Counting Down Our Top Ten List Of Discovery Driven Planning Misses Part 2 (5 Through 1)
Through Valize, Ron Boire and I have been working with clients to use the tools we have developed to bring Discovery Driven Planning / Discovery Driven Growth to life. Although we’ve got years of experience doing this, and over 100,000,000 hits when you search on the term, it’s still pretty jarring to take on a project with a company only to find the same mistakes popping up over and over. As a public service, therefore, we share our current top 10.
#5: Pouring resources into a thing that your parent corporation is not prepared to support
A surprising result from my dissertation research was that there is a low correlation between the market’s reaction to an offering and how enthusiastic its parent corporation is about it. There are products that get met with lots of customer excitement but which the parent company has little interest in growing, and products that companies are wildly supportive of but to which the market’s reaction is basically “meh.”
#4: Justifying a brand-new offering on the basis of some fictional ROI that it will generate – hello, quantification of fantasy.
Have you ever seen a business plan that looks something like this? “The market for X is projected to be $2 billion by 2024, and all we need is to get 5% of that market.” With the revenue number firmly established at the beginning of the plan (because after all, how hard can it be to get 5% of a new market?), the rest of it goes into minute detail about costs so that an attractive net income number falls out at the bottom.
#3: Creating an accelerator, studio, innovation center or whatnot and then shutting it down when it doesn’t deliver tangible results in a 24-month timeframe.
Ok, so you want to build a billion-dollar new business because it is going to be the Next Big Thing for your company as competition nibbles away your existing core business. To show that you are serious, you create some sort of innovation place – an accelerator, a studio, a startup lab, an innovation center – some kind of cool-looking space that will house the most creative people you can get your hands on. Then let them set their imaginations free, come to work and do huddles, rethink existing business models and so on – it’s exciting! It’s big! It’s new! It’s Innovation Theater!
#2 The wrong metrics, or no metrics at all! Metrics for innovation need to be based on progress and learning, not lagging indicators like sales.
It seems to me that sometimes the metrics that we create, argue over, adjust and report are little more than some kind of corporate performative art. You can have three kinds of measures in a business. Lagging indicators are great information about things that have already happened. Current indicators tell you where you are. The most important – and the least used – are leading indicators that tell you about the future.
TA DA! #1 Treating untested assumptions as facts! Very easy to fall into, very hard to dig out of.
This is the uber indicator that an innovation project isn’t being de-risked in a way that makes sense. We know that human beings are subject to all kinds of cognitive and decision-making biases. Wikipedia thoughtfully has compiled a huge list of ways in which our decision-making processes can be distorted.
Go-to innovation resources Some go-to resources I like are Curt Carlson’s book and blog on the innovation practices they developed at SRI International, which took an organization that was on its knees financially and turned it into a reliable engine for creating billion-dollars businesses. Alex Osterwalder’s books and articles introduce innovation ideas in a user-friendly and accessible way. Our friends at Innov8rs have pulled together an incredible collection of resources and a big community of innovation professionals grappling with similar issues. Gina O’Connor, now a professor at Babson, has published a series of in-depth books on radical innovation and what it takes.
Valize was founded to help organizations build innovation and transformation capabilities. It’s a
Meanwhile, at Valize…
passion project of mine, prompted by my frustration that organizations struggle so much with innovation and growth, even though we know a lot about how to do it right. Further, people who read my books, come to my speeches or take my classes were asking how they could take their practices to the next level..
Contact Jacora@valize.com to learn more.
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