We live in overlapping circles on “Insularity.” Our families, friends, communities. Our teammates, functions, organizations, industries.
These insular communities provide us different levels of security and comfort. From a professional point of view, they are made up of people doing similar things, facing similar issues/challenges. While we may compete with each other in the markets, we learn from each other, see differing approaches, sometimes seeing new opportunities. And when we face challenges, generally many in our communities are seeing the same thing, so we feel less “alone.” There is a certain amount of comfort in saying, “Everyone else is experiencing the same thing.”
We, also, have trouble differentiating ourselves. If we are all looking at the same things, responding in similar ways, copying what each other does, we start looking the same. We get stuck on what works for us and others in the community. If we want to stand out, to differentiate ourselves within the industry, with our markets, we can’t do it by looking the same as everyone else. Or doing things the way everyone else does them.
Insularity can be tremendously destructive. We start viewing the “world” in very restrictive ways. As a result we create a business reality/mindset that may no longer be accurate or even relevant. We can be doing the wrong things or doing things that are dysfunctional for our current markets.
And as we start seeing what always worked no longer working, we look within our insular communities for answers. Are they doing something different? Are they facing the same issues? And we take security in seeing we are not alone. Everyone else in our community faces the same thing. And we don’t recognize things have changed and continuing to do the same things is possibly the worst thing possible.
Insularity is a result of collective closed mindsets.
How do we recognize and combat insularity?
Some thoughts on recognizing: When we start telling ourselves, “This is the way everyone else does things.” Or we focus on our competitors, copying or emulating what others do. Or when we benchmark ourselves only against each other, failing to look outside. When we worry more about being the same rather than looking at how we are different–in our offerings, in our GTM strategies, in how we engage customers and the community. Or, in tough times, when we rely on, “It’s not just us, everyone faces the same thing,”
How do we combat insularity? There are, actually, so many things we can do, we just don’t do them. First is a mindset around constant learning, continual improvement, and innovation. It’s constantly looking at how do we do things differently-changing from “the ways we have always done things,” or from “everyone else is doing the same thing.”
It’s recognizing we don’t differentiate ourselves only with our offerings. Offering based differentiation is never sustainable. It’s how we see things differently, how we do them differently, how we engage our people, our customers, and our communities differently. It’s looking for answers in different places. Maybe very different industries, markets, solution types. For example, it’s SaaS companies looking at commoditized materials companies asking what they do differently and finding ways on how to adapt some of those practices into their own company (In this example, commoditized materials companies recognize their product isn’t the differentiator.)
If we look at the leaders in every sector or segment, while they are aware of competition, their strategies focus on how they can do things differently. They look outside their companies, competitors, industries. They look within their customers, they look at very different markets focusing on “how can we be different, how can we change, how can we innovate?”
Insularity makes us feel good, but it blinds is to reality. It blinds us to thinking differently. It blinds us to learning and growing. It blinds us to innovation. It restrains us from outperforming all others.
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this article. Enjoy!
Leave a Reply