The phoenix encounter me.., p.2
The Phoenix Encounter Method, page 2
CHAPTER 10 Targeted Technology Firepower
CHAPTER 11 Firepower Far Beyond Technology
CHAPTER 12 Firepower from Combinatorial Innovation
PART III
PHOENIX RISING:
Encounter Breakthrough
CHAPTER 13 Blueprint for Breakthrough
CHAPTER 14 Phoenix Leaders: Dreamers and Doers
CHAPTER 15 Conclusion: The Phoenix Rises
Afterword: Final Reflection
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
ARE YOU ON FIRE?
Your bird—I couldn’t do anything—he just caught fire.
—J. K. ROWLING in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as Harry describes encountering Professor Dumbledore’s phoenix called Fawkes
If you’re smelling smoke, there’s a good reason. The business landscape is going up in flames around leaders everywhere. Forces of disturbance and change that sparked small fires in the twentieth century have turned into twenty-first-century wildfires—further inflamed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unstoppable trends appear unexpectedly, and unpleasant surprises materialize out of nowhere. These are things that keep business leaders awake at night.
Leaders of legacy firms feel especially uneasy. Already working hard to keep their businesses running against increased competition, they now also have to figure out how to deal with new technologies, social media, platform-based business models, emerging markets, upstart entrants, demographic shifts, and new world orders—a veritable firestorm of changes. It’s exhausting and it’s terrifying.
WHAT SHOULD THEY DO? WHERE SHOULD THEY TURN?
There are dozens of books that warn leaders about disruptive change like this and dozens more that tell them what they should do about it. The Phoenix Encounter Method is a different kind of book and method. Yes, it surveys the many dangers and opportunities that are burning on the horizon, but it also does something more. It lays out a new, specific, step-by-step method that helps leaders throw themselves into firestorm change and turn it to their organization’s advantage. The method cultivates a new leadership thinking—a new attitude and a new kind of strategic debate that seeks out fire and embraces it. The method helps leaders develop their own bespoke script for renewal and transformation. In the post-COVID-19 environment, this is an absolute imperative.
The method is challenging. It involves Radical Ideation, dramatic war-gaming, confrontation, and provocation. It unfolds in a series of what we call “Completely Opposite Viewpoints Debates”—structured exercises that require leaders to consider many radically different ideas before settling on a strategic agenda for their organization and its business model. This book is about how to have that debate and fundamentally switch leadership attitude, mindsets, and thinking.
The ideas unleashed by the Encounter method come from perspectives totally different from an organization’s customary way of thinking. It is a very distinctive form of strategic encounter. These ideas may sometimes seem wild and crazy. At its soul, the method compels leaders to imagine fully destroying their current organization themselves with unconstrained firepower. It then takes them through the steps needed to generate a wider range of options to defend the organization, fortify the core business, and build the bespoke solutions for their business model with initiatives they need for renewal.
The Phoenix Encounter—a Very Different Approach
What makes the Phoenix Encounter method a very different approach to leadership thinking:
• A dramatic battlefield of strategic thinking exercises unfolding as a “burning down to rebirth process—groundwork, battlefield, breakthrough” —to build a sense of urgency.
• A deliberately structured and sequenced method to aid leaders to orchestrate strategic debate to identify a wider set of options for renewal and transformation, using completely opposite viewpoints and diverse perspectives at every point (ideation, analysis, decision, and execution).
• A process supported by specific tools and leadership habits such as Proactive Scanning and Radical Ideation to personalize ideas to their unique business context, increasing relevance and replicability.
• A method that forces leaders and teams to switch attitude and mindsets and make stakeholder views (especially those of customers) central to strategic dialogue. It deliberately emphasizes qualitative, nonblinkered thinking first, which is then subject to quantitative and other analysis to help leaders break from biased thinking and the status quo.
• The work of the Phoenix Encounter Extreme Attack, Horizon Defense, and Future-Facing Blueprint that moves well beyond traditional war-gaming and scenario planning, taking optionality to the extreme. These options include disruptive and nondisruptive innovation to create value benefiting stakeholders while fortifying the core business in tandem.
• A strategic leadership thinking method that leaders and their teams can run and own themselves.
Our method requires the leader to adopt a new way of seeing, thinking, and acting. It cultivates a bold and farsighted talent that we call the Phoenix Attitude, a set of mindsets, habits, and behaviors that equips a leader to grasp firestorm disruption as a path to organizational renewal. At the heart of the method is a sense of urgency and a willingness to walk through fire. That’s why we call it the Phoenix Encounter method.
The Phoenix Encounter uses specific exercises and language in very confronting ways in the method and throughout this book. Our method intentionally uses some aggressive military-like terms—this is done deliberately to bring urgency to the forefront of the opposites debate with the “do-or-die” nature of firestorm disruption. It is by no means a suggestion that aggressive leadership or tactics are the appropriate way for leadership engagement between people in a diverse and pro-collaborative modern world. Far from it, in fact, we believe that emotionally intelligent leadership is critical. It is the only way that a leader will be able to engage people inclusively in the kind of strategic debate we advocate.
