The last few days talking about
teams was fun, and I suspect it doesn’t seem like it but I’m slowly spiraling
in toward a broader goal, and it’ll take another week or so to get there. For now now let’s shift gears a bit and talk
about what you do with teams – you create change!
The question is, how much change do you strive to make, how do you go about starting it, what direction do you head, and how do you manage it? One model of innovation maps varieties or levels of integration into quadrants. Actually, quite a few do, with different measures on the two axes, but in general they convey the same basic notion: some innovation is small, some is moderate, some is major, and some is earth-changing.
Most of us working in major companies deal with the low-end of innovation – let’s call the Type 1 and Type 2 – little incremental improvements to existing products, or modest enhancements to make a product more appealing to current markets or perhaps to address an adjacent market. These sorts of innovation are easier to budget, plan, and manage, and they have the sort of low-risk, predictable-ROI feel to them that really appeals to corporate management. Honestly, if you could guarantee a few percent growth with no setbacks and decent working capital and inventory turns, but never have a great year and never take over a new market, you could have a very successful career in most major companies.
The more major innovation types are what we might consider inventions – either adopting a technology or approach from some other industry and disrupting a market in some unexpected way, or finding a new technology outright and creating new market wholesale. Applying computers and communications technologies to products was a great innovation engine for the latter decades of the 20th century, but it took the Internet and cell phones to really change the world in a wholesale manner. We all know what sorts of companies tend to excel at such disruptions too – startups, and those few larger companies that somehow continue to think like startups.
So why is this important, you ask? Well, I think most of us are trapped thinking small at our jobs and in our personal lives, for the same reason that small, surer-thing bets are popular for managers: we are averse to loss more than we desire gains. This lopsided viewpoint is a well-established feature of our basic brain wiring, and since we can all extrapolate and foresee the small enhancements with little chance of loss, and we fear the possible (and even likely) chance of major loss with a big initiative, and the result is predictable.
Think back to the first few monologues, where I made the point about terminology and lexicons: to take a step up, we need a pretty firm base of thinking to start from. It’s natural and easy for most of us to see those modest innovations, and really that’s why Lean (more on Lean later…) posits that there are always improvements that can be made at every level of the organization, because as humans we are good at it. Incremental improvement is what makes the world of corporate continuous improvement go around, and here in a few days we’ll talk some about how to leverage small bets productively with a larger view in mind.
The question is, how much change do you strive to make, how do you go about starting it, what direction do you head, and how do you manage it? One model of innovation maps varieties or levels of integration into quadrants. Actually, quite a few do, with different measures on the two axes, but in general they convey the same basic notion: some innovation is small, some is moderate, some is major, and some is earth-changing.
Most of us working in major companies deal with the low-end of innovation – let’s call the Type 1 and Type 2 – little incremental improvements to existing products, or modest enhancements to make a product more appealing to current markets or perhaps to address an adjacent market. These sorts of innovation are easier to budget, plan, and manage, and they have the sort of low-risk, predictable-ROI feel to them that really appeals to corporate management. Honestly, if you could guarantee a few percent growth with no setbacks and decent working capital and inventory turns, but never have a great year and never take over a new market, you could have a very successful career in most major companies.
The more major innovation types are what we might consider inventions – either adopting a technology or approach from some other industry and disrupting a market in some unexpected way, or finding a new technology outright and creating new market wholesale. Applying computers and communications technologies to products was a great innovation engine for the latter decades of the 20th century, but it took the Internet and cell phones to really change the world in a wholesale manner. We all know what sorts of companies tend to excel at such disruptions too – startups, and those few larger companies that somehow continue to think like startups.
So why is this important, you ask? Well, I think most of us are trapped thinking small at our jobs and in our personal lives, for the same reason that small, surer-thing bets are popular for managers: we are averse to loss more than we desire gains. This lopsided viewpoint is a well-established feature of our basic brain wiring, and since we can all extrapolate and foresee the small enhancements with little chance of loss, and we fear the possible (and even likely) chance of major loss with a big initiative, and the result is predictable.
Think back to the first few monologues, where I made the point about terminology and lexicons: to take a step up, we need a pretty firm base of thinking to start from. It’s natural and easy for most of us to see those modest innovations, and really that’s why Lean (more on Lean later…) posits that there are always improvements that can be made at every level of the organization, because as humans we are good at it. Incremental improvement is what makes the world of corporate continuous improvement go around, and here in a few days we’ll talk some about how to leverage small bets productively with a larger view in mind.
But when should we want to make
bigger changes quickly, and if we do, how do we go about it? Perhaps we can look at a few examples that
came from the natural world (the world is, after all, ever-changing) but have
already been proven in technology as well.
That’ll be tomorrow’s topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment