Going forward by stepping backwards

We’ve all hit a wall at some point. You may run up against a competitor you cannot beat. You might lose your job despite your best efforts. You could be doing everything you can – but still not getting that promotion.

But whatever the cause, what feels like a roadblock could be your first step on a new growth journey, as long as that step is backwards.

When you can’t go forward, the only way to keep moving at all is to take a step back.

We see this all the time in the corporate strategy world. Companies that have hit a wall take a step back, reassess and then move forward. Consider Tractor Supply, founded in 1938 to sell tractor parts to the six million farms in the United States. Growing steadily, the company went public in the 1950s.

But by the late 1960s, due to more reliable tractors needing fewer replacement parts and the decline in farms from six million to three million, Tractor Supply was struggling. Over the next 12 years, Tractor Supply was acquired twice and had five different presidents. After seeing a significant number of store closings and a revenue decline to $100 million, several key executives participated in a leveraged buyout in the early 1980s.

The new owners ploughed into the data and discovered that while the number of commercial farmers was decreasing, hobby farming was on the rise. This suggested a strategic pivot away from supplying tractor parts, and towards general farm and ranch supplies.

Today, Tractor Supply has grown to 1,400 stores, three times more than its next five competitors combined, with revenue north of $5 billion, and is a successful chain of stores for home improvement, agriculture, lawn and garden care.

Of course, Tractor Supply is not alone – they were doing what so many start-ups do. According to Prof Amar Bhidé of Tufts University in Massachusetts, 70 per cent of all successful new businesses end up with a strategy different than the one they originally pursued. The sequence of events for these companies is almost always the same: step back, reassess, and then pivot or jump to a new strategy.

So when you feel like you’ve got stuck in your personal growth journey, take a page from their playbook. Ask yourself: why have I stopped growing? What does the data tell me? And what adjacent areas might let me grow again? Then take a deep breath – and a step back.

When we've got too close to a wall it completely fills our line of sight, preventing us from getting an accurate view of our surroundings. It's like the mobile game Close Up. First you see an extreme close- up of an object, but then the frame slowly pans out, revealing what the object really is. Until the camera pulls back it is nearly impossible to identify what you're looking at. – Copyright Harvard Business Review 2015 Whitney Johnson is the author of the forthcoming Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work.