How to Figure Out What Works

Becoming a test-driven, learning organization and cutting the debate!

Everyone is talking about disruption, leading in an era of continuous transformation and creativity in business. The gotcha for most companies is that this is very far from their current norm. They have been in an era of cementing market position, revenue optimization, and respectable year-over-year gains with low earnings volatility.

This comes from a company culture of execution excellence rather than innovation excellence. The whole culture and organizational design have grown up with this objective, and the same culture and organizational structure don’t “just work” suddenly for innovation excellence-driven outcomes.

Innovation is about finding the path, not traveling an understood path efficiently.

Let me introduce two characters, one is Execution, and the other is Innovation. In this story, it is usually like a boxing match...Execution vs. Innovation…ready, set, FIGHT! Just kidding, right? This is often the reality, although perhaps a bit less dramatic. From the Innovator's perspective, Execution looks stuck in their ways and on a one-way set of train tracks. From Execution’s perspective, Innovation looks like someone spinning in circles about to get dizzy with no clear path.

Execution excellence is all about the operational repeatability of the existing model with increased or maintained efficiency. Innovation needs to invest significantly in searching for things completely unrelated to the current way of doing business. Sometimes researching new capabilities and sometimes working at novel ways of applying new or existing capabilities to drive different outcomes.

Execution is about creating the same output. Innovation deliberately changes the work to change outcomes. Do I have your interest yet? Let’s see.

So how do you do this?

If you ask yourself this, you have already opened yourself up to new ideas; good job! Testing isn’t about taking your view and selling it to stakeholders. Testing is about focusing on the activities to bring many ideas and objectively test them. The point of testing is to learn what does and does not work. To always improve and increase your chances of success. We need to design what people want, not convince people that they want what we’ve developed. Also, people often don’t know what they want until they can interact with it.

When you say good ideas can come from anywhere, do you really mean that?

A test-driven culture walks the talk of ideas being able to come from anywhere. If you are always testing, you need a constant stream of ideas and need to source ideas from your whole team. The largest killer of creative confidence is debating things and cutting them off or going based on one person’s opinion. Determine what you need to learn, think about the ideas you will test to gather that learning, and never become too attached to a single idea!

Don’t underestimate how hard this is!

Execution excellence cultures are set up to rally behind one idea and execute like crazy. This is not a search process like innovation. The two are at odds. Your team and your broader company will need your support and empathy as you start to go down this path. It is a shift, but this is a learned skill and philosophy. Please support them in going down this path, start small and insulate early work from the larger culture and organization.

...or how simple it is once you make the change!

Stop stressing; you don’t need to go into a pressure cooker before you “launch” an initiative to your staff or even your customers! The next time you start something, pause and resist your inclination to approach it the way you always have.

Invest in clearly framing the problem before considering solutions. Do this by spending way more time in re-framing and getting your question right. Describe how the world will be different if you are successful!

Don’t go to your defaults; engage your team, engage outsiders, and engage a small multidisciplinary group when you get some momentum.

Testing is the way to design what people actually need. Test, don’t debate, and watch what happens next :)