The Insurgent Organization:
What Moves First?

What moves first? First-mover is clearly a market advantage in all businesses. First-mover is also a mindset, a mentality, an attitude and a culture. And, in a business and information environment that moves faster and faster all the time, this mindset, attitude and culture often amount to a decisive advantage.

Size, scope, superior resources and a heritage of success can also be market advantages. But it is rarely the biggest, richest or traditional leadership that moves first.

What moves first? The answer: It is seldom the incumbent market leader. It is always the insurgent. In fact, the leader’s bigness, bureaucracy, formality and caution often anchor it to the past and hold it back from moving first. The insurgent, by contrast, values and exploits speed and mobility over size and scope. In this way, the insurgent is compelled by vision, not heritage—by the future, not the past.

The single dynamic separating the incumbent and the insurgent most dramatically is change. Incumbents hate change, because change implies disruption of all that has made them successful. Insurgents, by contrast, love change, because change means opportunity. Change is their goal, while status quo is the goal of the incumbent.

It’s the same in politics, sports and warfare. For over thirty years, we’ve studied and built our strategic model on the foundation of insurgency. Since the 1980s, and our work with Steven Jobs at Apple, we’ve used an insurgent political model to help companies and their leaders develop more effective competitive, communication and innovation strategies.

CREATING INSURGENT INNOVATION:

We preach and practice insurgent strategy. But, importantly, we don’t teach insurgent strategy as much as we help unleash it. The instincts for insurgency exist within almost all organizations. And our job is to identify it, activate it, focus and energize it.

• Innovation is about disruption. Making something better is not as important as making something different, disrupting the existing order of things.
• Of course, incumbent market-leading corporations are not disruption-friendly environments. At their core is a resistance to changing the formulas, strategies and the very order of things that have made these incumbents successful. And so this is why we developed the concept of the “pop-up garage,” as an off-campus hot house of insurgent ideas for companies.
• Our work with Sandbox Industries helps us identify first-moving ideas and individuals in various industries. And, often, we find that disruptive ideas cross both market and industry lines.
• While most revolutionaries don’t have a playbook, we’ve worked with and studied successful underdogs and insurgents in business, politics, sports and the military to define the common principles of the most successful insurgents.

INSURGENT STRATEGIC PRINCIPLES:

Today, few traditional incumbent market leaders are truly successful in creating innovation. So, in helping companies break through to successful innovation, we help organizations and their leaders learn how to think, plan and act like insurgents, using the principles below.

No company can transform from an incumbent to insurgent, first-mover culture in an instant. But we’ve learned how to identify, encourage and activate insurgent groups within corporations of any size. And we’ve learned that these principles are the foundation for a first-mover attitude and culture.
Indeed, it is an infectious attitude that can transform a company culture over time, particularly when it is supported by leadership.

Here are the principles that drive this process:

1. Do the doable: Revolutionaries most often begin with meager resources. And marshaling these resources is an imperative. So the insurgent can never waste them, waste time or organizational morale on impossible goals. Insurgents, in fact, establish what we call “momentum goals;” small, achievable objects that get some first downs. And, in any human endeavor, momentum is magical.
   
   Innovation is a messy process. The overall goal must be disruption of a marketplace, not just change and not just improvement. A rule we learned in football has served well in this process: “Take what they give you.” Take any opening; move to the daylight of opportunity.
   
   
2. Move the movable: The best way to achieve movement in the market is to target a small group with a high interest in change. This lesson comes from politics: target the smallest group that will give you the win. This saves resources—and achieving this win can lead to greater momentum and to the next win and the string of wins that follow.

In any marketplace, a small group of highly influential users will lead all other groups toward a new idea.

These are the “early adopters.” These are the first-movers in any market. And these first-movers are seeking new ideas—and they will try almost anything … at least, once.

Holding first mover’s usage, however, is another matter. And this is why we developed the targeting model below. Through our experience in running insurgent political campaigns around the world, we’ve learned the importance of precise targeting to focus resources where they will do the most good: In this case, the “early adopters” and “following consumers” who will provide the base of usage and support for your new idea. We call this “attitudinal segmentation,” and it looks like this:

HO SO Undecided SS HS

HO = Hard Opposition: These are your active opponents. They may be a competitor or activists with an opposing agenda. They work against you. And, in our studies, we find Hard Opposition comprises a small, but potent force; this usually constitutes no more than 5-8% of the total marketplace.

