Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

Whether you’re a country, company, organization, or team, revolution is your mortal enemy.  And that’s why the systems of established organization are designed to prevent impending revolutions and squish those that grow legs. And that’s why revolutions are few and far between. (This is bad news for revolutionary innovation and radical change.)

With regard to revolutions, it’s easiest to describe the state of affairs for countries.  Countries don’t want revolutions because they bring a change in leadership.  After a revolution, the parties in power are no longer in power.  And that’s why there are no revolutions spawned by those in power.  For those in power it’s steady as she goes.

Revolutions are all about control.  The people in control of a country want to preserve the power structure and the revolutionaries want to dismantle it.  (Needless to say, country leaders and revolutionaries don’t consider each other good dinner company.)  And when the control of a country is at stake, revolutions often result in violence and death.  With countries, revolution is a dangerous game.

With regard to revolutions, companies are supposed to be different from countries.  Companies are supposed to reinvent themselves to grow; they’re supposed to do radical innovation and obsolete their best products; and they’re supposed to abandon the old thinking of their success and create revolutionary business models.  As it turns out, with regard to revolutions, companies have much more in common countries than they’re supposed to.

Like with a country, the company’s leadership party is threatened by revolution.  But the words are a bit different – where a country calls it revolution, a company calls it innovation.  And there’s another important difference.  Where the president of a country is supposed to prevent and squelch revolutions, the president of a company is supposed to foster and finance revolutionary innovation.  The president of a country has an easier time of it because everyone in the party is aligned to block it.  But, the president of the company wants to bring to life the much needed revolutionary innovation but the powerful parties of the org chart want to block it because it diminishes their power.  And it’s even trickier because to finance the disruptive innovation, the company president must funnel profits generated by the dominant party to a ragtag band of revolutionaries.

Where revolutionaries that overthrow a country must use guerilla tactics and shoot generals off their horses, corporate revolutionaries must also mock convention.  No VPs are shot, but corporate innovators must purposefully violate irrelevant “best practices” and disregard wasteful rigor that slows the campaign.  And, again, the circumstances are more difficult for the company president.  Where the country president doesn’t have to come up with the war chest to finance the revolutionaries overthrowing the country, the company president must allocate company profits for a state-funded revolution.

Just as revolutions threaten the power structure of countries, innovation threatens the power structure of companies.  But where countries desperately want to stifle revolutions, companies should desperately want to enable them.  And just as the rules of engagement for a revolution are different than government as usual, the rules of engagement for revolutionary innovation are different than profitability as usual.  With revolution and innovation, it’s all about change.

Revolutions require belief – belief the status quo won’t cut it and belief there’s a better way.  Innovation is no different.  Revolutions require a band of zealots willing to risk everything and a benefactor willing to break with tradition and finance the shenanigans.  And innovation is no different.

Image credit — Lee Wright

Once you have a project to work on, it’s always a challenge to choose the first task.  And once finished with the first task, the next hardest thing is to figure out the next next task.

Two words to live by: Critical Path.

By definition, the next task to work on is the next task on the critical path.  How do you tell if the task is on the critical path?  When you are late by one day on a critical path task, the project, as a whole, will finish a day late.  If you are late by one day and the project won’t be delayed, the task is not on the critical path and you shouldn’t work on it.

Rule 1: If you can’t work the critical path, don’t work on anything.

Working on a non-critical path task is worse than working on nothing.  Working on a non-critical path task is like waiting with perspiration.  It’s worse than activity without progress.  Resources are consumed on unnecessary tasks and the resulting work creates extra constraints on future work, all in the name of leveraging the work you shouldn’t have done in the first place.

How to spot the critical path? If a similar project has been done before, ask the project manager what the critical path was for that project.  Then listen, because that’s the critical path.  If your project is similar to a previous project except with some incremental newness, the newness is on the critical path.

Rule 2: Newness, by definition, is on the critical path.

