“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Albert Einstein (supposedly)
This is one of my favorite quotes because it’s an absolute gut punch. You think you know something, probably because you’ve been saying and doing it for years. Then someone comes along and asks you to explain it, and suddenly, you’re just standing there, mouth agape, gesturing, hoping that this wacky game of charades produces an answer.
This happened to me last Monday.
While preparing to teach a course titled “Design Innovation Lab,” I thought it would be a good idea to define “design” and “innovation.” I already had a slide with the definition of “innovation” – something new that creates value – but when I had to make one for “design,” my stomach sank.
My first definition was “pretty pictures,” which is both wrong and slightly demeaning because designers do that and so much more. My second definition, I know it when I see it, was worse.
“Design is a discipline of study and practice focused on the interaction between a person – a “user” – and the man-made environment, taking into account aesthetic, functional, contextual, cultural, and societal considerations. As a formalized discipline, design is a modern construct.”
Before unveiling this definition to a classroom full of degreed designers pursuing their Master’s in Design, I asked them to define “design.”
It went as well as all my previous attempts. Lots of thoughts and ideas. Lots of “it’s this but not that.” Lots of debate about whether it needs to have a purpose for it to be distinct from art.
Absolutely no simple explanations or punchy definitions.
So, when I unveiled the definition from the very official-sounding International Council of Design, we all just stared at it.
“Yes, but it’s not quite right.”
“It is all those things, but it’s more than just those things.”
“I guess it is a ‘modern construct’ when you think of it as a job, but we’ve done it forever.”
As we squinted and puzzled, what was missing slowly dawned on us.
There was nothing human in this definition. There was no mention of feelings or empathy, life or nature, connection or community, aspirations or dreams.
In this definition, designers consider multiple aspects of an unnatural environment in creating something to be used. Designers are simply the step before mass production begins.
Who wants to do that?
Who wants to be a stop, however necessary, on a conveyor belt of sameness?
Yet that’s what we become when we strip the humanness out of our work.
Humans are messy, emotional, unpredictable, irrational, challenging, and infuriating.
We’re also interesting, creative, imaginative, hopeful, kind, curious, hard-working, and resilient.
When we try to strip away human messiness to create MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) target markets and customer personas, we strip away the human we’re creating for.
When we ignore unpredictable and irrational feedback on our ideas, we ignore the creative and imaginative answers that could improve our ideas.
When we give up on a challenge because it’s more difficult than expected and doesn’t produce immediate results, we give up hope, resiliency, and the opportunity to improve things.
I still don’t have a simple definition of design, but I know that one that doesn’t acknowledge all the aspects of a human beyond just being a “user” isn’t correct.
Even if you explain something simply, you may not understand it well enough.
Why are people so concerned about, afraid of, or resistant to new things?
Innovation, by its very nature, is good. It is something new that creates value.
Naturally, the answer has nothing to do with innovation.
It has everything to do with how we experience it.
And innovation without humanity is a very bad experience.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve heard so many stories of inhuman innovation that I have said, “I hate innovation” more than once.
Of course, I don’t mean that (I would be at an extraordinary career crossroads if I did). What I mean is that I hate the choices we make about how to use innovation.
Just because AI can filter resumes doesn’t mean you should remove humans from the process.
Years ago, I oversaw recruiting for a small consulting firm of about 50 people. I was a full-time project manager, but given our size, everyone was expected to pitch in and take on extra responsibilities. Because of our founder, we received more resumes than most firms our size, so I usually spent 2 to 3 hours a week reviewing them and responding to applicants. It was usually boring, sometimes hilarious, and always essential because of our people-based business.
Would I have loved to have an AI system sort through the resumes for me? Absolutely!
Would we have missed out on incredible talent because they weren’t out “type?” Absolutely!
AI judges a resume based on keywords and other factors you program in. This probably means that it filters out people who worked in multiple industries, aren’t following a traditional career path, or don’t have the right degree.
This also means that you are not accessing people who bring a new perspective to your business, who can make the non-obvious connections that drive innovation and growth, and who bring unique skills and experiences to your team and its ideas.
