The wonderful Novo Virus
What if businesses aren’t predisposed to dislike new things? What if it’s an accident of evolution? The corporate equivalent of a penicillin allergy; being allergic to something which was designed to save your life.
Imagine a hypothetical organization. Let’s call it Veteris Corp for arguments sake. Let’s also imagine that it’s been very successful over 40 years and amassed an impressive workforce of 100,000 people. Like most established businesses, the model and profits are now coming under threat by new entrants. Now let’s take an off piste mental leap and imagine that 5% of their employees are fools. What is a fool? For the purpose of this tale a fool is someone who by malice or accident can do meaningful damage to the business. It could be a fat thumb accident, professional negligence, inappropriate behavior with clients or a gift that looks suspiciously like a bribe. These are folks that the embattled HR team knows are out there but usually won’t find until after they’ve wrought their chaos. Usually when I tell this story people react to the revelation that there are fools in their company in one of three ways.
- 5%! I’m sure there must be 20% I feel surrounded by fools
- 5%, that’s unacceptable. I’ll have them hunted down and executed
3. Am I a fool?
For the sake of easy arithmetic we’ll agree on 5%. In the case of Veteris corp this means there are 5000 rogue agents roaming around the business that at any point could just screw everything up. It’s a stressful thought.
In response companies evolve sophisticated protection mechanisms to defend themselves against the foolishness that they know is out there. Governance, process, procedures, policies and regulations are all there to protect the business from stupidity. With 5000 stupids on the prowl that’s a good thing. Those who follow the process, even the dim witted, can come to little harm.
So here’s the problem: Innovation, especially really good, world changing, mind altering disruptive Innovation, to the system looks exactly the same as foolishness. All of the sophisticated and highly evolved early warning and protection mechanisms that have taken years to perfect, turn on Innovation with ferocity usually reserved for the most hideous halfwit. As an innovator you have provoked an aggressive immune response and the ‘white blood cells’ of the organization (Regulatory, Compliance, HR, Legal) will come after you with extreme prejudice.
So there we are. Innovation is a helpful virus oft snuffed out by a sophisticated corporate immune response. Imagine I could infect you with an amazing new affluence virus, the Novo virus. Allow yourself to succumb to it and you may experience some minor short term ill effects, but in the long term your wealth will grow every year. An unfortunate few may experience more severe wealth loss side effects. On the whole the benefit outweighs the risk in the long term. Alas, if you resist infection you’ll never see where you could have been in years to come. It’s difficult to see an absence of growth and it’s evident only by watching those around you growing and wondering why you seem left behind.
Do you allow yourself to be infected? Whether you embrace the Novo virus or not will depend on your context. Behavioral science shows us that the fear of loss trumps the happiness of a gain. If you are successful and wealthy and surrounded by people you only partially trust, you have a lot to lose and will be less likely to take the risk. In fact you may invest in sophisticated antiviral countermeasures to avoid being infected. You’ll watch everyone else growing around you and wonder what you did wrong.
On the contrary, with nothing to lose and in ‘startup mentality’ you won’t hesitate. Indeed if the first infection fails you’ll go again because you still have nothing to lose. This is why startups embrace the Novo virus. An added benefit to being a small player is with less than 20 people in your small organization the fools have nowhere to hide. They stand out like a sore thumb and can be easily removed. The signal to noise ratio on stupidity is high so it’s easier to trust those around you.
The good news is that there are some easy tactics to deal with a corporate immune system. It’s far from aspirational but we can take our inspiration from an antibiotic resistant bacteria or a horrible plague. Not all viruses can be stopped; it’s possible to weaponize the Novo virus. Here are a few approaches I’ve seen and tried over the years.
The adaptive Novo virus — Fitting in better
Innovation teams tend to want to have swanky working spaces, lax dress policy and better coffee than everyone else. They’ll have exposed ceiling pipes and deceptively expensive designer furniture. Perhaps they’ll also have table football and some bean bags. It’s the virus equivalent of a marching band entourage and a fetching neon lycra jumpsuit. Not subtle and they’ll see you coming from miles away. Instead try to blend in. Learn to love the operational side of the business. Learn the language. What’s important to people? Positioning new things as solutions to meaningful problems, described in their language and with empathy for the operational side of the business is Innovation by stealth. You’re no longer an invasive species. The combination of vicarious empathy and slow exposure inoculates the business to your presence and makes you less threatening. You’re ‘one of us’. Congratulations, you’re now the kind of friendly bacteria that makes people pay more for yoghurt.
