Nowadays, Agility is celebrated as the proverbial silver bullet against all and every beast one encounters, ranging from product development up to organizational transformations. Though it is perfect for some scenarios, it is very much counterproductive for the most. Especially in the delicate case of innovation, nothing really significant was ever achieved by this way, only mediocre advancements were gained.
Meh… Good enough.
Mediocrates (a lesser-known Greek philosopher)
So what is the problem with thinking Agile Methodologies are the key enablers of innovation?
The core of Agility is to go step by step into an uncharted territory. Do something, then inspect outcomes and adjust the approach accordingly. Experiment and nurture evolution of the fittest idea, with continuous validation. Basically it is about finding the next “good enough” thing to capitalize on and repeat that over and over again. This keeps innovation on the edge of the known domain, but it never enables bigger leaps of faith.
Scenarios of Mediocracy
In case you have an existing product or service, you get a ton of feedback from the outside world continuously. What typically happens, is that these requests are vetted, improvements are defined and they get put into a backlog, listing everything needed to be done, ordered by the sequence of execution. This order is typically defined by the extent of the respective customer need, the most wanted features end up at the top of the backlog, and the less popular ones sink down to the abyss.
When developing a new product or service, your approach is similar. You thrive to sense what is needed and validate your ideas early and often as mandated by Ries’s Lean Startup. Fishing blindly for client value, you pray to the gods of User Experience to help you randomly find the secret underwater treasure chest and make you rich. This approach is also focusing on what people need, moreover it is based on the fundamental belief, that there are people out there (users) who know what they want and they recognize it when they see it. This premise is unfortunately only true for products and services resembling to already existing other ones.
So all this is about focusing on client need and minimizing risks when conquering an uncharted domain. Collecting treasure, step by step, and continuously monitoring the gauges and compass. This is fine. You can make great progress with this, provided you are already in the game. It is like in strategic computer games, when the whole map is covered with the fog of ignorance and you have to command your teams around to discover adjacent new sectors. Such a stable, manageable step-by-step progress leads to certain gains.
Sadly, nothing of immense significance was ever achieved this way though. The above approach only keeps you at the edge of the map, but will never let you change the game.
So how does epic, disruptive innovation work than?
Well, it takes a Visionary!
Obsession of the Visionary
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Henry Ford
Though we have no proof, that Henry Ford ever said the above quoted words, and he typically did asked his customers about what do they want, the quote itself nevertheless points to the spot, where this all gets interesting.
- I still remember when I acquired my first iPhone 3G device. I had no idea what I can do with it. I knew it had to be cool, but not much more. Only later did I realize, what esoteric sorcery was embedded in that magnificent device. But I was not alone, close to no one knew at that time what an iPhone was good for.
- The same happened with the microchip. At that point it was very much confusing, what such a devices can be a good for. Today you can read these lines thanks to this unbelievable invention.
- When the gunpowder was invented, the Chinese used it for entertainment purposes only. Later, we understood, though it cannot make our arrows faster, it can do something completely different, with an order of magnitude greater impact.
This list goes on for all major inventions throughout history, which shaped our world and way of thinking. No one understood them at that time. Users had to start using them, to understand their capabilities and slowly grow a need for them.
So what is the common factor in all great innovations? How do they happen?
Well, the path of real innovation looks something like this:
There is a Visionary, who is dedicated and devoted to an idea. This guy is a maniac. She is entirely sure, that this is a great idea. No one around her understands it, they only see the possessed soul. Most of them turn away, push back, until some – for some mysterious reason – decide to try the new thing, and gradually, as described by Rogers’s Diffusion of innovations theory, they adopt the new concept.
The mesmerizing point in this journey is the Initiation moment, when the first supporter / adopter says yes. Everyone is against the Visionary around that point. It takes a huge amount of personal charisma, a significant upfront investment and unreasonable stubbornness to make this magical leap. These factors rarely coexist in a single person, and even if they do it takes quite long time to convert the pagans to the sacred way.
Don’t confuse this point with Moor’s Chasm around turning an innovation into a global success! That one only comes a lot later, after the first few adopters, before the Early Majority starts to adopt! (See the picture above!)
Pain of Loneliness
It makes the process even harder, that during this Initiation period there is no possibility to validate, no feedback can be gained. There is no one to turn to. People typically dismiss your idea as unnecessary or stupid. This is no surprise, as they don’t have any related personal experience, that would reinforce your point.
So no matter how great your idea, product or innovation is, you either champion it to victory as a one-man-show or chances are high, it will end up at the rock bottom of the backlog, provided it is to be financed by others. The so called angel investors are no better either, they tend to invest in something already in the Innovators phase, or even more often, they prefer it to be already around the Early Adopters phase.
And just to broaden your view a bit, don’t just think about actual “products” and “market” when ruminating about this topic! It as about every great idea ever conceived! Be it may a mission to Mars, your redesigned Excel spreadsheet innovating cost tracking on a project, cooking a revolutionary bizarre food or suggesting to your spouse to sell the house and start living in a caravan.
It seems to me, this is a very lonely phase for you, my dear Visionary. You, and only you understand at this point why and how this great thing makes the world a better place. You are driving on the freeway, full speed and for some reason, everyone is facing you, driving head on and honking screamingly. I feel your pain! Unfortunately, I am not aware of any magic potion to help you in this challenging period, and that is sadly not the objective of this article.
Love to Enable
What I do think is of utmost importance, is to highlight some key points for you, my fellow leaders and influencers. It is essential, that you better understand how innovation really works, so you can better incubate it in your organizations:
- The Zipper was not created by improving the button! No great invention was achieved by improving something old. Every great advancement comes with a paradigm shift.
- The Visionary risks everything when coming out with something disruptive. She puts her heart and soul in it and assumes an enormous amount of vulnerability with doing so. An act to be welcomed with matching respect and support by others, yielding the feeling of security and safety!
- The nurturing of real innovation requires unconditional openness and support. You can’t force it to happen in a specific area and you can’t really direct it either. The best you can do, as a leader, is to dedicate resources to it without attaching expectations of any kind to it and monitor progress.
- Innovation is slow until it becomes fast. Like hatching of a baby bird. Instead of trying to speed it up, focus on easing it with patience, support and recognition! Give people unstructured thinking time!
- Prepare for impact! The real game-changer innovations always spawn resistance, a significant organizational counterforce, trying to block the innovation. It is like giving birth to a child. The friction and pain is immense. Help the delivery, make room for the new baby, prepare your people for it and, support its first steps in the community!
- Don’t try to formalize it in official corporate ways. Innovation is very much personal thing. It is fine to provide some framing to it, but let it flow in its organic and viral ways.
- Though there are methods to guide it, there is no framework for innovation itself. It can not be implemented as new thing we start doing. It is a rare cultural phenomenon and formulates by itself, only when the environmental conditions are right.
Follow these guidelines and your organisation will be a compelling place for the magical bird of innovation to occupy its nest.
And one more thing! All you Agile fans out there, please stop advertising the 5 letter word as the incubator of innovation. It is not. Agility (as methodologies and frameworks go) is great for perfecting the newborn great idea, but incubating innovation – as detailed above – takes something completely different, something very deep and human, what might be best collectively characterized – surprisingly – by the simple word, not often used in official contexts, called “love”. Enable them with love, and they will love what they are doing. Innovation is just an unavoidable byproduct of that.
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