Chapter 2
UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENTS
Why You Shouldn’t Trust Everything Innovators Tell You about Innovation
Some innovators are one-hit wonders. They’re like a band with a catchy tune that goes viral. They score a huge success and then are never heard from again.
Consider the infamous “pet rock.” In 1975, Gary Dahl and his friends sat in a bar grumbling about their high-maintenance pets. Out of their grumbling, Dahl came up with the idea for a new pet — a pet rock. It would never need to be groomed, fed, or cared for. It would never get sick, disobey, or die. When Gary took his idea to market, it proved to be incredibly popular, selling more than 1.5 million units. Unfortunately, that was the last great idea he had. After the success of the pet rock, Gary’s ideas weren’t so successful.4
Sometimes an innovation succeeds because it’s so novel and off the wall that it gains instant notoriety. But the problems with this kind of innovation are that it’s hard to repeat, it doesn’t take long for the novelty to wear off, and it’s usually easy to duplicate. So it seldom translates to long-term success.
I once read about an innovative high school basketball coach who came up with the ultimate end-of-the-game play. Trailing by one point, with only a couple of seconds left on the clock, his team had the ball out of bounds. With one player stationed near the basket, he had the others run to the free throw line and suddenly drop to their knees and begin barking like dogs at the top of their lungs. As the other team turned to stare in disbelief, the ball was passed to the one player left standing under the basket. He caught it and easily made the game-winning shot.
Now that may be a great example of thinking outside the box (and barely within the rules). But I guarantee you, no matter how innovative and successful the coach’s ploy might have been the first time, it had little chance of succeeding the next time the two teams met.
Some innovators and innovations are like that. They perfectly fit the time, place, and situation. They’re incredibly successful. But it’s a one-time deal. It can’t be pulled off a second time.
SERIAL INNOVATORS
There is another kind of innovator and change agent at the opposite end of the spectrum. These folks aren’t one-hit wonders. Instead, they pull off multiple innovations and major changes seemingly without a hitch. They are what I call “serial innovators.”
When you see them from a distance, they appear to defy the odds. They seem to be immune to failure. But that’s just not true. The truth is that they are just like the rest of us. They head down plenty of dead ends. They have lots of failures.
But they also have a special genius that keeps their failures from becoming fatal. And it’s not what most people think. Their success is not found in their ability to avoid failure. It’s found in their ability to minimize the impact of failure.
They have learned to fail forward — or at least sideways. They seldom fail backward. And even when they do, they know how to navigate the choppy waters of a failed change or innovation in a way that preserves the long-term credibility of their organization and leadership.
We’ll see how they do that in a later chapter. But first, let’s take a look at why it’s incredibly difficult for most of us to learn much from these successful leaders. Contrary to what we might expect, many of them are clueless as to how they pull it off.
If you ask them for guidance, many of them will give you terrible advice. They will tell you to do all the wrong things. It’s not that they are trying to mislead. It’s not that they are frauds. The problem is that they are “unconscious competents.” They do all the right things. But they have no awareness of how or why they do them.
UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENTS
When you ask an unconscious competent for the secret to his success, he’ll tell you what he thinks he does, not what he actually does. It’s similar to what a natural athlete does when he picks up a ball and instinctively makes the right move or throws the right pass.
Unconscious competents see and do things at a subconscious level far better than most of us could do with months of practice and preparation. They also usually have no idea that much of what they see and do is foreign and unnatural to everyone else. Which explains why they make great teammates, but lousy coaches.
I remember as a young man reading an article by one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He claimed that hitting the ball was relatively simple. All you had to do was watch for the spin of the seams to determine what kind of pitch it was, and then you just hit the ball based on the spin.
So I went out and tried his advice. It didn’t work. I had no idea how the seams were spinning. I couldn’t even see the seams. In fact, I could hardly see the ball. It was coming at me way too fast.
Not long afterward, I heard another former player being interviewed on the radio. He said he couldn’t pick up the spin of the seams either. When he tried, the ball ended up in the catcher’s mitt. Yet he was still able to hit a baseball well enough to have a lengthy career in the major leagues.
The truth is that despite what one of the greatest hitters of all time may have thought, his ability to hit a baseball involved far more than simply picking up the spin of the ball and hitting it. It also demanded incredibly quick hands, great balance, proper weight transfer, arm extension, an accurate knowledge of the strike zone, and a host of other things I could never get the hang of. But all of these things came so naturally to him that he hardly noticed them. Instead, he credited his success to something that actually had very little to do with his success.
