Preface

This article has been sitting in the backlog for a while - it’s been a culmination of thoughts and experiences across several decades of working in high change, high innovation areas. Where I’ve watched the sheer pace of change frighten, exhaust, burn out, inspire, and enthuse many different individuals over and over again. And with the industry at a crossroads thanks to the petrifying? exhilarating? (fill in the right adjective yourself) explosion of AI technologies in the last several years with the velocity of innovation only increasing it feels like an apt time to finish a short retrospective on my experiences with rapid innovation.

Why now? As the Altman-gate situation continues to play out in a way that is almost too Silicon Valley-esque not to be an episode (maybe ChatGPT could write the script? #toosoon) and we are left dissecting the details of the rise-fall-rise of one of the more prolific AI innovators of this recent phenomenon it appears that this drama has been at least in some way driven by a want, a need or a belief that the safest thing to do was to try and pump the breaks on some of the innovation going on at OpenAI. This paragraph may age poorly as the details emerge, but take it as a scene setter only, the content is relevant regardless.

The Runaway Train of Innovation

Does it feel like the world is changing faster than it ever has before?

Is this just an artefact of us ageing? As the music we love continues to move more and more into the “Classics” section of Spotify is this just our brain losing plasticity and becoming more and more resistant to change?

In short: Yes, we’re getting older, but the rate of innovation and adoption is definitely increasing.

Case in point - I’ve had to reinvent myself every few years into my career - and yet I’ve never not been in the fields of data, AI and technology. But the fact of the matter is the technology I’m working with has changed that rapidly…no sooner have I moved some technical mountains than I look up only to see a new peak that wasn’t there before.

There are several studies that highlight the increasing rate of change and speed of adoption over the last century of human history. This Harvard Business Review article gives several examples to demonstrate the experience:

This trend is even more prominent in the second example provided from work done at MIT:

In the above example (the innovation and adoption of telephonic technology) we can see just how rapidly the increase in adoption has happened - and the major ingredient that pushes innovation is high adoption of an existing technology as it opens the marketplace mechanics to come into play and entices many more innovations (more adoption, bigger market, more potential that a new innovation can capture a wide audience and make significant money).

The information age and technology age has gifted us the ability to innovate at speeds never before thought possible, and with the kinds of scaled efficiency that AI offers the world the speed to innovation is set to become many factors faster still in a very short space of time.

Let this set the premise - innovation is fast and getting faster.

Innovation is more Failure than Success.

Let’s get the mandatory Thomas Edison quote out of the way (no, not that one, and yes, I’m aware of the many opinions of Edison and how much of his innovation was in fact inspiration/patenting the work of others):

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

We have a bias towards success because it’s recorded more openly than failure. When we think of the world’s greatest innovators we remember them for their successes, not their countless failures. We assume that success comes from genius more than luck, that brilliant people have brilliant lightbulb moments instead of just seeing them as people tenacious and crazy enough to pursue so many thought bubbles that statistically one has to stick and, with a relevant measure of luck, it may stick in a way that changes the world.

If you work in a high change, high innovation environment (and if you don’t now, there’s the very real chance that you will in the future whether you seek it out or not) you’ve got to become comfortable with failure as a part of the process. Innovation is about making bets, holding experiments and testing hypotheses - you will have an idea of what will happen, but if you always know the outcome then you’re not innovating hard enough because you’re not introducing any risk.

In multiple teams I’ve worked with and led I have put significant effort into normalising failure as a necessary milestone on the path to success. This is a significant cultural undertaking, and it has to be authentic - the concept of not only encouraging innovation but expecting it means equally to encourage and expect failure. The key is to put in frameworks to ensure that you can fail positively - learn lessons, measure authentically, and where possible fail fast. With these measures in play, you can start to get your teams comfortable with failure as a pathway to innovation and success - but it will take time, it’s an unnatural experience to celebrate failure and doing the opposite is built into us from birth. We are scored, rated, scolded and grounded based on success or failure and it often comes at the expense of resilience. A useful exercise is to explore some use cases of the ways some amazing innovations have come to light to help illuminate just how messy the process is, even when it’s governed by sensible processes and frameworks.

