Everything has a half-life, but we don’t behave that way. Especially when it comes to success. The thinking goes – if it was successful last time, it will be successful next time. So, do it again. And again. It is an efficient strategy – the heavy resources to bring it to life have already been spent. And it is predictable – the same customers, the same value proposition, the same supply base, the same distribution channel, and the same technology. And it is dangerous.
Success is successful right up until it isn’t. It will go away. But it will take time. A successful product line will not fall off the face of the earth overnight. It will deliver profits year-over-year and your company will come to expect them. And your company will get hooked on the lifestyle enabled by those profits. And because of the addiction, when they start to drop off the company will do whatever it takes to convince itself all is well. No need to change. If anything, it is time to double-down on the successful formula.
Here’s a rule: When your successful recipe no longer brings success, it’s not time to double-down.
Success’ decline will be slow, so you have time. But creating a new recipe takes a long time, so it is time to declare that the decline has already started. And it is time to learn how to start work on the new recipe.
Hardship 1 – Allocate resources differently. The whole company wants to spend resources on the same old recipes, even when told not to. It is time to create a funding stream that is independent of the normal yearly planning cycle. Simply put, the people at the top have to reallocate a part of the operating budget to projects that will create the next successful platform.
Hardship 2 – Work differently. The company is used to polishing the old products and they don’t know how to create new ones. You need to hire someone who can partner with outside companies (likely startups), build internal teams with a healthy disrespect for previous success, create mechanisms to support those teams and teach them how to work in domains of high uncertainty.
Hardship 3 – See value differently. How do you provide value today? How will you provide value when you cannot do it that way? What is your business model? Are you sure that’s your business model? Which elements of your business model are immature? Are you sure? What is the next logical evolution of how you go about your business? Hire someone to help you answer those questions and create projects to bring the solutions to life.
Hardship 4 – Measure differently. When there is no customer, no technology and no product, there is no revenue. You must learn how to measure the value of the work (and the progress) with something other than revenue. Good luck with that.
Hardship 5 – Compensate differently. People that create something from nothing want different compensation than people that do continuous improvement. And you want to move quickly, violate the status quo, push through constraints and create whole new markets. Figure out the compensation schemes that give them what they want and helps them deliver what you want.
This work is hard, but it’s not impossible. But your company doesn’t have all the pieces to make it happen. Don’t be afraid to look outside your company for help and partnership.
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How many times a day do you ask someone to do something? If you total all the requests you make of coworkers, family members, friends, people at restaurants and shops, and even strangers, the total is somewhere between 100 and 1 bazillion. Now, what if I told you that by including just one word in your request, the odds of receiving a positive response increase by 50%?
And no, that word is not “please.”
The real magic word
Harvard 1978. Decades before everyone had access to computer labs, home computers, and personal printers, students had to line up at the copy machine to make copies. You could easily spend hours in line, even if you only had a few copies to make. It was an inefficient and infuriating problem for students.
It was also a perfect research opportunity for Ellen Langer, a professor in Harvard’s Psychology Department.
Prof. Langer and her colleagues asked students to break into the line using one of three phrases:
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine?”
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”
The results were definitive and surprising. Students who used the first phrase were successful 60% of the time, but those who used the phrases with “because” were successful 93% and 94% of the time.
“Because” matters. The reason does not.
Note that in phrases two and three, the reason the student is asking to cut in line isn’t very good. You can practically hear the snarky responses, “Of course, you have to make copies; why else would you be at the copy machine?” or “We’re all in a rush,” and the request is denied.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, the research (and hundreds of subsequent studies) showed that when the ask is simple or familiar, people tend to follow instructions or respond positively to requests without paying attention to what’s said, even if the instructions don’t make sense or the request disadvantages them in some way. Essentially, people hear “because,” assume it’s followed by a good reason and comply.
“Because” matters. How you use it matters more.
The power of “because” isn’t about manipulation or coercion. It’s about fostering a culture of transparency, critical thinking, and effective communication.
Taking the time to think about when and how to communicate the Why behind your requests increases your odds of success and establishes you as a strategic and thoughtful leader. But building your “Because’ habit takes time, so consider starting here:
Conduct a “Because” Audit: For one day, track your use of “because.” How many times do you make a request? How many times to you explain your requests with “because?” How many times do you receive a request, and how many of those include “because?” Simply noticing when “because” is used and whether it works provides incredible insights into the impact it can have in your work.
