Systematic Innovation Requires Intentional Execution

Success doesn't necessarily come from breakthrough innovation but from flawless execution. A great strategy alone won't win a game or a battle; the win comes from basic blocking and tackling.

Naveen Jain

These days everybody is talking about innovation. Innovation seemingly creates wealth, competitive advantage, and other cool stuff. If you are a one man show, and suddenly an idea dawns on you, and you are capable of turning that idea into a profitable business plan, and you are a good enough salesman to get funding, and a hard worker and genius enough to see it through to execution, then innovation is all that. But, even a one man show who becomes successful needs to keep the game going and come up with more innovations. Owners of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), as well as large enterprises go to sleep every night with the hope that the next innovation in their industry comes from them and not from competitors who would cut into their market share, brand recognition, or entire existence. 

 Where to look for innovation

Peter Drucker believes that innovation is a specific function of entrepreneurship[1]. 

Most innovations; however, especially the successful ones, result from a conscious, purposeful search for new opportunities, which can be found only in a few situations. Four such areas of opportunity exist within a company or industry: unexpected occurrences, incongruities, process needs, and industry and market changes. Three additional sources of opportunity exist outside a company in its social and intellectual environment: demographic changes, changes in perception, and new knowledge. I must emphasize that the father of modern management was concerned about where to find the idea and not how to deliver it successfully. Every VC would agree that these days great ideas are a dime a dozen, delivering the innovative idea to the market is priceless.

Hypothesis-driven development that relies on continuous experimentation is the stepping stone to innovation in a sustainable manner.

With the advent of agile development, big data, and advancement in analytics, there is a viable approach to not only come up with the idea, but to see it through all the way to delivery to the customer, aka, successful execution. Hypothesis-driven development that relies on continuous experimentation is the stepping stone to innovation in a sustainable manner. There are many schools of thought about the process of building the product correctly, such as Test Driven Development[2] (TDD), but a few that talk about building the right product and Hypothesis-driven development not only focus on this area, but it becomes the building block of systematic innovation.

Evolution has a lot to teach us

I am a big fan of evolution.

I think evolution can teach us a great number of lessons if we look at it with the right lenses. Humans have had some unbelievable miracle like changes, such as opposing thumbs[3] to grab and manipulate the world around us, standing on two feet[4] to walk upright, which freed our hands, and a sudden increase in our brain size due to our need to move. Interestingly, the primary function of the brain is not to feel or even to think but to help us move[5]. And as one innovation creates opportunities for two more, humans developed their ability to walk and then developed their double-curved spine, which includes a shock-absorbing system associated with bipedal walking, which resulted in the need for a bigger brain to process visual and other sensory processing for movement management on different terrains.

Relationship between innovation and enterprise size

To mimic evolution, enterprises need their product teams to design features in a way that allows the hypothesis to be examined by data.

By a series of innovative steps, resource constraints, and being constantly under pressure, enterprises can mimic evolution’s development on how to systematically innovate. Evolution works by playing the numbers game and enterprises need to follow suit. But how?

Systematic innovation and availability of resources have a direct relationship

 So, how can different sized companies systemically innovate? Small companies have no option but to rely on chance to stumble upon a new idea. Naturally this is neither reliable nor sustainable, but systematic innovation and availability of resources have a direct relationship.

 SME is where intentional execution can become a vehicle towards sustainable innovation. It starts with waste-free execution. First, clarity of goals must be wrapped around clear communication of intent. Then comes the process of taking that intent through thoughtful planning and to-the-point implementation. How many companies do you know that have minimum wastage in their execution? How many companies do you know that are probably setup for hypothesis based development and experimentation? Evolution has had millions of years and natural selection at its disposal. So, the key is expedited experimentation, which by definition would be overwhelmingly failure ridden.

To mimic evolution, enterprises need their product teams to design features in a way that allows the hypothesis to be examined by data. The engineering team would need to have the right architectural foundation to build experiments quickly that are inexpensive, and each step would need to be instrumented for analytics. This would be only half of the solution, then an end-to-end process should get the solution in the hand of the customer at the end of a fast cycle. At this stage, business analytics would gather the data, and analyze the results so decision makers can identify what works and what does not with the help of data driven decision-making. Then the team can stick with what worked and go back and do it all over again for those that did not work. The mantra is to make the experimentation cheap and failure fast.

Recognizing execution

As I mentioned in my previous article,[6] these days companies and upper management are still struggling to see the execution as front and center of their efforts. This is not to say that execution does not get recognition, it does.

However, executing on the strategy and business unit initiatives are the secret sauce that not that many executives understand. Some use their leadership qualities to excite and motivate, and some use sticks and carrots to push down the execution accountability, but there are very few companies in the technology sector that believe their highest priority is not their quarterly market reports, strategic planning, merger and acquisitions, or the next big feature set. That it is their core commitment to intentional execution.

 Analogy may help

Let’s use an analogy to paint a clearer picture. A family wants to go on a vacation. The goal of the vacation is “to create unforgettable memories and energize individual members of the family”. The Performance Indicators (PIs) are quality of the hotel, and food, comfort of the flight, enjoyment level of the activities, and adherence to budget amongst many others.

