Be Less Zombie

35Calibrating Culture to Outcome

The building blocks of an ‘innovation-as-inevitable’ culture.

The further we move from the core, the higher the risk of failure. It's just as true for Google as it is for you. Yet the future gives us no choice but to deliberately lean into uncertainty to find our sources of future relevance.

Different types of innovation inevitably carry different risk profiles. But one of the most common traps that companies fall into is trying to mix low-risk and high-risk innovation in the same context. It very rarely works. Here's why.

Your company is likely to be set up to deliver repeatable certainty. There is a range of well-known products and services, an established business model to protect and a well-understood customer base to serve. That context is perfect for incremental innovation; there are plenty of known cause-and-effect relationships where investment risks are low and tolerance for failure is scant. And so it should be if we're doing a good job in a well-understood context.

But try dropping an idea for a brand new proposition into that climate. This fledgling idea kind of makes sense on paper but it uses emerging technology that we don't really understand, serves a category of customer that we're not too familiar with, would require some support capabilities that we don't have, and would be driven by a business model that is hard to predict.

That idea, 99 times out of 100, will die fast or drown by death of a thousand watering-down committees. ...