But as the level of newness increases, it’s more difficult for project managers to tell the critical path from work that should wait.  If you’re the right project manager, even for projects with significant newness, you are able to feel the critical path in your chest.  When you’re the right project manager, you can walk through the cubicles and your body is drawn to the critical path like a divining rod.   When you’re the right project manager and someone in another building is late on their critical path task, you somehow unknowingly end up getting a haircut at the same time and offering them the resources they need to get back on track.  When you’re the right project manager, the universe notifies you when the critical path has gone critical.

Rule 3: The only way to be the right project manager is to run a lot of projects and read a lot.  (I prefer historical fiction and biographies.)

Not all newness is created equal.  If the project won’t launch unless the newness is wrestled to the ground, that’s level 5 newness. Stop everything, clear the decks, and get after it until it succumbs to your diligence.  If the product won’t sell without the newness, that’s level 5 and you should behave accordingly.  If the newness causes the product to cost a bit more than expected, but the project will still sell like nobody’s business, that’s level 2.  Launch it and cost reduce it later.  If no one will notice if the newness doesn’t make it into the product, that’s level 0 newness. (Actually, it’s not newness at all, it’s unneeded complexity.)  Don’t put in the product and don’t bother telling anyone.

Rule 4: The newness you’re afraid of isn’t the newness you should be afraid of.

A good project plan starts with a good understanding of the newness.  Then, the right project work is defined to make sure the newness gets the attention it deserves.  The problem isn’t the newness you know, the problem is the unknown consequence of newness as it ripples through the commercialization engine. New product functionality gets engineering attention until it’s run to ground.  But what if the newness ripples into new materials that can’t be made or new assembly methods that don’t exist?  What if the new materials are banned substances?  What if your multi-million dollar test stations don’t have the capability to accommodate the new functionality?  What if the value proposition is new and your sales team doesn’t know how to sell it?  What if the newness requires a new distribution channel you don’t have? What if your service organization doesn’t have the ability to diagnose a failure of the new newness?

Rule 5: The only way to develop the capability to handle newness is to pair a soon-to-be great project manager with an already great project manager. 

It may sound like an inefficient way to solve the problem, but pairing the two project managers is a lot more efficient than letting a soon-to-be great project manager crash and burn.  After an inexperienced project manager runs a project into the ground, what’s the first thing you do?  You bring in a great project manager to get the project back on track and keep them in the saddle until the product launches.  Why not assume the wheels will fall off unless you put a pro alongside the high potential talent?

Rule 6: When your best project managers tell you they need resources, give them what they ask for.

If you want to deliver new value to new customs there’s no better way than to develop good project managers.  A good project manager instinctively knows the critical path; they know how the work is done; they know to unwind situations that needs to be unwound; they have the personal relationships to get things done when no one else can; because they are trusted, they can get people to bend (and sometimes break) the rules and feel good doing it; and they know what they need to successfully launch the product.

If you don’t know your critical path, you don’t know very much.  And if your project managers don’t know the critical path, you should stop what you’re doing, pull hard on the emergency break with both hands and don’t release it until you know they know.

Image credit – Patrick Emerson

There are countless books and articles on innovation.  You can read how others have done it, what worked and what didn’t, how best to organize the company and how to define it.  But I have not read much about how it feels to do innovation.

Before anything meaningful can happen, there must be discontent or anger.  And for that there needs to be a realization that doing things like last time is a bad idea.   This realization is the natural outcome of looking deeply at how things really are and testing the assumptions of the status quo.  And the best way to set all this in motion is to do things that generate immense boredom.

Boredom can be created in two ways.  1. Doing the same boring work in the same boring way.  2. Stopping all activity for 30 minutes a day and swimming in the sea of your boring thoughts.  Both work well, but the second one works faster.