 Then it comes to some decisions, the destination type i.e. beach, city sight seeing, adventure, etc. It could be decided either collectively by the family members or by one or both parents. There will always be a number of constraints. For example, with the destination category comes the budgetary limitations, as Cabo San Lucas and Turks and Caicos are both beach destination with different price tags. Or the availability of all family members due to school, work, etc., and its compatibility with the destinations’ peak time, Las Vegas may be great destination in Fall but not in middle of summer.

Once the decision is made, then small and big issues like validity of passports, shots if needed, packing and getting to the airport need to be negotiated one by one and navigated. Once at the destination, what to do, where to visit, and who to socialize with contribute to the overall Key Performance Indicators[7] (KPIs)of the trip. Finally, travelling back home will have many interesting challenges like catching the flight back home on-time, collecting all the luggage, and being fresh enough to go back to work and/or school after returning from the vacation.

 As you see, every step and every decision can and will impact the final mission of this vacation which was to have a collective happy and enjoyable trip, where everybody got what they were looking for and came back with great memories and feeling energized.

 Imagine, in picking the destination, if the children were not consulted then you would have a couple of nagging teenagers who hated their trip, and made it miserable for their parents. This was strategic planning. Imagine, somebody lost their passport so everybody had to miss the vacation that was all paid for. This is part of end-to-end planning. How about, the possibility of eating something shady and being sick the entire trip? This is implementation and quality control. Collectively, all of these can make the trip a set of memories to enjoy and remember for rest of the family members lives; where the family bonded like never before and new experiences were shared, or nightmarish memories were created that would haunt the family for the rest of their lives. Successful execution is careful attention to all the steps mentioned above. If you take vacations frequently, knowledge of every step, and understanding that collectively executing these steps correctly would be the bigger contributing factor than which destination to take.

 I would like to reiterate the point, since it is the key concept to remember, where to vacation becomes secondary in importance to how to vacation. It does not matter how great the picked destination is if one or many of the steps go wrong. The intentional execution means front and center focus on taking each step in the right way.

 Small and large enterprises should figure out their execution strategy by meaningful planning, institutionalized execution, and caretakers armed with a set of reliable resources that understand what intentional execution means and how it is done. In many years of working in the technology development business, I have seen project managers assigned to the task on hand, then problems got bigger and more complex, so program and portfolio management roles were created. I truly believe appreciation for execution is a direct function of organization maturity, and problem and solution domain complexity. Almost everybody looks at execution as an afterthought. When things are not going the way they should, then people start thinking about all that jazz that an execution entity would bring to the table like PMO.

What is the relationship between execution and innovation

Intentional execution is the art and science of understanding what the objective of the end game is, then delivering the results in a predicable and efficient manner.

Intentional execution would create two key competitive advantages: it gets you where you intend to go; predictability. And it gets you there from the least costly route[8]; operational efficiency. Operational efficiency can create the flexibility and latitude in the enterprise pipeline for risk taking, since the enterprise is not playing catch up all the time. Efficiency would allow cheap and fast failure or timely success and occasional jackpots.

Intentional execution is the art and science of understanding what the objective of the end game is, then delivering the results in a predicable and efficient manner. That means, acknowledging the fact that execution is the key competitive advantage of the enterprise and not its feature-set. IBM released the PC but in a few years DELL destroyed the PC market with better and more innovative execution.

Summary

Execution is no afterthought, enterprises need a dedicated caretaker for execution; PMO. In many enterprises, product and engineering managers are accidental caretakers. They are commissioned to deliver the solution (service or feature). It may work depending on that person’s capabilities, background, skill set and focus area, but it is not sustainable. And certainly, it is not an optimal path[9]. A paradigm shift towards an execution centered organization is needed.

 Likewise, streamlined processes, updated risk inventory, project playbooks, and war room dependency management will bring clarity to each step of the journey, which will result in continuous improvement and time-to-time execution innovation.

 And finally, the glue that sticks it all together, having an KPI driving execution culture that not only allows, but recognizes and encourages fast failure. And a well defined feedback stream that arms the entire enterprise with more knowledge about what works and what does not, and directs the knowledge back into production.

Once these are implanted and working, any enterprise can have sustainable innovation. It’s that simple!

Author

Ramin has been in software development for over 20 years in various capacities. Currently, he is focused on defining how to improve execution in different size enterprises by means of PMO. Follow him on Twitter https://twitter.com/RaminErfanian

[1]https://hbr.org/2002/08/the-discipline-of-innovation

[2]https://www.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html

[3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1571064/

[4]https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution

[5]https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains?language=en

[6]https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/execution-new-innovation-ramin-erfanian-1?trk=prof-post

[7]https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/kpi.asp

[8] Anything resource dependent such as budget, time, number of talents needed, minimized rework and wastage

[9] As I mentioned in my article “execution is the new innovation” I discuss this point in more detail