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There is a big problem
There is a big problem that organisations often face: they want to be innovative, but they also want to minimise risk. This creates a certain amount of tension. If I had to pick the number one thing that I would recommend to organisations that are trying to become more innovative, it would this: experiment. Experiment all the time. Try everything that you can possibly think of to try. An experimental mindset is absolutely essential to successful innovation.
We were talking about this idea in class this week, and it clearly makes people nervous. I was suggesting that in an uncertain environment, normal strategy tools such as SWOT analysis, five forces and so on are actually pretty dangerous to use. One of the students asked “so everything is chaos, and we throw out the tools and models, then what? What are we supposed to do?”
That’s a good question. I replied that in part this was a rhetorical trick – in terms of the narrative of the class, we were at a point equivalent to just before the end of the Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings trilogy: we’re trapped in a castle surrounded by tens of thousands of orcs, Gandalf is missing, the hobbits are spread all over middle earth, and we have absolutely no idea what is going on. How do we navigate from this point to the five different happy endings that conclude the story?.
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