Introduction to the Innovators Drama

Many projects, especially innovative and creative, start with a blast and end with a bang. We want to spark disruption and leave a dent in the universe, but often, the outcomes are a headache and a bump in our ego.

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The team was promising. Experienced, motivated, and with a great ambition to build a company that will change the world or make a lot of money. The project started from two of the founders' ideas to monitor mechanical malfunctions in distributed manufacturing. They made some preliminary checks, validated the pain, and gathered an excellent team of talented and skilled sales, marketing products, and development people.

The project took off enthusiastically, but soon, things started cracking. Minor disagreements between different team members began to appear. In addition, dilemmas related to product development, questions around user experience, business development strategy, and development roadmapping started forming during the initial brainstorming.

As the team elaborated the initial idea, the brainstorming meetings became long and complicated. There were too many opinions in the room and too many simultaneous problems to address: How will the product be? How does the business model work? How long will it take to launch the first version? What would it consist of? Why should it be like some imagines and not like what others imagine? You could say the patient (the project) was very much alive, but the operation was starting to feel dizzy.

Since the founders were experienced in leading teams of thinkers in state-of-the-art ideation approaches, they chunked down the issues into small challenges and devised design sprints around them. The team loved the idea of integrating design thinking practices and working agile and embraced the spirit of creativity with open arms.

A series of design thinking sprints were conducted to envision the product, user experience, and business model. The team spent time together to identify opportunities and propose ideas for tackling challenges related to the customer journey, performance metrics, value propositions, information architecture, and development roadmaps. As required, at the end of each round, the team articulated concrete next steps before moving on. They enjoyed bringing up ideas, debating and expressing their opinions, and prioritizing attention points and next steps. But as time passed, something was creeping into what seemed like an ideal development process.

As it often happens in creative ventures, new insights and course corrections were needed from time to time. It wasn't anything dramatic, perhaps throw a few days or a couple of weeks of work due to new findings or not paying attention to some issues in advance. After that, the team schedules became more hectic, and the collaborative thinking sessions became slightly less exciting and somewhat more disturbing.

As the project evolved and the team produced more and more outputs, each adjustment met more resistance. There was much more work at stake. With the busy work plans and piling backlogs, each decision had much more impact, needed more agreements and considerations, and affected a lot more invested resources to be reconsidered or allocated.

But because the team felt commitment, they kept taking an active part in the collaborative thinking sessions, but gradually, they started drifting away. Finally, going out to call or interrupting a meeting to attend to a burning issue became part of the agenda.

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As the work progressed and daily operations intensified, scheduling a brainstorming or a sprint became more difficult. New team members joined the core team, and bringing them up to speed was also time-consuming. Already made decisions were opened again, sometimes to align with the business development rationales, and sometimes to exercise wits and creativity on behalf of a new member.

Over time the once vibrant and engaged thinking sessions got replaced with a more "tachless" approach. The let's do it, talk about issues and resolve them quickly, was replaced with a - we don't have time to dwell on it with everything that's going.

Impatience with the nonlinear parts of work grew, and priorities shifted. Exploration and research uncovered hidden information that resurfaced after being mentioned before. With every step made, revisiting decisions and thoughts already processed became more demanding, and at some point, annoying. From the side, you could see a delicate complacency growing — less challenging and critical observations on issues and more calls to make choices and move on.

It was now possible to hear more and more statements such as "I thought we had that covered" or "I don't know and need to check" or "this is a ____ issue, they need to look into it and say what they want/need."

Besides, the scope of challenges and growing backlogs in each business discipline called for a more distributed smaller team meeting, and having a good perception of the big picture was hard.

Since different disciplines encountered different challenges, advisors that were brought in often gave recommendations that had side effects on other teams' works. As a result, coordination became a challenge and also captured increasing amounts of attention.

Bringing people on board also became more and more difficult since telling the story and bringing people up to speed with decisions made, and choice rationale became time-consuming.

New initiatives to adopt new agile practices, methods for defining metrics and priorities worked occasionally and in other times only made people more frustrated. It seemed like there were no organizing principles to what's happening. Conservatism started to creep in. objectives conflicted, and metrics were engineered to demonstrate achievements.