SO = Soft Opposition: These stakeholders may oppose your idea, or support another, but are not active in this opposition. They comprise about 15-18% of any market.

The Undecided: We find again and again in our research that this huge segment is too hard and too expensive to move directly.

As the late Congressman Dan Rostenkowski used to say, “You can by their votes, but they don’t stay bought.” These consumers are undecided by circumstances (they have no relationship to your product or issues), or by character (they refuse to align with a new brand). Still, too many companies seek their “votes,” because this segment can be 40+% of the marketplace.

SS = Soft Support: These stakeholders may like your new brand and share your objectives for disruption of the marketplace, but they will not be active in support unless you give them reasons to do so. The Soft Support comprise about the same share of the marketplace as the Soft Opposition, about 15-18%. And their movement and buzz creates the most powerful force for change in any marketplace.

HS = Hard Support: These are your loyalists, and these Hard Supporters will not only find your brand, but stick with it, share your objectives and speak up for you. These hard core loyalists represent only about 5-8% of the total marketplace, but they are vital not only in supporting your cause, but also in winning others to it.

In any innovation campaign we use this segmentation model as a kind of operating system. And we’ve learned that even the best new ideas require careful nurturing. So this is the platform upon which all strategies and tactics must be driven—because the objective of these strategies and tactics is to win more usage and more loyalty. For example:

• Lock down the loyalists. This group of Hard Supporters is often over-looked. Invariably, these loyalists are the most compelling medium of communications in terms of vocal support, but you must shape their messaging. And we’ve developed a system for doing this: We call it the “3X5 Card Discipline.”
• Move the Soft Support to greater loyalty and more active support. By better understanding the structure of support by your loyalists, we can identify the key issues (relevant benefits and differentiation) that will develop more satisfactory usage and active support by this vital group. And the momentum of loyalist’s viral communications is the most important force in any campaign in business or politics.
• Manage the opposition. Of course, you can’t eliminate the opposition. And you can’t waste resources on trying to win them over. But you must be aware of the power of the opposition’s arguments over others in the marketplace, and you must develop strategies to diminish their power.

3. Offer Control: Although the first objective of an innovation campaign is to create disruption, in development there must be a clear strategy to shape the direction of market movement resulting from this disruption.

We’ve learned about the decision making process in a very wide spectrum of situations and industries. And we find that consumers will move to a new concept—particularly if this concept gives them a greater sense of control. Indeed, this sense of control is more important than ever in today’s cluttered and often threatening information environment.

• People seek ideas/products/brands that give them a greater sense of control of their personal security, their economic security, their health, their well being and their control over the forces of powerful institutions.
Over the years, we’ve learned there are five concepts that relate to and help contribute to this sense of control:

• Choice: Consumers believe new and increasing choices in the marketplace provide them more control.
• Change: Change leads to choice. Consumer technology has given people a sense of positive anticipation about change. They anticipate better, faster, cheaper.
• Customization: People seek choices that are designed specifically around their needs and wants. They no longer accept the idea of “One Size Fits All.”
• Connection: People feel greater control when an idea allows them to link to “people I like, people like me, people I’d like to be like.”
• Convenience: Making the usage experience easier remains an important way of giving more control to consumers.

We look at each of these dynamics in both developing and insurgent innovation—to ensure that the first move is the right move.

4. Play Offense: Moving first means taking the initiative. It means changing the market dialogue—because the advantage today goes to the insurgent who understands how to use change to gain and maintain control of this dialogue.

No market gain can be developed on the defensive. Incumbents tend to play defense, react and respond to change rather than leading change. This, then, is a distinct advantage for the insurgent.

SUMMARY:

“Insurgent innovation” is a superfluous term: all successful innovation is by definition insurgent. It disrupts the assumptions of the marketplace.

Ultimately, this kind of purposeful disruption helps create an insurgent culture— and a first-mover culture. And today, we believe this is essential to true success in any kind of product or service market.

FIND OUT MORE:

David Morey
1-888-626-9776
Email: info@playoffense.com