Choose Your Own Innovation Adventure
How mixing and matching business frameworks can free you from the pursuit of certainty and lead to unexpected ideas
Innovation is inherently risky and uncertain. We’ve often heard the saying, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Embracing new ideas means embracing the risk of failure, and no amount of statistical evidence can eliminate that risk. This uncertainty is a tough pill to swallow for C-suite executives seeking to drive investor confidence.
How can we reconcile this need for certainty with the potential lack of it? When a rigorous statistical analysis doesn’t produce the supportive evidence we’re looking for, our thirst for structure and certainty can lead us to grasp at anything that helps organize our thinking or, even worse, supports what we already believe — all in the pursuit of innovation.
We may find an article that proposes a new business model idea. We may read a book that reaffirms our long-held beliefs about a customer, or we may massage forecasts to represent the ideal futures of a new product we take to market. Sometimes, we’re taught that a framework is the best practice to evaluate business decision-making — a silver bullet to so many business problems. We fall in love with a framework, a methodology, or a tool kit that soon becomes gospel in our organization. Don’t get me wrong; many of these techniques have merit, usually. But so often, we, as consultants, must help our customers navigate the uncertainty of business decision-making — and frameworks can only go so far.
But wait: What exactly is a framework?
A framework is a thinking technique that enforces a level of discipline to the creative process of problem-solving, accounting for values like holism, balance, and priority.
As a strategy and innovation consultant, I navigate the nooks, crannies, and blind corners of innovation strategy, helping customers explore potential decision-making pathways using a variety of helpful frameworks. But as in life, some tools are perfect for a situation and others are complete mismatches.
Too often, strategists, consultants, and our customers find themselves jamming a square peg into a round hole. I’ve found that more work-intensive, comprehensive, and collaborative approaches can round out the square and fill the gaps.
Innovation without displacement
A newer framework that resonated with my customers was from W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s book Beyond Disruption. The famed authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne argue that instead of following the overused adage, “Disrupt or be disrupted,” companies should target the problems that haven’t been solved.
The fintech company Square offers a compelling example. Small businesses were overlooked by larger point-of-sale companies for years (think food trucks, hairdressers, landscapers). Square created solutions that expanded these businesses’ addressable occasions, enabling them to receive credit cards as payment in addition to cash. Square’s solution was not disruptive but rather expansive, increasing the marketplace without displacing existing companies. Of course, one could argue that Square would eventually begin displacing other companies’ market share.
Kim and Mauborgne explain that nondisruptive innovation is perceived to be less threatening to an organization than taking on the mantle of “disruptor.” In fact, in workplace cultures that emphasize people and societal good, expansive innovation can be inspiring and motivating. Instead of encouraging customers to disrupt themselves, antagonizing their real and perceived successes, Kim and Mauborgne’s framework drives them to consider:
- What are we good at and how could that apply to an underserved industry? (Blue Ocean thinking)
- What problem has our industry (or any industry) not solved for a large group of people?
Thinking about innovation and brainstorming ideas can feel freeing rather than destructive. Who wants to ideate business strategies that could potentially uproot your own livelihood? In contrast, it feels inspiring to tackle a new problem in ways that don’t risk displacing you and your colleagues. In one workshop with a customer, I noted how many folks in the room wore eyeglasses — a perfect example of nondisruptive innovation. It only solves, rather than disrupts. By the end of the workshop, participants were scrambling to figure out what their eyeglasses could become. What unsolved problem could they solve to propel themselves forward in the market?
Strategic disruption in organizations
Of course, some companies are eager to innovate by disruption. Most begin their lives as disruptors, and some maintain that cultural DNA as they scale. Whether through a new business model, a new technology, or a new experience, companies disrupt by differentiating themselves in established markets — their own or a new one. Eventually, though, even famously disruptive companies fall into a rhythm and develop standard practices. They evolve into managers rather than innovators. Instead of fostering new ideas, they focus energy on creating new ways to make their core offerings more efficient and protect what they have built.
But some companies put forth valiant efforts to maintain self-disruptive thinking — a difficult cultural value to embed in an organization in the long term. Netflix is one of the best and most famous examples of this: first disrupting the video rental space, and then disrupting itself and cable networks by heavily investing in streaming. Yet Netflix now has something to lose, and it’s becoming harder for the streamer to deviate from its core today.
Intentional, strategic, and perpetual self-disruption can have significant payoffs, but it can also lead to real cultural and psychological consequences. Disruption can create anxiety, especially in organizations that have something to protect. Whether an organization is older, siloed, or bureaucratic, it’s a much more difficult battle to convince management to embrace uncertainty and change. So much depends on how an organization’s leaders incentivize work from the top down. Corporate antibodies will attack the outsider perspective, protecting what they were fortified to keep safe.
Operationalizing self-disruption
When does it make sense to be self-disruptive? Self-disruption can be a response to new industry threats — be they well-funded startups, established industry entrants, or changing consumer preferences. Sometimes, to protect what you have won’t be enough. We must find ways to create new value for customers.
It’s difficult to know which approach to take — should you pursue the disruption route or focus on unsolved problems? How do you navigate such complex and uncertain problems? How can you know which approach will be most successful in your organization? Through our work at Slalom, we stopped using singular frameworks and focused on encompassing styles — utilizing multiple frameworks within a single project. By taking what worked best across many different frameworks and adjusting to the specific customer’s context, our teams created a style called SIS.
Scout. Ideate. Strategize. SIS is not a framework but a style, incorporating a team’s skill sets, capabilities, and tools in a structured way. It allows for the use of multiple strategic frameworks (like VRIO, Porter’s, SWOT, PEST, or even Kim and Mauborgne’s “nondisruptive” innovation) so we can explore every dimension of a problem or opportunity.
The most impactful innovations are not created in boardrooms by teams of consultants. That would require a few of us to be smarter than the aggregate of all of us. SIS is an example of a democratized innovation approach where a team of interdisciplinary individuals — outsiders, insiders, strategists, researchers, data analysts, product managers, experience designers, and developers — works together to create an innovation strategy.
These individuals scout the competition, emerging technologies, and customer needs, resulting in a comprehensive present-day competitive landscape with an eye toward predicting potential future competitive landscapes. The team then ideates from multiple attack points, grounding brainstorming exercises in (1) what we know customers value, (2) what the competition isn’t doing, and (3), without any constraints, what most would call a “blue sky” ideal. Ideas are then organized, categorized, and scored based on customer and business values, thinking holistically about how each concept would affect the customer, the business, and the world.
Finally, the team strategizes together, debating the different pathways to take. If we execute one concept, what makes sense to do next? If we do this, would it conflict with that? If we enact a particular strategy, which competitors could quickly follow, and would it be a defensible position in the long run?
Conclusion
Certainty is difficult to find, and as a result, we seek out frameworks to help us satisfy our primal need to quell our anxiety in this chaotic business world. But overreliance on a singular framework can lead us to a false sense of certainty. If you were looking to buy a used car, you wouldn’t only look at the engine, right? You’d explore the whole thing, scrutinizing its maintenance history, inspecting surface-level dents, and quantifying its true value through price calculators and other tools. SIS is one simple way to bring holism to the chaos of business. As you navigate potential frameworks to solve the challenges you’re facing, think about how you can bring them all together in a style that works for you.
Slalom is a next-generation professional services company creating value at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity. Learn more and reach out today.
