This started out as a book about innovation. But it ended up being a book about change and innovation. That’s because change and innovation are twins separated at birth.
Change alters what we’ve always done. Innovation produces something that has never been done. But both have one thing in common: the more that they’re needed, the more likely they are to be fiercely resisted.
That’s why two of the most challenging tasks of leadership are successfully navigating the change process and introducing innovation. It’s why I wrote this book. In the following pages we’ll explore what it takes to introduce lasting change and innovation. I’ll expose the dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about, and we’ll examine the counterintuitive practices that successful change agents and serial innovators use to greatly increase their odds of their success.
Let’s start with a look at the dirty little secret that those who extol the benefits of constant change and radical innovation never want to talk about. It’s most often swept under the rug or ignored in the hope that it will just go away. Yet its shadow looms over every attempt to break out of the box and try something new.
Make no mistake. It can’t be avoided. It’s the dark side of the creative process. If you have dreams of blazing new trails of innovation or championing major change, it will smack you upside the head before you’re done.
So what is this dirty little secret that haunts our best efforts at bringing change and innovation?
It’s simply this: most innovations fail.
They always have. And they always will.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a new product, a new program, or a new process. It can be a new company or even a new church. When it comes time to start something new or make a major change, the surest horse you can bet on is the one called Failure.
You’d never know this if you listen to the people who write and speak about leadership and innovation. They often make it sound as if out-of-the-box thinking, burn-the-boats risk-taking, and gutsy leadership are all it takes to win the race and rise to the top.
But despite the great press and sizzle that surrounds the idea of innovation and change, the fact is that most attempts at innovation and major change crash and burn. Even organizations and leaders who are famous for cutting-edge, innovative strategies have a far longer list of failures than successes.
Now I’m not saying that all of our great ideas are doomed to failure. I’m not saying that change and innovation are too dangerous to try at home. And I’m certainly not suggesting that change and innovation are unimportant or unnecessary.
No, the pundits are right. If we fail to innovate and change, we eventually will lose the race. We’ll fall to the bottom of the pile and slide into organizational irrelevance.
But that doesn’t change the truth that innovation always carries significant risks. Failure is far more common than most aspiring leaders realize and far more likely than the zealous advocates of innovation are willing to admit.
In fact, failure is an integral part of the change process.
AUTOS, AIRPLANES, AND THE INTERNET
Imagine for a moment that you had tons of money to invest when the combustible engine was first invented. Now imagine that you also had the foresight to grasp how profoundly it would alter the way we live, spawning new industries and radically changing our global culture, creating new pockets of enormous wealth.
Since you couldn’t know which specific businesses would rise to the top, you probably would have “wisely” invested as broadly as possible in as many of the new automotive companies as you could find.
But if you had done this, you would have gone flat broke. Rather quickly, because almost all of the innovative startups in the automobile industry went belly up.1
The same is true of the airline industry. While manned flight has profoundly changed the way we live, if you had invested money in all of the early airline companies, you’d have nothing to show for it today. Most of them went under. Very few made any significant profits.
Ditto for the internet. It’s an understatement to say that the internet has changed everything. But those who jumped in too quickly and invested in everything that looked remotely promising lost everything.
Why?
As always happens, innovation’s dirty little secret showed up to crash the party. Despite its game-changing potential and all the talk about a new economy with a new set of rules, the old rules prevailed. And most of the bleeding-edge early adopters and the first-to-market companies (the darlings of the investment community) crashed and burned.
WHY CHANGE AND INNOVATION GET SUCH GOOD PRESS
So if failure is such an integral part of change and innovation, why even bother with it at all? Why does something so wrought with pain and disappointment get such good press?
One reason is the influence of a niche industry that has become big business. Billions are spent each year on seminars, training events, and books that promise success to leaders (and pretty much anyone else) who are willing to take a big risk to try something radically new.2
If you want to fill a room, sell lots of books, and charge up the troops, it’s counterproductive to point to a high failure rate. In fact, it’s a guaranteed way to cut down on sales and limit speaking engagements. So no one talks about it. Instead, the motivational gurus focus on stories of against-all-odds success and ignore the many casualties along the way.
A second reason why change and innovation get such good press is that most failures aren’t all that spectacular or important. We never hear about them because they aren’t newsworthy. A huge percentage of new initiatives never even get off the ground, and among the few that do, many crash and burn with little fanfare.3
Why?
Because if these failures aren’t connected with our company or our employer (or something that makes the national news), we aren’t likely to notice them.
The same holds true for new businesses, church plants, and other startups. There are countless failures. Think of the trendy new clothing store in the local mall. It used to be a Chinese takeout. Before that, it was a boutique wine shop. Each of these changes represents a failed dream, a likely bankruptcy, and a ton of heartache and soul searching. But if it wasn’t our dream, our bankruptcy, or our heartache, we aren’t likely to have noticed.
A third reason why change and innovation get such good press is simply human nature. We don’t like to think about negative things, even if they’re inevitable. How many people do you know who adequately plan and prepare for their death? The odds that we will die are astronomical. But most of us would rather not think about this inevitability — at least not right now.
It’s the same with failed changes and innovations. They surround us. But we’d rather not think about them. We chalk up the failures of others to foolish ideas, bad planning, or inept leadership. We think we are different. We can’t imagine the possibility that the changes we champion and the great ideas we have just might not be so great after all. We’re sure that our ideas will succeed where others have failed.
This helps to explain why the dirty little secret of failure remains such a well-kept secret. Motivational gurus don’t want us to think about it. And even though failure is incredibly common, most of these failures don’t hit close enough to home to notice. On top of that, we’d rather not think about it — or plan for it. It’s not as exciting and sexy as dreaming and thinking about our latest idea for the next big thing.
Yet that raises an important question, the question that drives this book: how is it that some people and organizations seem to defy the odds?
How is that some folks successfully innovate and change time after time? How do they overcome their failures? How do they maximize their successes? What is it that sets them apart? What do they know — and what do they do — that others don’t?