A rant for rebooting big business innovation.
We’re knackered, but big change is on the horizon…
After 16+ months of riding it out and adapting, most organizations have done a solid job of keeping it together. For most, it’s been exhausting, meaning this summer is an ideal time to pause for breath and recover a little because corporate innovation is about to undergo a pretty significant reboot.
Most organizations are now looking beyond this pandemic, to a future with massive challenges to overcome, but with incredible optimism. Lots has changed during Covid, but a lot also hasn’t … yet. The really big implications of how we work, play, shop, learn, live, love, build and more are still to come.
But corporate innovation hasn’t really worked yet…
The problem with most corporate innovation so far, has been that most organizations, and indeed basically every consultancy has made a big assumption, that innovation is this magical linear process taught in a handful of easy steps, for a fee, and how magically after you’ve worshiped at the church of design thinking then you too can be an innovator … or intrapreneur if you prefer.
Sadly, it’s a myth. Don’t get me wrong, design thinking, human centered design, or indeed most flavours of innovation process are not incorrect, but merely provide a single way of looking at the world, a foundation of what is really required. You can have the most brilliant process in the world, but if you don’t have the ability to flex how you apply it, a culture that embraces courage and ambiguity or the ability to see things through, then it’s going to underwhelm.
Established businesses are designed to maximize returns, while minimizing risks. Innovation, disruption, even good old digital transformation is inherently risky and highly unlikely to see you make a quick buck. For a cliched example, see Tesla, Airbnb, Uber etc. None of them actually make any money and all would have been weeded out of a corporate innovation process for being too out there, not commercial enough, misunderstood by existing customers, a threat to the quarterly returns.
In a traditional corporate innovation process, you’ll always see some form of scoring or voting to prioritize ideas after a lovely workshop filled with sticky notes. In this, the facilitator will tell the participants to pick the ideas that are the most desirable, viable, and feasible. The most exciting ideas might score a 10 for desirability or perhaps for their commercial potential, but to do them is hard so you give it a 2. Something that is bang average but easy to deliver with the current capabilities, ends up beating out the thing that might change the world thanks to a range of 6s and 7s.
Further, if something really great does make it through. It ends up getting owned by someone relatively middling in the organization who must then ‘socialize’ it to their boss, their boss’ boss, their equivalents in about 4 other departments (typically with a crap PowerPoint) which a) kills all the momentum due to the time it takes, and b) results in feedback that waters the idea down so as to not touch a nerve.
By this point, I suspect people reading will be either nodding their heads or clicking away because I’ve touched a nerve. Good.
Embrace irregular thinking of different futures.
We can’t predict the future, but we can imagine future scenarios. Foresight and strategic futures is nothing new, but there are so many ways to apply it. Every single foresight workshop pre-2020 had a Post-It that said ‘pandemic’. And 99% of them went in the bin with little thought afterwards because it wasn’t seen as very likely. Whoops.
Innovation is by its nature irregular. It simply doesn’t come about by following the way it’s always been done, by the people who’ve been there and done it. Management consultants make lovely slide decks, they do not typically have controversial opinions or even interesting life experiences. They are broadly homogenous and their entire system is built on the desire for conformity. If you want to change your business, you’d be better off hiring a stand up comedian, Arctic explorer, drug dealer, physiotherapist or sex worker.
Why? Because such professions require an entirely different level of sensing and way of looking at the world to be successful. What different audiences will find funny, the need to consider the weather and terrain, wondering if this buyer is part of a sting, knowing which muscles to press or am I spanking my client too hard are considerations beyond the skills of most middle managers and management consultants.
Do. Not. Hire. People. Like. You.
Do things out of sequence.
Innovation is not a linear process. Don’t fall into the trap of research -> ideas -> prototyping -> business case -> build -> fail -> rot (because you spent all the budget on the MVP).
You should always be speaking to customers, industry experts, startups, competitors, collaborators, random opinionated people who write rants on linkedin. Idea generation should be continuous, not just random workshops, or platforms for virtual Post-It notes that say “NFT” or “DeFi” or “People Like You Data”. The most creative ideas come at random times, due to serendipity, failure, drunkenness, getting out of the office, being in the office, listening to a pissed off customer, talking to a loony, attending conferences, reading science fiction … or philosophy.
Indeed, sometimes you should just build shit for the sake of it, to learn more, to see how hard it is, to see how easy it is. Do it without permission. If you’ve got an innovation mandate, you have been given trust.
Be confident. Operate with autonomy. Justification is never sexy.
On a related note. You need to get rid of your insecurities. There is nothing worse than a well paid, intelligent person, feeling the need to socialize decks around or making sure everyone is on side, diluting the big idea as they go. You will (and should) be prepared to rub some people up the wrong way. We’re adults, we can do this respectfully, there’s no shame in a good argument among friends.
Execs need to be more involved in innovation at the outset, and I don’t just mean sitting in the odd workshop. Something I see all too often is a mid-30s, early 40s leader not being able to take a risk for fear of being wrong and getting fired. At this stage in life, you tend to have a decent sized mortgage, kids and financial commitments that you need to keep up. Before starting, execs need to give trust and back their people. Their people need to know if they fail, they still have the roof over their heads.
