It Isn’t the Innovator’s Dilemma Mr. Christensen, it is the Interpolator’s Dilemma
In 1997, Clayton Christensen from the Harvard Business School released a book called The Innovator’s Dilemma. This book became an overnight sensation, partly at least because it appealed to the corporate plague of understanding why so many become toppled or get caught flat-footed from pesky peripheral new entrants hiding in the shadows.
When things don’t make sense to the decision-makers in the market, lexicons like “disruptive innovation” and “skating to where the puck is going to be” become convenient ways to feel better about this perceived truth. The actual truth is found with the individual people involved. Particularly, the ones that are in the position to make decisions but are unable to interpolate what their own people are attempting to convey to them.
Behind these popular lexicons you will find all the emotions within the struggling organizations that go along with the seemingly unexplainable reality. Relative buzzwords like “skating to where the puck is going to be” is a high-energy way to feel better about the reality that no one knows where that is, exactly, nor that there is any chance the decision-makers will be putting their skates on any time soon. If you look closely enough, you will find every struggling organization is engulfed in relative terms as an attempt to either look like they are in better shape than they are (to themselves, employees, market and shareholders) or, to feel better about the reality of the situation.
We crave these types of lexicons because it gives hope to those that need it, gives energy to those who are losing their passion, and provides a hide-behind for those that don’t know what to do.
Clayton Christensen, like all similar books or articles, takes the appropriate symptoms of the problem but ultimately fails to elucidate the actual underlying cause. If I could select one piece of Christensen’s writing, it would be an excerpt from Disruptive Innovation: Intellectual History and Future Paths (working paper 17–057 Harvard Business Review):
“The emergent theory of disruptive innovation was initially a statement of correlation. Empirical findings showed that incumbents out-performed entrants in the context of sustain innovations, but underperformed in the context of disruptive innovations. But there was no intellectually satisfying understanding of why this happened — there was no causal mechanism to link the observed association between the circumstances and market leadership outcomes.”
There is a suggestion here that there is no “causal mechanism” that links the circumstances to the market outcomes. That is because no one is characterizing what is always there to be seen — the people involved. The people who succeed in being the “healthy and stealthy” disruptors as well as the perceived stodgy and inflexible disruptees who are only able to sustain innovation upon their existing trajectory.
We can all agree with the facts that every great company started with founders. Founders that had no trajectory to build an escalator to facilitate growth. We also know that many of them came from companies that fit the description of who ends up toppled by “disruptive innovation.” The ones who decide to be the disruptors are the ones that cannot un-see what they see and are unable to get their company’s decision-makers to see, and interpolate the same. It is as much a conundrum as it is a dilemma. These individuals have no choice but to pursue what becomes the beginning of the cycle of business life: visionary founding, sensory building of the bureaucracy for efficient growth, misaligned trajectory with the world/market, rotation of the ship over the drain of relevance, visionaries jump ship and restart the process (see What Makes a Company Sick.)
As Theodore Levitt wrote in Marketing Myopia, “In truth, there is no such thing as a growth industry. There are only companies organized and operated to create and capitalize on growth opportunities. Industries that assume themselves to be riding some automatic growth escalator invariably descend into stagnation. The history of every dead and dying growth industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of beautiful expansion and undetected decay.” It is the cycle of life. Visionaries who can make sense out of things see things that they cannot un-see. What they see cannot be articulated in a way that the organizational decision makers can interpolate it, therefore, it remains stuck as conjecture, supposition or otherwise dismissed.
You see, Mr. Christensen, it is not the innovator’s dilemma you write about. It is the interpolator’s dilemma that leads to the incumbents circling the drain waters of relevance. The innovators will innovate, somewhere, somehow, even if it is germinated in the seeds they plant with others that blossom years, decades or a lifetime later.
The company, however, at that moment fails because the decisions are made by interpolators who simply cannot extrapolate to any level of comfort. By definition, interpolators are anti-visionary based on their brain function hardware. They simply cannot make sense out of it. It is “Syntax Error” and the company continues to focus its energy on what it can make sense out of, which is sustaining innovations in existing markets. Note, there are always a few in the circle of decision-making that sees what the internal visionaries and innovators see, but they do not “rock the boat” out of groupthink and fear of disrupting their upward path and the means it provides for themselves and their families (see The Dangers of Collective Ignorance in the Meeting Room.)
Not until the forensic autopsies start including the brain functions and the UP Factors of the specific people involved in the control of the decisions and allocation of resources, no real progress can be made in understanding “why.” A comparison of the functions and UP Factors involved of both the disruptor and disrupted would reveal a lot. In fact, if would explain everything that happened, including the snowflakes that should take responsibility for the company’s avalanche.
Jim Collins in his book Good to Great came close because he highlighted individual people that made the difference. But he too failed to link Level 5 leadership of those specific people who became the CEO to what made them different from a brain functions perspective beyond the surface attributes they had in common.
In a summary of the book, Collins wrote something that jumped at me. He explained why the attempt to make that final connection to what is at the individual level that makes that person a Level 5 leader is either a dead-end road or an endless search. Collins wrote,
“For your own development, I would love to be able to give you a list of steps for becoming Level 5, but we have no solid research data that would support a credible list. Our research exposed Level 5 as a key component inside the black box of what it takes to shift a company from good to great. Yet inside that black box is another black box — namely, the inner development of a person to Level 5. We could speculate on what might be inside that inner black box, but it would mostly be just that — speculation. So, in short, Level 5 is a very satisfying idea, a powerful idea, and, to produce the transition from good to great, perhaps an essential idea. A ‘Ten-Step List to Level 5’ would trivialize the concept.”
Collins is correct in this statement because he and his team did, in fact, lack the data to make this further connection into the inner black box. When I first read this book, I thought to myself, “finally, someone is going to write about what I see!” But it was not in the book. And to clarify Mr. Collins, it is not trivializing the concept when the lens is there to see the things that could not before be measured or characterized. Now, there is a way to peek inside that inner black box that leads to an individual’s emergence towards Level 5 leadership. The challenge is you have to get closer to the “devils in the detail” to use these lenses. You must apply the forensics to the actual people involved in these stories. Which means, you have to get your hands really dirty into the details of the people that we all agree are the ones that make the difference.
There is a reason Steve Sasson invented the first digital camera in the early 1970's yet it never saw the light of day inside the behemoth of Kodak. There is a reason that we only know Western Union as a way to wire money. From a Western Union management internal memo in 1876: “This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device has no value to us.” How many times have we experienced this short-sightedness ourselves? Have we ever been the one who judged before we understood it?
Everything happens because of people and teams, not processes. Until forensics actually looks at the specific individuals involved through these lenses, the success of the effort is limited to the next wave of lexicons and relative terms so others can feel better about the reality of failure and lost opportunities to make true differences in the world.
How “team-able” are you? How team-able are those on your team? The most obvious element of team chemistry is being team-able, yet, we just assume because we are all adults it just works out? How well has that been working for us? We can build high-performance machines but we cannot seem to harness high-performance teams. This is indeed a conundrum of a pandemic scale.
My recommendation: Be wary of anyone who writes a book or article or gives a talk that is based on the forensics of corporate strife and failure that fail to discuss the functions and UP Factors of the specific people involved.
You can learn more about the Ultimate Human Dilemma and the Ultimate Human Solution by visiting our website at www.up-factorllc.com
