Marginal Success Creates Exponential Potential
Ignorance and uncertainty indicate you’re breaking new ground.
Yesterday’s after action meeting confirms ignorance is stressful, slow, and expensive. The team determined our last innovative initiative could be executed more effectively with half the budget. I’m delighted not disappointed.
Ignorance is expensive but unavoidable during innovation.
Hire or Develop?
You can hire experienced talent when new initiatives are high cost, high risk, and beyond your experience. Low risk, low cost initiatives, on the other hand, provide learning opportunities that develop leaders and exponentially enhance organizational potential.
Results?
During low cost, low risk innovations, focus on process and procedure goals more than outcome goals. For example, the marketing team can determine the methods, channels, and extent of their efforts. They cannot, however, predict results.
Avoid arbitrary goals. For example, don’t say our target is X number of new customers. Do say we are reaching X number of homes in this geographic region through direct mail, radio spots, and newspaper ads.
Expectations?
Expectations determine organizational assessment and attitude.
Several times during the recently completed initiative I told our entire organization: “This is an experiment. Trying something is better than doing nothing. We’re going to work hard to achieve great results and see what happens.”
Everything we did was new to us. Ignorance was high, confidence was low. A “let’s try this” approach created a safe learning environment.
Tough, honest assessments offset the cost of ignorance by creating learning opportunities.
The best thing?
We achieved acceptable, not stellar results. We have, however, more potential today than we had three months ago.
Proper expectations enabled the team to evaluate this initiative in ways that extend vision and fuel passion. They’re engaged, confident, and motivated for round two.
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What factors make innovation successful even when optimal results aren’t achieved?
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Innovation is successful even when optimal results aren’t achieved because it can provide building blocks of confidence and competence that the team can take into the next effort. It can help the team members collectively refine and focus on their mutual goals, and develop a deeper hunger for achieving them.
I have been thinking a lot about hunger for goals since reading “Just Don’t Fall,” Josh Sundquist’s biography about overcoming childhood cancer and amputation of his leg at the age of 9 to become a Paralympian skier after the medical professional told him he would never be able to even run. He had a lot of failures along the way to the 2006 Turino games, but the point when he decided, despite lots of disappointments, to do “1 More Thing 1 More Time 1MT1MT (his concept),” is the point at which he started on the trajectory to his goal. Website: http://www.joshsundquist.com
I agree Paula.
I would also add that innovation often opens new markets that you couldn’t access before or didn’t even know were there.
Dear Dan,
I like the idea of doing something than doing nothing. At least you may get some direction after doing something. It also instil the feeling of practices and you could land up into being master of something. I agree that marginal success creates exponential potential because it encourage you towards more wins. Actually success with humility has great potential. In absence of humility, even a great success looks superfluous.
I think to make innovation successful, a mindselt of creativity, passion and curiosity is must. Without these elements, it is almost impossible to harbour innovation. Leaders should have great perseverance and wider perspective to understand innovation. Innovation involves huge investment and more risk. So, leader should ready to face unexpected outcome because innovation may or may not be responded by customers. But a successful innovation definitely attracts and invites a innovation premium in the form of greater margin, huge market share, and monopoly in profitability and business.
“Every time you get knocked down, you get up smarter.” That’s what my combatives instructor in Basic Training said, and it’s been one of my mantras for all of life — there’s as much to learn from failure or under-achievement as there is from resounding success. That’s the whole concept of failing forward. I agree completely, Dan, that if you want to grow your organization you have to grow your people, and to do that you have to stretch them and give them a safe place to learn and sometimes fail.
The visual of ‘falling forward” Greg is important, gotta love it. We may believe that we are just making the same mistake over and over, however, if we learn from it, perhaps we are in fact falling forward. And, until the time/space continuum gets mastered, we really don’t make the exact same mistake every time. 😉 I have mentioned before that I snowboard (2nd childhood) and my mantra is “I’m not having fun if I’m not falling down.”
Ignorance and uncertainty are uncomfortable especially when leaders perceive that they are expected to know (it all).
Ignorance is expensive, not learning may be more expensive.
Ignorance when transparently displayed feels very vulnerable.
Does it follow that if you are comfortable and certain in your knowledge that you are not breaking new ground and may have hit a plateau, or worse begun to stagnate?
Excellent point, Doc — comfort is often a warning sign, since it can go hand in had with complacency.
Dan,
I am interested in your thoughts on how you would handle the other two quadrants of the risk/cost matrix – internally or outsourcing, and why you would pursue that route.
I too would like to hear from Dan on this — my thoughts when I read it were as follows: High cost, low risk — use internal people with experienced manager oversight. Low cost, high risk (assuming risk to be regulatory liability or marketplace position or something like that) — invest in an outside resource. Be interesting to see what the right answer is!
While Dan may have covered outsourcing to some degree there seems to be some evidence that the hidden costs of outsourcing are often not factored in when constructing the risk/cost matrix. What may appear on the surface as low cost, low risk, if supply line/time lengthens, in fact, there can be higher risk and higher costs.
It is easy to make the case of an outside resource involved internally…learn from other masters, you can’t be a prophet in your own land, etc.
Dan I would have to agree with your thoughts here. I think you created an atmosphere that allows for creativity and encourages new ideas. I hope the long-run results give you the returns you would like to see.
If people were always limited or held back I believe the world would be a significantly more boring place to live and innovation would be stifled.
Dan –
I’ve been delivering team building games since 1993 and my main one sets up so every tabletop is successful, but some double the results of the others because they plan better, maybe ask for help from the Expedition Leader, and they tend to collaborate with other teams. Not collaborating (aka “competing”) results in less good results.
So, an opportunity for learning. They do okay, but they could do better and even the best teams seldom max out insofar as performance.
I’ve also been using a metaphor of a wooden wagon rolling on Square Wheels® with a cargo of round rubber tires as a tool for generating a list of issues and opportunities.
Both approaches assume that there is some success, but that further investigation will turn up additional improvement opportunities. And both anchor on the theme of continuous continuous improvement.
One of my long-term one-liners along these lines was attributed to the coach of the Denver basketball team, Frank Layton, who had difficulty motivating one of his players, a kid with a lot of talent but not much drive, in the coach’s opinion. So, Frank says to Jeff: “Son, what is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy” and the player responds: “Coach? I don’t know and I don’t care.”
We can see a lot of that in organizations these days and that is why playing with these experiential exercises is so much fun, since you can get people turned on (or around!).
The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is the team building exercise that I mentioned. I first got started with it in 1993 and it has undergone continuous improvement since that time. And after all these years, I continue to really love delivering it and watching the discovery process.
The Square Wheels tools have gotten me travel to 34 countries so far and I add three more new ones in July. Sure is fun out there!
.
I agree with Paula. This project provided building blocks for us. Team members were stretched out of their normal comfort zones and realized they had talents that could be used:
-One team member realized he can be a leader.
-The whole group learned to work together.
-Even though we may have not received a lot of new customers, it looks as though we got a few very interested ones.
I think it was a big success.
“One team member realized he can be a leader.” That to me suggests wise governance of the project, to allow that to develop, so kudos to you or whoever was responsible.