The Gravitational Pull of the Known
Most organizations are built to improve what’s known. Their budgets are structured around it. Their leadership incentives reward it. Their planning cycles assume it. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with this — improving the known is essential. Doing what we already do faster, better and less expensively is the foundation of operational excellence; any organization that neglects it will not survive long enough to transform anything. In fact, gains made improving the core business are often used to fuel innovation.
If an organization wants a real innovation agenda – not just paying lip service to the idea, but truly delivering step change in the business at a predictable cadence – then it must acknowledge that the skills, tools and leadership capabilities for improvement are fundamentally different from those required to challenge what’s possible. Even sometimes at odds with day-to-day operations.
TQM. Lean Six Sigma. Process improvement. The Deming method. These are the tools of performance and process improvements, the spread of best practice, the rigorous work of making the existing machine run better. And they are well known to most leaders. They are comfortable. They are measurable. They produce results that show up in quarterly reports and annual reviews.
Challenging what’s possible — by introducing new products, new services, new business models, new delivery channels — requires different structures, different funding, different timelines and frankly different people. It requires leaders with deep expertise in how the current system works and enough imagination to see how it might work differently. That combination is rare. And the organizations that cultivate and give it cover are rarer still. In the start-up world, there is a reason why the teams hired to build 0 to 1 are different than the teams that build from 1 onward. For long term success, over many rounds of funding, but skill sets are needed.
The reason is structural. The systems organizations operate are designed — with exquisite precision, even if sometimes by accident — to select for improvement over invention. When organizations and leaders are under constant pressure to deliver results this quarter and to show constant improvement, the focus tends to be on improving what’s known. The short-term win has a built-in constituency: the people whose jobs depend on the current model, the metrics that are already being tracked, the board members who want to see steady upward progress. Transformation work has no such constituency. It produces ambiguity before it produces results. It consumes resources before it returns them. And it asks the organization to tolerate a period of uncertainty that every incentive in the system is designed to eliminate.
This is the gravitational pull of the known. And overcoming it is not a matter of inspiration or will. It is a matter of design.