Next, with your discontent in hand, it’s time birth the right question.  Some think this the time for answers, but with innovation the real work is to figure out the question.  The discomfort of trying to discover the right question is seven times more uncomfortable the discomfort of figuring out the right answer.  And once you have the right question, the organization rejects you as a heretic. If the organization doesn’t dismiss you in a visceral way, you know you don’t have the right question.  You will feel afraid, but repeat the cycle until your question threatens the very thing that has made the company successful.   When people treat you like you threaten them, you know you’re on to something.

To answer your question, you need help from the organization, but the organization withholds them from you.  If you are ignored, blocked or discredited, you’re on the right path.  Break the rules, disregard best practices, and partner with an old friend who trusts you.  Together, rally against the organization and do the work to answer your question.  If you feel isolated, keep going.  You will feel afraid and you will second guess yourself.  Proceed to the next step.

Make a prototype that shows the organization that your question has an answer.  Don’t ask, just build.  Show the prototype to three people and prepare for rejection.  You and your prototype will be misunderstood and devalued.  Not to worry, as this is a good sign.  Revise the prototype and repeat.

Do anything you can to show the prototype to a customer.  Video the customer as they interact with the prototype.  You will feel afraid because you are breaking the rules.  This is how you should feel.  Keep going.

Set up a meeting with a leader who can allocate resources.  If you have to, set up the meeting under false pretenses (the organization is still in rejection mode) and show the video.  Because of the uncertainty of their response, you will feel afraid.  Show the video anyway.

The organization is comfortable working in the domains of certainty and control, but innovation is done in the domain of uncertainty.  By definition, the organization will reject your novel work.  If you are rejected, keep going.  Revise your heretical question, build a prototype to answer it, show a customer, show someone who can allocate resources, and be afraid all along the way.  And repeat, as needed.

With innovation, mostly you feel afraid.

Image credit – Tybo

Everyone likes patents, but few use them as a business tool.

Patents define rights assigned by governments to inventors (really, the companies they work for) where the assignee has the right to exclude others from practicing the concepts described in the patent claims.  And patent rights are limited to the countries that grant patents.  If you want to get patent rights in a country, you submit your request (application) and run their gauntlet.  Patents are a country-by-country business.

Patents are expensive.  Small companies struggle to justify the expense of filing a single patent and big companies struggle to justify the expense of their portfolio.  All companies want to reduce patent costs.

The patent process starts with invention.  Someone must go to the lab and invent something.  The invention is documented by the inventor (invention disclosure) and the invention is scored by a cross-functional team to decide if it’s worthy of filing.  If deemed worthy, a clearance search is done to see if it’s different from all other patents, all products offered for sale, and all the other literature in the public domain (research papers, publications).   Then, then the patent attorneys work their expensive magic to draft a patent application and file it with the government of choice. And when the rejection arrives, the attorneys do some research, address the examiner’s concerns and submit the paperwork.

Once granted, the fun begins.  The company must keep watch on the marketplace to make sure no one sells products that use the patented technology.  It’s a costly, never-ending battle.  If infringement is suspected, the attorneys exchange documents in a cease-and-desist jousting match.  If there’s no resolution, it’s time to go to court where prosecution work turns up the burn rate to eleven.

To reduce costs, companies try to reduce the price they pay to outside law firms that draft their patents.  It’s a race to the bottom where no one wins.  Outside firms get paid less money per patent and the client gets patents that aren’t as good as they could be.  It’s a best practice, but it’s not best.  Treating patent work as a cost center isn’t right.  Patents are a business tool that help companies make money.

Companies are in business to make money and they do that by selling products for more than the cost to make them.  They set clear business objectives for growth and define the market-customers to fuel that growth.  And the growth is powered by the magic engine of innovation.  Innovation creates products/services that are novel, useful and successful and patents protect them.  That’s what patents do best and that’s how companies should use them.

If you don’t have a lot of time and you want to understand a patent, read the claims.  If you have less time, read the independent claims.  Chris Brown, Ph.D.

Patents are all about claims.  The claims define how the invention is different (novel) from what’s tin the public domain (prior art).  And since innovation starts with different, patents fit nicely within the innovation framework. Instead of trying to reduce patent costs, companies should focus on better claims, because better claims means better patents.  Here are some thoughts on what makes for good claims.

