Being Innovative - It Takes Less Effort Than You Think

Over this Fourth of July weekend I was fortunate to spend at least one day with many colleagues and professionals whom I respect. After the discussions about family, finances and global topics ran dry we moved along to "shop talk" of sorts focusing on the various trends, market dynamics, technology and talent changes we have seen recently and what they meant to individuals.

One of the most common topics happened to be innovation. The general view was that innovation was seen as very complex and difficult concept to implement in any organization. Many of these individuals were seeking my advice on how to best innovate within their organizations or for themselves.

In my experience innovation means many things to people. A rather simple and easy way to be innovative in my experience is to see and act differently. This sounds easier than it really is for most professionals since most subscribe to a set of rules and conditions that have been honed through years of experience in the industry. For example, many professionals learn to look at options that they think can be delivered. This is pretty normal; look at your toolbox containing items such as budget, time, talent, material, etc. and then come up with a plan that is well known and has a high rate of "predictable success". 

"Predictable success" is a term I use as a measurement that most businesses use on tasks that they have a need to feel "good" about. It is something that you see project managers measure, directors use on pretty slidedecks, and investors look at with interest. This is not to say that this is incorrect or not needed, rather this measurement is not the kind used for innovation.

I want to point out that innovation is about failure. Not just once or twice but a lot of the time. This is one of the most singularly frightening aspects about innovation to an organization and individuals. Failure is not considered a good thing. It is considered a weakness. So rather than fail, most companies will put out solutions that are "good enough" based on what they think their customers want. This is where things get really fuzzy. Most companies are really bad at figuring out who their customer is, let alone what they want.

For example let's look at the iPhone. When it first came out many in the telecom and handset industry thought it was "just another smartphone". Sure it was pretty. However I had heard numerous professionals with decades of experience saying things like "I looked at it. Not impressed." or "Nothing new there. It will not do well." or "I do not think this thing from Apple is going to do well." Several years later the iPhone is a huge hit and considered highly innovative even in spite of the fact that many of it's features are not really that new.

Innovation is not about being 100% new, but rather doing something in a new way that delights people. That is why the iPhone does better than other smart phones. It is also the same reasoning that can be attributed to FaceBook or Google. I call this being "delightfully different". It also sounds like a characteristic but it is really an intrinsic measurement, one of the most visceral. If you do something that people really like it shows on satisfaction, engagement levels, commitments, sales, etc. If not, then these remain relatively flat.

For most professionals adhering to "predictable success" in delivering solutions means not being "delightfully different" and vice versa. Again this is mostly due to their years of indoctrination. However being innovative does not take a lot of effort. It does take an effort on the part of the professional to be open-minded. Closing off any avenue of thought means eliminating whole realms of possibilities. This is not what people have to foster. Rather they have to look at the challenge, then determine an ideal way to deal with it, then using their toolbox find a way to make their idea a reality.

A case in point happened on a recent project where we were assigned a proprietary toolset from a vendor. All the normal approaches were not delivering results and jeopardized the entire project. I and a few others looked at the problem differently. We totally ignored what the toolset was capable of doing. We instead focused on what we needed to get done. The basic problem was that what was in place was not capable of doing the required workload in the time we needed. The answer was simple from that view, get the stated units of work to complete in the timeframe requested. The challenge: the current vendor toolset did not do this. The solution was easy once framed in this light: extend the vendor toolset to do what we needed. The end result was a deliverable capable of not only meeting the initial expectations, but delighted the business, technology and operational folks since it met all of their requirements under huge growth expectations with minimal time and money. Where almost all professionals get stalled is not looking at the problem in the most basic of forms and being open-minded about how to solve it.

This is where I explain to professionals those "fancy" management concepts about innovation apply. Once the challenge has been identified the organization needs those "innovators" to come up with solutions. It may fail once, twice, a dozen times before the ideal solution is delivered but it will be delivered. 

Being innovative from a professional standpoint is as varied as their career objectives. I usually pose thought-provoking questions. For example: "Why use a document library? Why not a wiki?", or "Why use a file folder? Why not create discovery?", or "Why delete data, why not keep it all?" The answers are startling in terms of how engrained they are in tradition as opposed to possibility. 

So why be innovative at all? As I point out to so many of my colleagues it is about their career. Times have changed so much that what they consider normal is now obsolete. For example most system administrators within a legacy organization are used to dealing with maybe a dozen servers where their counterparts in more innovative companies are used to dealing with hundreds if not thousands at a time. The mindsets, the skillsets, the possibilities for businesses even in this narrow area is huge. Mobile development is totally different now than it used to be. Android and iPhone are now whole new career options as are the user design experience, application domains, and many other dimensions to mobile. It is so new, most being less than 4 years old, that one would think that being "new" would be a liability, but in fact the opposite is true. Those with more experience are finding it hard to adjust with their more innovative counterparts growing at the expense of their counterparts.

Professionals may not like the change in the market, however it is now an expectation from many employers. To compete now and in the future, professionals will now have to be innovative and the first step in that new world is with their own mindset.