Do you strive for continuous improvement or innovation? Mixed messaging can confuse your team.
During a meeting with a group of associates, one of my team members asked me about our focus on innovation. As part of her question, she provided a couple of examples from her team. One was an example of innovation; the other was continuous improvement. I intentionally called out the discrepancy and saw a bit of “whatever!” in her eyes. I explained it was important to identify the work accurately because innovation and continuous improvement require different skills and different leadership.
Continuous improvement generally requires a deep knowledge of how things currently work and the problems with the current way of doing things. You can then match that knowledge with challenging questions to break through current barriers. s
Innovation, on the other hand, requires freedom from current thinking and practices; it requires a different lens, often one derived from an outside-in perspective which many organizations lack. Design thinking and other approaches provide the freedom to truly think in new ways, creating something new, even if based on something old.
Both may be large or small, and organizations need both. Innovation is something new. Continuous improvement is improving something that already exists. Afterall, you cannot improve something that does not already exist. Innovation may take something that exists and substantially change it to where it becomes something new. But innovation does not take something that exists and incrementally improve it.
Recognizing the difference between the two helps leaders ask the right questions and set the right direction. Remember, clarity in communication is critical to your success. Being clear on this distinction will allow you to provide your team with the right tools and training to do the work you are asking them to do, leading to better outcomes.
Many leaders will speak about the power of innovation and the need for it to become part of everyone’s job, seeking to change the corporate culture. But their actions don’t follow. Whether due to fear of failure, funding constraints, daily pressures, or any other reason, innovation is not prioritized. The contradictions in messaging and action prevent the team from moving beyond continuous improvement.
For those that do emphasize innovation, it is equally important for them to be clear in their messaging to establish the boundaries teams need to proceed with freedom. For example, I liked to poke at a peer of mine who was very good about focusing his team on innovation and was fond of saying, “It’s okay to fail. Just fail fast.” But what is the definition of fast, I would ask? How long does a team have to prove a new product will or will not be successful in the market? Or that a new logistics system can be implemented across an enterprise? While many leaders often repeat this mantra, most don’t mean it. Their behaviors do not support their words. When there is failure, they begin probing the team about what went wrong and why the problems were not averted. They don’t do it from a learning perspective, but too often from a financial perspective. This behavior leads teams to pull back and not try new solutions. This can happen because what the leader really meant was fail small and cheaply. I don’t know many leaders who would say there were great learnings from a $10M failed project. This is not a good way for a company to amass learnings. Rather, perform work incrementally, test hypotheses and solutions, and move on quickly if it does not appear the approach is going to meet the goals. They say fast, but they mean small and cheaply.
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What types of guardrails do you set to help your team understand what successful failure looks like?
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