Innovating with our hands tied
Lessons from a pandemic on the ‘Art of the Possible’
In June, I had a bite-sized taste of digital innovation — a surprise delivery of pandan-flavoured choux au craquelin. Cream-filled puffs deliciously marrying two cuisines (French and Southeast Asian), and two business models (cottage industries and digital marketing). A friend had discovered a home-based patissier on Instagram; with a click and a message, they gifted a chance to revisit childhood memories of pandan-flavoured desserts, bringing cheer in the middle of a grim lockdown.
COVID-19 is a trauma that will scar many in the years to come. In many ways it has tested our resilience, forcing businesses, communities, and governments to innovate for survival. Where previous attempts at embracing digital technologies have failed, this pandemic has seen an inspiring number of businesses succeed. Proof then, that organisations of all sizes can build digital and data capabilities; keen observers have taken notice, and now industry is chomping at the bit to keep this momentum going.
Although the pandemic has delivered incredible outcomes, it has done this at an enormous human cost — words cannot capture the immense suffering wrought on so many. Working in a sector that extols learning as a virtue, I have been pondering the lessons to draw on effective innovation that can be applied in less trying times.
Suddenly, everything is innovative
Much has been made of the speed with which digital adoption has occurred. Confined to our homes, consumers have reaped the benefits of businesses willing (or forced) to pull the trigger on big digital change.
Setting up my home office, I nearly developed a costly online shopping habit at JB Hi-Fi*. Armed with my price comparison notes, I would ring up and tell Richard (my friendly service rep) that I had, by force of will, found a better price. “OK!”, he would chirp, “I’m going to SMS you a link — just click in and you’ll see we’ve matched that price. If you confirm your order before 2pm, you’ll get your <insert tech impulse-buy here> this afternoon. Bye!”. And behold, he was right. My inner bargain sleuth, although stupefied by Richard’s sorcery, would do a got-a-good-deal happy dance.
Fully remote-work workforces, mass channel overhauls and everything in between — this year has spun up countless instances of the ‘Art of the Possible’. It is easy to forget that until now, the ‘Art of the Possible’ existed more in the form of presentation packs than it did in tangible outcomes.
Look Ma, we’re innovating
Before the pandemic forced businesses to do all the digital things, there had been a run of discussions that data and digital transformations were in fact not going well. Inculpated were technical legacy & debt, organisational alignment and cultural problems as underlying factors to poor transformation outcomes. Wrapped around it all, strategic misfiring was a common denominator.
It is frequently assumed that Horizon 3-type innovations are the most important — disrupt, or be disrupted, they say. Inspired by slides littered with ‘Re-imagine [X]’, it is tempting to set a strategy based on what sounds ‘more innovative’ than your competitors — that is, a solution is not innovative unless it’s bigger, more novel, and ‘more betterer’ than your competitive neighbour next door. So we find a bazaar of in-vogue service providers peddling their wares — machine learning solutions one minute, digital twins the next, and then data platforms, IoT and Blockchain all-in-one. Every seller needs a buyer, and in this marketplace the executive in search of the mythical “quick win” is a kid in a candy shop. “I don’t care what this chatbot will say, but I’ll take two. Build ’em fast!”. Months later though, ChattyMcChatface has to be put away because he swore at a customer.
Further, emboldened by vendors promising infinite scaling, strategies are recurrently framed around becoming like <insert sexy tech company here>. “Netflix has a great data platform. We must be like Netflix!”. But a strategy that emphasises technology often neglects the reason a business exists. That is, if you’re attempting to be ‘more innovative’ by copying the latest pattern from Netflix — unless your business also produces and distributes content like Netflix, you might not be pursuing the right strategy.
Blindly styling an innovation strategy on “being like Google / Microsoft / Facebook / Amazon” is akin to spruiking lane departure sensors on a train — it’s a great technology for cars, but we should at least consider that a train sits on rails.
Culprit in many a strategic misfire is the Strategy Hydra — the product of strategists piling up bigger and bolder plans, each at the behest of a different executive. And while a hydra has many heads, it only has one body; problems arise when each head wants to “set the agenda”, grow legs and run off in its own direction. The marketing strategy needs more AI, the AI strategy needs more platforms, the technology strategy needs less platforms, and the customer strategy needs — you guessed it — chatbots, which need a data strategy which needs… more data.
So it would seem that even in the best of times, good strategies are painfully difficult to implement. Yet, out of the kiln of a global pandemic, we’ve seen businesses bypass long-standing tensions and deliver once elusive frictionless experiences.
Choosing to innovate with our hands tied
It might appear a foregone conclusion that pandemic-inflicted necessity, as the ‘mother of all invention’, has been the single catalyst for the digital adoption we’ve witnessed; moreover, many having taken the leap with advanced technology are convinced these patterns are here to stay. But it matters that leaders do not rest on their laurels; the work to restart our economies is only now beginning, and we must not waste the precious lessons this year has laid bare.
I’ve observed that solving problems when our hands are tied is a critical source of innovation. This year, organisations are being coerced into attending to the problems most in need of attention. Strategy Hydra be gone: there is one** all-of-business strategy, be it unbeatable experiences or product, and everything from marketing to technology has had to invoke ‘what we do best’.
More often than not, this means taking what currently exists and deploying it intelligently. In rising to the bar, organisations are finding ways to supercharge their assets and create wonderful things. Back to JB Hi-Fi: by connecting a clean (and characteristically loud) website, data, switched-on staff and fast internet — they have recreated the classic in-store bargain-hunter’s joy online.
This specimen of innovation presents two counterintuitive issues — firstly, it doesn’t immediately look like innovation, and second, it can feel uninspiring to embark on a program as drab as “update your data warehouse and upskill your staff”. But the innovation is there; we have to understand where to look. It is not always the most radical technology (e.g. “Serverless everything!”) that makes a difference,
rather, leaders should locate their business’s backbone and strengthen its core.
This is not to say bleeding-edge work is unimportant; rather it is the opposite — businesses seeking to harness the disruptive power of web-scale inference must first have done the harder work figuring out how they plan to wield it productively. We don’t want rude, or worse still, dishonest AI running loose just because thinking about customer needs wasn’t “bleeding-edge enough” to prioritise.
Finally, while we reap the fruit of innovation today, it certainly wasn’t cultivated in a day. JB Hi-Fi has been quietly chipping away at “delighting customers” since 2018, likely even before that. It also helps to reflect on the origins of giants like AWS and Google (the former that evolved from “a services company with no fanfare”, the latter originally named Backrub and hasn’t wavered in its quest for better answers) and play the same infinite game.
So, this COVID-driven race towards data & digital adoption isn’t actually the point; choosing to optimise resource allocation for lasting impact is. How we make such choices… we’ll go into another day.
* Disclaimer: I neither work for nor own shares in JB Hi-Fi.
** This particular thought was the product of an enlightening conversation — thank you, Jon.
