Incremental Change In Exponential Times

By Doug Stephens

Over the last holiday shopping season, Amazon was clocking in 306 transactions per second!  Photo app Instagram achieved a market value of 1 billion dollars in two years with a mere twelve employees.  90% of the data that exists right now was created in the last two years and it’s estimated that soon, that world’s store of data could begin doubling every few hours. Just about everywhere we look we see more evidence that change is happening on an absolutely exponential scale.

Some of this velocity and volume of change is a consequence of huge leaps in technology and the increasing connectedness of people and things.  And given the rate of the planet’s population growth, some is just sheer math.  The upshot is that change is no longer safe and incremental as it once was.  It’s volatile, risky and rapid.

But how many meetings did you have at your company in the last month (or year for that matter) where the ideas being shared were so innovative they made you really uneasy?  How many product or service creations came forward that were so radical that they worried you a little?  How many failures were publicly celebrated by management for having moved the organization forward in its thinking?

I speak to so many companies who claim innovation as their dominant competency and yet when I delve deeper into the construct and culture of most, I often find that in fact, risk aversion is what’s really being rewarded.  Completion, compliance and complicity are what get people ahead – no rocking the boat or running with scissors allowed.

“If an idea doesn’t make you feel a little uneasy, chances are it’s not really all that innovative.”

 

I’m also surprised at the number of companies that benchmark innovation vertically within their category or industry and fail to look outside to see the amazing things going on.  The problem with this, as I’ve called out before, is that increasingly the real competition in the market isn’t your direct competitors but someone from outside who imagines a better way of doing what you do and builds it from scratch.  With ever lowering barriers to entry, these outsiders can be far more dangerous than any known competitor.  So, fixating on what your direct competitors are doing won’t inspire innovation, only stifle it.

The net effect of these conditions for most organizations is incremental and almost imperceptible levels of change. Safe, subtle and linear – that’s “change” in most organizations. And that is precisely why most organizations simply won’t make it in the new era of consumerism. 

I look at it this way…if the change happening outside your company is far more unsettling than the change happening inside it, you’re not innovating at all.  You’re being left behind.