YakShaving

One of my favorite quotes of all time is David Kelley from IDEO’s “Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner”. I’m a nerd, so I even have the quote hung up near my desk to remind me to just make something or do something. Trying it, instead of postulating about it. A friend just sent me a link to a WSJ article about managing innovation.
In it, a strategist from IDEO talks about the essential aspects of an innovative culture in an organization.

The first one is really awareness and attitudes. The second one is ways of thinking. The third one is processes and tools, and the fourth one is managing risk.

The biggest problem I perceive in completing a project is a lack of understanding on how to pilot a potential solution. This sounds weird, but I think it makes a lot of sense for companies to set projects up so that they can fail relatively easily.

A metaphor I liken this to is non-profits. Every year, tons of nonprofit organizations

get started to support very worthy causes. There are a finite number of causes to go around, but lots of people with large hearts (and sometimes unfulfilled egos?) who want to help. Rather than finding an organization that is supporting their particular cause of interest, people will start yet-another-non-profit (YANP).
The problem with these, of course, is that it is difficult to reach any economies of scale or efficiency. And these organizations don’t really consider other groups to be “competitors”. They trudge forward in purgatorial oblivion– preventing their organizations from perishing and being born again, fresh.

In much the same way, groups within an organization can tend to hold on to projects far too long for political reasons or otherwise. Project pilots ought to be structured artfully and cleverly like scaffolding, that can fall if necessary, revealing a structure to develop big platform wins.

This requires more than a “stage-gate” methodology or approach. It requires a team to think deeply about what success and failure means for an initiative.