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Innovation's Dirty Little Secret

why serial innovators succeed where others fail

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By Larry Osborne

ZONDERVAN

Copyright © 2013 Larry Osborne
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-49450-8

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CHAPTER 1

MOST INNOVATIONS FAIL

The One Thing Leadership Gurus Will Never Tell You

Innovation has a secret, a dirty little secret.

Those who extol the necessity of innovation seldom mention it. They try to sweep it under the rug or tuck it away in the closet. They ignore it in the hope that it will just go away. Yet its shadow looms over every attempt we make to break out of the box and try something new.

Make no mistake. If you have dreams of blazing new trails or championing major changes, this dirty little secret will smack you upside the head before you're done. You can't avoid it. It's the dark side of the creative process.

What is the dirty little secret of innovation?

It's simply this: most innovations fail.

They always have. And they always will.

It doesn't matter whether we're talking about a new product, a new program, or a new process. It can be a new company or even a new church. When it comes time to start something new or make a major change, the surest horse you can bet on is the one called Failure.

You'd never know this if you listen to the people who write and speak about leadership and innovation. They often make it sound as if out-of-the-box thinking, burn-the-boats risk-taking, and gutsy leadership are all it takes to win the race and rise to the top.

But despite the great press and sizzle that surrounds the idea of innovation, the fact is that most attempts at innovation and major change crash and burn. Even organizations and leaders who are famous for cutting-edge, innovative strategies have a far longer list of failures than successes.

Now I'm not saying that all of our great ideas are doomed to failure. I'm not saying that change and innovation are too dangerous to try at home. And I'm certainly not suggesting that change and innovation are unimportant or unnecessary.

No, the pundits are right. If we fail to innovate and change, we eventually will lose the race. We'll fall to the bottom of the pile and slide into organizational irrelevance.

But that doesn't change the truth that innovation always carries significant risks. Failure is far more common than most aspiring leaders realize and far more likely than the zealous advocates of innovation are willing to admit.

In fact, failure is an integral part of the change process.

AUTOS, AIRPLANES, AND THE INTERNET

Imagine for a moment that you had tons of money to invest when the combustible engine was first invented. Now imagine that you also had the foresight to grasp how profoundly it would alter the way we live, spawning new industries and radically changing our global culture, creating new pockets of enormous wealth.

Since you couldn't know which specific businesses would rise to the top, you probably would have "wisely" invested as broadly as possible in as many of the new automotive companies as you could find.

But if you had done this, you would have gone flat broke. Rather quickly, because almost all of the innovative startups in the automobile industry went belly up.

The same is true of the airline industry. While manned flight has profoundly changed the way we live, if you had invested money in all of the early airline companies, you'd have nothing to show for it today. Most of them went under. Very few made any significant profits.

Ditto for the internet. It's an understatement to say that the internet has changed everything. But those who jumped in too quickly and invested in everything that looked remotely promising lost everything.

Why?

As always happens, innovation's evil twin showed up to crash the party. Despite its game-changing potential and all the talk about a new economy with a new set of rules, the old rules prevailed. And most of the bleeding-edge early adopters and the first-to-market companies (the darlings of the investment community) crashed and burned.

WHY INNOVATION GETS SUCH GOOD PRESS

So if failure is such an integral part of innovation and change, why even bother with it at all? Why does something so wrought with pain and disappointment get such good press?

One reason is the influence of a niche industry that has become big business. Billions are spent each year on seminars, training events, and books that promise success to leaders (and pretty much anyone else) who are willing to take a big risk to try something radically new.

If you want to fill a room, sell lots of books, and charge up the troops, it's counterproductive to point to a high failure rate. In fact, it's a guaranteed way to cut down on sales and limit speaking engagements. So no one talks about it. Instead, the motivational gurus focus on stories of against-all-odds success and ignore the many casualties along the way.

A second reason why innovation gets such good press is that most failures aren't all that spectacular or important. We never hear about them because they aren't newsworthy. A huge percentage of new initiatives never even get off the ground, and among the few that do, many crash and burn with little fanfare.

Why?

Because if these failures aren't connected with our company or our employer (or something that makes the national news), we aren't likely to notice them.

