What is Relevance?

I’m increasingly finding myself frustrated by the word relevance.

It falls foul of ‘the red pen’ exercise that we run with clients. When working with teams, we talk about how everyone might feel like they’re working on the same thing, but in reality they are all carrying different understandings based on their own interpretation of the problem, or of a word itself. 

For example, if I said the word ‘red’, you’ll have an immediate association with another word. For some that might be ‘pen’, because I wrote ‘red pen’ in the previous paragraph, for others that might be ‘danger’ or ‘light’. The trick here is to help people to realise they’re not quite talking about the same thing, and to spend time agreeing on a shared definition and on shared outcomes. 

We need to define relevance

Marketers talk about cultural relevance. Brands talk about staying relevant to younger audiences. Technology companies talk about maintaining relevance in a changing market. Politicians talk about institutions remaining relevant to modern society.

For me, relevance is the ability to remain valuable to the people who determine your future. 

While reflecting over the last eight years of The Unmistakables and advising organisations through periods of enormous change, I've come to believe that relevance is becoming one of the defining leadership challenges of our time. It is one that we are squarely focusing our energy on. 

When we started in 2018, our strategic mission was to help businesses understand and reach minority groups. That felt like the right conversation and was baked on a real need at the time. 

Businesses were grappling with representation internally and externally, social movements were changing expectations and leaders were asking questions about who was being heard, who was being overlooked and how organisations could better reflect the societies they served. 

Since then we have worked across leadership teams, talent functions, marketing departments, product development processes and creative industries. We have challenged assumptions, introduced new perspectives and helped people think differently. The work mattered - and still matters, but it needs to be thought about differently today. 

As I’ve been reflecting on where real success has been coming from in our work, the most successful clients succeed because they don’t tick a box that said they were inclusive. Their success comes because inclusion, more specifically the way of thinking more inclusively, and strategically, helps them to become more relevant to who they are serving. 

The most successful clients spend more time understanding about more people and perspectives so that they can make better decisions. They identify opportunities earlier because they have fewer blind spots, and they’re more open to learning. They are building products that work for a broader range of customers and they are attracting talent that others couldn't see and creating the conditions for them to perform at their best. Inclusion isn’t seen as an outcome, it’s seen as a mechanism. The real outcome is relevance. 

Leading for relevance 

The knock on effect of relevance for business and leaders is enormous. For a founder, the signal of success used to be scale - having a team, building through headcount - and now the markers and milestones have changed. Reports of the $1bn company with a single employee set a new standard for what the art of the possible can look like, the human in the loop that brings together the idea of an A Player with AI. 

For bigger businesses it means advantage is being eroded much more quickly. Competitive advantage used to come from controlling information, distribution and access. It’s now being built up in different ways. It’s more about speed of movement, being agile and not fragile, and spotting emerging trends faster than the rest and executing on them. 

Customers today have more choice and employees have more visibility. Communities can organise themselves more rapidly. Reputations can be built or destroyed in days and information moves instantly. People no longer wait for institutions to tell them what matters, they decide for themselves and then they force organisations to respond. 

Strangely, despite all of this, people still operate as though the old rules apply. We see this in politics, with the promise of bringing back old politicians from a by-gone era to suggest an air of stability, which doesn’t marry up to a new environment that demands adaptability. The leaders themselves are no longer relevant for the times we are living through. 

The risk is that leaders spend more time talking to themselves than understanding the people they serve. They rely on the old paradigm of five years ago, which simply doesn’t reflect the reality of today. This is something we've spent several years observing, trying to understand, and in fact diagnosing for ourselves. We call it organisational lag.

Tackling organisational lag 

Organisational lag is the gap between how leaders believe the world works and how people actually experience it. It is the distance between internal assumptions and external reality and every organisation has some degree of lag. The challenge is that most don't realise it exists until the consequences become impossible to ignore.

A product launch fails, a campaign goes belly up, a brand becomes irrelevant, a reputational issue escalates, a competitor spots an opportunity first, a generation of talent chooses to work somewhere else. The risks go on and on. The result? Growth slows and leaders begin searching for explanations and more often than not, it’s down to not having the right views and voices around them. 

This is why I increasingly believe the greatest threat to growth is organisational lag. Behind conversations about AI, talent, innovation, customer loyalty and culture sits a deeper question: how do we continue to matter as the world changes around us?

This is where relevance moves from being a marketing concept and to becoming a leadership discipline. Relevance in its truest form is less about trend chasing and just inserting yourself into cultural conversations, it’s more about creating a deep and evolving understanding of the people who determine your future, and how you’re going to adapt to meet their needs in service of growth. 

It goes all the way from a team understanding evolving audiences, right down to a line manager understanding someone who is different to them in a weekly catch up. 

The organisations that will succeed in the future will remain closest to reality, challenge assumptions, understand people as they are, rather than as they’d wish them to be. They’ll be the ones that can adapt fastest. 

The next phase of The Unmistakables 

This is why The Unmistakables is evolving our thinking. We are still committed to inclusion and we see it as one of the most powerful ways to reduce organisational lag. It broadens understanding, improves decision quality, surfaces perspectives that would have been missed, and helps you see more of the world, to respond more effectively to it. 

Inclusion creates relevance and relevance creates growth. That belief sits at the centre of everything we are building next. Over the coming months we will be sharing more of our thinking on relevance, organisational lag and what it takes to remain valuable in a world that refuses to stand still.

While relevance may have become a word that means everything and nothing, I suspect it is also becoming one of the most important strategic capabilities any organisation can develop.