Many of the most innovative and creative leaders do the same thing. Because they are unconsciously competent, they spout clichés about believing in themselves, taking huge risks, and making wild leaps of faith.
All the while, the real key to their success is not found in any of these things. It’s not found in taking massive risks. It’s not found in radical leaps of faith. What enables them to succeed is their instinctive and unconscious ability to know which risks are worth taking and what to do when things don’t go as planned. But if you ask them to describe how they do it, they credit their success to something altogether different.
It dawned on me years later that the superstar who claimed that hitting a baseball was a relatively easy task still failed to get a hit more than 65 percent of the time. To this day, that statistic gives me a warped sense of encouragement. It reminds me that hitting a baseball — like successful change and innovation — isn’t nearly as easy as some of the experts make it out to be.
CONSCIOUS COMPETENTS
Fortunately, there is another class of serial innovator. These are the innovators who are successful at innovating time after time and also know why and how they are successful. They are what I call “conscious competents.”
Unlike unconscious competents, these innovators are self-aware. They know what they are doing and why they are doing it. And unlike the theorists and researchers who study and write about innovation, but have never pulled it off themselves, they know firsthand the nuances of innovating and leading change in the real world.
Ironically, conscious competents, while they are successful, are seldom “Hall of Fame successful.” More often than not, they have more in common with a professional golfer’s swing coach than the top money winner on the PGA tour. A good swing coach is almost always an excellent golfer in his own right. But unlike the superstar on the tour, the swing coach had to work a little harder at mastering the fundamentals in order to make the cut.
Frankly, that’s my own story. Though I’ve had a great deal of success in my chosen field, these successes came neither quickly nor easily. In fact, during my first three years at the church I pastor, attendance increased by a total of one person. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that’s one-third of a person per year. Inspiring indeed.
During that time, just about every innovation and change I instituted failed. Along the way, I paid more than my share of “dumb taxes.” But I also learned not to make the same mistake twice. And I carefully watched and learned as others made their own mistakes. I learned the fundamentals.
Eventually, the church took off. From a small group meeting in a high school cafeteria, we grew into one of the largest churches in America, gaining a reputation for innovation, organizational health, and national influence.
Then a strange thing happened. A steady stream of leaders (in both church and business settings) began seeking my advice. Seeing our growth and the success we had handling the difficult transitions that came with it, they asked for help navigating the choppy waters of their own transitions, looking for counsel as they sought to innovate and make major organizational changes of their own.
Frankly, it took me by surprise. I have theology degrees, not an MBA.
But I quickly learned that when it comes to growth, change, and innovation, there’s not much difference between a church, a community organization, and a car dealership. The landmines, roadblocks, and paths to success are remarkably similar. When it comes to change and innovation, failure is still the norm. And the path through it is still the same.
In fact, some would argue that it’s even more difficult to make major changes in a church or nonprofit environment because of the voluntary nature of the organization and relationships. Pastors and nonprofit leaders lack executive power. They have few, if any, economic levers to motivate people. If people don’t agree with what they say or dislike the changes taking place, it’s easy for them to bolt. It’s a lot easier to find a new church than to find a new job.5
In the following pages, we’ll unpack the basic and transferable principles of innovation and change from an in-the-trenches perspective. We’ll look at what it takes personally and organizationally to create an environment that fosters innovation and change rather than shutting it down. I’ll be sharing examples from the church, the nonprofit world, and business, because those are the worlds I know best.
If you’re a novice leader or a board member, my goal is to help you better understand and navigate the predictable risks and dangers of implementing new ideas and major organizational change.
If you’re an experienced leader, my goal is to help you better assess the odds of success and failure before launching out, and to help you develop a workable (and sellable) game plan that will minimize the natural resistance to any new change or innovation.
And if you’re a grizzled veteran, I hope to add some new tools to your belt. But I also expect that I’ll be affirming some of the counterintuitive thoughts and insights that you’ve long had but have been hesitant to say out loud.
If you’ve long felt that the Innovation Emperor is naked, that the hype and promises are overblown, I’m here to tell you that you’re not the crazy one. When it comes to innovation and leading change, it’s the conventional wisdom that’s crazy.
But I realize that it’s not eay to be the only one shouting, “The emporer is butt naked!” Especially when everyone else is praising his wardrobe.