The Network Garden

One of the things that is hard for a lot of companies to execute on is Innovation. By Innovation, I mean efforts that result in a material evolution of: A) Product or service capabilities; C) Client engagement lifecycle; or C) People, process and organizational structure.

The companies that I’ve seen successfully navigate this path embrace a philosophy that can best be described as:

“We try different things. Some work. Some don’t. The ones that work we do more of. The ones that don’t work we do less of.”

In terms of best practices, consider these four cornerstones to successful innovation:

1) Manageable bites: You need early wins to garner (and continue garnering) internal support. Plus, smaller bites are easier to iterate from based on real-world learnings.

2) Clear narratives: What story does your innovation enable you to tell?

3) Clear outcome goals: What are the codified use cases you will support?

4) Regularly tracked and measured metrics: You manage what you measure..so explicitly measure.

A final thought on experimentation and risk. One of my favorite axioms for thinking about risk mitigation when it comes to innovation is Jeff Bezos’ “One-way vs Two-way doors.”

One-way doors require a lot of commitment, and are hard to extricate from, if they don’t pan out.

Two-way doors are easy in, easy out.

The paradox is that companies often mistake two-way doors for one-way doors, and as a result, become overly cautious when it comes to experimentation.

They are over-weighting the real risk.

Extreme caution is warranted when it comes to navigating one-way doors, but opportunism, optimism and aspiration are worth the effort when it comes to navigating two-way doors.

The good news is that there is no rocket science in this.

Just will, purpose and pursuit.