A Novo virus pandemic — Overwhelm the system
A lot of viruses work by simply overwhelming the immune system. They wage an assault on unprecedented scale which is almost impossible to repulse. In Innovation there’s a lot of talk of launch & learn. Start small. This is the immune system encouraging you to be a lesser virus. They’ll tolerate you being around because they know they can knock you out later and quietly slip poison to your projects as they sleep. Instead go big. Create $Bn ideas with huge ambition. Killing something on that scale comes with tremendous personal risk which a lot of your white blood cells will shy away from. The survival instinct will overcome their killer instinct. Imagine killing a $Bn opportunity only to have a competitor do it shortly afterward. It’s career suicide. The flip side here is that you take on immense personal risk. Hopefully that’s why you love Innovation and this is exactly the challenge you were looking for.
Dulling the immune response — Fail quietly, win with quality
Every time an Innovation group fails, the whole discipline is diminished. You are not just responsible for growing your own company, but for the survival of Innovation as a corporate function. We’re encouraged to embrace failure, but failure scorches the earth not just today, but for generations after. How many times have you heard something along the lines of; ‘we tried that in 1987, remember Douglas?….poor Douglas’; cue wistful look to ceiling and groaning in chorus. It’s a poignant moment of lament for a fallen colleague. Everyone with Innovation in their title has a duty to their peers to succeed or ‘die trying’ (not literally die, but be prepared to fight down to the wire).
We need better training; better tools and a better experience in schools & colleges. We need a focus on the realities, not the theory of helping companies do new things at scale. We need a bias toward the human and cultural, not the strategic & procedural. Only this will better prepare people to thrive within a large organisation. Innovation specialists need to be equipped to deal with resistance from the white cells. This doesn’t mean you can’t fail. However, make sure you fail in the lab, not in the field. Better methodologies, better data and solid process will help you to fail quietly, away from the gaze of white blood cells. This ensures that when you come onto their radar you’re fit for the fight. Have answers ready for the toughest questions and make it tricky for white cells to shut you down. Trying to fix a half baked idea in flight makes you easy pickings for the foolishness police.
As in nature corporate immune systems leave behind specialist cells post infection which retain an accurate memory of the vanquished virus. Immune systems are primed to prevent further infection. Many companies suffer from this acquired immunity by accident. If you hear, ‘we tried that before’, or that will never work in this business, chances are that this is what you’re up against. If you hear Douglas mentioned as a cautionary tale it’s definitely what you’re up against. A single failure can inoculate the business leading to lifelong resistance to a new idea. Or opportunity. Failure comes at a high and enduring cost.
In closing
Never underestimate the sophisticated self-protection mechanisms businesses evolve. The larger and more established the existing business and the larger the employee base, the bigger this issue will be. Some corporations have realized the amazing power of the Novo virus and proactively killed off or muted their white cell functions. In those organizations those functions have been forced to recognize and focus only on legitimate cases of foolishness, avoiding Innovation as collateral damage. They’re willing to accept the occasional faux pas or legal slip up for the greater good of evolving business. They also understand that to thrive you need to trust your team (which is a hiring challenge) and give them resource and freedom to do what’s necessary whilst making them highly accountable for outstanding results.
Other companies have accepted that they need their powerful protections and instead spun off smaller business units with less trigger happy responses to new ideas. Many large companies don’t recognize their own autoimmune response to Innovation but it’s one of the single biggest challenges to growth. Overcoming the effect is possible but only if you become skilled in hiding from it or overwhelming it and only if you read widely and interact with the innovation community taking every opportunity to learn new approaches. New ways to acquire and present data which the organisation has not yet evolved a response to. Even having an awareness that you may be eliciting or experiencing an immune response rather than a genuinely meaningful objection or barrier can help greater objectivity. Let the Novo virus in and watch your business grow.
