Smart Innovation vs. Cautious Failure
I recently enjoyed a TED Talk by OKGo, the band with the incredible music videos on youtube. One concept stood out to me as they discussed how it is they discover inspiration for their unique concepts.
They begin by discussing how their Rube-Goldberg machine video has 130 different interactions, and most projects could easily have over 130 moving parts and aspects people are responsible for. But even if all 130 parts were 90% guaranteed to be successful, the chance of everything working is still .9¹³⁰ power which comes out to be 1 in a million. If everything was 99% guaranteed to work, it comes out to be a 27% chance for success. That’s when he says, regarding new ideas:
“You’re basically constrained to just reshuffling ideas that have already demonstrably proven that they’re 100 percent reliable. If the only things I’m allowed to consider in the first place are ideas that have already been done over and over and over again, I am screwed. However, there are ways around this, because we all know that there are tons of untried ideas still out there, and plenty of them will turn out to be every bit as reliable as we need, it’s just that we don’t yet know they are reliable when we are at the planning phase.”
Their method is to explore sandboxes of untried ideas. So rather than planning before spending, the band spends a significant amount of their budget on the exploratory phase. Trying new things without a plan for how they are going to use them. Then when something clicks and works well, they can commit and move forward with something novel.
In the corporate or non-profit space, money is held very closely, for non-profits, it was probably donated and therefore needs to be accounted for responsibly. If it is a business, it needs to show a return. The need to tie every dollar spent directly to a concrete, measurable outcome, limits the potential for discovery. The reality that exploring for new ideas, things never before tried is uncharted territory. But, it is the space where new value can really be created. Whether it is entertainment value as with OKGO, or product value. If you only do things with a 100% proven success rate, you will never discover the next thing that has 100% proven success rate that other people will start to imitate.
Here is a case study:
This guy was first, he spent who knows how long, creating this machine and composing a song for it. It is 100% new. It was extremely well received. To date, 46 million views well received. His smart innovation, and willingness to explore a new means of performance really paid off.
M&Ms saw that this idea worked and sponsored this video later, it was a commercial that they paid to use as advertising and on youtube it has received 4 million views + however much viewership saw it on television. Whether they counted 15% of the views as a success or not, their cautious approach to only use the guaranteed successful model resulted in something people had already seen and were less impressed by.
It pays to be first, a rough estimate, 46 million views is worth somewhere around $90,000. To translate this to practical advice, especially in the realm of technology, where the environment change so rapidly, it is critical to explore. It is smart to explore. It should not be seen as taking a risk, but investing in discovering something new.
What is one way you can create space for discovery in your workplace this week? How can you give yourself or your team room to play in a sandbox of untried ideas without a plan?
