Successful changes and innovations tend to take on lives of their own. They seldom end up exactly where or what their creators thought they would be.
German chemist Alfred Einhorn was seeking to invent a nonaddictive narcotic for general surgery. In 1905, he succeeded in inventing what we now call Novocain. To his chagrin, his invention was rejected by most surgeons because they favored general anesthesia, while dentists loved the new drug, using it to help them pull teeth. Einhorn was convinced that dentists’ use of Novocain devalued his noble invention and undercut its potential market for general surgery. So he spent the later part of his life in a fruitless attempt at keeping dentists from using it.8
Clearly, he didn’t have much success. And in hindsight, we can’t help but wonder, “What was he thinking?”
Thomas Edison had a similar experience. He envisioned his invention of the phonograph as a business tool that could be used for dictation. He had no idea that the technology behind it would eventually launch a massive music industry. He actually put the newly invented phonograph aside to work on other projects. Despite his brilliance as a market-oriented inventor, he couldn’t see the gold mine that his invention would eventually open.
Or, more recently, consider the story of Dr. Spencer Silver, creator of the glue that makes Post-It Notes possible. Dr. Silver was an employee of 3M. He was attempting to formulate a powerful glue when he ended up creating a low-tack, pressure-sensitive, reusable glue. Having no idea what it was good for, he tried to promote it to the management of 3M to see if they had any ideas on how it could be used. They labeled it a solution without a problem.
Six years later, one of Dr. Silver’s coworkers started using it to temporarily hold a bookmark in his hymnbook. It worked marvelously. So Dr. Silver put some of it on the back side of a pad of paper, and suddenly, Dr. Silver’s solution had found its problem.9
It makes you wonder how the brilliant and innovative minds at 3M missed this obvious application. When presented with the low-tack glue Dr. Silver had invented, they saw what is now a hot-selling product as nothing more than “a solution without a problem.”
This should remind us of the truth that we don’t really know what something is — whether it’s a new product, a new program, or some other innovation — until it hits the real world. Only then do we know what we have on our hands. Until then, it’s just a concept or a theory. Only after it has been released into the wild can we know how it will actually work, how people will respond to it, and what it wants to be.
That’s why we should always plan and innovate in pencil. And not just at the beginning, when we’re coming up with new and creative ideas. Use a pencil all the way through the lifecycle, making plans, but always being ready to change them at a moment’s notice.
PLANNING IN PENCIL
Planning in pencil simply means keeping your options open as long as possible. It involves using the language of flexibility rather than certainty. It’s being careful to say, “This is what we do for now,” rather than, “This is what we will do forever.” It’s making sure that everyone knows that midcourse corrections aren’t simply allowed; they’re encouraged.
Let’s say that you’re launching a major new program. Obviously you have to start with a schedule, a location, a time frame, a curriculum, and standards. But once you launch, it’s certain that the schedule, location, time frame, curriculum, and standards you set will need to be fine-tuned. Nothing ever works as planned. It’s likely that these things will need a major overhaul. It all depends on how the real world and the marketplace respond.
Let’s look at some examples of how things change and why planning and innovating in pencil is so important.
A Lecture-Lab Church
At North Coast Church, our entire ministry is built around sermon-based small groups. Think “lecture-lab,” with the weekend sermon being the lecture and the weekly small group being the lab. When we launched the concept nearly thirty years ago, we knew of no other churches using our model. (There might have been, we just didn’t know of any.) It was an innovative and laser-focused paradigm.
These midweek small groups have been a smashing success from day one. Our weekly small group attendance has always exceeded 80 percent of our weekend attendance. Currently, it’s more than 90 percent. These groups have helped slam our back door shut. They’ve turned a massive crowd into a church. They’ve been the major reason for our sustained growth and spiritual health over the years.
Yet we’ve constantly had to tweak them. Even from the beginning, nothing has gone exactly as planned.
We thought leaders wanted and needed lots of training. So we not only offered it; we made it mandatory. Until we realized that some of our best leaders were the ones who skipped the extra meetings.
We thought we could make every group sermon-based. But we quickly realized that if you treat adults like children, they don’t respond too well. So we stepped back and started allowing groups to pick a different type of Bible study for a quarter, as long as they returned to our sermon-based curriculum when the quarter was over.
We imagined leaders would prepare for their groups by listening to a weekly fifteen-to-twenty-minute training tape. (This was before everyone had internet access.) But our leaders weren’t sitting down at the kitchen table to listen with pen, paper, and Bible in hand. They were listening to the training in their car — on the day of the meeting, often on their way to the meeting.
We also envisioned tiered layers of oversight, with each group overseen by a volunteer leader of five groups, who would be overseen by a leader of twenty-five groups. With this limited span of care (no one directly overseeing more than five people), we were sure we had the ideal administrative and coaching system in place. It was manageable and realistic. It looked great on paper.
It sucked in real life. The volunteers hated it.
And then there was our neighborhood focus. We imagined that people preferred to be grouped by neighborhood. But we hadn’t realized that in Southern California, the neighborhood is no longer a useful construct. Nobody identifies themselves by their neighborhood unless it’s a new housing tract. The new neighborhoods are our workplaces, our station in life, and our special interests. So we had to reengineer our groups in light of that reality.
I could go on. After nearly thirty years, the list of things we’ve been wrong about or radically changed is quite long. But we’ve continued to be successful because we’ve been willing to change as the facts changed. And to do so quickly.
Coffee Snobs
The story of Starbucks provides another illustration of how important it is to plan in pencil. Prior to the rise of Starbucks, you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in America who believed that selling premium coffee at premium prices was a viable business model. For most people, coffee was a commodity, and many preferred the convenience of instant coffee heated up in a microwave over the time and hassle it took to brew a fresh pot.
Starbucks changed everything. But one of the major reasons why Starbucks was so successful changing America was that it also let America change Starbucks.
In his book Pour Your Heart into It, Howard Schultz tells the fascinating story of Starbucks’ innovative rise to become one of America’s premier brands. It’s a story full of midcourse corrections. And it’s quite clear that the outcome would have been radically different had Schultz written down the details of his original dream in permanent ink instead of in pencil.
For instance, Schultz and his early management team had a passion for quality coffee and wanted to instill that passion in others. So they started out with a long list of things they would never do.
That list included never franchising, avoiding supermarkets, and never letting their coffee be served in settings they couldn’t control (such as in a Marriott or on a United Airlines flight). They also determined that they would never sell flavored coffee or add flavored syrups to a latte. Nonfat lattes also were taboo, because Italian espresso bars use whole milk. As for foo-foo drinks like a Frappuccino, there was no way they’d even consider such a thing.10
Obviously, they’ve made a few midcourse corrections. Try to imagine Starbucks with a CEO unwilling to have made those changes. It would have produced a different niche brand, with a very different stock price.
Video Venues
The same thing happened when we introduced the video venues that I mentioned earlier. When I first came up with the idea, I thought it would be a great way to turn an overflow room into a reward instead of a punishment. I also saw it as a great way to broaden our demographic outreach. By offering different worship styles, I figured we could reach people we’d never reach with our old one-size-fits-all style of worship. I even saw it as a great way for a bigger church to feel like a smaller church and to avoid having to build a massive sanctuary.
But I missed out on one of the most important uses of a video venue. I failed to see that it could also be a powerful tool for launching satellite campuses and for beginning a multisite ministry.
In fact, when our executive pastor, Charlie Bradshaw, first suggested that we use our venues in this way, I blew him off. I told him that it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t imagine putting together all of the ministries that a stand-alone church would need for an off-site video venue. And if we did this, who would come?
But it wasn’t too long before a handful of churches who had come to see what we were doing took our new toy and started to play with it in the wrong way. Instead of creating on-site venues to reach a broader demographic audience, they planted satellite campuses to reach a wider geographic audience. Only then did I realize that our video venues had far more potential than I had envisioned. So we started launching our own satellite campuses, and pretended that we had planned to do so all along.
I share this to illustrate a common problem: innovators sometimes see the trajectory of their innovations so clearly that they have a hard time recognizing new opportunities when their innovations veer off course and go in their own directions. Even worse, they tend to fight it.
STAYING FLEXIBLE
The best way to keep this from happening is to plan and proceed in pencil. Throw away the pen. Never use it. Even mature innovations need tweaks and an occasional overhaul.
The only thing you and your leadership team can know for sure about the future is that it will be different from what you think it will be. So prepare for it by keeping as many options open as long as possible.
Avoid instituting game plans that are so detailed there’s no room for adjustment.
Never fall in love with your first draft — or your latest draft.
Institute guiding principles instead of rigid policies.
Always keep your ear to the ground. Things change when you least expect it.
And never forget that successful and serial innovators deal with what is. They don’t worry much about what should be. They don’t worry much about what they thought would be. They just worry about what is. And when things change, they change.