The Hero Leads

Welcome, The Hero Leads readers. Thank you for following the link from the book to this page.
(If you don’t have a copy yet, you can find it on Amazon.)

Chapter 10: The Road Back

In this stage of the Hero’s Journey, you make it stick. You have met the challenges of the Ordeal and secured the Reward. Now you turn back toward the Ordinary World to make it better for your efforts. The goal at this stage is to shift from changemaker to guardian. You must protect what you built, assert a new normal, and turn your short-term success into a lasting practice.

Questions to ask yourself

• Are you ready to stop exploring and start protecting what you built?
• When people start to backslide and resume their tasks as before, do you assert the new normal?
• Have you revised the old metrics, incentives, and habits of your organization to support the new way?
• Are you catching and publicly rewarding the right behaviors early?
• Are you refining the new system through small, consistent improvements rather than dramatic transformations?
• Can you simplify your product or service without reducing its value?

Switch from changemaker to guardian

Organizations are constantly engaged in two competing activities: exploration and exploitation. Exploration is the search for new possibilities. Exploitation is the extraction of value from what is found. When you first advocated for change, you led exploration by challenging assumptions and testing new ideas. Now your task is different. You must shift from changemaker to guardian. You must exploit what has already proven to work.

The success you think is final can be fleeting. What is done can be undone. Opponents who could not stop the change will now work to reverse it. Systems naturally drift back toward comfort. You must lock in the win. Myth tells us of Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill endlessly. The boulder will always tend to roll back. You cannot escape the uphill struggle, but you can prevent the backslide by metaphorically wedging a stone under the boulder. Embed the change into your organization so that it sticks even when you are not around to enforce it.

Once your novel system is established, there is still work to be done. Lead the evolution of your revolution. Look for ways to simplify your product or service. Simplification lowers costs, increases reliability, and makes acceptance easier. Persistently set small, challenging goals that demand excellence in execution. You build habits and feedback loops to keep the change alive.