Courageous Leadership, Relentless Innovation, and Pushing the Envelope

First of all, it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to share some thoughts on here.  Hopefully I can make up for lost time with a few articles on short order, but time will tell. 

As I’m rapidly approaching my 30-year professional milestone, I’m reminded that the reason I began this journey was to relate and share experiences in the interest of (hopefully) helping others avoid some of the many mistakes I’ve made over the years.  In my mind, if you’re lucky, you are doing things as part of your professional (and arguably personal) life that are challenging enough to create the conditions to fail or minimally sub-optimize outcomes to the level that you’ll reflect and realize there was a better way to approach things if you had another chance.  That is fertile ground for learning and development.  Said differently, we only truly understand our potential when we challenge ourselves to reach beyond our established norms and pursue aspirations to achieve and accomplish more.  Ideally, over time, we also become more self- and situationally-aware, so we continue to adapt and adjust how we do what we do, minimizing negative impacts and maximizing the value we create while things are still in motion (versus during a “debrief”/retrospective process).  That’s ultimately a byproduct and benefit of experience and, unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing you appreciate once you have it if you’re humble enough to admit you make mistakes in the first place.

Focusing specifically on the topic at hand, I was thinking about innovation recently and a keynote address I heard a number of years ago.  The speaker made a point about the difference between “best practice” and “innovation”.  His overall point was that there was a significant difference between the two and leaders often unfortunately weren’t doing a good enough job distinguishing between them.  In the case of best practice, you have a process or approach that has been done so many times that there is a well understood and generally accepted “best” way to do it.  If that is effectively true and we seek to do things in a way that aligns to best practices, how innovative can what we’re doing actually be?  What is truly unknown or exploratory in that situation?  Arguably not very much, and yet best practice thinking is often recognized and sought out from a leadership standpoint as a way to drive process or operating improvement.  Is that necessarily a bad thing?  Not necessarily, because it could be that the nature of the area is not one where any level of significant change or transformation is anticipated or desired and the organizational goal is really just to stabilize something and make it execute well and consistently enough that it is not having an adverse impact on overall performance.

Where I’d suggest there is room for thought is whether this “status quo” is true anymore in the world of digital business.  Is there really ever a case where you have a process that is so static that there is literally no room for making it better?  I’m not sure.  Can you make it more predictive, automated, integrated with customers/partners/suppliers, quality-oriented, etc.?  The complexity of digital business, particularly in terms of integration, speed, quality, and customer centricity would tend to make me think that even the most mundane of our solutions to current problems provide opportunities to improve.  If that’s the case, then I’d offer that relentless innovation is worth consideration. 

The litmus test can simply be this question: if you had a blank sheet of paper and had to design your process in a perfect world, would it work exactly how it does today?  If you set aside limitations, constraints, the current operating environment, and opened up the discussion to the realm of possibilities on what excellence could look like in that domain, what would it be?  If it looked different from current to desired state, what would you do about it?

This isn’t to suggest change for change’s sake or having a lack of priorities as there is a point to prioritizing efforts based on maximizing value, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a vision of a desired “ideal state”.  The point is that it’s very easy to accept the status quo and the perceived safety of the known in terms of best practice and lose the opportunity that comes with continuous reinvention.

This is where courageous leadership comes into play and we should ask ourselves why we prefer the best practice solution to true innovation.  Is it the safety that comes with not taking the risk of exploring the unknown?  As leaders we can take the safe route, let others take the risks for us, learn from their mistakes and implement only those things that are generally accepted to work (and work well).  Where does this leave us, however, in terms of establishing competitive advantage and differentiation in the marketplace?

Technology delivery is challenging and it is becoming even more the case as the pace of innovation is accelerating.  Most organizations will struggle with being able to adopt and integrate new technologies as they emerge over time and limit their competitive position as a result.  That is somewhat related to antiquated architectures and infrastructures that stifle innovation and change (something I will address when I write about framework-centric design and the future of enterprise architecture), but I believe it’s also related to a lack of organizational agility and courage in terms of innovation itself.

Innovation should be uncomfortable.  By that, I mean there should be an element of the unknown that creates a healthy discomfort you may actually fail in the pursuit of what you’re doing.  If it isn’t “scary”/exhilarating at some level, are you really pushing the boundaries of what’s possible or just re-treading a path that others have explored before you?  This is not an argument for being undisciplined or taking unnecessary risks.  Rather, the point is to understand that true innovation should be pushing the boundaries of what is actually achievable to the point that you could fail.  If what you’re doing is simply an iteration of current solutions, at the pace technology is advancing overall, the odds may well be that what you’re doing will be obsolete by the time you ultimately deliver it (if it involves any scale or time to execute).  Said differently, if you’re going to set an innovation goal, make it audacious and one worth achieving in its ability to truly transform your business, because the alternate path will eventually lead you to obsolescence.

Having worked on innovative efforts at various points over my career, one thing that I have come to look for (as a watch item) is a lack of fear/awareness on a delivery team when what they are doing is still fairly new or unproven.  Experience tends to give you a sense of what to watch out for, or minimally an awareness that, as you delve into areas of technology delivery that are not very mature, you are going to encounter unexpected issues that will threaten the ultimate success of your effort.  Leaders who have operated in this space generally seem to know that, so their enthusiasm over pursuing the next “big thing” tends to be tempered by a healthy dose of humility on what they don’t know, need to understand, have on their “watch list”, etc.  That, to me, is a sign of strength and experienced leadership.  Where I’ve had a decent number of “lessons learned” in the past is exactly the opposite situation, where we took on a difficult challenge and took a “we got this” mindset (and there’s nothing wrong with being highly motivated), without really appreciating the complexities of what we were doing to the point that, when things eventually went sideways because of an unknown in the delivery effort, we were ill prepared to adapt and address the situation.  Experienced leaders know what they don’t know or minimally that they have blind spots that they need to identify.  Motivated inexperience tends to breed overconfidence and that’s dangerous when it isn’t held in check with discipline.

In creating an environment for excellence, the challenge for leaders is to create space for individuals and teams to experiment and innovate while making it safe to fail when things don’t work out.  It’s better to fall short of accomplishing something great and strive for true innovation than to excel at the routine and find yourself overrun by your competition at some point in time (and it’s only a matter of time if you encourage safety over courageous leadership).

Hopefully the thoughts were helpful…

-CJG 03/21/2022