Leaders often frame innovation as a monumental, revolutionary act, which can stifle progress. A more practical approach is to define it as incremental improvement. Fostering a culture where teams focus on making small, consistent enhancements to existing processes makes innovation a daily, achievable habit rather than a rare, intimidating event.
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Building an innovation culture is like making a snowball. Pushing it too hard in one direction will cause it to crumble. Instead, you must let it roll and adapt to the organizational climate, context, and people, allowing it to grow organically.
If a company creates a siloed "innovation team," it's a sign the main product organization is stuck in "business as usual" maintenance. Innovation should be a mindset embedded across all teams, not an isolated function delegated to a select few.
When facing internal resistance to a big idea, the tendency is to make the idea smaller and safer. The better approach is to protect the ambitious vision but shrink the steps to validate it, using small, targeted experiments to build evidence and momentum.
Maximum growth occurs during 'boring' periods of repetitive execution, not exciting periods of innovation. Many leaders, craving novelty, mistake this valuable stability for stagnation and prematurely introduce disruptive changes that hurt the compounding returns of a team mastering its craft.
Siphoning off cutting-edge work to a separate 'labs' group demotivates core teams and disconnects innovation from those who own the customer. Instead, foster 'innovating teams' by making innovation the responsibility of the core product teams themselves.
Forcing innovations to "scale" via top-down mandates often fails by robbing local teams of ownership. A better approach is to let good ideas "spread." If a solution is truly valuable, other teams will naturally adopt it. This pull-based model ensures change sticks and evolves.
A principle from fashion states that successful product iterations typically change only one core element at a time. Introducing two or three significant changes at once often fails because it overwhelms the consumer. This 'one egg' rule forces focus on the most impactful innovation.
Diller’s process for navigating the unknown isn't about brilliance but relentless iteration. He describes it as taking "one dumb step" at a time, bouncing off the walls of bad ideas and mistakes, and course-correcting. This embraces looking foolish as a prerequisite for finding the right path.
The 'move fast and break things' mantra is often counterproductive to scalable growth. True innovation and experimentation require a structured framework with clear guardrails, standards, and measurable outcomes. Governance enables scale; chaos prevents it.
Nubar Afeyan argues that companies should pursue two innovation tracks. Continuous innovation should build from the present forward. Breakthroughs, however, require envisioning a future state without a clear path and working backward to identify the necessary enabling steps.