Kevin Bacon, Footloose, and Innovation
This 1980s dance movie can help you plan for the joys and pitfalls that come with embracing growth and innovation.
Setting the stage
Footloose is more than a film about dancing. Well, it’s a little about dancing, but mostly it’s an American cinematic masterpiece about the effect of new ideas on small-town routines and culture.
Let’s revisit the wholesome tale: A young, wild-at-heart, dance-happy Kevin Bacon relocates to Bomont, Oklahoma, aka “the smallest town in the mid-west,” only to discover that his favorite hobby is illegal! Kevin Bacon fights to change the law that forbids its citizens from dancing. Kevin Bacon challenges this small town’s behavior and cultural paradigm with tractor fights, barn dances, and, most importantly, GROWTH!
My succinct and perfect recap of Footloose reflects how most organizations approach innovation. Additionally, it explicitly reflects my experience developing the innovation framework for a large aerospace company.
After getting my physics degree, I joined a large aerospace company as an electrical engineer. I wanted to see science done BIG. I wanted to see ridiculous sums of money thrown at problems and help find equally ridiculous solutions. I wanted to be part of a corporate science blunder that opened up a portal to the Upside Down. I wanted to do something meaningful.
Yet this BIG science factory was now the company that openly committed to “No more moon shots.” No more BIG science. Or barn dances. It had become Bomont. Younger me had to ask myself …
“What the f*** is this?”
But, as happens in all good stories, there turned out to be a group of other smart and talented individuals that were asking themselves the same thing. This good-looking, suave group of fellow Baconites knew the importance of innovation. We understood that bread and butter are lovely but they’re not GROWTH.
Growth comes from creating new value for customers and the company. Meaningful change comes from finding out customers want jelly and a biscuit and that you have strawberries and cake flour in your cupboard. It comes from finding an opportunity within that challenging middle space. We were Kevin Bacon, and we were going to teach ourselves and this place HOW TO DANCE.
Where our story begins
Within the town of Bomont, there are a particular set of behaviors and beliefs:
- It’s a town closed off to new ideas.
- It’s wary of newcomers.
- The people get angry and scared when Kevin Bacon starts to shake things up.
This is Bomont’s culture. We can see how quickly a town like that would fade away. Innovation is fundamentally a cultural issue. Innovation, by definition, is creating something new. New things are provocative. Provocation is Kevin Bacon.
An organization like a large aerospace company is no different. It was afraid of new ideas; if it’s unable to process failure, if it’s closed off to changing customer needs, or if it’s not willing to DANCE … then it will also fade away.
Kicking off our shoes and mixing metaphors
Much like in the masterpiece Footloose, my Baconites and I found that our company had a singular solid cultural driver coming from the top. The company was, and rightly so, focused on satisfying our previous customer commitments. However, this focus made it just like Bomont: monotonous and slow to change.
Kevin Bacon is the instigator who helps change Bomont, but he’s not alone. He has a group of friends who also want to dance. Like Kevin Bacon and his friends, my team started tackling this problem by building a cohort of believers in innovation. We engaged all manner of personnel from new hires to the CEO. With that groundswell, we created a way for employees to share ideas and stakeholders to share problems.
After that, we taught ourselves and our new impressionable teen friends how to innovate. We showed them what it meant to be entrepreneurial within an organization. We showed them how to find customers, find out what they wanted, and execute.
We gave them back the right to dance, and then we showed them how.
Ultimately, we saved millions of dollars annually. We helped the company explore new technologies and services, consulted teams on how to bring our methods into their work, gave people the freedom to be creative, and won at tractor chicken … I mean, we got buy-in from executives. Our team proved that we could create real value for the organization with our methodology.
We had established and proven a framework. We had helped the company, but, unlike Kevin Bacon in Footloose, we could not change its culture. It should be no surprise. Despite our connections to leaders and employees, despite our wins and cost savings, despite everything, we still had an entire organization’s culture to change. In Footloose, the town is small, and their emotional zenith is burning books! Imagine how much effort it takes to change a large company, many times the size of Bomont.
But it’s worth remembering that Kevin Bacon and his crew win in the end. Unfortunately, the Baconites at the giant aerospace company still haven’t found a resolution, but we haven’t gotten to the end credits yet either. So the story is still rolling.
Culture is everything
Kevin Bacon knew what he had to do. First, show Bomont that dance was good. Second, build a group that believed, not just in him but with him. Finally, he had to change the culture.
Consider this when implementing any kind of reform, not just innovation. Teach your organization to dance.
Slalom is a global consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Learn more and reach out today.
