When you want to play tennis with the rules of football
Trying to innovate applying the same old methods and mindsets is the formula to disaster — the story of Company X! 👇
Can you imagine someone playing tennis with the rules of football? It doesn’t look good, right? That’s what we can observe in many organisations nowadays; trying to apply rules, methods, and mindsets they learned in the past while trying to do new things. Lack of courage? Or education?
This is happening in many organisations that are trying to “apply” agile with the rules of waterfall project management. There are thousands of organisations doing this. It’s popular to find an excuse for it, but it’s also normal to find why these organisations are not growing exponentially. Instead, these organisations are living a tremendous fight to survive; challenged by more and more entrepreneurs and start-ups. In fact, the real challenge is the customer, who needs better value propositions on a daily basis. It’s very easy to change to a new ‘provider’ nowadays.
But what I find curious at the moment, is organisations trying to embrace innovation, in particular when developing new products and services, using outdated knowledge. Ah! But rebranding things to make it look updated!
It’s a blend of self-denial with trying to do things differently. It’s a blend of lack of real courage, because of the wrong incentive system, with a shy tentative of trying something new. It’s even hard to describe some Frankenstein methods that are being put in place.
Frankenstein Innovation Framework — the favorite model of legacy organisations when starting the innovation journey. They know it doesn’t look good, they know it’s going to fail, but they are afraid of challenging the status-quo and missing the anual bonus. When in fact they should be afraid of becoming Nokia. Then Frankestein kills the creator. The creator will apply for a new job elsewhere. He didn’t failed, and that was the problem.
Product and Service Innovation using methods from the XX century but branded as XXI century
- Imagine company X. Company X is 100+ years old bank. The leadership team decided to embrace innovation. Everybody talks about it!
- The next move was to start an innovation lab/hub. The lab is called Bankify by X.
- Bankify by X has developed a couple of Design Sprints. There are a couple of innovation opportunities detected. What’s next?
- Company X will create a business case, and set up a team to develop that particular innovation opportunity. A beautiful slide deck, very well assembled by a consultant or similar. The cover page headline is “How we are going to win”
- The development will take months and it will cost more than 100k. There’s a strong emphasis on the development of the product, without validation of the match between the need and what’s being developed. That will be done later in the development process. Priority is to build, build, build!
- Company X, through Bankify, will be able to test 4 or 5 ideas in one year. Or even less. The test will cost more than 500k. This is a lot more than early-stage start-ups get when testing the initial idea. Of course, investors are more prepared to understand how innovation works, that’s why they became investors in the first place.
- Company X does even better: identifies the need to set up a core team with a Product Owner, probably with a project manager/scrum master. None of these guys is aware of “lean startup”, what really an MVP is, or most of important of all, the entrepreneurial mindset is not there. The grit, the ambition, the pirate mindset.
- Company X adds a couple of lines to the job spec description of the Product Owner to make it look like a Product Manager. A role that we can find in highly successful organisations. But it’s a shy approach because company X is not ready to hire a real Product Manager. What company X wants is the typical product backlog manager. Then the scrum master will build with the help of software developers.
- Company X still calls this exploratory development a PoC. Probably an MVP, but in fact, it’s a PoC. A PoC is not appropriate for innovation, but it’s the language that Company X understands. Let’s not hurt some feelings.
- Company X will spend a lot of money to test just a couple of ideas. After 12 months, someone will start asking about how many euros came in per euros out. It seems that only the bean bags came in.
- Disappointment with the innovation lab/hub and the innovation process settles in. Working side by side with entrepreneurs in a coworking space doesn’t work. Sleeping in the garage doesn’t turn you into a car.
- It seems that innovation is a fad. The lab has more bean bags than revenue. It’s just a cost center. OMG!
- It seems that the person leading Innovation isn’t good enough. The buzz starts: “But he/she was just like us”, “he was speaking the same language, sharing the same believes”, “he/she was so diplomatic”, “he/she had a clear understanding of our organisation”, “our recruitment process is rock solid. It takes 9 interviews and 5 presentations!!!”
It’s a blend of self-denial with trying to do things differently. It’s a blend of lack of real courage, because of the wrong incentive system, with a shy tentative a trying something new. It’s even hard to try to describe some Frankenstein methods that are being put in place.
14. “oh no, look, that start-up is eating our pie. But they don’t know anything about our business! How’s that possible? They are going to fail soon!”
15. Ooooooooooops. “We are now Nokia, Blockbuster, Atari, Compaq; we are dead”
Sleeping in the garage doesn’t turn you into a car.
If you want to innovate you need to have the courage to change things, not just rename the same old approach and make it look innovative.
Don’t be like company X. Don’t start a Bankify (Innovation Lab) just because it looks great. Learn what it takes to innovate. The lack of education at the executive level is the major risk legacy organisations face. Leadership, Strategy, Management theories evolved. It’s time to unlearn and learn again.
Don’t play tennis with the rules of football. Accept that you don’t know tennis and start learning.
Doing the same thing over and over again — with new shiny names — and expecting different results is called insanity. Everybody knows this quote, but it seems that we forget when we start thinking about the risk of embracing new believes and knowledge.
Hugo de Sousa
Hugo de Sousa is an experienced corporate entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in the private and public sector. He likes to help organisations to become more innovative, fighting the “Titanic Syndrome”, and embracing new mindsets and ways of working. Hugo is the founder of #InnovationDaily, a publication on Medium and a hashtag on LinkedIn. Portuguese, living in Ireland since 2017.
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Disclaimer: Opinions are my own.
