You want to innovate. But are you willing to pay to price?
Disruptive innovation doesn’t come out of consensus. If we were always focused on consensus driven decisions, the pace of innovation would be really slow.
The struggle is between making a segment of people happy, or to move to a new alternative which will cause some pain in the short-run.
Innovation is rarely achieved without resistance. It usually requires a radical new way of thinking that is counter-intuitive to culturally embedded wisdom. Ultimately, its questioning a widely held assumption, something that has been taken for granted for a long time.
Politics and government is really about balancing conflicting interests of different people. The interests that are preserved and promoted are usually the one’s backed by the most resources.
The development of most disruptive products, hardly focuses on a coherent multi-year end strategy. There is a solid vision, but how to get there is open to change everyday. It’s what Jeff Bezos calls Day 1 thinking. The main focus is on developing the best possible product based on trail and error and feedback. It’s what Steve Job’s meant when he said you can’t connect the dots going forwards, you can only connect them going backwards. You have to believe that as long as you’re taking consistent action to create improvements everyday, that it will all lead to the realization of the vision.
We have this underlying cultural belief that success was a planned operation, decisions were meticulously thought out and then executed with precision. These are the stories told, and then copied and applied as best practices on new endeavours. But many non-mechanical projects continue to fail. When a postmortem analysis is done, failure to execute the best practice effectively is cited as a reason for failure. These are really easy to point out when you’re really not facing the problems of real-time pressure and imperfect information and other unknowns that don’t plague the postmortem phase.
An example of this was the emergency aircraft landing on the Hudson where investigators were pretty quick to place the blame on the pilot with the advantage of hindsight.
This can also serve as a lesson to be more forgiving to fellow humans.
We need to develop an awareness and understanding of such issues to develop an innovation friendly culture.
The characteristics of routine vs. non-routine tasks, simple vs. complex tasks need to be defined in order to see where something is applicable and where something is not.
We create this problem when we attempt to apply lessons learned in a different domain on a new domain. This is part of the learning process, but could we create a framework to be able to distinguish these so that learning processes is accelerated?
