‘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
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