Connect your “Becauses” As leaders, we often focus on the “what” and “how” of directives, but the “why” is equally crucial. Take your top three strategic priorities for the quarter and craft a compelling “because” statement that clearly articulates the reasoning behind it. For instance, “We’re expanding into the Asian market because it represents a $50 billion opportunity that aligns perfectly with our core competencies.” This approach not only provides clarity but also helps in rallying your team around a common purpose.
Cascade the “Because” Habit: Great leaders don’t just adopt best practices; they institutionalize them. Challenge your direct reports to incorporate “because” into their communications. When they bring you requests, ask them for the “because” if they don’t offer it. Make it a friendly competition and celebrate people who use this technique to drive better outcomes.
Tell me how you’ll start because then you’re more likely to succeed.
(see what I did there?)
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Amazingly Fabulous Tools is an award-winning, entrepreneurial market leader in the global machine engineering industry. The ambitious and proactive CEO Charlie Chaps invested in dispatching a Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley to research, investigate, and report on how to capture and emulate the critical ingredients of its “secret innovative sauce.” Upon their return, the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers created and shared a beautiful, illustrated PowerPoint presentation with the board despite secretly knowing and passively avoiding saying that Amazingly Fabulous Tools could not replicate what they had discovered, primarily due to how the top five innovation myths clandestinely operated in the organization.
The Corporate Antibodies
This is due to their overt experience with the organization’s “innovation antibodies,” which cause an organization to resist change and protect the status quo. These antibodies consist of rigid people and inconsistent processes that extinguish a new idea as soon as it begins to course through the organization. In the Amazingly Fabulous Tool company, most people, especially the founders and the board, unconsciously and powerfully neutralized any forces that threatened to destabilize the company’s current state and stunt its growth by shutting down the fresh ideas and unconventional thinking their company badly needed.
Charlie Chaps built a fantastic, largely incomprehensible strategic plan with a BHAG, strategic goals, and sets of individual KPIs. This plan provided concrete evidence that reassured the board that the company was taking action to sustain its leadership position in the market and would take the business to the next level by growing its ROI. It also aimed to leverage the collective genius of its owners, Bob the Brave Builder and Eric the Energetic Entrepreneur, to ensure a legacy was left no matter who was at the helm.
The Innovation Culture Diagnostic Findings
A quantitative and qualitative cultural diagnostic revealed that people lacked permission, safety, and trust to speak up, rock the boat and challenge the status quo. It also showed that the organization lacked rigor in its process disciplines and a focus on developing its people’s capabilities.
It also revealed that Amazingly Fabulous Tools was secretly driven by its founders’ and sales directors’ self-interest and greed due to the highly competitive profit-share sales model. Not by an obligation and commitment to creating, inventing, designing, and delivering disciplined, innovative process improvements, products, and services that their customers purchased and did not appreciate and cherish.
This was a stark contradiction and barrier to the company’s ability to sustain its enviable global reputation. Finally, people believed that Charlie Chaps’ fantastic strategic plan, BHAG, goals, and KPIs were confusing and disconnected from the organization’s current reality and would not produce a collaborative and innovative organization.
So, they did not accept or apply the plan and kept safe by conducting business as usual.
The Top Five Innovation Myths
Because the corporate antibodies revealed that people unanimously believed each of the key myths, including:
Myth # 1: Innovation is a solo activity; people believe that ” only the owners can innovate.” The Brutal Truth: Innovation is impossible without inclusion and collaboration, which are achieved through practical and disciplined teaming and networking.
Myth #2: Innovation is top-down; people believed they were not responsible or accountable for planning and were forced to be reactive. “The planning is difficult, that is for sure, because we are firefighting all the time, and that goes back to the frustration of not having enough time to do what needs to get done…and resources and …tools.” The Brutal Truth: When people have the permission and safety to challenge the status quo, make mistakes, and are trusted to learn through experimentation, innovation can emerge anywhere in an organization, or team.
Myth #3: Innovation is about the newest thing; people believed that radical innovation was needed when agility was the problem; “The scary thing is our key competitor is getting more flexible (agile); we’re just getting more reliable (stable). It’s the stupid things that are so annoying. It’s the embarrassing things.” The Brutal Truth: Innovation is guided by its strategic intent. It can be incremental, continuous, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or differentiated, as there is no one best way of innovating.
Myth # 4: Innovation can’t be taught; people believed that they did not have to learn to improve or innovate when they encountered quality issues continuously; “A lot of times, it’s not because the customer wants the machine tomorrow but because we want to ship it tomorrow because we want to get it off the floor, we want to meet numbers, we want the cash. We usually drive the time frame and rush it out the door, creating many internal problems. It also creates problems externally with the customer when they think they’re getting a machine fully intact, but half its parts are missing….” The Brutal Truth: Innovators are not born and are made. Anyone can learn to innovate,
Myth #5: You can’t force innovation; people were dis-empowered and did not take responsibility for influencing their environment to provide order and discipline; “It’s a traffic jam. That’s what we’ve got. It’s a traffic jam. Cars sitting bumper to bumper look like they are gridlocked. It represents the log jam of our activities. Where people are trying to push so many activities through two lanes of traffic when we’ve got six lanes worth of traffic.” The Brutal Truth: Innovation can emerge when people have a sense of urgency, understand, and are motivated to engage in necessary, high-impact cultural and organizational change.
People must be prepared for it, change-ready and receptive, and intentionally pulled towards a compelling and desired future within an equalized environment that balances chaos and creativity with rigidity and discipline through rigorous planning.
The real costs to the organization
People believed that “This business makes money despite itself. There is potential to be truly great”. This was the most significant innovation antibody because there was no sense of urgency or even a financial or growth necessity to innovate. The company was quite comfortable with the status quo and had no reason to shift its habitual and unconscious comfort zone in ways that people and organizations must do to innovate because it involves being ready and receptive to mega-changes.
The significant investment in sending the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley sadly remained in the mythical realm of Innovation Dreamland.
So, lacking focus, discipline and rigor, the group of seriously qualified and intelligent engineers knowingly consistently dispatched faulty million-dollar machines to highly valued, global customers.
The cost of rework and brand erosion were considerable.
These machines required considerable analysis, problem-solving, and rework upon their return. Their costs were not recorded as repairs, causing the engineering division to be consistently over budget. Charlie Chaps reacted by restricting its budget and inhibiting its investment in critical research and development, which is needed to create, invent, and innovate to repair and sustain its global reputation as an innovator.
Innovation Dreamland remained a mythical and magical fantasy in Amazingly Fabulous Tools.
Sadly, the organization failed to shift its focus from challenge to opportunity because it could not resolve the corporate antibodies (implicit killers), remove the roadblocks, break down the internal cultural barriers to innovation and develop the agility necessary to become both a people-centric and customer-centric organization.
It lost an opportunity to make innovation a daily habit for everyone by failing to embed it in its organization as a way of life. It needed to empower, enable, and equip its talented, experienced and motivated people with the emotional energy, change, cognitive, and innovation agility to expose, challenge and resolve the underlying corporate antibodies.
It did not prioritize customer satisfaction and keep its promises by creating, inventing, and innovating high-value, quality products and services that improve the quality of their lives that are appreciated and cherished.
Many transformations and change-led innovation initiatives designed as strategic interventions fail due to a lack of alignment between strategy, structure, processes, and human skills, resulting in unproductive actions and poor human behaviors.
This is a short section from Chapter One of our new book, “Conscious Innovation – Empowering People to Be, Think and Act Differently in a Constantly Changing World”, which will be published in 2025.
Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.
Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, it is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.
It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.
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In the evolving landscape of customer-centric business, the customer journey map has emerged as a pivotal tool. It serves not only as a means to visualize the customer experience but also as a strategic asset to drive innovation and transformation. By mapping out the customer journey, organizations can gain deep insights into customer needs, pain points, and moments of truth, ultimately leading to enhanced experiences and increased loyalty. Here are the top ten uses for a customer journey map.
1. Understand Customer Experience
The primary function of a customer journey map is to visualize the entire customer experience. By laying out the journey, businesses can empathize with customers, gaining a comprehensive understanding of their experiences and emotions at each touchpoint.
2. Identify Pain Points
Journey maps are instrumental in identifying pain points and frictions along the customer journey. By highlighting these areas, businesses can prioritize improvements and tackle the most impactful issues to enhance customer satisfaction.
3. Enhance Product Development
Innovative product development can be fostered through insights gained from customer journey maps. By understanding customer needs and pain points, development teams can create solutions that are aligned with user expectations and desires.
4. Improve Customer Support
Journey maps can highlight common issues faced by customers, allowing companies to streamline and improve their customer support processes. By addressing these areas, organizations can enhance their support services, leading to better customer experiences.
5. Drive Alignment Across Teams
Customer journey maps create a shared vision and understanding of customer segments across all teams within an organization. This alignment fosters collaboration and ensures that all departments are working towards a common goal: improving the customer experience.
6. Inform Marketing Strategies
By understanding the customer journey, marketers can design targeted strategies that align with each stage of the customer lifecycle. This ensures more effective communication and engagement, ultimately improving conversion rates and customer retention.
7. Personalize Customer Interactions
Journey maps help businesses provide personalized experiences by identifying key moments where tailored interactions can significantly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. Personalization fosters a deeper connection with customers, enhancing their overall experience.
8. Support Change Management Initiatives
During times of change, a customer journey map serves as a guiding framework to maintain focus on the customer as strategies and processes evolve. It ensures that change initiatives are designed with the customer in mind, thus reducing the risk of negative impacts.
9. Foster Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is driven by ongoing insights and feedback from customer journey maps. As businesses iterate on the customer experience, journey maps act as a feedback loop, helping organizations remain agile and responsive to changing customer needs.
10. Drive Innovation
Last but certainly not least, journey maps drive innovation by uncovering opportunities for creating breakthrough experiences and services. They challenge organizations to think creatively about how they can deliver unique value and set themselves apart in the market.
Conclusion
A customer journey map serves as an invaluable tool for organizations seeking to enhance customer experience and drive strategic growth. By visualizing the customer’s interactions with a brand, businesses can identify pain points and opportunities at every stage of the consumer lifecycle. From improving customer service and refining marketing strategies to informing product development and personalizing the purchasing process, the applications of a customer journey map are vast and impactful. Leveraging these insights allows companies to foster deeper engagement, build loyalty, and ultimately achieve a competitive edge in today’s dynamic market. As customer expectations continue to evolve, integrating journey mapping into your business strategy is not just beneficial but essential for sustained success.
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Once upon a time, in a lush forest, there lived a colony of industrious beavers known far and wide for their magnificent dams, which provided shelter and sustenance for many.
One day, the wise old owl who governed the forest decreed that all dams must be rebuilt to withstand the increasingly fierce storms that plagued their land. She gave the beavers two seasons to complete it, or they would lose half their territory to the otters.
The Grand Design: Blueprints and Blind Spots
The beaver chief, a kind fellow named Oakchew, called the colony together, inviting both the elder beavers, known for their experience and sage advice and the young beavers who would do the actual building.
Months passed as the elders debated how to build the new dams. They argued about mud quantities, branch angles, and even which mix of grass and leaves would provide structural benefit and aesthetic beauty. The young beavers sat silently, too intimidated by their elders’ status to speak up.
Work Begins: Dams and Discord
As autumn leaves began to fall, Oakchew realized they had yet to start building. Panicked, he ordered work to commence immediately.
The young beavers set to work but found the new method confusing and impractical. As time passed, progress slowed, panic set in, arguments broke out, and the once-harmonious colony fractured.
One group insisted on precisely following the new process even as it became obvious that they would not meet the deadline. Another reverted to their old ways, believing that a substandard something was better than nothing. And one small group went rogue, retreating to the smallest stream to figure it out for themselves.
As the deadline grew closer, the beavers worked day and night, but progress was slow and flawed. In desperation, Oakchew called upon the squirrels to help, promising half the colony’s winter food stores.
Just as the first storm clouds gathered, Oakchew surveyed the completed dams. Many were built as instructed, but the rushed work was evident and showed signs of weakness. Most dams were built with the strength and craftsmanship of old but were likely to fail as the storms’ intensity increased. One stood alone and firm, roughly constructed with a mix of old and new methods.
Wisdom from the Waters: Experiments and Openness
Oakchew’s heart sank as he realized the true cost of their efforts. The beavers had met their deadline but at a great cost. Many were exhausted and resentful, some had left the colony altogether, and their once-proud craftsmanship was now shoddy and unreliable.
He called a final meeting to reflect on what had happened. Before the elders could speak, Oakchew asked the young beavers for their thoughts. The colony listened in silent awe as the young builders explained the flaws in the “perfect” process. The rogue group explained that they had started building immediately, learning from each failure, and continuously improving their design.
“We wasted so much time trying to plan the perfect dam,” Oakchew admitted to the colony. “If we had started building sooner and learned from our mistakes, we would not have paid such a high cost for success. We would not have suffered and lost so much if we had worked to ensure every beaver was heard, not just invited.”
From that day forward, the beaver colony adopted a new approach of experimentation, prototyping, and creating space for all voices to be heard and valued. While it took many more seasons of working together to improve their dams, replenish their food stores, and rebuild their common bonds, the colony eventually flourished once more.
The Moral of the Story – (just in case it isn’t obvious)
The path to success is paved not with perfect plans but with the courage to act, the wisdom to learn from failures, and the openness to embrace diverse ideas. True innovation arises when we combine the best of tradition with the boldness of experimentation.
Image credit: Pixabay
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There are some questions in life which can be answered quickly, no real thought required, simple yes/no options. Others might involve a longer period of time, perhaps a pleasant exploration of the possibilities. Philosophical enquiries, searching for meaning in life, the universe, everything….
But there’s one set of questions which brook no hesitation, which demand instant application to the task in hand. Those are concerned with ‘helping with daughter’s homework’ and which usually extend to occupy most of the available evening. Which is how I’ve found myself pondering the big question of ‘how can maps help us?’, as an accompaniment to trying to create with her a schematic map of our house and garden….
It’s easy to take maps for granted — but we’d be pretty stuck without them. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world. They seem to have been — independently invented by many cultures across the globe, and they’ve been around a very long time. Fragments etched on tusks or scratched on stones, dating back 25000 years or more all point to maps as something important. Which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view — it would help our survival a lot if we were able to chart where to find food, mark dangers, settle boundary disputes. Especially if we could share that knowledge with others.
And it’s not just maps of where we’ve been and how to get back there. Maps also drove exploration and enabled trade. Phoenician sailors way back 3000 years ago were managing long trips like discovering a way round Africa and the explosion of global trade and imperials expansion owes much to explorers like Magellan, Columbus, Drake and da Gama. Their voyages showed us that (a) the world isn’t flat with an edge you can fall off and (b) that there were impressive profits to be made if you could reliably head for (and more importantly come back from) exotic destinations like the spice islands. Maps were at the heart if this — and one reason why the Portuguese lost their early advantage to the Dutch East India company was the acquisition (by fair means or foul) of the key maps ….
Maps aren’t just passive guidebooks either. They can certainly help us get from (a) to (b) reliably and repeat the trick. But they also act as warnings, signposting where to go but also what to avoid and why — from ‘here be dragons’ markings on medieval charts through to today’s detailed lines of demarcation around danger areas.
And maps can set the rule of the game. Much of the work of early cartographers was charting not only the physical layout of land and sea but the political and economic one. Wars have a nasty habit of involving incursions into territory ‘owned’ by someone else. And maps continue to play a role in the political landscape — for example redrawing electoral boundaries isn’t simply a psephological exercise, it’s a power game.
So maps matter — and (as my daughter’s homework underlines) we need to learn to work with them, even in an age of GPS and automated guidance.
What has all this to do with innovation? Quite a lot in fact: maps and map-making provides a powerful metaphor for much of what we do when we try to manage the uncertain journey which innovation involves. There’s probably hundreds of applications of the idea but here are five which spring quickly to mind:
1. Navigating uncertainty
Innovation is all about uncertainty, it’s not simple planning but a probe into unknown territory. When we think about radical innovation we are certainly in the realm of high uncertainty, trying to feel our way through the fog. Even incremental innovation — doing what we do but better — has its surprises, like the diversions we might need to make on a well-used route because of road works or repairs.
So making even the crudest of sketch maps for ourselves might help, and using charts begged, borrowed or stolen from other voyagers would be a recommended strategy. After all someone else may have made a similar journey and there might be clues in their codified experience — a sort of ‘trip advisor’ resource, or (for those not yet familiar with the classic ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) a guidebook plus maps with the important reassurance ‘Don’t panic!’ scrawled across the front cover.
Maps can warn of topographical challenges like rivers to be crossed or mountains to be climbed and in similar fashion making maps of the wider context in which our innovation is going to emerge will be helpful. For example, a healthcare start-up needs to map regulatory challenges, market demands, and technological barriers. Understanding these “elevations” and “obstacles” helps the company prepare strategies to overcome or navigate through them.
Maps come in many flavours, including exotics like ‘heat maps’ which can be useful in terms of analysing energy consumption for example (I got that one from Lara’s homework book). Same thing with innovation — sometimes ‘heat maps’ can help focus attention on key areas for development, for example in identifying market trends, customer preferences, and areas ripe for innovation.
Starbucks uses heat maps to analyze customer behaviour and preferences in different regions. This data helps the company identify hotspots where certain products or services are more popular, allowing for targeted marketing and product offerings. For example, Starbucks identified a growing trend in mobile ordering and payment, leading to the successful rollout of their mobile app, which has significantly enhanced customer convenience and engagement.
And, especially in service innovation, journey maps can help visualize the customer experience, detailing each touchpoint and interaction a customer has with a product or service. This helps in refining and improving the innovation to better meet customer needs.
Airbnb uses journey mapping to enhance the user experience for both hosts and guests. By mapping out every interaction a user has with the platform — from searching for a property to post-stay reviews — Airbnb identifies pain points and opportunities for improvement. This customer-centric approach has led to features like the Superhost program and streamlined booking processes, significantly enhancing overall user satisfaction.
2. Sharing the message
Innovation is a process, and anyone might get lucky once. The real skill lies in being able to repeat the trick, to recognise that it can be a managed process which depends on more than just luck. For which we need a map, some codified representation of what we’ve learned about how the process works and what to do about it.
Which is good news for people like me — our role has been to try and make sense of the hundred plus years of research and the reported experiences of tens of thousands of people to detect patterns — make maps — of how the process could be managed over time. What to do — and what not to do, much in the manner of early ‘here be dragons’ guidance. We’ve come a long way; our maps of the process are well-documented in text books, consulting offers and even at the heart of an International Standard (56001) for innovation management.
3. Forecasting and back-casting
Smart players of the innovation game don’t just grope their way through the fog and hope; they make use of futures tools to help develop a strategy — a map of where to go and what to do next, which steps to take. It’s a two-step process — forecasting involves looking forward, imagining and engaging the help of others to make more than random guesses, weaving them into coherent pictures of future scenarios. But it also involves back casting — working out how to get ‘there’ from ‘here’. Where and how to start?
That process is called road-mapping for a reason — it’s all about making relevant maps to guide our journey (and our resource commitment) into the future. You don’t get to launch a major new piece of software or a radical alternative product by simply pressing the ‘go’ button — it involves careful planning of each key stage from exploratory research through to prototype development, beta testing, market launch, and post-launch support. Each stage has specific goals, timelines, and checkpoints, helping the team stay focused and aligned with their objectives.
4. Simulation and pivoting, updating our maps
Drawing a map in the abstract, without understanding the conditions on the actual ground itself, is not a good approach to navigation. On account of the fact that maps are not the actual territory, they are a representation of that reality. Plenty of people have commented on this problem, from Prussian general von Moltke with his famous ‘no plan survives the first contact with the enemy’ through to boxer Mike Tyson’s more succinct version, ‘everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face!’
So we need the ability to revise our maps en route, improve them and press forward in a mode which Rita McGrath calls ‘discovery driven planning’ — map-making on the fly. These days this principle lies at the heart of ‘agile innovation’ and the ‘lean start-up’ model. Innovation involves testing assumptions , learning from feedback and course correcting — the innovation equivalent of GPS saying ‘off route, recalculating’.
For example, Netflix leverages real-time data analytics (akin to a GPS) to continuously adjust its content strategy. By monitoring viewer preferences and engagement in real-time, Netflix can quickly pivot its content offerings, invest in new shows, and even decide on canceling underperforming series.
The good news here is that we have a rich set of tools to help our adaptive cartography — simulations, FMEA, pre-mortems, etc. — which allow us to explore and change course before we actually hit the iceberg emerging through the fog.
An extreme variant of such map -making is the idea of ‘escape maps’ — escape routes developed to navigate out of a crisis. For example Toyota’s response to widespread recalls due to safety issues back in 2010 was to develop a crisis management plan to address the problems, communicate transparently with customers, and implement quality control improvements. This escape map helped Toyota navigate through the crisis, restore customer trust, and enhance its safety standards. But it also provided a resource on which they could build in the face of future challenges , like the supply-chain disruptions caused by earthquakes.
5. Co-operative cartography
Innovation is a multi-player game and in todays’ borderless digital world that’s become more relevant than ever. Open innovation is all about collaboration and consortia, finding or building an ecosystem in which all players bring something to the party and when well orchestrated can create emergent properties. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. And a key piece of this puzzle lies in the shared maps which they use for their collective journey.
Such maps may be built around something abstract but compelling — a vision into which people can buy, something which focuses their collective energies and points the way towards Treasure Island with enough for everyone. Platform businesses offer a good example of such collaboration, where platform owners orchestrate the players across a multi-sided market. Such arrangements depend on having clear maps of where and how shared value is created.
But a big part of the shared value ecosystem story is the fact that the ‘rules of the game’ are made explicit and become the boundaries and geography of the game. In other words the map of where and how the game will be played out. That’s often an underestimated aspect of the innovation story but it highlights the key role of cartography. Who is making the maps which set out the context within which shared value might be created?
Malcom Mclean’s revolution in world trade catalysed by his containerisation innovation might have run aground at an early stage. His voyage might have involved ships stuck in port if he hadn’t managed to find a way of working alongside the unions who were key cartographers in that context.
Mobile money across Africa is nothing special, it’s just how things work in that world, even as we still marvel at the power of smart transactions on our phonies. This leap-frogging to a new financial world connecting millions of people has been enabled by innovations like M-PESA and its lookalikes and has ushered in a quiet revolution. Over half of Kenyan GDP runs across M-PESA’s platfrm) — but this massive social innovation, bringing banking and financial services to the unbanked, wouldn’t have been possible without the active support and smoothing of the pathway played by the central bank. Their role as cartographers, supporting and promoting the innovation has been central to its widespread adoption.
Uber uses a topographical map approach to understand the regulatory, market, and technological landscape when expanding its services globally. Each city and country had unique regulations, market demands, and infrastructure challenges. By mapping these out, Uber can try to tailor its strategies to navigate through regulatory hurdles, optimize its technology for local conditions, and address market-specific needs effectively.
So maps matter in innovation — and the skills of working with them seem worth developing. In particular three key skills ought to be at the fingertips of anyone working in the innovation space:
Map reading — if there’s one thing we’ve learned in an era of GPS and navigational accuracy measured in millimetres it’s that the best maps in the world can still lead you into trouble if you don’t know how to use them properly. GPS has an enviable track record of leading strangers on to rocks or to other unexpected places, one of which Ulysses’ sirens or the Lorelei Rhine-maidens would be proud.
We need to learn to use maps intelligently, checking our position and adjusting, correcting course, pivoting with the map as a guide. But maps are not a substitute for thinking about and actively managing our journey.
We know a lot about the innovation process so whether you’re a start-up entrepreneur or a team inside an established organization, the journey to create value from ideas doesn’t have to be a random one. Importantly we have maps for many different contexts — it’s not a case of one size fits all — so there is guidance for innovators working in the public sector or not for profit world as much as the commercial world
Map making — we also need the skill of constructing storylines, roadmaps into the future which provide us with the key information at key stages on the journey. We can use maps which others have prepared but it’s also important to develop our own skills , just as our ancestors would have found ways to communicate what they were learning. Embedding key questions around which we need to explore and chart is a key stage in the evolution of any business model — it’s a story which sets out where we’re trying get to and what we’re learning on the way. We need this to engage others and recruit their questions, experience and insight — and if we succeed we can offer our maps for others. After all there’s a booming market in offering templates for business models which can be adapted and configured to suit…
But standards are only one part of the story. It’s not just committee work, it’s about engaging with cartographers on many levels, drawing them in, getting their support, buy-in, insight and influence. Think of an ed-tech solution which could transform the learning experiences of millions of children in rural Africa — and then try and introduce that without the support of the relevant Ministry of Education.
Or try and fight some of the powerful interests in trade unions or professional associations. Maybe wrestle with the regulatory thickets associated with trade bodies or government departments. Battle with the rules and those employed to make sure things are done by the book. Doesn’t take long before you realise that most changes don’t take place on a blank canvas — they involve negotiating a way through all sorts of obstacles. For which geography it would be helpful to have a map — but even more helpful to have a guide, someone who could help smooth or clear a path.