If you permit AI to find all your talent, pretty soon, the only talent you’ll have is AI.
Just because you can ghost people doesn’t mean you should.
Rejection sucks. When you reject someone, and they take it well, you still feel a bit icky and sad. When they don’t take it well, as one of my colleagues said when viewing a response from a candidate who did not take the decision well, “I feel like I was just assaulted by a bag of feathers. I’m not hurt. I’m just shocked.”
So, I understand ghosting feels like the better option. It’s not. At best, it’s lazy, and at worst, it’s selfish. Especially if you’re a big company using AI to screen resumes.
It’s not hard to add a function that triggers a standard rejection email when the AI filters someone out. It’s not that hard to have a pre-programmed email that can quickly be clicked and sent when a human makes a decision.
The Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have done unto you – doesn’t apply to AI. It does apply to you.
Just because you can stack bots on bots doesn’t mean you should.
At this point, we all know that our first interaction with customer service will be with a bot. Whether it’s an online chatbot or an automated phone tree, the journey to a human is often long and frustrating. Fine. We don’t like it, but we don’t have a choice.
But when a bot transfers us to a bot masquerading as a person? Do you hate your customers that much?
Some companies do, as my husband and I discovered. I was on the phone with one company trying to resolve a problem, and he was in a completely different part of the house on the phone with another company trying to fix a separate issue. When I wandered to the room where my husband was to get information that the “person” I was talking to needed, I noticed he was on hold. Then he started staring at me funny (not as unusual as you might think). Then he asked me to put my call on speaker (that was unusual). After listening for a few minutes, he said, “I’m talking to the same woman.”
He was right. As we listened to each other’s calls, we heard the same “woman” with the same tenor of voice, unusual cadence of speech, and indecipherable accent. We were talking to a bot. It was not helpful. It took each of us several days and several more calls to finally reach humans. When that happened, our issues were resolved in minutes.
Just because innovation can doesn’t mean you should allow it to.
You are a human. You know more than the machine knows (for now).
You are interacting with other humans who, like you, have a right to be treated with respect.
If you forget these things – how important you and your choices are and how you want to be treated – you won’t have to worry about AI taking your job. You already gave it away.
Using only three words, how would you describe your company?
Better yet, what three words would your customers use to describe your company?
These three words capture your company’s identity. They answer, “who we are” and “what business we’re in.” They capture a shared understanding of where customers allow you to play and how you take action to win.
Everything consistent with this identity is normal, safe, and comfortable.
Everything inconsistent with this identity is weird, risky, and scary.
Your identity is killing innovation.
Innovation is something new that creates value.
Identity is carefully constructed, enduring, and fiercely protected and reinforced.
When innovation and identity conflict, innovation usually loses.
Whether the innovation is incremental, adjacent, or radical doesn’t matter. If it conflicts with the company’s identity, it will join the 99.9% of innovations that are canceled before they ever launch.
Your identity can supercharge innovation.
When innovation and identity guide and reinforce each other, it doesn’t matter if the innovation is incremental, adjacent, or radical. It can win.
Identity-based Innovation changes your perspective.
We typically think about innovation as falling into three types based on the scope of change to the business model:
Incremental innovations that make existing offerings better, faster, and cheaper for existing customers and use our existing business model
Adjacent innovations are new offerings in new categories, appeal to new customers, require new processes and activities to create or use new revenue models
Radical innovations that change everything – offerings, customers, processes and activities, and revenue models
These types make sense IF we’re perfectly logical and rational beings capable of dispassionately evaluating data and making decisions. SPOILER ALERT: We’re not. We decide with our hearts (emotions, values, fears, and desires) and justify those decisions with our heads (logic and data).
So, why not use an innovation-typing scheme that reflects our humanity and reality?
Identity-enhancing innovations reinforce and strengthen people’s comfort and certainty in who they are and what they do relative to the organization. “Organizational members all ‘know’ what actions are acceptable based on a shared understanding of what the organization represents, and this knowledge becomes codified u a set of heuristics about which innovative activities should be pursued and which should be dismissed.”
