Moving Fast and Fixing Things with Anne Morriss

Your Working Life with Caroline Dowd-Higgins

Anne Morriss is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and founder of the Leadership Consortium, a first-of-its-kind leadership accelerator that works to help emerging leaders thrive. Her collaborators have ranged from early-stage tech founders to Fortune 50 executives to public-sector leaders building national competitiveness. Her recent TED talk, which has had over one million views, focuses on the move fast and fix things approach.

Co-Author

Frances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School. She served as Uber's first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy, helping the company navigate its crisis in leadership and culture. Frei regularly works with companies embarking on large-scale organizational transformation. Her TED talk on the topic of building trust has had over six million views.

https://www.theleadershipconsortium.org/team

Book title: Move Fast and Fix Things (by Anne Morriss and Frances Frei)

Key Messages:

Over a decade ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared they would, “Move fast and break things.” The phrase, legitimizing recklessness, became an informal motto at the tech giant, as well as for thousands of businesses who aspired to be like them. However, leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, cohosts of the TED podcast Fixable, are upending that Silicon Valley ethos with a new mandate for businesses: move fast and fix things.

Over the past decade they have helped countless companies create the speed and trust necessary to generate momentum and results. In MOVE FAST & FIX THINGS (October 3, 2023) they share the unique playbook they have developed, from their work with companies from Uber to Riot Games to Walmart. They have helped an exceptional range of businesses become impatient for progress, tackle hard problems, and take decisive action, elevating performance as they go. Their week-long approach lays out a distinct agenda for each day:

Monday: Identify the real problem holding you back – Far too often, companies don’t tackle the root issues but instead focus on surface problems that mask what’s really going on. The solution, for Frei and Morriss is to ask tough questions, build a team of problems solvers, and surface major roadblocks to progress. Then, gather new data and listen, really listen, with the curiosity of an anthropologist and the accountability of a leader.

Tuesday: Build and rebuild trust in your company – With the confidence that comes from knowing the right problem to solve, running smart experiments to steady trust “wobbles” helps strengthen relationships with key stakeholders.

Wednesday: Create a culture where everyone can thrive (aka “make new friends”) – Creating the conditions where everyone can thrive as complex, multidimensional humans can lead to a better change plan—and better performance—by including more and more varied perspectives.

Thursday: Communicate powerfully as a leader – Creating change means developing a powerful narrative honoring the past (both the good stuff and the not-so-good), articulating a compelling change mandate, and describing a rigorous and optimistic way forward. Then, telling that story with emotion, again and again, makes it impactful.

Friday: Go fast by empowering the team and removing roadblocks. – Leading change with a sense of urgency means empowering others to execute quickly. Clear strategy and a culture of speed are keys to unlocking rapid, enduring change.

Frei and Morriss’s larger message is to: “operate with urgency, be wildly ambitious, fix as much as you can along the way. And while the work of change is sometimes deadly serious, you can avoid the trap of taking yourself seriously.” They explain that while their playbook is meant to create momentum, some steps may take longer than one day to complete, but they provocatively point out how much can be accomplished in even a single day of focused work.

When companies move fast and fix things, they can look forward to Monday again and to solving their problems with optimism, creativity, even joy.

FIXABLE Podcast

Leadership coaches Anne Morriss and Frances Frei host the hit podcast, FIXABLE, where they offer fast and actionable insights and solutions for addressing critical workplace questions of today. Season two of FIXABLE is available August 28, 2023 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever listeners access podcasts. For more information, go to: https://www.ted.com/podcasts/fixable

Website/social media:

https://www.theleadershipconsortium.org/team

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-morriss-b1238b8/

https://www.instagram.com/annemorriss/

https://twitter.com/annemorriss