Patent claims should capture the novelty of the invention, but sometimes the words are wrong and the claims don’t cover the invention.   And when that happens, the patent issues but it does not protect the invention – all the downside with none of the upside.  The best way to make sure the claims cover the invention is for the inventor to review the claims before the patent is filed.  This makes for a nice closed-loop process.

When a novel technology has the potential to provide useful benefit to a customer, engineers turn those technologies into prototypes and test them in the lab.  Since engineers are minimum energy creatures and make prototypes for only the technologies that matter, if the patent claims cover the prototype, those are good claims.

When the prototype is developed into a product that is sold in the market and the novel technology covered by the claims is what makes the product successful, those are good claims.

If you were to remove the patented technology from the product and your customer would notice it instantly and become incensed, those are the best claims.

Instead of reducing the cost of patents, create processes to make sure the right claims are created.  Instead of cutting corners, embed your patent attorneys in the technology development process to file patents on the most important, most viable technology.  Instead of handing off invention disclosures to an isolated patent team, get them involved in the corporate planning process so they understand the business objectives and operating plans.  Get your patent attorneys out in the field and let them talk to customers.  That way they’ll know how to spot customer value and write good claims around it.

Patents are an important business tool and should be used that way.  Patents should help your company make money.  But patents aren’t the right solution to all problems.  Patent work can be slow, expensive and uncertain.  A more powerful and more certain approach is a strong investment in understanding the market, ritualistic technology development, solid commercialization and a relentless pursuit of speed.  And the icing on the top – a slathering of good patent claims to protect the most important bits.

Image credit – Matthais Weinberger

If you know what to do, do it.  But if you always know what to do, do something else.  There’s no excitement in turning the crank every-day-all-day, and there’s no personal growth.  You may be getting glowing reviews now, but when your process is documented and becomes standard work, you’ll become one of the trivial many that follow your perfected recipe, and your brain will turn soggy.

If you want to do the same things more productively, do continuous improvement.  Look at the work and design out the waste.  I suggest you look for the waiting and eliminate it.  (One hint – look for people or parts queueing up and right in front of the pile you’ll find the waste maker.)  But if you always eliminate waste, do something else.  Break from the minimization mindset and create something new.  Maximize something. Blow up the best practice or have the courage to obsolete your best work.  In a sea of continuous improvement, be the lighthouse of doing new.

When you do something for the first time, you don’t know how to do it. It’s scary, but that’s just the feeling you want.  The cold feeling in your chest is a leading indicator of personal growth.  (If you don’t have a sinking feeling in your gut, see paragraph 1.) But organizations don’t make it easy to do something for the first time.  The best approach is to start small.  Try small experiments that don’t require approval from a budget standpoint and are safe to fail.  Run the experiments under the radar and learn in private.  Grow your confidence in yourself and your thinking.  After you have some success, show your results to people you trust.  Their input will help you grow.  And you’ll need every bit of that personal growth because to staff and run a project to bring your new concept to life you’ll need resources.  And for that you’ll need to dance with the most dangerous enemy of doing new things – the deadly ROI calculation.

The R is for return.  To calculate the return for the new concept you need to know: how many you’ll sell, how much you’ll sell them for, how much it will cost, and how well it will work.  All this must be known BEFORE resources can be allocated. But that’s not possible because the new thing has never been done before.  Even before talking about investment (I), the ROI calculation makes a train wreck of new ideas.  To calculate investment, you’ve got to know how many person-hours will be needed, the cost of the materials to make the prototypes and the lab resources needed for testing.  But that’s impossible to know because the work has never been done before.  The ROI is a meaningless calculation for new ideas and its misapplication has spelled death for more good ideas than anything else known to man.

Use the best practice and standardize the work. There’s immense pressure to repeat what was done last time because our companies prefer incremental growth that’s predictable over unreasonable growth that’s less certain.  And add to that the personal risk and emotional discomfort of doing new things and it’s a wonder how we do anything new at all.

