Give Yourself Some Wiggle Room to Drive Innovation and Change
InfoManagement Direct, December 21, 2007
Recently I came across a quote by the legendary Chicago Sun-Times journalist Sydney Harris who observed, “Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same, but get better." Nothing like a little paradox to reboot the brain and inspire a new look at the same landscape.
We want things to stay the same - only get better. Ain’t that the truth? There’s a lot of comfort in things remaining the same. We know what to expect, we can predict our reactions, nothing is going to catch us off guard and cause us pain or make us look bad.
We gain a sense of security in things remaining the same, especially over a long period of time. It’s like a baseball hitter who spends hours hitting off a pitching machine. The speed and location of the ball are predictable, so eventually, no matter how fast the pitch comes in, the hitter can whack it. He starts feeling good about himself. Then he gets into a game where the pitcher is changing speeds and location, and suddenly those hard line drives turn into soft pop-ups and groundouts. Without the predictability of the machine, hitting becomes a much tougher job.
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Change by definition upsets the status quo. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it’s not. If it makes things better, then we love it. But because we only know the outcome after the change occurs, we hate the prospect of it, mostly because we’re afraid of losing what we already have. That’s human nature.
While I was in the process of wrapping my brain around this concept I was given a copy of a recent article by Geoffrey Moore from the Harvard Business Review.1 The article has proved very helpful in understanding the power of this paradox - stay the same only better.
The always-insightful Moore pointed out that there are three terms or time horizons we work in. Normally we deal in the short-term horizon and the long-term horizon. But according to Moore, there is also the overlooked, often borrowed from and always-misunderstood middle-term horizon, which ironically is the only place where innovative ideas can gain traction.
Eureka! Paradox solved - or at least given clarity.
We are very comfortable in the short term, getting instant gratification for our immediate needs - be it food (hence the proliferation of quick-service restaurants), receiving a thumbs-up for doing a good job, making a quick sale, or achieving our quarterly quota, etc. Hitting a short-term objective is satisfying, although getting there can be difficult. Still, the shorter the term we’re dealing with, the fewer chances there are for the rules, the environment or the assumptions we’re working under to change. As Harris points out, we would prefer it if it were a bit easier.
We are comfortable in long-term thinking about the future, designing new products and services, opening new geographic markets and starting new businesses because we apparently enjoy a degree of accountability that is, shall we say, more fluid at the edges. The future is ripe with possibility, riches and romance; or as they say in baseball - all teams look good in spring training.
The other comfort with the long term is that if changes do sneak up on us, we will have time to react to them. Changes that face a long-term outcome aren’t nearly as traumatic, giving us the opportunity to try different things, regain our equilibrium and return to a state of nonchange before we reach the day of reckoning. Things may have changed in truth, but they don’t feel like they did as much because we have time to assimilate the changes.
“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same, but get better."
What Moore gets right in his essay and that the Harris quote misses is that innovation is not actually a dilemma. A dilemma is a choice between two painful alternatives. Moore demonstrates that there is a third alternative, a middle horizon or a middle term, that incorporates the best of the other two. He says that in order to implement change, we need to create a space in this middle horizon that is free from the pain and rewards of the short-term horizon and also free from the open-ended “explore all options” thinking of the long-term horizon.
What’s needed, then, in order to implement innovation and alignment in the middle horizon, is a little wiggle room. I realize the term “wiggle room” isn’t listed in the glossary of the latest MBA textbooks - but it works for me. Wiggle room means there is flexibility in the business expectations of ROI and market share for new product and service innovations, making the prospect of change a less fearsome one; but it also means there are needed restraints that sharpen the focus. There is less of a tendency to push off concerns about the consequences of your actions on “future you” when the future is not as far off. Flexibility with restraint is the ideal environment to nurture innovation.
One of the ways to create an innovative middle horizon is to build both flexibility and structure into an IT organization through the use of managed services. On the flexibility front, managed services give companies two critical advantages - flexibility of capital resources and flexibility of human resources.
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