Is it me, or has innovation gone rather well, …. ‘meh’?
Y’know the old Tom Goodwin piece with the world’s biggest taxi company not owning taxis, hotel company not owning rooms, media company not creating content, retailer not owning inventory and so on … it’s now 2019 and that tweet is now a bit dated. But cast your mind back a wee bit, and how much genuinely life changing, innovative and genuinely audacious stuff has launched in recent times. Before you start, FaceApp or Zao don’t count.
Last week I had a proper moan about that Uber kiosk in Toronto Pearson where you can order an Uber without having the app and I stand by my comments that it is a pointless features layering cost and complexity onto a proposition that frankly pisses money in the wind. I love Uber, it’s brilliant, but the financials are pretty unsustainable likely at least until autonomous vehicles become the norm and when they’re a thing, screw a sodding kiosk for luddites or hipsters without a smartphone. An airport kiosk was a just a bit of colouring in for an ‘innovation’ team.
It used to be that innovation was either crazy simple, picking a real world problem, doing some thinking and coming up after much work and iteration with something beautifully elegant and simple that people would love. To me, that was Uber, or Monzo or even Google. None of these things are really earth shattering, they’re just damn good.
Or some batshit crazy people would have an idea so utterly ludicrous that everyone would laugh at them and give them a million reasons why it wouldn’t work. Jeff Bezos flogging books out his garage into what Amazon is now seems mental, Elon Musk doing Elon Musk things should have been (and probably was) ridiculed but PayPal, Tesla or SpaceX would suggest differently. I think The Boring Company is very daft, but I’m probably wrong.
So this made me think about what we (and I hold my hands up here) have preached about how to ‘do innovation’. We’ve long preached design thinking, squads, collaboration, sprints, innovation KPIs, the importance of constant customer interaction and so on. Now this isn’t all nonsense but effectively, what we’ve done, is create a lot of busy work that was probably a better money spinner for consultants and internal teams that it was really worth. Again, I’m sorry.
Weirdly, for as much as we’ve preached speed, collaboration, metrics etc. I think the unintended consequence of it all has been mediocrity. We sprint with haste rather than speed, we collaborate so hard that we compromise and we measure things to make us look good, not the things that really matter. I’ve worked with some amazing people over the years, and to be honest, a few duds, but in the pursuit of being nice and keeping good relationships that this post will likely now ruin, the desire to be collaborative often resulted in consensus, and empowering middle managers has often resulted in middle of the road thinking. I still think about some of the great ideas that this process has killed that could have been amazing.
Without wishing to make it seem like big companies should behave like startups, because they shouldn’t really, big ideas that change the world don’t come out of lovely workshops that have a nice icebreaker, where you invited Steve the assistant brand manager or Fern from sales to bulk up the numbers or to get them onside.
Likewise, there’s the getting all hung up about how sexy, cool and disruptive the startup of the month is but forgetting the many that failed. There’s the forgetfulness again of how a startup can be considered successful with its first hundred customers when corporates need tens or hundreds of thousands. My old boss Dan Taylor, now GM of Innovation for TAL always used to comment about how the popping of champagne in a startup probably gets you fired in a corporate.
Anyway, so what do we do about it? What if instead of fetishizing 5 day Google Ventures sprints that get you a pretty little prototype that’s been hacked, guessed at and doesn’t see the light of day, you spent a little longer creating an elegant and/or audacious idea to a real world problem. Like actually thinking, with smart people who understand the issue, get in a dark room like the old days and take some time to challenge the thinking and try a few new things. Sorry Steve and Fern but this one might not be for you.
Maybe they come back with something really different, novel, interesting, bold and perhaps a little scary that challenges the status quo. Maybe it’s something elegant that simplifies and puts into question the operating model of the moment.
Instead of Steve and Fern sucking through their teeth and questioning what it means if it fails, worrying about their job security, or finding ways to kill the idea or ways to compromise the idea, they spend time with senior leadership, create the case for change and decide to do it or not. Because if you’re not going to do it properly, then maybe it’s right to kill it and just focus on doing the day job well.
So my challenge is this, instead of creating a compromised idea that has been done in a rushed design sprint that made people feel good with the number of post it notes consumed, before taking 18 months to deliver a hacked version to market or rushing an Instagram story with some ‘influencer’ about how you’re the first brand in human history to allow augmented reality kombucha tasting using artificial intelligence that isn’t really artificial intelligence served up on the blockchain that will never make it to the general public … let’s spend a little more time a) doing the simple things well and b) having the guts to do something truly audacious.
