Smart Growth (continued) – the Hacker

 

Pascal Dennis, co-author of Harnessing Digital Disruption

Innovation requires engaging & aligning three very different personalities – the Hipster, Hustler and Hacker.  Laurent Simon

Smart Growth takes root when three very different personality types - the Hipster, Hustler and Hacker - are present & in full flow. This may help explain why startup Failure Rates are so high. If one or more are absent, our innovations are likely to be flat, or worse yet, over-complicated & irritating.

Each of these characters correspond to a fundamental question or test each innovation must pass:

1.     Does it wow?  Hipster

2.     Can we make money? Hustler

3.     Does it work? Hacker

The sequence of questions reflects hard-won wisdom:

·       If the idea doesn’t wow the customer, why bother?

·       If you can’t make money, why build it?

·       The ‘better mousetrap’ metaphor is flat out wrong!  Nobody cares about our mousetrap.

Last time, I talked about the Hipster. Today…

The Hacker is the engineer, coder, scientist, doctor, actuary, accountant…the one who is deeply engaged in the technology underlying the offering.  Think Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk or other famous Tech founders. Hackers are often noteworthy for having a flat, abstract or seemingly disengaged affect.  It’s not surprising. Technology is often so utterly engrossing, that it’s easy to disappear into it.

Hackers tend to be very smart. I’ve mentored many accomplished ‘Hackers’ including COOs, CFOs, CIOs, Chief Medical Officers, and Chief Risk Officers. Their domain knowledge is profound and attaining it requires years of focus, often to the exclusion of everything else. Ironically, being very smart can be limiting!

Mentoring ‘Hackers’, therefore, entails sharing tacit wisdom from other fields & utterly different perspectives. Chief Medical Officers, for example, readily absorb OpEx/Lean concepts like Visual Management & Standardized Work in contexts as varied as:

·       Surgery – (How do we ensure a quick, effective changeover between surgeries?)

·       Surgical Instrument Decontamination – (How do we know if a tray full of instruments has been disinfected?)

·       Infection Control – (How do we ensure a NICU waiting room is not contaminated?)

·       Emergency Department – (How do we know when we need another triage nurse, or doctor?)

Medical professionals readily absorb these methods. (Where the methods fail, the culprit is usually organization culture).

I was privileged to mentor an extraordinary CEO & Hacker, who recognized his blind spots – and asked for help to overcome them!  Before major meetings, he’d often whisper, ‘Help me understand’ the room…’ In other words, help me understand body language, tone of voice, and the overall vibe -  essential inputs that were opaque to him, despite his acute intelligence.

In the same way, during innovation sprints, we help Hackers see the world through the eyes of the Hipster. In Discovery interviews, for example, we are looking for often unconscious customer signals of delight or discomfort. Hipsters pick these signals up naturally.  “Did you notice how her body language changes every time you mention her elderly parents?”

These signals are usually invisible to Hackers, and to Hustlers, for that matter. But when we follow a clear validation process, we introduce them to an otherwise invisible world. It’s like introducing a color-blind person to the color theory. The Hacker may never become a Leonardo but will learn to appreciate the power of Design and develop a deeper understanding of reality.

Each of us sees a little bit of reality, which is why ‘radical collaboration’ is so powerful. A diverse team helps us we see what’s actually there – and what we need to do. But it’s a classic ‘Catch 22’: decision-makers can’t see what they can’t see!

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

PS For more on the 3H model, check out our book, Harnessing Digital Disruption.

#StartupFailure #HockeyStickGrowth #FailFastFailForward #InnovationStrategy #LeanExperimentation #ExecutiveAirCover

 

In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look….

Innovation Fundamentals - Radical Collaboration & the 3H Model
My Hockey Stick Curve, part 1
OpEx/Lean, Innovation and Wakefulness
The Difference Between Protecting Your Core Business & Igniting New Growth