You might react adversely to these depictions at first. If you do, please realize that this is a purposefully radical provocation to incite leaders to think and reflect differently and then take them forward in a measured and considered way toward decisions that encompass a wider set of strategic options. Our method might also feel too “alpha” at first, but the method is built on leveraging and involving as much diversity as possible.1 In fact, the people who have the most difficulty with the Encounter exercises are the supremely confident alphas who dismiss outside views out of hand.
Since 2016, we have conducted Phoenix Encounters* with more than 1,500 senior executives, including the leaders of legacy companies, new entrants, entrepreneurial startups, family businesses, and nonprofit or government organizations. These leaders come from a broad range of industries and sectors in both developed and developing economies—everything from mining and manufacturing to fashion and finance. This is a very diverse group of women and men, and yet almost every one of them has left our programs with renewed confidence, new skills, and a specific, actionable plan to take their organizations forward. We are grateful to our program participants for their courage and feedback. Through them, we have come to believe that the ability to engage in the kind of strategic opposites debate we have developed for the Phoenix Encounter is now a mandatory skill for every twenty-first-century leader.
BECOMING A PHOENIX
In the twentieth century, many successful organizations and their leaders were a lot like crows. Crows are very smart birds; they are observant and can both learn and play tricks. They can be fearless and will attack larger birds without hesitation (a flock of crows is called a “murder”). Both predators and scavengers, crows eat anything that will keep them alive, and they thrive in a variety of environments, from seacoasts to desert canyons. Highly resourceful, they are often overconfident.
In some places, they still dominate—but not everywhere. Consider the ’Alalā, species of crow native to the Hawaiian Islands. Unlike their cousin crows, these Hawaiian crows were unable to adapt to dramatic changes in the world around them, including new predators, diseases, deforestation, and competition for food. Their environment changed, but they didn’t, and the bird is now critically endangered.
These days, many twenty-first-century businesses look a lot like the ’Alalās. Caught in a landscape of accelerating disruption, these organizations are very vulnerable. Their environments and habitats are changing fast, and they are unable to think clearly amidst the chaos and noise. In history, the dodo is perhaps the most famous example of symbolic extinction—it took less than a century to disappear.
For this book, we have our eye on a different kind of symbolic bird: the phoenix. The phoenix is a mythical, brightly colored, and long-lived creature that can regenerate itself, withstanding the flames of fire to rise from the ashes of its former self. For millennia, the phoenix has been a symbol of rebirth and new life.2 Ancient Egyptians saw it as the companion of the sun god. Medieval monks saw it as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. In our mind, the phoenix is the kind of bird that leaders must become to survive the firestorm of disruption that marks our current century.
WHAT KIND OF BIRD ARE YOU?
Consider the story of a CEO we’ll call James Menta.* In November 2016, James assured a colleague that his American fresh-food supply company was totally safe from harm. “We’re the market leader, and we have our logistics and suppliers under full control,” he boasted. “No one can replicate that.”
A short time later, James took part in one of our Phoenix Encounter exercises, where his company was subjected to a series of simulated attacks.
The first attack exploited new technologies and introduced new regulatory frameworks that put James’s company at a disadvantage. The second attack went after his key talent. In the third attack, the challengers built a digital platform that connected all James’s suppliers (and new ones) to a larger ecosystem that better managed risk, created partnerships with technology providers with lower costs, and moved into neighboring markets. It was all a game, but James lost it decisively.
When the attack phase of the exercise was over, James was crestfallen. “We should be selling ostriches,” he said as he surveyed the wreckage. “We have had our heads in the sand. Our current thinking is totally wrong. We need to look upward and rethink everything we do.”3
We hear stories like James’s all too often. That’s why we wrote this book.
Throughout the book, we use vibrant examples to show how the Phoenix Encounter method helps leaders work toward transformational change. Many of these stories have never been told before. Most were shared with us by leaders who are convinced that their companies are where they are today because they took the initiative to conduct a Phoenix Encounter or otherwise applied much of the method. The experience has changed the way they lead and moved their organizations and business models forward, often against great odds.
How do they do it? They do it by changing their attitude and tackling firestorm disruption head-on in their business environment. They do it by engaging in extreme war-game-like Completely Opposite Viewpoints Debates. They do it by learning new leadership habits and formulating new blueprints for their organizations. They do it by walking straight into the fire and then returning to their organizations to carry out their plans and conduct Phoenix Encounters of their own. In this way, they kindle a shared vision of renewal within the organization, along with the skills to achieve it again and again.
They come into the Encounter as crows, and they go out as phoenixes.
