whole apart, look at the parts, decide whatâs essential and you need to keep, whatâs essential but needs to be transformed, and what needs to be thrown out. You can then put them back together in different ways and create multiple permutations. And every time you change an element, you will be changing your business model.
Letâs look at the restaurant business in this time of crisis and we can see this collapse and rebuilding happening in front of our eyes.
What are the basic parts of a restaurant business? I listed them above. Theyâre experts in food, theyâre local gathering places, Grade A certified in food sanitation, they have a food pantry, etc.
Now letâs look at the changes. What are the specific internal or external conditions you need to respond to? Below are the specific conditions under COVID-19. Our POV is filtered through these conditions.
Letâs go back and relook at the Deconstruction map. The current circumstances are forcing restaurants to take some of their key building blocks out of the equation, like being a gathering space and creating dining experiences.
What you need to do next is look at the other building blocks to see if you can combine them in new ways to keep your business afloat. You start making permutations, very much like a mathematical equation.
Above is one permutation mapped out. Many restaurants, including Los Angeles-based Dog Haus and Frischâs Big Boy, in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, are now becoming neighborhood corner stores, selling takeout food, food ingredients, and cleaning supplies. Theyâre reinventing themselves by recombining existing parts in new ways.
Another model is premium restaurants offering takeout, and in the case of the high-end Seattle restaurant, Canlis, becoming a drive-through. See it mapped out as an equation below.
Youâre getting the hang of it. To generate more permutations, look at other industry transformations for inspiration, like the one below that takes its cues from universities moving their courses online. Below is an online teaching model cross-fertilized with the restaurant model.
You can take a restaurantâs expertise in making food and add filming to it to generate online food-making courses. Your loyal customers can act as your ambassadors to generate awareness on social media to scale your reach from local to global.
What if you offered working parents who are now sheltering at home with their children a subscription model for affordable family meals?
You can continue and generate other permutations of your own.
Next, letâs look at what British brand Dyson is doing. This is another example of how a successful, but not âessential,â business can deconstruct its expertise and reconstruct it to respond to an essential needâventilators.
The strength of the Dyson brand is managing air. All their products, from vacuums to blow dryers to hand dryers, deal with moving air. Dyson in this moment of crisis is a natural fit for making ventilators. Even so, to be able to do this in a timely fashion, they need to break their current business model and rejigger a new one. Below is my unedited Deconstruction: Reconstruction map of Dyson that helped me think this transformation through.
What Dyson did was take their expertise in air and partner with another company with expertise in health care, The Technology Partners. Next, they threw out their signature, complex, and recognizable injected molded plastic parts with long lead times in favor of parts made out of flat stock and bent metal processes that lend themselves to fast manufacturing.
Both businesses responded in real time by breaking their businesses and rebuilding them. They kept whatâs essential, transformed whatâs transformable, and deleted what wasnât essential or sustainable.
Here are simple guidelines if youâd like to experiment with deconstructing and reconstructing your business in a controlled manner.
Deconstruct your business
Use these four prompts to break your business into its parts:
âą Whatâs your core business?
âą What are the strengths of your brand?
âą What was essential to your business and is it still?
âą What was essential to your customers and is it still?
Form a POV
List the changes caused by the crisis at hand. Today, our context is COVID-19 at its peak. Tomorrow it will be post-COVID conditions. You can use these two prompts to consider both:
âą What can you keep but need to transform, in the new context?
âą What do you need to throw out, in this new context?
Reconstruct your business
Put back the parts back together in new ways to generate as many permutations as possible.
âą What are short-term transformations?
âą What are long-term transformations?
âą What are short-term transformations with long-term benefits?
âą What are new collaborations and partnerships?
Do this logically and systematically, mathematically. Include even seemingly bad ideas as some of the best ideas come from worst places. For more on this, check out my Harvard Business Review article, âTo Come Up with a Good Idea, Start by Imagining the Worst Idea Possible.â1
You can add your own to any of the above prompts, some of which will emerge as youâre mapping things out.
Break and remake your business using this controlled model to transform it from a nonessential to an essential business in times of crisis.