Igniting New Growth is Like Falling in Love

 

‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ William Shakespeare

As a Toyota acolyte, I experienced the power of Kaizen - continuous incremental improvement creating continuous Value (not unlike the effect of compound interest). A decade ago, a nagging doubt crept in. If Kaizen & TPS are enough, why are the market valuations of the Tech tigers so much higher than those of the great Industrials? Clearly, Kaizen is necessary, but not sufficient. And so, I went to Singapore and fell in love.

A human being drew this & wrote this

Finding the Blue Ocean

I fell in love with the mindset, skillset & processes of ‘Abracadabra’ Innovation – creating new offerings seemingly out of nothing. In earlier articles, I described my collaboration with Laurent Simon – my friend, co-author & East Asia Innovation leader. Under Laurent’s guidance I participated in Innovation sprints in a range of industries. Twenty-five years after my Toyota apprenticeship, I found myself on another steep learning curve - how to ignite new Growth.

My Sprint colleagues & I were seeking the proverbial ‘Blue Ocean’, a place where nobody else was fishing. Kaizen, by contrast, entailed making small improvements to an existing offering or process – a very different challenge, though no less profound.

Abracadabra Innovation is Like Falling in Love

Abracadabra Innovation is a journey in the dark. Our Sprint teams often have little data & thus cannot answer the most basic innovation questions:

1.     Who is the customer?

2.     What do they value?

3.     Why do they buy or not buy?

Lesson # 1: you have to create your own data. You have to learn our way up the proverbial innovation curve through quick, cheap experiments. (Lean experimentation has a bright future).

Lesson # 2: It's like falling in love. You build trust a little at a time. Coffee, then lunch, then a low-risk date, say, a bike ride or a museum visit. So far, so good? Do I know this person? Do I like & trust them? Do I want to spend more time with them? Okay, then maybe dinner? At each step, each party gives a little more, and trust grows thereby.

We want to gradually engage the customer. The stages are typically some version of: I Know, I Like, I Trust; I’ll Try, I’ll Buy, I’ll Buy Again. And if you’re really good & lucky: This is so great, I’m going to tell all my friends! At that point the proverbial Customer Funnel becomes an Hourglass.

Think of this as a process with three Phases:

·       Awareness (Who are these jokers?),

·       The Bridge (Maybe I’ll try it), and

·       The Clubhouse (I’m a fan)

The innovator’s job is to pull people from Left to Right, and into a Clubhouse full of fans. Like any process, Innovation has bottlenecks. As Eli Goldratt taught us decades ago in ‘The Goal’, our job is to 1) Identify the bottleneck(s), 2) Understanding the blockers underlying each bottleneck, 3) Remove the bottlenecks, and 4) Keep going till we have a clubhouse full of fans.

And here’s the hard part – to do so we have to generate sound data usually out of nothing.

Next time I’ll talk about common innovation bottlenecks. Stay tuned.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org