Think Inside The Box

Innovation Think Inside The Box Sasson Jamshidi Brand Contributor ServiceNow BRANDVOICE Storytelling and expertise from marketers | Paid Program Aug 18, 2022, 05:54pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Vision and limitation may be two sides of the same coin. Do constraints lead to innovation? “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. ” — E.

O. Wilson If you talk to anyone who works in tech, they’ll tell you there’s hardly anything more thrilling than the possibility of new technology. However, in my decades as a solutions architect spent designing technology implementations for organizations around the world, I’ve observed a shortcoming that many of us have overlooked: We’re uncomfortable discussing the limitations of that technology.

Constraints can bring out the most colorful and creative innovations. getty But the most innovative teams don’t talk only about possibilities; they also talk about constraints. To think outside the box, we have to take a hard look at the box itself.

Limiting ourselves Let me describe a scenario. A team is tasked with providing a new solution for a customer. As the team puts their heads together, ideas start to flow.

The emphasis is on blue-sky thinking: What can we accomplish? What’s possible? After brainstorming and planning, the engineering team goes off to build the solution. The marketing, sales, and business teams continue to talk about vision and possibility. When the solution is delivered to the customer, the team emphasizes what the technology can do—not what it can’t do.

This is the way most organizations build new products and solutions, yet this approach misses something fundamental about innovation. Constraints are good for creativity. It seems counterintuitive, but there’s research to support this idea.

In 2019, a team of researchers published a paper about teams that succeeded because they imposed constraints rather than trying to evade them. Here’s one stunning example: GE gave its engineers 18 months and a modest budget of $500,000 to develop a portable ECG machine to deliver healthcare to rural communities. The team developed the technology, citing these limitations as a major reason they were able to work so effectively.

This is the rule, not the exception. Last year, a different pair of researchers specified the types of constraints that are helpful for teams. It’s not budget and risk—the most common constraints teams deal with—but rather outcome and time.

In other words, it’s what the final product will look like and how long you have to develop it. The researchers recommend talking about, and even imposing, constraints as early as possible. So why are we getting it wrong? What’s stopping us from talking about the box before we think outside it? A Rosetta Stone for innovation We have a bias toward promise and potential.

That’s understandable. It’s hard to talk about what might go wrong, and it’s exciting to talk about what can go right. Nobody wants to tell a customer that their technology can’t do everything.

Nobody wants to tell their boss or their teammates that a product might fail. This is particularly true at this moment in history. As we continue to wrestle with the fallout from the pandemic, executives are planning their next moves very carefully.

New products and services are seen as a risk. In an environment of profound uncertainty, nobody wants to be the person who says, “Let’s consider the possibility of failure. ” But I argue we should do just that.

[Are you an innovation leader? Take this self-assessment to find out. ] Part of the reason we don’t communicate this way is that after the brainstorming stage, conversations happen in silos. While the engineers work on the nuts and bolts of the product, everyone else stays laser-focused on the vision.

We assume that technical people speak one language and business people speak another. Even worse, we assume the two are mutually intelligible. As a result, the second that teams start talking about vision, they dismiss the technical people.

I’ve heard it myself: “Oh, you write code? I’ll treat everything that comes out of your mouth as just engineer talk. ” Or “If you understand how the code works, you can’t possibly understand the business case. ” But vision and limitation are two sides of the same coin.

Our customers are living in their current reality, not the reality of tomorrow, when they’ll have our amazing product. When we talk about constraints and limitations as part of our vision, we’re actually talking about where our customers are today, not just where they want to be. This helps us connect with their current problems and use cases—not what we hope they are or what we guess they might be.

Organizations and teams can’t build new things unless they are negotiating with the edges of technology. Good news: We can spot this behavior, which means we can stop it before it shapes our cultures, organizations, and technologies. On a practical level, that means knocking down the false divide between the technical and business worlds.

Nontechnical people need to incorporate technical people into all stages of the conversation—even sales, marketing, and customer relations. Technical people need to speak openly about the limitations of our technology. Teams fear that by discussing limitations, they’re shutting down creativity before it can start to flourish.

But that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. Organizations and teams can’t build new things unless they are negotiating with the edges of technology. To work on the edges is to wrestle openly with constraints.

Innovation is impossible without it. Sasson Jamshidi Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.