Innovation Anti-patterns
I’ve asked a few friends and colleagues about the top three ways they’ve seen time wasted during innovation projects. Completely unscientific, yet I ended up with an impressive list of symptoms and anti-patterns.
Now, some of these are about behaviours, some are about team maturity, but I found that surprisingly many are about poor strategic alignment.
This list is by no means complete and thinking in absolutes would stunt innovation, so consider this as a conversation starter, not a list of hard-and-fast rules.
# 1 Lack of confidence
The team is not comfortable with ambiguity.
People are afraid of stepping on people’s toes.
You are not asking why enough.
Working on ‘what the stakeholder/CEO/sponsor wants’.
# 2 Overconfidence
You are developing an innovation project that you won’t allow to fail during the testing of your hypothesis. The team may have started from the outset with a hypothesis that they are convinced will work, which will skew the evidence and prevent the team from discovering the best solution.
Someone already has a really strong idea about the solution they want and so lots of time is wasted talking about ‘how’ to make something work rather than understanding the problem, the needs and then thinking about options to solve them.
Talking about an innovation too much, but failing to realise they aren’t actually doing, testing or delivering anything.
#3 Your innovation work doesn’t align or integrate with the rest of the organisation
Innovations that the organisation won’t be able to implement due to systemic issues or business processes.
The product goals are not aligned with the organisational goals.
Talking about an innovation project as if it’s an end in itself.
# 4 Organisations often underestimate how hard it is and how long it takes to achieve real outcomes
Going wide and coming up with a good range of ideas is great, there is a huge amount of work that needs to happen to get an idea out into the world.
Business processes / capacity allocation / budgets don’t allow for change based on the teams’ findings.
#5 Analysis Paralysis
Gathering too much information instead of trying things out.
Expecting absolute and conclusive insight from desk-based research.
Part of this: Endless ideas — it’s great to generate ideas but at a certain point you’ve got to create some focus and have a way of deciding what to drill down into.
# 6 Bikeshedding
Discussing a matter disproportionately to its importance to solving the problem.
Bikeshedding is a term used to describe the phenomenon of people fighting harder to have a say on something small, but which they know and understand, rather than something huge and complex, which is much more important. The term comes from the bikeshed Vs nuclear power station metaphor, used to illustrate Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.
# 7 Users from afar
Second-guessing user intention and user need instead of actually trying things out.
Focusing the innovation energy on convincing others of the validity rather than building and testing it.
Prioritising business need, not user value.
# 8 Goldplating or premature optimisation
Spending time trying to perfect / tidy things when it’s not needed.
Polishing a pitch and creating branding for a product before its needs have been found.
The list of anti-patterns is mainly about team behaviours and dynamics, there is obviously some overlap with individuals’ cognitive bias, which can divert a team for the wrong reasons. Wikipedia has a very comprehensive list of cognitive biases.
I’ll be adding a bit more detail over time, feel free to suggest additions to the list of anti-patterns in the comments.
Thanks to my contributors Kathleen Bright, James Burnett, Jiten Vara, Tom E Smith, Eric Lamarca and Jim Bowes.
Caspar Below is Head of Digital at Shelter UK. We are helping people living in bad housing or facing homelessness. Donating to Shelter means we can provide advice and support so people in need don’t end up homeless.