The same holds true for new businesses, church plants, and other startups. There are countless failures. Think of the trendy new clothing store in the local mall. It used to be a Chinese takeout. Before that, it was a boutique wine shop. Each of these changes represents a failed dream, a likely bankruptcy, and a ton of heartache and soul searching. But if it wasn't our dream, our bankruptcy, or our heartache, we aren't likely to have noticed.

A third reason why innovation gets such good press is simply human nature. We don't like to think about negative things, even if they're inevitable. How many people do you know who adequately plan and prepare for their death? The odds that we will die are astronomical. But most of us would rather not think about this inevitability—at least not right now.

It's the same with failures of innovation and leadership. They surround us. But we'd rather not think about them. We chalk up the failures of others to foolish ideas, bad planning, or inept leadership. We think we are different. We can't imagine the possibility that the changes we champion and the great ideas we have just might not be so great after all. We're sure that our ideas will succeed where others have failed.

This helps to explain why the dirty little secret of failure remains such a well-kept secret. Motivational gurus don't want us to think about it. And even though failure is incredibly common, most of these failures don't hit close enough to home to notice. On top of that, we'd rather not think about it—or plan for it. It's not as exciting and sexy as dreaming and thinking about our latest idea for the next big thing.

Yet that raises an important question, the question that drives this book: how is it that some people and organizations seem to defy the odds?

How is that some folks successfully innovate and change time after time? How do they overcome their failures? How do they maximize their successes? What is it that sets them apart? What do they know—and what do they do—that others don't?

CHAPTER 2

UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENTS

Why You Shouldn't Trust Everything Innovators Tell You about Innovation

Some innovators are one-hit wonders. They're like a band with a catchy tune that goes viral. They score a huge success and then are never heard from again.

Consider the infamous "pet rock." In 1975, Gary Dahl and his friends sat in a bar grumbling about their high-maintenance pets. Out of their grumbling, Dahl came up with the idea for a new pet—a pet rock. It would never need to be groomed, fed, or cared for. It would never get sick, disobey, or die. When Gary took his idea to market, it proved to be incredibly popular, selling more than 1.5 million units. Unfortunately, that was the last great idea he had. After the success of the pet rock, Gary's ideas weren't so successful.

Sometimes an innovation succeeds because it's so novel and off the wall that it gains instant notoriety. But the problems with this kind of innovation are that it's hard to repeat, it doesn't take long for the novelty to wear off, and it's usually easy to duplicate. So it seldom translates to long-term success.

I once read about an innovative high school basketball coach who came up with the ultimate end-of-the-game play. Trailing by one point, with only a couple of seconds left on the clock, his team had the ball out of bounds. With one player stationed near the basket, he had the others run to the free throw line and suddenly drop to their knees and begin barking like dogs at the top of their lungs. As the other team turned to stare in disbelief, the ball was passed to the one player left standing under the basket. He caught it and easily made the game-winning shot.

Now that may be a great example of thinking outside the box (and barely within the rules). But I guarantee you, no matter how innovative and successful the coach's ploy might have been the first time, it had little chance of succeeding the next time the two teams met.

Some innovators and innovations are like that. They perfectly fit the time, place, and situation. They're incredibly successful. But it's a one-time deal. It can't be pulled off a second time.

SERIAL INNOVATORS

There is another kind of innovator at the opposite end of the spectrum. These folks aren't one-hit wonders. Instead, they pull off multiple innovations and major changes seemingly without a hitch. They are what we might call "serial innovators."

When you see them from a distance, they appear to defy the odds. They seem to be immune to failure. But that's just not true. The truth is that they are just like the rest of us. They head down plenty of dead ends. They have lots of failures.

But they also have a special genius that keeps their failures from becoming fatal. And it's not what most people think. Their success is not found in their ability to avoid failure. It's found in their ability to minimize the impact of failure.

They have learned to fail forward—or at least sideways. They seldom fail backward. And even when they do, they know how to navigate the choppy waters of a failed innovation in a way that preserves the long-term credibility of their organization and leadership.

We'll see how they do that in a later chapter. But first, let's take a look at why it's incredibly difficult for most of us to learn much from these successful serial innovators. Contrary to what we might expect, many of them are clueless as to how they pull it off.