The sheer importance of actually experiencing an Encounter yourself, and working your way through the book’s entire content, was reinforced for us by a debriefing comment in 2019 from Daniella Silosa, the CFO of an Italian energy company:
When I heard the lectures and read the setup materials for the Encounter exercises, I was intellectually curious but a little skeptical on where this would lead. After the radical debate was over, I could not believe just how massively transformative this was to my strategic thinking approach. It was the ultimate aha moment. Hearing and reading are not enough. You have to live through the frustration and discomfort of an Encounter to really believe—and then reap all its rewards.
WHO WE ARE AND HOW THE BOOK WORKS
The ideas for The Phoenix Encounter Method were developed by us, three professors at INSEAD, the Business School for the World, in collaboration with Ram Charan, the bestselling author of more than two dozen business books, for use in INSEAD’s flagship Advanced Management Program, other strategic leadership development programs, and consulting work.4 Our research includes field trials with more than 1,500 executive leaders and the compilation and analysis of a database of more than 5,000 articles, studies, reports, and books (both academic and business practice).5 During the extraordinary situation of the COVID-19 health and economic crisis of 2020, we continued our research and practice work using the Encounter method—albeit virtually, with social distancing regimes in place. We found a heightened sense of urgency in the leadership teams and boards we worked with to use the Encounter method and tools to reimagine their post crisis future—and contemplate a much wider set of strategic options (including pilot exercises during the crisis period and projects in the post-lockdown phase).
As authors, we bring a broad range of expertise to the table. Our training and academic research cover fields from marketing to economics, leadership development to technology, strategy to management, business models to operations, leadership communication to organizational behavior. We have experience in the classroom, the boardroom, the executive suite, and government as well as across diverse economies and industries. We are a multidisciplinary team whose common link is intellectual curiosity. We also have a strong friendship supported by mutual respect—and a shared admiration for cricket—so we refer to each other by our first names in this book: Ian, Paddy, Sameer, and Ram.
As we have written this book, we have been guided by an overarching vision. While rigorously grounded in academic research, the method and book should be relevant, practical, and actionable. Leaders in any sector of any industry should be able to use it. It should offer a process for finding their own relevant solutions rather than dictating the solutions. In short, the book should empower leaders and their organizations to rejuvenate their own futures and create their own solutions based on their own unique circumstances, deep knowledge, and experience.6
Therefore, all the Encounter templates, case studies, and updated scans are online at www.phoenixencountermethod.com where anyone can use and share them. In this way, we hope to create an exchange platform for leaders to share their experiences and learning in working with the Phoenix Encounter method. Our belief is that this will encourage a crowdsourced force-multiplier effect that can carry leaders and organizations further forward than they might be able to go on their own.
The book is divided into three parts, each aligned with a distinct phase of the Phoenix Encounter method:
• Part I, Phoenix Seeking: Encounter Groundwork, discusses the “why” of firestorm disruption and the “what and how” of the Phoenix Encounter method in detail, outlines the “who” of the Phoenix Attitude for leadership, and teaches essential tools and habits for Completely Opposite Viewpoints Debates.
• Part II, Phoenix Burning: Encounter Battlefield, explores and scans the radical ideas and disruptive trends that can be used as firepower in the Phoenix Encounter to attack and defend incumbent or startup organizations or industries.
• Part III, Phoenix Rising: Encounter Breakthrough, shows leaders how to create Future-Facing Blueprints for their business models and innovation initiatives and embed the Phoenix Attitude and Breakthrough in their organizations.
Most chapters begin with “whiteboard notes” as a visual overview and finish with a checklist with summary thoughts and questions for reflection. At the end of the book, we’ve included extensive Notes, broken down by chapter, to help readers explore ideas, sources, references, and additional information on matters we raise. Finally, a separate Facilitation Guide for the Phoenix Encounter Method will be available to give a step-by-step practical guidance to leaders and facilitators on how to run Phoenix Encounter exercises in any organizational setting.
Accessing Phoenix Encounter Method Online Resources
Readers have access to our online Phoenix Encounter method resources at www.phoenixencountermethod.com. There are open resources and information for anyone at this site, and readers can register for additional content like newsletters.
A Facilitation Guide for the Phoenix Encounter Method is also going to be available as a companion to this main book.
We foresee a day when big dreams and radical new ideas come naturally to every leader and organization. And yet, we see scores of leaders each year still stuck with their heads in the sand—trapped in a kind of backward-looking, inside-out thinking that leads to complacency or, worse, helplessness. We believe these organizations can survive and prosper if their leaders step into a Phoenix Attitude and regularly engage in searing encounters that wrestle with big ideas and options for firestorm change. To become a Phoenix, leaders must undergo a trial by fire.
We invite you to take your first step into your Phoenix-like future.
*In the authors’ programs and consulting work from 2016 to 2019, the method was called the “Strategic Encounter.” The “Phoenix Encounter” method is entirely built from this. We have changed the titles of various elements to better reflect the “trial by fire” underpinnings of the research work that our method demonstrates.
*In deference to our Encounter participants’ need for absolute commercial confidentiality, we have anonymized all examples in this book that arise directly from our work with global leaders in Phoenix Encounter exercises.