Identity-stretching innovations enable and stretch people’s understanding of who they are and what they do in an additive, not threatening, way to their current identities.
Identity-challenging innovations are threats and tend to occur in one of two contexts:
Extreme technological change that “results in the obsolescence of a product market or the convergence of multiple product markets.” (challenges “who we are”)
Competitors or new entrants that launch new offerings or change the basis of competition (challenges “what we do”)
By looking at your innovations through the lens of identity (and, therefore, people’s decision-making hearts), you can more easily identify the ones that will be supported and those that will be axed.
It also changes your results.
“Ok, nerd,” you’re probably thinking. “Thanks for dragging me into your innovation portfolio geek-out.”
Fair, but let me illustrate the power of this perspective using some examples from P&G.
Radical Moved P&G into services and uses a franchise model
Identity-stretching Dry cleaning service is consistent with P&G’s identity but stretches into providing services vs. just products
Do you see what happened on that third line? A Radical Innovation was identity-stretching (not challenging), and it’s in the 0.1% of corporate innovations that launched! It’s in 22 states!
The Bottom Line
If you look at innovation in the same way you always have, through the lens of changes to your business model, you’ll get the same innovation results you always have.
If you look at innovation differently, through the lens of how it affects personal and organizational identity, you’ll get different results. You may even get radical results.
If you’re like most people, you’ve faced disappointment. Maybe the love of your life didn’t return your affection, you didn’t get into your dream college, or you were passed over for promotion. It hurts. And sometimes, that hurt lingers for a long time.
Until one day, something happens, and you realize your disappointment was a gift. You meet the true love of your life while attending college at your fallback school, and years later, when you get passed over for promotion, the two of you quit your jobs, pursue your dreams, and live happily ever after. Or something like that.
We all experience disappointment. We also all get to choose whether we stay there, lamenting the loss of what coulda shoulda woulda been, or we can persevere, putting one foot in front of the other and playing The Rolling Stones on repeat:
“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you might just find
You get what you need”
That’s life.
That’s also innovation.
As innovators, especially leaders of innovators, we rarely get what we want. But we always get what we need (whether we like it or not)
We want to know.
We need to be comfortable not knowing.
Most of us want to know the answer because if we know the answer, there is no risk. There is no chance of being wrong, embarrassed, judged, or punished. But if there is no risk, there is no growth, expansion, or discovery.
Innovation is something new that creates value. If you know everything, you can’t innovate.
As innovators, we need to be comfortable not knowing. When we admit to ourselves that we don’t know something, we open our minds to new information, new perspectives, and new opportunities. When we say we don’t know, we give others permission to be curious, learn, and create.
We want the creative genius and billion-dollar idea.
We need the team and the steady stream of big ideas.
We want to believe that one person blessed with sufficient time, money, and genius can change the world. Some people like to believe they are that person, and most of us think we can hire that person, and when we do find that person and give them the resources they need, they will give us the billion-dollar idea that transforms our company, disrupts the industry, and change the world.
Innovation isn’t magic. Innovation is team work.
We need other people to help us see what we can’t and do what we struggle to do. The idea-person needs the optimizer to bring her idea to life, and the optimizer needs the idea-person so he has a starting point. We need lots of ideas because most won’t work, but we don’t know which ones those are, so we prototype, experiment, assess, and refine our way to the ones that will succeed.
We want to be special.
We need to be equal.
We want to work on the latest and most cutting-edge technology and discuss it using terms that no one outside of Innovation understands. We want our work to be on stage, oohed and aahed over on analyst calls, and talked about with envy and reverence in every meeting. We want to be the cool kids, strutting around our super hip offices in our hoodies and flip-flops or calling into the meeting from Burning Man.
Innovation isn’t about you. It’s about serving others.
As innovators, we create value by solving problems. But we can’t do it alone. We need experienced operators who can quickly spot design flaws and propose modifications. We need accountants and attorneys who instantly see risks and help you navigate around them. We need people to help us bring our ideas to life, but that won’t happen if we act like we’re different or better. Just as we work in service to our customers, we must also work in service to our colleagues by working with them, listening, compromising, and offering help.
