Burning Platforms

If you wait until the platform is burning to jump off, you’re too late.

In 2011, then-Nokia CEO Stephen Elop famously sent out a company-wide email that has come to be known as the Burning Platform memo. It’s well worth the read, even now.

I need to start by saying burning platforms simply don’t exist in an organisational or business context. TL;DR, if you wait until the platform is burning, and your only option is to jump, you’re too late. Any time this argument is presented it’s a poor attempt at emotional manipulation.

Since I’m a questions (and not an answers) guy, a few rhetoricals:

• In the story, the man on the platform has been sleeping and finds the oil rig platform on fire - why is he all alone?

• Why weren’t there plans in place that provided for better options than jumping into the North Atlantic? Like a boat? Or some other emergency protocol?

• Since when does any intelligent organisation need to directly tie decision and action like this?

I know this is just an allegory but no good organisation ever works like this. Change is considered and usually far too slow. Yet we speak of burning platforms to drive urgency and action because without the rhetoric we do nothing.

Instead, how might we make change the status quo? How might we be better prepared to not jump into the frozen sea to escape a burning platform, but rather elegantly step onto a new platform well before the original platform is alight?

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash