Innovation is a tricky beast.
Unfortunately, it’s one of those words that’s been abused, diluted, and jammed into just about every mediocre piece of marketing collateral known to man. Thankfully, we have people like Saul Kaplan who are devoted to infusing innovation into a bunch of things.
He got my brain cranking when he talked on Twitter a while back about there being a distinct difference between innovation and improvement. We often mistake the latter for the former. And when it comes to adopting a radical shift in business – like making it more social – improvement simply isn’t enough.
Building a Better Mousetrap
Improvement is a critical thing. Continuous Improvement has even found its way into the lexicon of business as a dedicated practice of making things better, all the time.
Sometimes, tossing out everything you already know is wasteful or simply unnecessary. But improving things is typically incremental. It’s based on existing norms and familiar, fundamental assumptions about the way things work or should work. It’s usually rooted in ideas that are largely understood and accepted, but characterized by tweaking details – processes, systems, even cultures – in order to refine or streamline them somehow.
By its nature, improvement retains original characteristics of the thing itself while refining some details. More than likely, we’re keeping something that works, we’re just finding ways for it to work a little better.
Faster Horses
Henry Ford was famous for once saying that if he’d asked the American people what they really wanted, they’d have said faster horses.
There’s something to that when it comes to social business adoption too, and the chasm between simply incrementally tweaking familiar concepts and actually breaking down the systems to create and build something better. Even if it means starting from scratch.
True innovation is incredibly difficult because it’s uncomfortable. It’s utterly disruptive, because it takes established norms and turns them on their heads (or blows them up entirely). It creates a *new* normal that might not only be unfamiliar, but absolutely scary because it can lack precedent or proof. It’s based largely on hypothesis, not established history or performance. Which goes against nearly every fiber of our business beings.
Most importantly, innovation isn’t just a thing or an outcome, but a process. A process that requires not only investment and dedication, but the desire to actually put new ideas into action. That’s an attitude as well as a product. It requires getting our heads outside the boundaries of faster horses, and into really wanting to drive significant change.
We Need Both.
Shifting the fabric of business at a fundamental level means that we have to both improve *and* innovate.
Some things we do will be rooted in long time, sound practice, but will need to be modernized or reworked a bit to adapt to the speed, culture, and communication realities that are implied by a more social business. But because social media and social business aren’t just “better marketing”, some things we do will need to be utterly and completely abandoned, reinvented, or established anew.
Identifying which things are which is part of the trick: it’s going to be a different set of things for everyone, and we have to take the time to examine our own work carefully enough to determine that. Your culture might be sound, so perhaps it’s just your systems that need improvement. Or perhaps you’ve got some well oiled infrastructure, but your culture is a terrible foundation upon which to build, so you have to focus on some serious innovation there.
That’s what scares us. That’s what hinders our progress, and even our understanding. Not being willing to both improve AND innovate for the long term good of our businesses. Embracing that some things will be a new version of the familiar, while others will be completely new concepts or ideas that feel incredibly uncomfortable and unpredictable to us.
Change is something that many of us want, but few of us are willing to undertake the risk and discomfort for ourselves in order to enjoy the results of that change. If social business, however, is really to take root as a sustainable, pervasive shift in the way we work overall, we have to know the difference between improvement and innovation, and be willing to take on a bit of both for ourselves.
Thanks for this. Building something new is a PITA. Even though I know on an intellectual level that Those Who Prefer Stabile & Reliable Cheese Sources won’t understand me, it doesn’t make it any easier to create a new model for Cheese Acquisition*. Thanks for being someone who understand the voice in the wilderness. I gotta go hit the treadmill. Sifting imminent.
(*http://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-My-Cheese-Amazing/dp/0399144463).
Great article love this quote ‘Shifting the fabric of business at a fundamental level means that we have to both improve *and* innovate.’ Thanks
That’s right. Innovation is so valuable, for precisely that reason…it’s scarce. Because it’s much scarier than improvement. It almost always involves risk, and some type of sacrifice (money, time, reputation). Improvement is guided by the question, how do we make things 1% better. Innovation is guided by the question, how do we make things 100% better. Great post, Amber.
Amber, as always great post! The ideas you discussed remind me of the expression, “Good, Better, Best”. Improvement is good, inovation is better, and being able to utilize both is the ideal and best situation. My job requires me to help clients break out of their boxes and explore new ways of communicating with their audiences through new and exciting practices of social media, PR, branding and advertising. While most companies I work with are finally grasping the idea that there needs to be improvements, most still lack a grander vision of innovation. For them its an obstacle they are not comfortable enough to take on. I am stuck working with people who are completely fine with the “Good”. The problem now is trying to impress upon them the need for “Better and Best”. In my experience there are not enough people out there ready to catch the wave.
So then the question really becomes: “why the resistance?”. Because
that’s the only way we’ll dig to the root of a solution if there is
one.
I think the resistance stems from a basic unfamiliarity with the industry. Social media is a new and generally unproven field. There are no long-term studies, or proven methods that guarantee success. Everyone seems to have their own theories on what works and what doesn’t. I see companies wanting to dip their toes in the water but not get completely wet if that makes sense. (I do understand that this is commonly the rule…there are still many exceptions…Dell,Target, Coca Chola etc have gone all in and have had great success.)
But take it beyond social. Innovation stalls because of fear overall: fear of change, fear of risk, fear of failure. It’s figuring out how to surmount *that* that absolutely stops companies in their tracks, all the time, regardless of the driver.
Oh trust me, I know it goes way beyond social. I was just realting inovation to the field that I happen to be working in. Change is always a scary word to use around any industry that has an established way of doing things. In an industry as new and unproven as social however, how easy/difficult inovation is I guess is always in the eye of the beholder. All that being said, lets just say that people are and always will be afraid to step outside the status quo.
Think it’s more than that, tbh.
Sony stopped innovating as it got distracted into new business models, eg cinema, in which it had no expertise.
Vanity plays a big part in the destruction of great ideas.
All great points, Amber. I am flying the flag and cheering on the movement toward social business.
And almost every time I mention it, someone has the headlight-meets-raccoon look. The bars are filled each night with colleagues commiserating about work and it is so rarely about the offering. It is usually about all that icky human stuff that requires actual attention and discomfort. Bob isn’t pulling his weight. Mary is a terrible person for that job. Brian sucks as a manager.
Change is a powerful word in elections but the nodding begins to subside when that change is directed at every single one of us – not just them or that group or those others. All of us. No exceptions. Now, who will self-appoint themselves change managers in this is new world? Oh hang on, they just ordered another round.
I always believe in the saying “There’s always a better way of doing things.”. You can’t do away with the changes that is happening that’s why you need to equip yourself and strive for continuous improvement. This way, you will be able to assess which area needs to be amended so to improve the business.
During “sitting shiva”, I thought about creating a system to inform family and friends of shiva & funeral details as well as a calendar to coordinate food that people send. Today http://ShivaConnect.com is a reality and it features a Shiva Registry system to assist Jewish families and those who wish to express their condolences.
It’s innovative, quick, convenient and addresses the fact that people communicate through the internet, email, texts, Facebook, etc. By nature, many are resistant to change and the challenge is to have a Shiva Registry page created by Jewish families when there has been a loss… replacing the myriad of phone calls that bring confusion and unnecessary stress during this most difficult time.