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- Rebellious Thoughts #82 - 🤘 How to Innovate as a Company
Rebellious Thoughts #82 - 🤘 How to Innovate as a Company
Are you doing it?
By Gus Balbontin
Edition #82
Hey!
As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.
Alright, here we go:
Missed me?! Ha!
I am nowhere near as consistent as I used to be but - but - when I do write I get a lot of emails back and love and thoughts from you all so… im’m happy with the more spontaneous writing cadence.
This week I am going to be discussing at this online webinar (you can all join here) if it’s a good idea to have an innovation team or role in your business or not.
The riddle is well known in business - if you appoint a person or a team to do innovation in your business, are you simultaneously telling the rest of the business they are not doing innovation?
Here are some thoughts… remember I always say you don’t have to believe me, these are just provocations and my perspective.
Let’s rewind first.
This is how I like to organise innovation in a business (here is my BAU-HOP-STEP-JUMP model) - remember that innovation has to also occur in BAU - every day - in the most mundane of processes - just as much as in JUMPS and everything in between.
In fact, proportionally the majority of time spent on innovation should be in BAU! That’s where your customer is experiencing you, that’s where you pay attention.
What’s innovation? (Here is a reminder of the model) I always simplify it by saying that it’s just fixing problems.
You fix BAU problems or crazy JUMP problems… all of it is innovation, all inevitably start in disorder and transition in to order. We tend to think that innovation is the crazy, disorder end but, to innovate we need both order and disorder and depending on what we are solving is the balance we need in our teams.
For example… A startup generally has more disorder than order, while a well-established business has more order than disorder.
Another example… If you are solving BAU problems, then it’s likely you’ll have more order in the team and slightly less disorder, but if you are solving JUMPS it’s likely you’ll have more disorder and less order.
Why is this context important? Because when we appoint a role or team to do innovation - it’s generally seen as appointing a team to do disorder, to challenge the order in the business. And this is the first mistake we make - innovation people seeing themselves as simply challenging order and the rest of the business as being the order and resisting it. Creating a us and them that gets us nowhere.
The question we don’t ask is where should the innovation team focus? Everywhere?
If it’s BAU and HOPS every person in the business should be doing it all the time. Every day we should challenge ourselves and try to find ways to solve the customer problem more effectively and efficiently.
If it’s STEPS and JUMPS, it’s fair to shift this responsibility to a dedicated team of role and I’ll go as far as saying that it needs to be partly external - especially the further into the future you go - External people have not drank the cool aid of the business so they can genuinely think outside of the box.
I do believe firmly that for BAU and HOPS you don’t need a person or team. All you need is just good leadership and lots of regular novelty (see in this newsletter why)
For STEPS and JUMPS you definitely need a separate team and the further out you go the more external it kinda becomes.
But don’t you need something to kick-start innovation in BAU and HOPS if the business has become too stuck in its ways? Or maybe to keep pushing everyone?
Maybe - yes - depends a little on the business, industry and the scale… So yes, sometimes you have to run a number of activations and initiatives that wake up everyone and shakes them into thinking and challenging the norms a bit more but the goal should always be to drive BAU and HOPS innovation internally. To make internal innovation sustainable, you need to look at it holistically, from recruitment all the way through to incentives, KPIs, structures and more.
For STEPS and JUMPS I think it’s different, the business can do BAU and HOPS innovation but it will always struggle with STEPS and JUMPS because it’s hard to be something that you are not, and sometimes STEPS and JUMPS require the business to think completely different and reinvent itself.
Kodak, Blockbuster, Lonely Planet are examples. So this is where I would definitely build some capability and I would definitely infuse it with some external thinking. This is where you push the boundaries hard, where your experience doesn’t count and radical thinking is favoured.
Anyway, need to go, I’m in Sydney, squeezing the last few things in before we go to Argentina to see the family.
Come to the event on Thursday 4 December at 10.30 AEDT and let’s chat more about it!
Yew!
Love
Gus!
Below is the podcast I recently recorded, just in case you missed it - it’s fun to relax and dive into topics I can’t during keynotes - have a listen, tell me what you think!
Recommendations:
If you’re curious about how to actually use AI in real life—not just read about it—check out HumanAI, a newsletter by my good friend Lucas.
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