Getting Pickled: The Innovation Impotence of Going Native
In our currently hyper-polarized world, I keep returning to a concept that rewired my brain a few years ago: two things can be true at the same time. So simple. Statement A and also Statement B, perhaps seeming to contradict each other on the surface, can both be valid in different context, circumstance, and perspective.
Let me give you an example of two conditions of innovation that seem to be in opposition, but as someone who has operated as both entre- and intra-preneur I can attest are both very real.
Innovation Condition 1: You can’t disrupt what you don’t understand.
(Ava DuVernay)
To innovate, you have to be knowledgeable on the domain. You have to know enough to know what can change, and what must remain. You have to have an awareness of what will break, who will break, what will grow in its place.
Ideally, you have to not only learn the domain academically, but also develop an empathetic understanding.
If you attempt to disrupt without understanding, you risk missing the mark — a meager loss — or even worse, you end up on a blind path of colonization instead, forcing assimilation. You risk losing value without knowing it existed. Think of every sci-fi or exploration movie you’ve ever seen, where the newcomers disrupt the existing culture without understanding. Never ends well.
Maybe a little less fantastical… imagine trying to build autonomous cars without understanding the current auto industry, and the transportation ecosystem surrounding them. Could you create a viable self-driving car without intense knowledge of the road and traffic systems?
Innovation Condition 2 : To disrupt, you must orbit the giant hairball.
[Paraphrased from Gordon MacKenzie]
Corporations, bureaucracy, status quo — even the things that have to-date guaranteed success — that’s the hairball. Becoming intimately involved with the systems in place can have you tunneling deep into the hairballs. If you become entwined with the ways of today, you lose your perspective to think differently about the ways of tomorrow.
Where once you may have been the creator shaping the policies and culture and market success, you hit the tipping point where the structure you built around yourself becomes an innovation prison. Your mental wiring becomes structured to easily forecast the challenges and reasons Why Not when presented with any deviant ideas.
To disrupt, you have to stay out of the gravity control of that hairball. You can’t examine, obey, or uphold too closely. Keep your gaze a little distant, intentionally stand apart from the masses. Be very aware of your maintained and careful ignorance.
To stick with cars, we all know if Ford didn’t practice a little intentional orbiting we would all still be riding faster horses. Or, name any gig economy company, and tell me if the founders were embroiled in the existing corporate hairballs — fleet management or hotel chains — we would have democratized car services and rental accommodations.
Christian Sandstrom describes in the MIT Technology Review how the original, undiluted premise of the Innovator’s Dilemma works:
…the demand to serve current, profitable customers in the short-to-medium term seemed to captivate companies. The needs of these customers made it seem irrational to invest in other initiatives, and so, he contended, these firms ended up brittle and vulnerable to being blindsided. He argued that companies were being misled by the very same practices — such as listening to their customers, or designing next-generation products for existing users — that had made them successful in the first place. Firms performed well by adhering to the needs of key actors in the environment, but over time, the environment started to impose a great indirect control over firms, eventually putting them in deep trouble. The theory was beautifully counterintuitive.
So, yes, two things can be true. To innovate, you need to both care enough to understand, AND be cautious of getting embroiled. In my friend Greg Larkin’s lexicon, innovation benefits from being both punk and pinstripe.
The trick is being self-aware enough to know when you might have become the Icarus of the hairball. As a colleague of mine puts it, after some time in an intrapreneurial role, you start to get pickled. You are brining, losing your crispness. Going native is how we often referred to it when I ran a startup and my very talented digital experts spent too long solving problems and building things for a single client. I could tell when they started making decisions based on challenges in the client environment, instead of challenging the environment influencing the client’s decisions. They empathized too much. They gave up a little. They lost their funky edge.
Some tips to balance between both of these truths:
- When you are beginning something new — new role, new project, new team — permit yourself time to learn. Don’t jump to conclusions and uninformed belief systems. Find experts, find the users, map the down & up-stream ecosystem.
- Explore at a double-click level, and no deeper. Get comfortable saying, I don’t need to know that. Re-focus hairball discussions on the outcomes you want to achieve, not the processes in place. Be wary of anyone who begins with “let me give you some history here.”
- Anyone who has worked with me will tell you I offer this repeated guidance, “If someone isn’t looking at you funny at least once a day, you aren’t trying hard enough.” Say the weird thing you are thinking. I have found some of the most creative outcomes begin as a joke… hey wait… maybe that could actually work…
- Question everything. Take no battle as lost. Make “Why?” your favorite question, and “Help me find a different way” your favorite request.
- Critically, notice when you stop being the one questioning and become the one answering. Then start questioning yourself. Gone native, become pickled? Might be time for a change.
An egg pickles in 2–3 days. A cucumber pickles in a week. Time to pickling is highly dependent on the object being pickled, and the pickling agent. In my personal experience, 1–3 years is standard innovation pickling time for an intrapreneur, though every person and every company culture is different.
