When we think about organisations pivoting, we tend to think of startups. That’s perfectly understandable. They’re small, nimble, and able to change direction quickly. The same can’t be said of corporates. They’re big, cumbersome, and weighed down with bureaucracy. Surely pivoting is nearly impossible for them?

While that’s an understandable line of thinking (how many big corporates can you name that pivoted after finding success with their original business model?), it certainly doesn’t mean big corporates can’t benefit from the art of the pivot.

In fact, it can fundamentally change the way they go about building new products.

Pivots as part of the Lean Startup Method

The first thing to understand when it comes to how corporates can benefit from a pivot is that it doesn’t necessarily entail a complete shift in the organisation’s operating model.

Instead, the pivot should be thought of within the context of the Lean Startup Method.

Initially designed as a scientific way of building businesses, the Lean Startup Method has increasingly found its way into the corporate world as organisations look to become more innovative.

Doing so involves conducting a series of experiments and taking action based on those experiments (read more about how innoway helps organisations conduct experiments).

Conducted properly, the results of these experiments can determine whether an organisation should stay the course or change tack (pivot or persevere).

In a corporate setting, this can mean spending much less time and money on everything from deciding whether to pursue a new product line to which project management tools you should use.

Over time, and implemented across the organisation, these small, informed, decisions to pivot or persevere add up. They start to change the way the organisation approaches everything it does, making it feel less like a corporate and more like a very big startup.

The art of implementation

Of course, making pivots part of an organisation’s culture isn’t that simple. Even if you’ve run successful experiments which indicate the need for a pivot, you may come up against resistance.

Someone may have any number of reasons why you shouldn’t pursue the pivot (it’s not in line with the company’s founding vision, we can’t afford the required expertise, it might not work), but that doesn’t mean you can’t execute the pivot.

The people putting up these barriers are known as “corporate blockers”. As we’ve previously detailed, they’re actually incredibly important to the organisation’s wellbeing.

As Eric Ries notes, they’re the organisation’s immune system. They protect its assets and prevent anything from damaging it.

Ideally, the higher-ups within the organisation should try and keep blockers to a minimum but in any sizable organisation that’s going to be difficult to achieve.

It’s therefore important to work with these blockers and engage them in the creative process of designing the experiments that determine whether or not you execute a particular pivot.

Embracing the culture

Doing so will go a long way to ensuring that the process of experimenting and, if necessary, pivoting, become baked into the organisation’s culture.

Bringing them into the process shows them that properly thought pivots can be beneficial to the organisation.

Once they’re sold on the concept, corporate blockers can switch tack and become evangelists, encouraging their own units to adopt the same methodology.

Of course, these soft factors might not always be enough.

Pivoting goes beyond “convincing” the support units. The mindset-led soft factor has to be combined with the hard factor, which is governance: a set of policies (as outlined in Steve Blank’s “Getting to Yes!” blog ) that will allow the organization take calculated risks – not to break the rules, but to bend them!

There may be some challenges when it comes implementing this type of governance. These include:

• Support units unable to measure the risk, or to control it.
• Regulation limits (sometimes you just can’t test certain things: e.g. a drug that has strong side effects, talking about violence in movies to underaged people, etc).
• Internal policies that affect company assets big time: e.g. changing the color of Coca Cola brand, or the iMac name, to name a few.

These limits are not, however, insurmountable.

Overcome them and innovative thinking spreads across the organisation: people can make more confident decisions around whether to pivot or persevere on whatever they’re working on.

The pivots might not always be big, but over time the organisation will find itself in a position where it can make a big pivot if it needs to.

If your organisation needs help figuring out whether (and what) to pivot, contact innoway here.