But magically, new things do bubble up from the bottom. People do find the courage to try things that obsolete the business model and deliver new lines of customer goodness.  And some even manage survive the run through the ROI gauntlet.  With odds stacked against them, your best people push through their fears cut through the culture of predictability.

Imagine what they will do when you demand they do new work, give them the tools, time and training to do it, and strike the ROI calculation from our vocabulary.

Image credit – Tony Sergo

At every meeting you have a chance to move things forward or hold them back.  When a new idea is first introduced it’s bare-naked.  In its prenatal state, it’s wobbly and can’t stand on its own and is vulnerable to attack. But since it’s not yet developed, it’s impressionable and willing to evolve into what it could be.  With the right help it can go either way – die a swift death or sprout into something magical.

Early in gestation, the most worthy ideas don’t look that way.  They’re ugly, ill-formed, angry or threatening.  Or, they’re playful, silly or absurd.  Depending on your outlook, they can be a member of either camp. And as your outlook changes, they can jump from one camp to the other.  Or, they can sit with one leg in each.  But none of that is about the idea, it’s all about you.  The idea isn’t a thing in itself, it’s a reflection of you. The idea is nothing until you attach your feelings to it.  Whether it lives or dies depends on you.

Are you looking for reasons to say yes or reasons to say no?

On the surface, everyone in the organization looks like they’re fully booked with more smart goals than they can digest and have more deliverables than they swallow, but that’s not the case.  Though it looks like there’s no room for new ideas, there’s plenty of capacity to chew on new ideas if the team decides they want to.  Every team can spare and hour or two a week for the right ideas.  The only real question is do they want to?

If someone shows interest and initiative, it’s important to support their idea.  The smallest acceptable investment is a follow-on question that positively reinforces the behavior.  “That’s interesting, tell me more.” sends the right message.  Next, “How do you think we should test the idea?” makes it clear you are willing to take the next step.  If they can’t think of a way to test it, help them come up with a small, resource-lite experiment.  And if they respond with a five year plan and multi-million dollar investment, suggest a small experiment to demonstrate worthiness of the idea.  Sometimes it’s a thought experiment, sometimes it’s a discussion with a customer and sometimes it’s a prototype, but it’s always small.  Regardless of the idea, there’s always room for a small experiment.

Like a staircase, a series of small experiments build on each other to create big learning.  Each step is manageable – each investment is tolerable and each misstep is survivable – and with each experiment the learning objective is the same: Is the new idea worthy of taking the next step?  It’s a step-wise set of decisions to allocate resources on the right work to increase learning.  And after starting in the basement, with step-by-step experimentation and flight-by-flight investment, you find yourself on the fifth floor.

This is about changing behavior and learning.  Behavior doesn’t change overnight, it changes day-by-day, step-by-step.  And it’s the same for learning – it builds on what was learned yesterday.  And as long at the experiment is small, there can be no missteps.  And it doesn’t matter what the first experiment is all about, as long as you take the first step.

Your team will recognize your new behavior because it respectful of their ideas.  And when you respect their ideas, you respect them.  Soon enough you will have a team that stands taller and runs small experiments on their own.  Their experiments will grow bolder and their learning will curve will steepen.  Then, you’ll struggle to keep up with them, and you’ll have them right where you want them.

image credit — Rob Warde

Every idea that’s worth its salt will be rejected out of hand.  That’s just how it is.  You can get angry because you didn’t get the support you think you deserve or you can accept the fact that their negative reaction is about them.  The first way you shut down and your idea dies on the vine.  The second way you let their negativity pass right through you and continue your uphill slog until your idea is commercialized.  Either way, it’s your choice.

It’s difficult to let others’ negativity pass though you.  It may be easier to flip the situation on its head.

