Where Do Burning Platforms Come From?

A burning platform can be found internally and externally; often it is a combination of the two. An internal burning platform might be pride, competitiveness, or the necessity not to waste your life. It is that burning desire to accomplish something and the innate human quality to create and contribute. An example of an internal burning platform can be found in the story of Lance Armstrong, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France (considered by many to be the hardest endurance bicycle race in the world).³ Armstrong was diagnosed with cancer, and if that wasn’t tragic enough, shortly thereafter he lost the support of his major sponsor. Competitive bicycling would seem to be out of the question. However, Armstrong was clear in his quest for the yellow jersey. He had a burning platform to overcome cancer, return to good health, and prove that his former sponsor’s decision to drop him was foolish. A burning platform does not have to be noble; it can also be based on negative emotions (e.g., anger, revenge, fear of failure). An internal burning platform can be anything that will get you off that couch.

Another example is found in one of our favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption.⁴ In this film Tim Robbins plays a character, Andy Dufresne, who was wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his wife and her lover. Andy was a skilled accountant and eventually ended up helping the warden in a scheme to steal money from the prison system. As the movie progresses, another prisoner tells Andy that he knows the man who shot his wife. Andy, thinking this will clear his name, goes and tells the warden. However, the warden has too much invested in Andy to let him go, so the warden actually kills the other prisoner who gave Andy this information. Obviously Andy is depressed. In the prison yard talking to his best friend Red (played by Morgan Freeman), he describes his dream of owning a hotel and fishing boat in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Red tells Andy to stop dreaming about his vision because he is in prison, and all that talk about vision will make it difficult for Andy to survive. Then Red starts thinking about Andy’s vision and says that Andy’s vision is a “shitty pipe dream” because Mexico is out there and he is in prison. Andy eventually says that it comes down to a simple issue: either “get busy living, or get busy dying.” It comes as no surprise that later that night Andy makes a successful escape out of the prison. If Zihuatanejo was the vision, then his friend’s death at the hands of the warden clearly became his burning platform. These circumstances motivated him to take the risk of executing his plan.

A burning platform can also come from external pressures. The burning platform may be a competitive threat, a declining financial situation, regulatory pressure, or global change. Most of us learned how to use a computer due to an external burning platform; we feared that if we did not, our company would hire someone who could. On the organizational level, new technology can create an external burning platform (move forward and adopt technological change or get left behind). The U.S. auto industry had a burning platform when Japanese automobile manufacturers started making better quality cars. It was not until after the U.S. “big three” (Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors) lost a considerable market share to the Asian “big three” (Honda, Toyota, and Nissan) that U.S. automobile manufacturers started to develop their own better quality cars. In short, the Asian car companies lit the fire under the U.S. auto industry. On a more personal level, the most compelling burning platform we heard came from a senior-level person at an organization we had worked with. We were describing the concept of the burning platform and this woman started to cry. During the break, one of us asked her why she was crying. She said that she was tired of all of negative press about her organization in the papers. There was a scandal involving the organization, and as newspapers often do, this story was in the headlines for a long time. She told us that the story was so bad that she stopped telling new people she met where she worked. She ended by saying that the tears were her realization of her burning platform: Either solve the scandal in a way that integrity and reputation return to the organization, or start looking for another job.

Usually, both external and internal motivators are at work. Sighting the external burning platform may occur at different times due to the hierarchical structure of most organizations. Top leadership usually focuses on a more distant horizon in time. They may see threats to the security of the organization much sooner than the frontline employee. Along the same line of reasoning, the frontline employee may be privy to immediate dangers or dysfunctional workings concerning the customer interface. Product quality issues, poor reception to existing products due to a technology shift, and customer outrage with service problems are examples of issues that frontline employees might see before top leadership does. These threats tend to be more immediate, indicating the fire is lapping at the company’s ankles. Urgent action is required. The strength of an organization’s communication system is brought into view. Slow response and distrust of the information coming from the first layer of the organization will cause overly slow corrective actions.

While a collective burning platform needs to be identified for the purpose of moving toward an organizational vision, it is simply an expression of the commonality between individual burning platforms. In other words, as is the case with a collective vision, the burning platform is the product of the alignment and intensity of individual burning platforms. Therefore, individuals must discover why it is critical for them to change, if in fact that urgency exists. Remember, organizations do not change; people in organizations change. All too often we see individuals who can identify the burning platform (e.g., “someone should really fix that issue,” or “I can’t wait until managers get off their butts and do something about this problem”) but do not have the internal fire to do anything about it. The business or organization may be threatened, but unless the individuals inside the walls have an individual burning platform, all will stand aside and watch Rome burn. History is filled with stories of individuals and organizations that knew they should change, had a clear vision, but never identified a burning platform and eventually watched the fire consume them.

In business circles, two examples confirm the need for identifying and articulating a burning platform. First, the leading manufacturers of horse-drawn carriages and wagons were not the pioneers or inventors of automobiles. In fact, as the world was moving toward automobiles, carriage makers continued to make wagons and carriages. These manufacturers did not think they had a reason to stop doing what they were doing. In our second example, the same thing can be described for typewriter manufacturers. The typewriter-manufacturing industry was critically wounded with the advent of the desktop computer and printer. In the United States, typewriters are practically nonexistent. However, we are still typing. Why didn’t typewriter manufacturers develop capabilities for making keyboards for computers? We think it is because they did not identify the burning platform. We think it is the role of leadership to help organizations and individuals to identify a burning platform.

Leadership’s task is to help individuals develop consciousness about the collective and individual burning platforms. The leader’s job is to coach individuals toward the discovery of the burning platform, not to tell the individual what his or her burning platform should be. If a collective burning platform exists and is seen by many, but individually the energy to change is low, leadership is required to supply consequences for inaction. Thus leadership has influence on actually developing individual burning platforms through performance feedback and corrective action. And similar to a vision, consciousness surrounding the burning platform must be kept current. A one-time discovery is insufficient. Leadership is required to test the current might of the burning platform.