Innovation is boring.
You probably wouldn’t be interested.
I live in the weeds of building digital experiences and products, which is a very hairy place to be on a good day. It’s complex, nuanced and a bigger problem space than you or I can solve on our own. Diversity of thought and harnessing group intelligence are the single greatest tools you can leverage, which means collaborating, co-creating and communicating with other people will be your only way through the weeds alive. Most interpretations on what to do next on any given project at any given time, are not immediately apparent to any single domain like design, technology or business. Forget about having one stakeholder who isn’t steeped in the complexities of the project’s day to day context. Because of this, it has become extremely hard to ignore the barrel of the gun teams are often forced to stare down helplessly as they are pushed to deliver more and more quickly without being given the space to reflect and improve on what was just built, even within agile environments.
Agilefall
As Jenny Odell wrote about this bewildering bias toward growth in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, “In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative.”
Agile was never meant to be a bulletproof indicator of timelines, but is often used this way. Project owners will get point estimates from the team and use the previous sprints velocity as a fool-proof indicator for absolute deadlines on when to expect features. This gets communicated up the stakeholder chain and before you know it, the team is being expected to deliver half baked work based on half baked estimates by certain dates, with zero control over the iterative flexibility agile was supposed to allow for. Agile is meant to be iterative on first principles. It is meant to give you the space to reflect on what you just built and compare it against what you just learned from having built it. When you do this, your next sprint and future work will be more informed by ongoing insights that set you up for success in the future based on your desired outcomes for the project. But teams need the autonomy and responsibility to make these calls, and to be beholden to outcomes, not deadlines.
The innovation daisy chain
The speed in which our ability to communicate has far outpaced our human capabilities to digest information and meaningfully respond. When expectations for growth and delivery in a world where information is abundant, attention and meaningful digestion of thoughts become expensive. Not everyone can take a minute to ask themselves if arbitrary deadlines and point goals matter more than getting value out of your digital investments. More and more, this is leading to investments becoming deep pits of debt before ever being given a fighting chance to show value.
The concept of technical debt isn’t new, but I feel it has only been telling one side of the debt story for a while now. Your code could have perfect quality but still may not provide the value you’re looking for, thanks to the daisy chain of compounding factors that go into driving innovation, which doesn’t hinge on code quality alone.
Innovation happens when insights are clear and easy to find. Insights are clear and easy to find when operations have been simplified and easy to navigate. Operations have been simplified and easy to navigate because someone took the time to think about the cost of ignoring mundane problems that take time to solve. When time has been invested in solving mundane problems, effort and energy is freed up into interpreting insights for real value. The problem we are running into in this industry is the complete indifference we have for the much less seen and much less valued time spent on adjusting, improving and maintaining operations. These things are invisible and are the main enablers of innovation and value.
The banality of innovation
If we trace the roots back to its origin, innovation is built on the broad foundation of a much more boring reality. One that posits operational responsibility, iteration and maintenance are the true enablers of digital innovation.
When a team is given the right amount of autonomy, time and space to iterate, label, organize, document and understand what they have created, insights become clear and innovation happens. When a team sees how a pain-point has turned into a pain-plane, and is given the time and space to address it, innovation happens. The real differentiator for companies and teams in the future will be the speed in which they were able to learn about what will drive the most value, not how prudently they completed their sprint goals by a certain date. What provides the most value only becomes clear when you have the brain coins available to spend on thinking about what should come next, instead of spending them on addressing the impact your dirty laundry has on every facet of your business.
Tolerating low quality, disorganization and recklessness for the sake of delivery speed or resistance to hard conversations does not make you better, nor does it accomplish what you are setting out to do. It makes you less innovative, more tired, and turns your investment into debt right out of the gate.
We have reached the glass ceiling in the digital space where we will never be able realize the full potential of our investments and people if teams are not given the autonomy and the responsibility to take time, effort and care to fortify their creations in a way that can be leveraged for maximum value and insight. Innovation happens after years of doing the right thing, the right way, and improving upon it. The ‘right’ thing in this case is the very overlooked responsibility and effort being put into perfectly boring, thoughtful, iterative and organized operations so that real innovation can happen.
“The thing about repairing, maintaining and cleaning is: it’s not an adventure. There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just work. And the bottom line is: some people are ok going to work and some people, well some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose.”