When confronted with an exceptional idea, people generate a negative response.  The underlying feeling is fear, but usually manifests as aggressive dismissal.  Instead of reacting with anger, maybe you can learn to see their fear-based reaction as a signifier of significance.  When you have a tooth with a cavity and you drink cold water, your tooth creates a reactionary zing of electrical energy, a tell-tale sign of the underlying decay.  The zing signifies the significance.  Just as the cold water elicits an electrical response from the cavity, the exceptional idea elicits a negative response from the person.  Don’t worry about the negative response, revel in it.

The only thing better than an idea that is so good it threatens is an idea that’s so good no one can understand.  These ideas are so deep, no novel, so twisted they conflict with conventional wisdom.  These ideas confuse everyone, especially the experts.  At first the experts aren’t threatened because they don’t yet understand.  They chuckle and take pity on you for thinking such strange thoughts.  Just as a negative reaction indicates significance, their chuckles and pity are leading indicators of significance.  Don’t let their reactions deter you, let them inspire you.  As your unconventional wisdom seeps into them and they begin to understand, their chuckles will morph into aggressive dismissal.  This tell-tale sign makes it clear you’re on to something.

If your idea doesn’t get a negative reaction, you’re not trying hard enough. Think bigger.  If your idea doesn’t threaten your most profitable product, come up with one that does.  If your idea doesn’t shake the fillings out of your business model, go away and don’t come back to you have one that does.

Companies don’t need more ideas, they need ideas that are more creative.  They don’t need more continuous improvement, they need more discontinuous improvement.  And they don’t need ideas that build on success, they need ideas that dismantle it.

If your ideas don’t threaten, don’t bother.

Image credit — Ed Schipul

The first question is usually – What’s the best practice? And the second question is – Why aren’t you using it?  In the done-it-before domain this makes sense.  Best practices are best when inputs are tightly controlled, process steps are narrowly defined, and the desired output is known and can be formally defined.

Industry loves best practice because they are so productive.  Like the printing press, best practices are highly effective when it’s time to print the same pages over and over.  It worked here, so do it there. And there. And there. Use the same typeface and crank it out – page by page.  It’s like printing money.

Best practices are best utilized in the manufacturing domain, until they’re not.  Which best practice should be used? Can it be used as-is, or must it change? And, if a best practice is changed, which version is best? Even in the tightly controlled domain of manufacturing, it’s tricky to effectively use best practices. (Maybe what’s needed is a best practice for using best practices.)

Best practices can be good when there’s strong commonality with previous work, but when the work is purposefully different (think creativity and innovation), all bets are off.  But that doesn’t stop the powerful pull of productivity from jamming round best practices into square holes. In the domain of different, everything’s different – the line of customer goodness, the underpinning technology and the processes to make it, sell it, and service it.  By definition, the shape of a best practice does not fit work that has yet to be done for the first time.

What’s needed is a flexible practice that can handle the variability, volatility, and uncertainty of creativity/innovation. My favorite is called – Try It.  It’s a simple process (just one step), but it’s a good one. The hard part is deciding what to try.  Here are some ways to decide.

No-to-yes. Define the range of inputs for the existing products and try something outside those limits.

Less-with-far-less. Reduce the performance (yes, less performance) of the very thing that makes your product successful and try adolescent technologies with a radically lower cost structures.  When successful, sell to new customers.

Lines of customer goodness.  Define the primary line of customer goodness of your most successful product and try things that advance different lines. When you succeed, change all your marketing documents and sales tools, reeducate your sales force, and sell the new value to new customers.

Compete with no one. Define a fundamental constraint that blocks all products in your industry, try new ideas that compromise everything sacred to free up novel design space and break the constraint. Then, sell new products into the new market you just created.

IBE (Innovation Burst Event). Everything starts with a business objective.

There is no best way to implement the Try It process, other than, of course, to try it.

Image credit — Alland Dharmawan.

Innovation isn’t a thing in itself, and it’s not something to bolster for the sake of bolstering.