Remember - you gotta break a few eggs to make a cake.

To recap, now we know that innovation is happening faster than ever before in human history, and that it’s a messy journey filled with many more failures than successes. Sign me up!

But wait, there’s more…

You Won’t Know Where the Journey Ends

Let’s talk about a recent lived example of innovation that all of us went through. In fact, let me show it to you in a picture and see where your brains take you:

A cute little spikey ball?

Four years ago from the date of publish all apart from those involved in virology would have had next to no response to this image. And for those lucky enough to still not get a memory response, this is the COVID-19 virus - the cause of immediate, global and existential innovation across the human race.

Innovation was put into warp speed - mRNA based vaccine development, the ability to work from home, video-conferencing and asynchronous communication, logistics for shopping from home, contactless customer service, flexible working, augmented reality “travel” - industries were created and crushed overnight proving that necessity truly is the mother of invention. As it turns out fear of imminent death is just the right persuader to push the world into a deep innovation cycle…but more on that later.

The COVID-19 innovation wave reinforced one principle of innovation - that you don’t know the destination until you arrive. Innovation is as much a creative process as it is a scientific one, it involves connecting disparate dots that don’t belong together and as such it requires us to be comfortable in a journey without knowing the end point.

Within 2 weeks of COVID lockdown happening in large parts of the world I had teams working remotely and effectively in cities all across the world - we had never done it before at this scale, things broke, processes were flipped, we tried things and then tried others several times until we innovated our way (along with the rest of the world) to “the new normal”.

Innovation is a process that requires being comfortable in the unknown. Don’t just take my word for it, we don’t need to dig far into the history books:

  • Percey Spencer invented the kitchen Microwave accidentally. Whilst working on radar technology commissioned by the Dept of Defence he noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket melted whilst standing in front of the machine. Several experiments later and the principles behind the humble microwave were born.
  • Sir Alexander Fleming was busy in his microbiology lab, too busy to thoroughly clean some of his petrie dishes which promptly grew a fungus inside them. To his surprise, where the fungus grew it also destroyed the staph sitting in the dish. He discovered penicillin and revolutionised medicine along the way.
  • John A Hopps was deep into research around hypothermia when he had what he described as “an annoying interruption” to his work when he discovered that electrical pulses could cause a heart to pulse and created the first pacemaker saving countless lives in the process.

The destination is only important once you’ve landed at a useful destination - a key insight is to view innovation as needed investment even if you don’t know what the investment will yield, simply because history shows that with enough effort there is likely to be a yield of some kind. The bleaker take on this is that without investment in innovation you’ll stagnate and be left behind (which is precisely where we’re going next).

You’re doing well to have made it this far. We have covered:

  1. Innovation is happening faster than ever before
  2. It’s messy and filled with failures
  3. You don’t know where it will lead you to

Overwhelmed? You’re not alone. With that in mind it’s time to turn ourselves to whether we can simply opt-out.

This Is Scary! How do we Stop?

There are many well researched reasons as to why people in general are strongly resistant to change - it’s ultimately a part of the human condition. And yet with so many logical and emotional reasons to resist change, society has been powerless to stop it - case in point the relatively recent letter cosigned by Elon Musk and many others in the industry calling for a 6-month halt in the development of AI which failed almost impressively given the calibre of the names that called for the ceasefire.

There are many more educated and eloquent individuals who can delve into the reasoning as to why we can’t stop innovating, I’m simply going to rely on the facts of human history - we can not stop change and innovation. Don’t get me wrong, you can choose to stop innovating and changing, you can even try and control a group of people to do the same, but where you stop others will not. Innovation is relentless - you can ignore it in the same way you can ignore the rain, but your ignorance doesn’t make it any less real and present.

What a rock and a hard place - change is hard, innovation is fast, messy and unpredictable, and yet here I am telling you that it’s going to happen anyway. This leaves you with three options:

  1. Become a recluse and go off the grid - yes, there’s a website for that
  2. Endure change and innovation waiting for it to be over each time - what a lot of people do, which often leads to burn-out or high levels of stress and frustration
  3. Embrace it, learn to live with (or even enjoy) the uncertainty

There’s a mantra used by those of us stupid enough to have long distance running as a hobby:

Get comfortable being uncomfortable

When you sign up for a marathon you don’t sign up to run the first 30kms, you sign up to run the last 12.2kms. That’s when it gets real, when your muscles are depleted from glycogen, your stomach is hurting from trying to process fuel, when you hit the metaphorical “wall” and you are running/hobbling to finish in a level of discomfort. You train to be comfortable in that discomfort zone - and the more you train, the more comfortable it feels.