If you ask them for guidance on the topic of innovation, many of them will give you terrible advice. They will tell you to do all the wrong things. It's not that they are trying to mislead. It's not that they are frauds. The problem is that they are "unconscious competents." They do all the right things without being aware of how or why they do them.

UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENTS

When you ask an unconscious competent for the secret to his success, he'll tell you what he thinks he does, not what he actually does. It's similar to what a natural athlete does when he picks up a ball and instinctively makes the right move or throws the right pass.

Unconscious competents see and do things at a subconscious level far better than most of us could do with months of practice and preparation. They also usually have no idea that much of what they see and do is foreign and unnatural to everyone else. Which explains why they make great teammates, but lousy coaches.

I remember as a young man reading an article by one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He claimed that hitting the ball was relatively simple. All you had to do was watch for the spin of the seams to determine what kind of pitch it was, and then you just hit the ball based on the spin.

So I went out and tried his advice. It didn't work. I had no idea how the seams were spinning. I couldn't even see the seams. In fact, I could hardly see the ball. It was coming at me way too fast.

Not long afterward, I heard another former player being interviewed on the radio. He said he couldn't pick up the spin of the seams either. When he tried, the ball ended up in the catcher's mitt. Yet he was still able to hit a baseball well enough to have a lengthy career in the major leagues.

The truth is that despite what one of the greatest hitters of all time may have thought, his ability to hit a baseball involved far more than simply picking up the spin of the ball and hitting it. It also demanded incredibly quick hands, great balance, proper weight transfer, arm extension, an accurate knowledge of the strike zone, and a host of other things I could never get the hang of. But all of these things came so naturally to him that he hardly noticed them. Instead, he credited his success to something that actually had very little to do with his success.

Many of the most innovative and creative leaders do the same thing. Because they are unconsciously competent, they spout clichés about believing in themselves, taking huge risks, and making wild leaps of faith.

All the while, the real key to their success is not found in any of these things. It's not found in taking massive risks. It's not found in radical leaps of faith. What enables them to succeed is their instinctive and unconscious ability to know which risks are worth taking and what to do when things don't go as planned. But if you ask them to describe how they do it, they credit their success to something unrelated.

It dawned on me years later that the superstar who claimed that hitting a baseball was a relatively easy task still failed to get a hit more than 65 percent of the time. To this day, that statistic gives me a warped sense of encouragement. It reminds me that hitting a baseball—like successful innovation—isn't nearly as easy as some of the experts make it out to be.

CONSCIOUS COMPETENTS

Fortunately, there is another class of serial innovator. These are the innovators who are successful at innovating time after time and also know why and how they are successful. They are what I call "conscious competents."

Unlike unconscious competents, these innovators are self-aware. They know what they are doing and why they are doing it. And unlike the theorists and researchers who study and write about innovation, but have never pulled it off themselves, they know firsthand the nuances of innovating and leading change in the real world.

Ironically, conscious competents, while they are successful, are seldom "Hall of Fame successful." More often than not, they have more in common with a professional golfer's swing coach than the top money winner on the PGA tour. A good swing coach is almost always an excellent golfer in his own right. But unlike the superstar on the tour, the swing coach had to work a little harder at mastering the fundamentals in order to make the cut.

Frankly, that's my own story. Though I've had a great deal of success in my chosen field, these successes came neither quickly nor easily. In fact, during my first three years at the church I pastor, attendance increased by a total of one person. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that's one-third of a person per year. Inspiring indeed.

During that time, just about every innovation and change I instituted failed. Along the way, I paid more than my share of "dumb taxes." But I also learned not to make the same mistake twice. And I carefully watched and learned as others made mistakes. I learned the fundamentals.

Eventually, the church took off. From a small group meeting in a high school cafeteria, we grew into one of the largest churches in America, gaining a reputation for innovation, organizational health, and national influence.

Then a strange thing happened. A steady stream of nonprofit and for-profit business leaders began seeking my advice. Seeing our growth and the success we had handling the many transitions that came with it, they asked for help navigating the choppy waters of their own rapid growth, looking for counsel as they sought to innovate and make major organizational changes of their own.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Innovation's Dirty Little Secret by Larry Osborne. Copyright © 2013 Larry Osborne. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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