At this point, I got a call from the CEO of the project. I have a feeling things are getting out of control. I have good people, but there is too much creative chaos, and I start hearing sounds of power conflicts and disintegration. I can't afford to have my team unfocused. I need them to understand what's stopping them and do it quickly without getting them upset. Instead, they are super stressed and don't have any patience for theories. And they completely lost their belief in top-down solutions. Is there something I can do?

Of course, I said. It sounds like the team got into a bit of a drama. It's pretty natural, but what's important is what you and they do now. There are three ways to deal with these types of dramas, prevent them, deal with them, and learn from them. I think you are already past the first one, but we can certainly cover dealing and learning simply enough. And if they'll understand how to utilize the innovators drama, they will be able to take care of prevention on their own in the future.

The innovators drama? He asked me, amused.

Yes. I answered. Haven't you ever wondered how informed and engaged teams get to the situation your team is in now? Don't you think it's odd that despite all the techniques, frameworks, and approaches to being creative, so many businesses struggle with innovation?

Why do good teams get stuck, and why motivated teams lose their ambition to stretch themselves. Why it's so hard to scale the adoption of transformation skills despite the myriad of available advisors and consultants? I used to ask myself this question for so long until I realized the answer was just under my nose. In my work, I was often puzzled why there is such friction between theory and practice and why people don't want to theorize things even when their practices are at a dead end. Then one day, it hit me. The friction was the thing. People did not shy away from the problems; they wanted to avoid the frictions and tensions that the problems brought with them. The tensions and frictions built in the creative endeavors were so disturbing and confusing that people made everything in their power to break through without breaking things down. That was their drama.

Another problem that coincided was that as much as they tried to avoid the conflicts and frictions, the drama just got more complicated. They were building creative, operational, and strategic debts that were liable to erupt at some point. And mess up their already busy backlogs.

Drama occurs when we fail to acknowledge critical challenges. Either because we don't recognize them, don't understand their significance, don't know how to deal with them, or lack some critical resource or condition to address these significant challenges. These issues feel challenging to handle, and they feel more expensive to understand than to avoid. But this is a very wrong and dangerous assumption. The chances are that we haven't checked how much is dealing with the problems costs because we worry that theorizing will be expensive or that we will get people upset.

What if I'll tell you that it doesn't have to be this way. What if there was a way to deal with creative tensions and their subsequent dramas without rocking the boat too much and without getting into analysis paralysis mode. Would you like to try it?

What do I have to prepare? He asked.

Nothing I said. You don't have to prepare anything. Instead, allocate some time to explore challenges in an organized manner, identify root cause issues, and quickly develop a good understanding of how expensive and disruptive they are. But for sure, avoiding them won't get you there. On the contrary, these issues will keep surfacing when you least expect them and are least capable of dealing with them effectively.

Any significant Innovation is inherently disruptive because it changes things. If we don't understand how much change we deal with and how much effort we need to invest to succeed, changes will always seem big and intimidating. But to find out, we need to address the drama, which was an expensive activity until now, but I will show you how to do it quickly, precisely, at a more extensive scale and lower costs.

I'm starting to love this drama already, he said.

I think you will love it, and also your team will, once they learn how to defuse the drama for themselves and their colleagues, partners, stakeholders, and clients.

So... what is the Innovators Drama?

The innovators drama is the reason we fail to adopt best practices, get stuck in creative endeavors, and pay through the nose when we try to break through or innovate at scale.

Innovation processes don't operate in sterile labs. Instead, they occur in challenging realities. And despite the fact the most of us deal with the same challenges, each one brings different types of knowledge, habits, concerns, and complications that make the innovation process extremely contextual.

I think the most probable explanation for the complexity of innovation processes is this. The mix between the inherent complexities of the innovation process and the internal conflicts each participant brings into a creative process, multiplied by interpretation and knowledge gaps, and factored by the amount of best practices that the modern entrepreneurial world consist of all adds up to overwhelming complexity. And I doubt if this complexity could be resolved without paying attention to the local complications.

But since paying attention and being emphatic is a significant mental effort, finding the local conditions seems to increase the cost of dealing with debts instead of reducing them.

In this book, I will introduce an approach and method that should make understanding the local conditions less expensive and more accessible. To do so, I will compliment and tweak a few strategies. I don't pretend to reinvent the wheel, but instead, I try to grease the axle a bit.

The approach I call things to be done is a bridge between jobs to be done and getting things done. And it utilizes ideas from OKR's and systematic inventive thinking.