If innovators want to succeed, they need to project their visions so all can see, understand and appreciate them.
Innovation will always be central to humanity’s prosperity. Yet we often fear it, stifle it, and fight against it. From the Tolpuddle Martyrs and a man with a flag in front of the first cars, to today’s continued fear of nuclear power, we are always finding reasons not to do it. Perhaps with good reason, when the first factories brought misery to the working class, early cars were dangerous to man and beast, and Chernobyl is still very much in our consciousness. Yet industrialisation brought us prosperity, cars gave us freedom and nuclear power the potential to provide us with cheap energy. So how do we persuade people of the good of it? We need to counter their fear with excitement.
The fundamental problem is that we are hard-wired to look for problems – it’s how early homo-sapiens survived – “there could be a sabre-toothed tiger in that thicket – I’ll keep in the open” better to lose out on some nuts and berries than be eaten yourself. That’s why news channels are 99% misery, death and destruction – it sells! We clamour for calamity.
Charismatic leaders like Henry Ford or Steve Jobs knew how to sell innovation. JFK pushed technology to the limits to land a man on the moon. These people not only had a vision, but they were able to articulate it and bring the masses with them.
Where it seldom happens is in big organisations and within committees, because there is always someone who imagines that sabre-toothed tiger and so everyone else thinks “better not then – easier if we don’t”.
So what’s the answer? We have to mitigate the risks as much as possible, but we don’t start there; we need to back up the opportunities with proof and data, but we don’t start there either. We start with winning hearts.
In corporations and other large organisations, we have to win hearts across the departmental mix by sharing the vision. We have to position and express innovation in a way that different audiences can see it as an opportunity for the business, for their department and for themselves individually. We have to put it in the context of what they understand; for example, people in marketing see things very differently from those in manufacturing. Their apprehensions are different, too. The marketer might not see an obvious brand fit, and the manufacturer would worry about all the costs and disruption to their line. Yet there is a common way we can get them excited. We show them who the end customer would be, the world they live in, and what it would be like for them to use and benefit from this innovation. We tell a story. Everyone in business wants to sell stuff, so if they can see how that would work, they will go out of their way to make it happen.
A few decades ago, when I was with IDEO, when laptops were just starting to make their presence known, I was working on a project with Steelcase, the world’s largest office furniture manufacturer. They were worried. Their business was built around open-plan offices. Their furniture’s main differentiator was dealing with the spaghetti of power and data cables feeding phones, monitors and computer towers. With laptops and mobile phones making headway, cable management would soon become a thing of the past, along with their USP. They needed to innovate. We got to work, redesigning their furniture for flexibility and mobility. The designs were radically different from what had come before, so we made a video, set in the not-too-distant future, showing how people would work with this new technology and our new furniture. It was shown at the NeoCom Furniture fair in Chicago, demonstrating how this traditional business was very much fit for the future. Much of what we proposed then has now become commonplace with hotdesking, flexible working, WeWorks and working from home. Back then, people worked in cubicles, but we gave them a compelling glimpse of how it might be and, looking back, who would want to work in a box? No wonder they were excited by it.
Storytelling is at the heart of how we bring everyone on board, and today AI is providing the visualisation tools to fast-track the narrative and bring to life quickly, efficiently and realistically our visions of the future. So don’t be shy, innovators, share your visions.
