Launch p2.1: Systematized Innovation
“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute”
Culture and Methodologies
Let’s say that your idea has passed the mission filter. You have buy-in from leadership and/or advisors, and you’re convinced that there’s a real opportunity to create value. Great job. You’ve got the equivalent of a spark that you need to convert into a bonfire. Have you ever tried starting a bonfire with frozen wood, or no wood? What if it’s windy or rainy out? What if you don’t know how to build a fire lay, and nobody around you feels comfortable jumping in? Your spark doesn’t have much of a chance, does it? Innovative ideas are just that: ideas. They are delicate and imperfect concepts that require the proper setting and conditions to develop and, just like that bonfire, you want a team that can help you fan and fuel the spark into a proper flame.
The culture necessary to nurture ideas into innovations might happen spontaneously in a startup, where people self-select for working in a highly iterative and creative environment, but it seldom happens by chance in larger corporations. Even in startups, you must screen against toxic personalities that corrode the psychological safety that’s necessary for intellectual vulnerability – and it does take vulnerability to put your unvarnished ideas out there. You have to trust that those imperfect ideas will be handled respectfully and without judgment. Most of the best ideas start from something seemingly foolish, and the best teams know how to give them their due course of deliberation.
There are ways to approach new ideas so that we don’t snuff them out until it’s time. Failing fast is great unless we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so we want to make sure that there’s a process in place that addresses key elements of a good idea. One method that I like to follow borrows from Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, where there is a series of predefined steps that align people’s thinking toward a common goal. It happens that during group ideation people aren’t always on the same page with respect to what “hat” they are wearing. Whereas some people may be in a white hat mentality, where there are no bad ideas, and everything is fair play, others might be in green hat mentality, where they are judging based on financial metrics, or others in black hat mentality, where they’re quick to shoot down ideas based on any number of viability gaps. The thing is that being in white hat mode requires tons of creativity, intellectual vulnerability, and energy. It’s far easier shooting down ideas than generating truly unique concepts out of nothing! All it takes is one person wearing a black hat in a room before white hat people shut down from frustration and exhaustion. The Six Thinking Hats approach states that all hats are important, but in due course. Black hat people will have their moment, but not until it’s time. We all begin in white hat mode, where all ideas are equally good, then we systematically progress down the chain, assessing for different elements of a candidate idea until we get to the black hat stage, where we all now try to kill the idea. If an idea makes it past the funnel then we feel like we may be on to something worth exploring further – and we have full buy-in from the team! This process dignifies each idea in a fair and equitable way that promotes team building and multifaceted parallel thinking, giving each team member the confidence that their particular interests and concerns will be addressed in a rational and predictable way.
In a situation where some friendly competition is helpful, you may consider hackathons, or other mechanisms for stimulating creativity. The main point of all of this is that the environment must be created to promote innovation and collaboration. Without that you effectively have a spark with no lay, tinder, or fuel. In evolutionary terms, imagine a random mutation that serves no clear and immediate benefit to the host, but environmental pressures instantly select it out of the gene pool. Such pressures might have expunged the original light-sensitive molecules that evolved into eyes or the unformed skin flaps that evolved into wings. The environments must have been such that these mutations were presented with the proper conditions to morph into properties that today are critical for survival. They all developed under the influence of certain systems.
What could those systems have looked like? I bet that they were wildly different, but as cell development goes, I’m sure that those initial cells were following signals that created a supportive feedback loop. When given the right circumstances and ample time, it’s amazing what evolution can create! When innovating, it’s important to have the proper environment and mentality, but it’s also important to apply the right system that adequately supports your objectives. This is where product development methodologies come in. Let’s say that your objective was to create a wing. Let us further imagine that you had a blueprint of what that wing should have been ahead of time (if you designed an improper wing then your host would plunge into extinction). Now you need to follow a highly controlled and low risk environment to develop and test that wing before flight. Could those environmental engineers in charge of the wing have followed a waterfall approach to creating flight? Under those circumstances perhaps it would have been the right approach. But if you’re creating the eye, and you have no a priori idea of what it would look like or how it would function, then maybe you need to follow more of an agile process that creates forward motion while taking calculated bets and mitigating costs. Or maybe any number of processes, from incremental to spiral to six-sigma, would be more appropriate. It really depends on your team, your environment, and your objectives, but when I hear people boast about being an “agile shop” I can’t help but think “then I hope that you’re building an app, and not a nuclear submarine”.
So think carefully about the people in your team. Think about the environment, the culture, and the ways to align thinking toward common goals. Systematizing your innovation approach is about understanding the levers that favor success and establishing the conditions for idea evolution, all while optimizing time and resources. These conditions aren’t identical across companies, but there are many common elements that should be carefully taken into account.
