In our projects internally at companies we like to think that we’re doing something innovative. Yet, this is often the wrong usage of the word. As Blair Enns once said,
“The Innoficiency principle states that innovation and efficiency are opposable goals, you cannot increase one without decreasing the other.”
At first, I was appalled by this statement from Blair, but it made me think twice. Reflecting on my experience over the past 10 years or more, as a UX Designer, I often joined teams that had existing product in the market. There was a choice before us. Either continue optimizing existing product, or start from scratch building a product brand new. It reminds me of the SAP poster I once saw that said,
“Complexity is 50% legacy, 50% new, and 50% duct-tape. Simplicity is 100% new.”
This too got me thinking. Wait a second, I had been stuffing features in like crazy. Little did I know that a few years later I would read an article by Jared Spool on “Feature Bloat” where he says,
“For every feature you pack into a product makes it less usable. Welcome to the effects of Experience Rot.”
Wow! This got me thinking. I had been making products less usable for half a decade or more. I had been implementing feature requests left and right as a designer and front-end developer. Whoops! I needed to start understanding why.
You see, I like to think of innovation as revolution, from the book “Creating Breakthough Products” By Jonathan Cagen, and Craig Vogal. In the book they separate two roadmaps for evolution and revolution. Efficiency and Innovation if you will. Not that anything is wrong per se with efficiency, we just need to know what our objective is.
Today, if you’re doing innovation you should be utilizing Design Thinking and Design Sprints. These two processes are designed specifically for innovation, new things, that disrupt even our legacy product/ service offerings. This is hard for some teams to stomach because “why would we cannabalize our own product offerings?” Well, innovation is risky..
“Creativity + Risk = Reward” — Mark Dziersk 2011 IDSA Conference St. Louis MO
If we’re to truly do something innovative it will not be logical.
“Poetry should resist intelligence, almost.” — Wallace Stevens
When we design something innovative there’s a risk. It’s like a birthday surprise party. The birthday girl may like being surprised, but there’s that single moment where she hates being surprised, and it’s both traumatic and funny for the visitors. That’s what innovation is like. So, we can’t even ask people if they want a birthday surprise or we risk voiding the surprise element. This is where many teams go wrong with innovation. They think they just need to ask people what they want. Yet, as Henry Ford is attributed saying,
“If I asked people what they wanted they would’ve said faster horse.” — Maybe Henry Ford
Nevertheless, innovation has a hard time internally at established companies that have grown safe, and so too have their employees that are full-time managerial class. They’re good at keeping things normal and consistent. The trouble comes when a startup comes out of nowhere and pulls the rug right out from under that former behemoth. You could turn to Netflix vs Blockbuster. Kodak vs Nokia. On and on the story goes. The truth of the matter is like what Jessica Walsh says..
“If no one hates it. No one really loves it.” — Jessica Walsh
This makes me realize that innovation is a risky endeavor where there’s no way to ask people what they want we have to use anticipatory design theory and intuition akin to designing a birthday party surprise. We have to seek to delight the user by over delivering value and wow!-ing them. There’s the Kano Model for this as well.
Moreover, we need to continue efficiency gains, through optimization, usability testing, and keeping existing revenue streams treading water for as long as possible. It’s just that quarterly we need to take those profits and invest some into innovative pursuits which should appear as bat shit crazy impossibilities to others at the company, but still worth pursuing.
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