I’m not suggesting you start training your teams for a marathon, although having said I have had some great “running meetings” with those who were inclined - your brain becomes very creative during exercise. But training for discomfort is pivotal, recognising that you will have a broad behavioural spectrum of responses to this training (some will enjoy it, others will be very fearful). This training should be deliberate, explained and should ramp up over time to enable a level of tolerance to grow - don’t expect people to move from change resistant to keen innovation masters overnight.

This journey can be made more palatable if you make the successful case for why embracing innovation and change is the least uncomfortable way forward in life and work - and whilst that story can and should be nuanced to your industry and circumstances, it’ll always be a variation of the same:

There will always be a reason not to innovate, however there will always be an event that forces us to.

The world is a dynamic, changing system that requires adaptation to survive, and if there is one thing that humans are incredibly good at, it’s surviving. Just.

Let’s focus on that “just” for a second, because it’s important.

Humans Love Being as Close to the Edge

Climate change as a term was first use was in 1975 by geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory in his paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”. Nearly 50 years later have we made much progress? Well, we’ve apparently still got 5 3/4 years left before we’re doomed so all is good, right? We wouldn’t want to start too early.

Tommy Lee Jones said it best in Men in Black:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

Humanity is not good at long term planning, we love living in the “now” and yet we’ve managed to grow to become a complex, intelligent and advanced species. We have the ability to innovate with extreme efficiency as was shown recently with COVID-19 where we combined as a world to solve a potentially fatal challenge, and has also been on shameful display during wartime (when many of our largest technological advancements have come) but there is a common thread to those times of heightened innovation:

Immediate consequences if we didn’t act RIGHT NOW.

I’m not suggesting we put teams in life-or-death situations, but we do need to clearly paint the sense of urgency, to create an environment where the need for innovation and change isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have with a ticking clock in the background. Don’t wait for a situation to become urgent, it’s incumbent on leaders to shape that urgency in a way that provides the right level of positive impetus to innovate. You don’t have to overcomplicate it, it could be as simple as competition with a rival - they are investing in a new feature, we have to beat them to market with ours - but the story has to be authentic and vivid, you have to create that personal urgency in order to unlock that innovation potential.

That was a lot! Let’s Recap.

Take a breath. In for a count of 5, hold for a count of 5, out for a count of 5.

  1. Innovation is happening really fast
  2. Innovation is failure more than success
  3. Innovation is messy
  4. Innovation is not knowing the destination
  5. Innovation is inevitable and unstoppable
  6. Innovation thrives in time-bound urgency

That was a lot to digest.

Working in high change, high innovation technology for many years has been equal parts thrilling and exhausting. It’s a dream for someone who adores life-long learning but it’s still a hard slog and requires you to push up against the very nature of being human quite regularly.

Leading in that same environment is something else altogether - you not only have to model the behaviour above, but usher others out of their comfort zones, through their discomfort zones and into that space of innovation and creativity - over, and over, and over again. Please don’t misinterpret, this process is a privilege and a joy to behold when you’re able to build that excellent, self-sustaining, high functioning innovation culture but it is most definitely hard work.

The alternative? There is none. Remember, as we’ve seen, even when you’re on top of your game, when you have the world listening to you, when you have seemingly limitless influence - you will still be powerless to stop innovation.

To succeed in the world of today and tomorrow you must embrace innovation, in all its messy, unstructured, confusing, unknowing, uncomfortable glory. You must learn to thrive in the uncomfortable, to expect the destination to creep up on you when you least expect it, and to reinvent yourself when the times call for it. Don’t wait for the next COVID-esque emergency, don’t wait until the Climate Clock is 1 minute from zero - develop your story, create your urgency, charge up your creativity and see where your innovation can take you.