Learning to identify and recruit cartographers to your value network is increasingly a key skill in scaling innovation for impact.
So (back to our homework question) can maps help us ? In plenty of ways; we’d literally be lost without them. But the real question isn’t so much about whether they can help us but rather how we can best equip ourselves to create and use them….
Two important questions to help you grow your business:
Is the problem worth solving?
When do you want to learn it’s not worth solving?
No one in your company can tell you if the problem is worth solving, not even the CEO. Only the customer can tell you if the problem is worth solving. If potential customers don’t think they have the problem you want to solve, they won’t pay you if you solve it. And if potential customers do have the problem but it’s not that important, they won’t pay you enough to make your solution profitable.
A problem is worth solving only when customers are willing to pay more than the cost of your solution.
Solving a problem requires a good team and the time and money to run the project. Project teams can be large and projects can run for months or years. And projects require budgets to buy the necessary supplies, tools, and infrastructure. In short, solving problems is expensive business.
It’s pretty clear that it’s far more profitable to learn a problem is not worth solving BEFORE incurring the expense to solve it. But, that’s not what we do. In a ready-fire-aim way, we solve the problem of our choosing and try to sell the solution.
If there’s one thing to learn, it’s how to verify the customer is willing to pay for your solution before incurring the cost to create it.
Image credit: Pixabay
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In our race to enable and support hybrid teams, our reliance on collaboration software has inadvertently caused us to forget the art of true collaboration.
The pandemic forced us to rely on digital platforms for communication and creativity. But as we embraced these tools, something essential was lost in translation. Last week, I watched team members sitting elbow-to-elbow spend two hours synthesizing discovery interviews and debating opportunity areas entirely by chat.
What collaboration is
“Collaboration” seems to have joined the ranks of meaningless corporate buzzwords. In an analysis of 1001 values from 172 businesses, “collaboration” was the #2 most common value (integrity was #1), appearing in 23% of the companies’ value statements.
What it means in those companies’ statements is anyone’s guess (we’ve all been in situations where stated values and lived values are two different things). But according to the dictionary, collaboration is “the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing.”
That’s a short definition with a lot of depth.
“The same thing” means that the people working together are working towards a shared goal in which they have a stake in the outcome (not just the completion).
“Working together” points towards interdependence, that everyone brings something unique to the work and that shared goal cannot be achieved without each person’s unique contribution.
“Two or more people” needing each other to achieve a shared outcome requires a shared sense of respect, deep trust, and vulnerability.
It’s easy to forget what “collaboration” means. But we seem to have forgotten how to do it.
What collaboration is not
As people grow more comfortable “collaborating” online, it seems that fewer people are actually collaborating.
Instead, they’re:
Transacting: There is nothing wrong with email, texts, or messaging someone on your platform of choice. But for the love of goodness, don’t tell me our exchange was a collaboration. If it were, every trip to the ATM would be a team-building exercise.
Offering choices: When you go out to eat at a fast-food restaurant, do you collaborate with the employee to design your meal? No. You order off a menu. Offering a choice between two or three options (without the opportunity to edit or customize the options), isn’t collaboration. It’s taking an order.
Complying:Compliance is “the act of obeying a law or rule, especially one that controls a particular industry or type of work.” Following rules isn’t collaboration, it’s following a recipe
Cooperating: Cooperation is when two or more people work together independently or interdependently to achieve someone else’s goal. Collaboration requires shared objectives and ownership, not just shared tasks and timelines.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these activities. Just don’t confuse them with collaboration because it sends the wrong message to your people.
Why this matters
This isn’t an ivory-tower debate about semantics.
When people believe that simple Q&A, giving limited and unalterable options, following rules, and delivering requests are collaboration, they stop thinking. Curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving give way to efficiency and box-checking. Organizations stop exploring, developing, and innovating and start doing the same thing better, faster, and cheaper.
So, if you truly want your organization to grow because it’s filled with creative and empathetic problem-solvers, invest in reclaiming the true spirit of collaboration. After all, the next big idea isn’t hiding in a chat log—it’s waiting to be born in the spark of genuine collaboration.
Image credit: Unsplash
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But enough delay, here are October’s ten most popular innovation posts:
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Drum roll please…