Innovation creates things (products, services, business models) that are novel, useful and successful.  It’s important to know which flavor to go after, but before that it’s imperative to formalize the business objective.  Like lean or Six Sigma, innovation is a business methodology whose sole intention is to deliver on the business objective.  The business objective is usually a revenue or profit goal, and success is defined by meeting the objective.  Successful is all about meeting the business objective and successful is all about execution.

There are a lot of things that must come together for an innovation to be successful. For an innovative product here are the questions to answer:  Can you make it, certify it, market it, sell it, distribute it, service it, reclaim it?  As it happens, these are the same questions to answer for any new product.  In that way, innovative products are not different.  But because innovation starts with novel, with innovative products the answers can be different.  For an innovative product there are more “no’s” and for each no there’s a reason that starts with a C: constraint, capacity, capability, competitor, cooperation, capital.  And the business objective cannot be achieved with closing the gaps.

After successful, there’s useful.   Like any work based on a solid marketing methodology, innovation must deliver usefulness to the customer.  Innovation or not, strong marketing is strong marketing and strong marketing defines who the customer is, how they’ll use the new service, and how they’ll benefit – the valuable customer outcome (VCO.)  But with an innovative service it’s more difficult to know who the customer is, how they’ll use the service and if they’ll pay for it.  (That’s the price of novelty.)  But in most other ways, an innovative service is no different than any other service.  Both are successful because they deliver usefulness customers, those customers pay money for the usefulness and the money surpasses the business objective.

Innovation is different because of novelty, but only in degree.  Continuous improvement projects have novelty.  Usually, it’s many small changes consistently applied that add up to meaningful results, for example waste reduction, improved throughput and product quality.  These projects have novelty, but the novelty is the sum of small steps, all of which stay close to known territory.

The next rung on the novelty ladder is discontinuous improvement which creates a large step change in goodness provided to the customer.  (Think 3X improvement.)  The high degree of novelty creates broader uncertainty.  Will the customer be able to realize the goodness?  Will the novelty be appealing to a set of yet-to-be-discovered customers?  Will they pay for it?  It is worth doing all that execution work?  Will it cannibalize other products?  The novelty is a strong divergence from the familiar and with it comes the upside of new customer goodness and the downside of the uncertainty.

The highest form of novelty is no-to-yes.  No other product on the planet could do it before, but the new innovative one can.   It has the potential to create new markets, but also has the potential to obsolete the business model.  The sales team doesn’t know how to sell it, the marketers don’t know how to market it and the factory doesn’t know how to make it.  There new technology is not as robust as it should be and the cost structure may never become viable.  There’s no way to predict how competitors will respond, there’s no telling if it will pass the regulatory requirements.  And to top it off, no one is sure who the customer is or if anyone will it.  But, if it all comes together, this innovation will be a game-changer.

Innovation is the same as all the other work, except there’s more novelty. And with that novelty comes more upside and more uncertainty.  With novelty, too much of a good thing isn’t wonderful.  Sufficient novelty must be ingested to meet the business objective, and a bit more for the long term to stay out in front.

Be clear about business objectives, deliver usefulness to customers and use novelty to make it happen.  And call it whatever you want.

Image credit – Agustin Rafael Reyes 

Doing anything for the first time is difficult.  It goes with the territory.  Instead of seeing the associated anxiety as unwanted and unpleasant, maybe you can use it as an indicator of importance.  In that way, if you don’t feel anxious you know you’re doing what you’ve done before.

Innovation, as a word, has been over used (and misused).   Some have used the word to repackage the same old thing and make it fresh again, but more commonly people doing good work attach the word innovation to their work when it’s not.  Just because you improved something doesn’t mean it’s innovation.  This is the confusion made by the lean and Six Sigma movements – continuous improvement is not innovation.  The trouble with saying that out loud is people feel the distinction diminishes the importance of continuous improvement.  Continuous improvement is no less important than innovation, and no more.  You need them both – like shoes and socks.  But problems arise when continuous improvement is done in the name of innovation and innovation is done at the expense of continuous improvement – in both cases it’s shoes, no socks.