Before someone comments about ‘innovation accounting’ … just no. The number of ideas you have, prototypes you’ve built, people you’ve spoken to does not really matter. Save the time and the excel sheet, and focus on the outcomes.
Move fast, but also take your time.
A year is a long time in a big business, and by following your linear process, innovation can take a lot of time you might not necessarily have. I have lost count of the number of times that a team has a really promising opportunity that much work has gone into, only for the organization to go through the inevitable reorg, putting everything on pause and then have to go through a process of starting from the beginning again. You must find quick wins that create momentum, and consider whether you really need to be aligned with the rest of the business. Make them keep up with you.
And now I will completely contradict myself. Innovation is often too fast, making everything into sprints, doing mediocre things fast often means the moment to actually deliver meaningful change wasn’t there yet. Lots of big ideas came before their time. I should really call this innovation foreplay. Without the iPod, would we have had an iPhone? Remember how shit the first Teslas were? The Lego brick came 20 odd years after they started making toys. James Dyson spent years in his shed.
You can do a lot with a little, but real change requires multiple big bets.
I am yet to see an established business with a suitable budget for innovation. There seems to be this expectation of magically knocking up prototypes, proof of concepts or even real products with the digital equivalent of popsicle sticks and bailer twine that will sustain the future business on a pittance.
Yes, constraints can make us much more resourceful and creative. But if you aren’t able to invest in the good ones, then you’re better off keeping the limited powder dry. Furthermore, make it easy enough for teams to take a punt on something unproven. I recently witnessed a very well known brand spend 8 months pissing about trying to make the business case for a small investment in a new product, guessing at sales numbers before deciding the opportunity wasn’t big enough. Firstly, it wasn’t a lot of money, and secondly they killed the idea through ‘commercial’ assumptions without even knowing what product they might have been selling.
You should be investing roughly 2% of your total revenue into innovation, initiating tens of new venture opportunities each year and I think this might even be conservative. Put your money where your mouth is by investing in your own people’s ideas to do things internally, and where you lack capabilities or capacity, rethink how you source alternative start-up / scale-up / agency collaborators. The portfolio approach will balance your risk and win out in the end.
Make lots of new friends, take chances, get lucky.
Sort of like embracing the irregular futures thing, but this is about your action, not just your thinking. You cannot possibly deliver all of your innovation or transformation internally or through your existing procurement roster, if you could, you would have done it already.
Do not be afraid to be vulnerable, get out and find new people that can help you accelerate innovation. Go borrow other people’s platforms, leverage good tech, swing and miss a lot, but accept you can always pump up your RBI with some lucky singles or a Bartolo style homer.
Don’t overcomplicate it.
Most innovation teams tend to attract over academic personalities, more interested in crafting the perfect 2x2 than actually delivering on big ideas. As a consumer, you would steer away from complexity. As a business leader, make it simple for others to follow … we know there is nuance, but that’s not for us to worry about.
If you can’t tell the story in 5 slides, a short narrative, or within a tweet, then you’ve got work to do. (would you have a look at how much guff this hypocrite has written up to here…)
Test what doesn’t make sense. Be prepared to be wrong a lot.
Far too many corporate types spend their time testing things they already know to be true, as it will help them look smart and prove they met this year’s balanced scorecard. This is totally wasteful. Instead, we should be testing the things that don’t make sense, putting our resources into learning, not rigorous arse covering.
Almost every big breakthrough or interesting event in life comes from something that doesn’t make sense. Nature is a great example of this, so is sport, politics and most likely your marriage too … or is that just me?
Don’t believe me, just read Alchemy.
Have fun. Don’t be embarrassed by innovation theatre.
It’s very cool to bash innovation theatre these days. And OK, there is a lot of it out there. But if you strip the theatre out of the damn thing, then what’s the point? Corporate innovation is really hard, you’re swimming against the tide, you’re going to get knocked back time and time again, and when you do get it right, often someone else gets the credit long after you’ve gone.
Life is a game. You should have fun playing it. Nobody lives to work. We remember the fun things in life, we put money into fun things that have little obvious economic return, we make friends through fun, and we go above and beyond for the fun stuff. It’s why storytelling is critical to delivering innovation in a corporate environment. If you have no theatre, I don’t believe you will ever have any innovation.
*obviously don’t just cock about and get nothing done, but you know what I mean…
Now if you made it this far, I can only assume you were quite bored today or are incredibly tolerant of a rant from a reluctant and recovering Deloitte employee recently described as “too autonomous and entrepreneurial for our organization to stomach”.
I fully believe in big business innovation, and over the coming months and years every big business is going to have Now or Never moments. Moments in time where with courage and guts, they can take advantage of societal, technological, political, regulatory, environmental change to create better businesses for the future.
I’m quite good at helping people with this, through Now or Never or Irregular Studio, I bring unconventional and irregular thinking, methods and people to create new products, services and businesses.
