Futurists are usually right, at the wrong time. The thing about true innovation, is almost everything is an expansion on an older idea. It isn’t until time and technology converge at that perfect moment that great ideas are executed. Ideas tend to spark well before the execution due to lack or resources, namely practicality.
The Hope: Your leaders take whatever risks they need to in order to get the job done.
The Reality: Your leaders are risk averse, hoping that their less-than-bold moves trigger some kind of true change.
How many times have you heard, in the midst of a crisis, that “everything is on the table” when in reality, there are very few things on the table? Typically, in my experience, that phrase is only used instead of the blunter “Someone here is going to have to make a sacrifice, and just so you know, it won’t be me”.
As I said a few posts ago, forget about innovation already! Everyone already does it – it’s not interesting anymore. In fact, it’s probably past time we all changed our job titles: Chief Disruption Officer sounds way cooler than Chief Innovation Officer. Plus you get a much better acronym CDO vs CINO (you know, CINO is a four letter word). Just think about doing a search and replace on all of your job titles and documentation, don’t you think you’d get so much farther as a “Disruption Manager” running a “Disruption Program”, reporting to the “Director of Disruption” (almost sounds like a Batman villain. Oh yeah, I thought I saw him hanging out and grabbing a drink with the Joker and the Penguin the other day.)
You know how they say that the moment that you publish a book, it’s outdated? Well, for innovation, that’s doubly true. While my book, Innovation Mastery, The Definitive Guide to Running the Ultimate Innovation Program has only been out for a few months, I realized that we had moved beyond innovation into a completely new space.
I used to watch reality programming but have since kicked the habit since we dropped cable and moved to pure on-demand TV watching (Netflix, etc.). One of our favorite shows used to be Restaurant Impossible – if you haven’t caught it, you probably know the type – this famous chef (well, at least Food Network famous) would go around to failing restaurants and in 48 hours with a very small budget (I think it was $10,000) attempt to turn them around. He would go in, see what was going on, and typically do three things:
Let me know if you’ve experienced this because I have.
Remember the last time you were in a brainstorming session. Maybe you all sat down to address a specific challenge, like “We need to increase revenues” or “Competitor XYZ is eating our lunch and we have to react”, or maybe you had something specific, like “We need to reduce costs in this office by at least 30%”, or maybe you had no challenge at all – it was just a general brainstorming session to come up with new ideas.