How Create Innovations that Surprise
"Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure." Albert Einstein
Strategically, others can support us or oppose us, but the most common reaction is that they ignore us. In this article, I am going to discuss innovation with the specific goal of creating surprise and getting attention. This is necessary for every step—listening, aiming, moving, and claiming— needed to advance our position in the minds of others. And I start with this Einstein quote because, for our purposes, he is wrong. Innovation can be produced by logical thought. Not Einstein’s level of creativity but the practical inventiveness that we need on a regular basis to improve our strategic positions. We are taught two mistaken ideas:
That creativity requires a flash of inspiration, and
That creativity requires a genius.
In a world in which we are trained to follow instructions, our creativity is blunted. In school, we are taught to think of inventors as rare, exotic creatures and ourselves as those who must do what everyone else does.
However, as children, we are all wildly creative. We make up games and stories. We are born knowing how to play. This type of innovation is fun, easy, and almost automatic. We need such ideas every day, small dashes of creativity are useful in making every strategic move. We need to demonstrate to others that we are not boring creatures of routine. We need it to make an impression on those we meet. Without demonstrating our inventiveness, we lose all momentum in advancing our positions in the minds of others.
Winning positions in the minds of others starts by mastering the best practices in our competitive arenas, but best practices alone only take us so far. We must also surprise people. Surprise has two components: innovation and timing. Together, all three—best practices, innovation, and timing—create the surprise. That surprise gives us momentum, the topic of the previous article.
What makes this type of innovation easy is its limited goal of creating momentum. This is not the “continuous improvement” of quality control or business evolution. We are innovating only to create a surprise. We may never use a particular innovation for anything other than creating a single surprise at a single point in time. In doing this, we may occasionally invent something wonderful, but that is not our goal. Our goal is just pulling rabbits out of our hats when we need them. However, if we routinely do things differently, we may eventually stumble on a very powerful idea.
Little Dashes
To make regular innovation practical, we think in terms of parts and pieces rather than wholes. It is a reductionist approach rather than a holistic approach. This is the opposite of most strategic methods, which usually involve seeing the big picture. When we talk about “little dashes” of creativity, the accent is on the “little.” By keeping our innovations small, we can consistently come up with them when they are needed.
Machines are made of parts. Recipes are a number of ingredients. Processes are a series of steps. Everything developed by the human mind is made up of smaller components. Each of these parts, ingredients, and steps are potential targets for innovation. We may not all work with machines or recipes, but we all use processes, so we will focus our discussion there.
All processes have separate pieces because they take place over time. Minimally, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but most consist of many separate activities. We break our processes into their component steps or activities. This is one reason that I break down the strategic methods in these articles into their components. It makes it easier to use them creatively. This reduction of processes into their components can go on somewhat indefinitely since each activity has its own beginning, middle, and end. The smaller the activities, the more safely we can play with them by getting creative.
We don’t play with a large number of components at once. That would be self-defeating. At the most, we innovate using only a handful of pieces. In most cases, we only use one or two. Again, the focus here is on “small” but visible changes.
The Three Alternatives
There are three common ways that we innovate using these pieces.
We can rearrange a few parts.
We replace one part with something different.
We can eliminate one part entirely.
The most common and easiest form of innovation is rearranging pieces. We add and subtract nothing. When we have something working—a machine, recipe, or process—we can safely assume that everything in it is valuable. We don’t even have to think deeply about why it is needed. However, we can usually rearrange them in a small way that will still allow them to work, but work in a way that surprises because it is not what people expect. We don’t rearrange everything. We rearrange as little as possible. But we can rearrange anything. The end can become the beginning and the beginning can become the end. We need this new order to be noticeable, but nothing more. The new arrangement may not be as technically efficient, but the point is to create a surprise. A simple example is changing the order of steps in the sales process, perhaps by handling objections before doing any sales pitch or demonstration.
Replacing something with something else is a riskier approach, but it can be more surprising. Sometimes, these new elements can be just cosmetically different, making something look different even when it is essentially the same. Cooking recipes are a good illustration of this type of innovation. Say adding fruit jam in place of sugar in a barbeque sauce. This can be a change for better or worse, but it will always surprise and get people’s attention.
The best innovation is eliminating an existing part. This always saves money and saves time, but it can be difficult to make work. We must understand the process, machine, or recipe more deeply to make this approach work. Some years ago, during my training sessions, I eliminated using bullet points on my slides. Instead, I just used pretty pictures with a short title to organize my ideas. Some of the pictures were funny. Some were just pretty. I presented the same ideas in the same order, but this focused people’s attention on what I was saying. This changed training in ways I didn’t expect, leading to more audience questions and less routine note-taking. From this change, I began to focus more on group activities and interactions rather than lectures.
Conclusions
The change to proven methods should be made in as small an increment as possible. This approach minimizes mistakes and reduces potentially wasted efforts. Innovations that are too small to create surprise must be combined for impact. One of the keys to creating surprise is that the change must be large enough to entice others to pay attention.
This has a lot to do with timing, which is the topic of the next article.
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