Module 3•Unit 3 of 6•12 min

Reinvention for Resilience

The second, far more extensive level of change is reinvention. Where renewal makes moderate adjustments, reinvention is a total transformation - of the business, or of significant parts of it. It is what a business does to stay resilient against the grand sweep of change, no matter how sweeping. Reinvention is rarer, harder, and riskier than renewal - and, for long-term survival, unavoidable.

The relationship

Reinvention relates to Resilience. By reinventing the business from generation to generation - undertaking major transformations - it stays resilient to the large-scale changes reshaping its world.

Renewal vs. reinvention at a glance

Renewal

→Moderate in scope
→Season to season
→Serves relevance
→Within the current shape

Reinvention

→Extensive - often total
→Generation to generation
→Serves resilience
→Changes the shape itself

What reinvention may touch

Reinvention can be all-encompassing. It may require an organisation to change its very charter or purpose, its brands, its structures, roles and relationships, and its offerings - the deepest and most identity-defining attributes of the enterprise. This is why reinvention is so hard: it asks a business to change not just what it sells, but who it is.

You decide

Your core product line still sells well, but a new technology is quietly making its entire basis of value obsolete over the next 5-10 years. What do you do?

The cruel irony of reinvention is that it is easiest exactly when it feels least necessary - when the core is still strong. Once decline is obvious, the money, talent, and confidence needed to reinvent are already slipping away. Great leaders reinvent while they still can afford to.

Discuss with your group

Is your organisation facing a change that renewal alone cannot address - one that will eventually require reinvention? How early is it willing to act?

Try this at work this week

Imagine your core basis of value is gone in ten years. Sketch, in three bullet points, what your reinvented business might look like. The discomfort of the exercise is exactly the point - and the earliest form of preparation.

Sources

Global Innovation Institute (GInI), Foundations of Innovation body of knowledge.
Govindarajan, V., The Three-Box Solution, 2016.
Reeves, M., Haanaes, K. & Sinha, J., Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, 2015.

Renewal for Relevance

Creative Destruction