The War Against Incrementalism

In Amp It Up, I talk about the war against ‘incrementalism’.

Excerpt from Amp It Up:?

Another human tendency is to approach things incrementally, from an abundance of caution. It feels safer to inch forward rather than take bold leaps. Incrementalism is about avoiding risk by building on whatever has already been achieved as a stable foundation. But merely trying for marginal improvements on the status quo carries its own risks.

But often we default to an incremental mindset, and we don’t even consider what could happen if we came at an issue from the other end. What if we envisioned an end state or an ideal state? And then work our way back from there to the present status quo? It is incredibly energizing to approach things this way as it unleashes creative energy, innovation and imagination. What if we started over, a clean sheet a paper, what would that look like? Igniting that spark is the source of innovation.

Excerpt from Amp It Up:

Larger, established enterprises are especially prone to incremental behavior because risks are not rewarded—but screwups are severely punished. Many of these companies end up killing themselves gradually, through stagnation. That’s why very few enterprises that were

in the Fortune 500 just 50 years ago still exist. A living organism like a business needs to reinvent itself all the time, rather than just consolidate and extend past gains.

It’s not just a fun, engaging exercise to envision the future and avoid the tyranny of incrementalism. Odds are you will slowly drive yourself to extinction while upstarts with nothing to lose create a future that was yours to lose. It’s happening constantly and all around us. Entrepreneurs in all shapes and sizes assault the status quo. Most of them fail, not every idea is viable, but every so often they break through and severely challenge the status quo.

Excerpt from Amp It Up:

Why did eBay not become Amazon? Why did IBM not become Microsoft? Why didn’t taxi companies invent Uber? Why didn’t Hilton or Marriott invent Airbnb? Why didn’t Oracle invent Snowflake? Why didn’t BMC invent ServiceNow? Why didn’t tape automation companies invent Data Domain? Why didn’t Ford invent Tesla? The answer in all those examples, and many more, is incrementalism.

Data Domain was a radical reimagination of data backup and recovery. Cheap disk was already attempted to replace tape libraries but the economic differential between disk and tape prohibited broad-based adoption. Data Domain crushed tape’s economic edge by introducing a high speed deduplication technology that eliminated redundant data segments on the fly. The result was that the storage array could store 50 or more full backups in the space that could normally house just one. That helped break the back of tape’s longstanding hegemony.

But, not so fast. Backup administrators still needed to make a tape to go off-site for disaster recovery purposes. That slowed adoption as tape libraries could not be retired altogether. Then, Data Domain leveraged its deduplication efficiency for network replication. Backup volumes now moved off site over a network, reliably, automatically and much faster than on a truck across town.?

There is no way these challenges could have been solved with an incremental approach, it required rethinking the process on the basis of new technologies. Tape technologies improved incrementally all the time: higher capacity drives and media, faster drives, lower cost but it all amounted to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.?

ServiceNow also took a non-incremental view of the helpdesk management space. Legacy product were infamous for being rigid and static: it was difficult, demanding skill-wise and expensive to introduce the simplest changes to a system once deployed. So, IT staffs grudgingly put up with it although they had long, running lists of things they wanted to enhance and change.

Enter ServiceNow. A dynamic platform that would enable even moderately skilled staff to make all manner of changes on the fly. Add or change a company logo on an incident form. Add a field to a table. Change notifications, reports, workflows. Instead of hoping for a change window every 12-18 months, IT staff now made changes on a daily basis. It was no surprise that ServiceNow became a personal favorite to IT staffs everywhere.

Snowflake was a textbook case of reimagining the future. The founding team, made up of Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, long time database technologists at the database management giant Oracle. But, they did not want to take existing technologies to the cloud. They wanted to redesign for cloud scale, and while they were at it rethink almost anything they never thought was right with existing approaches.?

They massively simplified database management. All the knobs and needs for tuning are gone. The role of database administrator is optional. Cluster provisioning represented as t-shirt sizes. The separation of storage from compute became one of the greatest software innovations of our era. You now could increment compute and storage independent of each other. The cluster control plane was taken out of the cluster altogether which led to the ability to run unlimited numbers of clusters against the same data at the same time.?

Cloud scale enabled levels of provisioning economically out of reach for most on premise customers. The consumption model allowed customers to pay just for what they used. Consumption also democratized access to world class technology to almost anybody because there were no machines or software to buy. The results in customer operations were breathtaking. Workloads often ran factors, if not orders of magnitude faster than before.

There are some situations that warrant an incremental approach. Some industries evolve painstakingly slowly and carefully, and for good reason. Like in aviation, for example, safety and the value of tried ‘n true systems is not taken lightly. We don’t give up hard-fought gains in the name of boldness and innovation. But, the power of innovation and non-incremental thinking can be astounding. That’s why we should not mindlessly default to an incremental mindset. Innovators everywhere are conspiring to invade your sanctuaries.?