Coming up with an acid test for innovation is challenging.  Innovation is a know-it-when-you-see-it thing that’s difficult to describe in clear language.  It’s situational, contextual and there’s no prescription.   [One big failure mode with innovation is copying someone else’s best practice.  With innovation, cutting and pasting one company’s recipe into another company’s context does not work.] But prescriptions and recipes aside, it can be important to know when it’s innovation and when it isn’t.

If the work creates the foundation that secures your company’s growth goals, don’t worry about what to call it, just do it.  If that work doesn’t require something radically new and different, all-the-better.  But you likely set growth goals that were achievable regardless of the work you did.  But still, there’s no need to get hung up on the label you attach to the work.  If the work helps you sell to customers you could not sell to before, call it what you will, but do more of it.  If the work creates a whole new market, what you call it does not matter.  Just hurry up and do it again.

If your CEO is worried about the long term survivability of your company, don’t fuss over labelling your work with the right word, do something different.  If you have to lower your price to compete, don’t assign another name to the work, do different work.  If your new product is the same as your old product, don’t argue if it’s the result of continuous improvement or discontinuous improvement.  Just do something different next time.

Labelling your work with the right word is not the most important thing.  It’s far more important to ask yourself – Five years from now, if the company is offering a similar product to a similar set of customers, what will it be like to work at the company?  Said another way, arguing about who is doing innovation and who is not gets in the way of doing the work needed to keep the company solvent.

If the work scares you, that’s a good indication it’s meaningful.  And meaningful is good.  If it scares you because it may not work, you’re definitely trying something new.  And that’s good.  But it’s even better if the work scares you because it just might come to be.  If that’s the case, your body recognizes the work could dismantle a foundational element of your business – it either invalidates your business model or displaces a fundamental technology.   Regardless of the specifics, anxiety is a good surrogate for importance.

In some cases, it can be important what you call the work.  But far more important than getting the name right is doing the right work.  If you want to argue about something, argue if the work is meaningful.  And once a decision is reached, act accordingly.  And if you want to have a debate, debate the importance of the work, then do the important work as fast as you can.

Do the important work at the expense of arguing about the words.

If you want to make a difference, you’ve got to add energy.  And the more you can add the bigger difference you can make.

Doing new is difficult and demands (and deserves) all the energy you can muster.  Often it feels you’re the only one pushing in the right direction while everyone else is vehemently pushing the other way.  But stay true and stand tall.  This is not an indication things are going badly, this is a sign you’re doing meaningful work.  It’s supposed to feel that way.  If you’re exhausted, frustrated and sometimes a bit angry, you’re doing it right.  If you have a healthy disrespect for the status quo, it’s supposed to feel that way.

Meaningful work has a long time constant and you’ve got to run these meaningful projects like marathons, uphill marathons.  Every day you put in your 26 miles at a sustainable pace  – no slower, but no faster.  This is long, difficult work that doesn’t run by itself, you’ve got to push it like a sled.  Every day you’ve got to push.  To push every day like this takes a lot of physical strength, but it takes even more mental strength.  You’ve got to stay focused on the critical path and push that sled every day.  And you need to preserve enough mental energy to effectively ignore the non-critical path sleds.  You’ve got to be able to decide which tasks you must get your whole body behind and which tasks you must discount.  And you’ve got to preserve enough energy to believe in yourself.

Meaningful work cannot be accomplished by sprinting full speed five days a week.  It’s a marathon, and you’ve got to work that way and train that way.  Get your rest, get your exercise, eat right, spend time with friends and family, and put your soul into your work.

Choose work that is meaningful and add energy.  Add it every day.  Add it openly.  Add it purposefully. Add it genuinely.   Add energy like you’re an aircraft carrier and others will get pulled along by your wake.  Add energy like you’re bulldozer and others will get out of your way.  Add energy like you’re contagious and others will be infected.

Image credit – anton borzov