It’s time to extinguish the ‘burning platform’ for good

Fear can be a dangerously double-edged tool. If you have recently scrambled to book a coronavirus vaccination, you know how fear can prompt urgent, necessary action. On the other hand, if you have lived through multiple lockdowns, punctuated by dire government warnings, you know constant anxiety can be debilitating.

Yet leaders persist in trying to scare their staff out of comfy complacency. To do so they will often imply their organisation is standing on a "burning platform" and must jump or perish. The pandemic has reignited use of the illustration. In recent months, coronavirus has been invoked in exactly these terms as a trigger for UK tax reform, the shake-up of mental health services, the acceleration of digital higher education and the economic transformation of Singapore.

It is time to recognise that this cliché has finally run its course. It is inadequate, inappropriate and, as a way of motivating staff, potentially counterproductive.

The implication that change management is a matter of life or death was always in slightly dubious taste. Consultant Daryl Conner plucked the idea from television interviews with a survivor of the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, which killed 167 oil rig workers, and included it in his bestseller , from where it entered the management mainstream.

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Even when executives do not use the metaphor itself, the truism that every crisis is an opportunity has convinced them to keep their companies at a constant rolling boil of angst about imminent disruption and disaster. "In my experience, that's the primary way in which CEOs drive change: implying that everything is going to collapse if we don't do something," says strategist John Hagel, author of a new book .

Some 74 per cent of chief executives surveyed in 2019 by academic Constantinos Markides found the following statement to be true: “To create a sense of urgency, you have to make your people appreciate the imminent threat of disruption and the mortal danger the company is facing.” In fact, Markides writes in , “nothing could be further from the truth”.

Call to arms

I think there are a few exceptions. In 2011, Nokia's then chief executive Stephen Elop used the burning platform metaphor as a call to arms, warning staff, "We must decide how we are going to change our behaviour". Nokia was in a fix and he won plaudits for his frankness after years of smug superiority. But some critics claim he merely fuelled the flames that later consumed Nokia's devices business, closed off strategic options, and instilled a sense of despair among staff.

During the pandemic, chief executives have revelled in the speed with which they have been able to push through changes that would have stalled in normal times. But it is easy to draw the wrong conclusions. "Getting people to fear something in order to change behaviour can only work in the very short term," says Christina Gravert, a behavioural economist at the University of Copenhagen. "It's an emotion and so, long term, it's going to be very exhausting."

The main drawback to using fear as a tool for change is clear from our own experience. It can break habits, but extended anxiety can also turn us into risk-averse introverts, nervous even to edge out of our narrow comfort zones.

Conner himself has spent some of the past 30 years clearing up misapprehensions about the metaphor he propagated. It is a way to illustrate the commitment needed to achieve change, not a mandate to terrify, he has said. Indeed, it might just as well apply to a company in peak condition, facing no immediate threat, that realises it needs to explore new opportunities in order to stay on top.

CEO anxiety

To create a more “permanent sense of urgency”, Markides suggests, chief executives should make the need for change positive and personal, and encourage their staff to feel emotionally committed to necessary transformation. “If CEOs recognised that fed the fear, I think they would think twice about using it,” Hagel told me.

He thinks many chief executives are unwilling to acknowledge their own short-term fear of missing their quarterly targets and being ousted. That seems a fair anxiety given the precarious tenure of those that reach the corporate pinnacle. It is also true that the Covid-19 conflagration and the smouldering climate emergency are real crises. But Hagel says leaders can acknowledge the challenges and obstacles of the current volatility, while still pointing out the path towards new positive goals. Instead, too often chief executives “just want to hold on to what they have”.

“It’s a world of increasing pressure,” Hagel adds. “But it’s also a world of expanding opportunity.”

- Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2021