Don’t Have What You Need? Great!
Music is something I’m passionate about. I love finding stories from the world of music that reflect in interesting ways on what I do in my consulting practice.
This piece by Jeff Haden talks about David Bowie’s creative process and what it suggests for innovation and success in business. It tapped into some things my clients have found valuable in our work together.
In recording the classic song “Heroes,” Bowie made some choices he knew couldn’t be reversed. He forced himself to take the results from those choices as is, and make something great from them. To use the constraints he created for himself as a catalyst for a final product he otherwise might not have been able to imagine. This wasn’t an anomaly, but a purposeful and routine part of how Bowie worked.
The author does a nice job relating this to business –
The benefits (not just the necessity) of “using what you have, instead of waiting – or wishing – for what you don't have.”
The competitive advantage you can gain by “embracing an apparent contradiction [the lack of resources you think are must-have] as the best way forward,” rather than as a prompt to dial back your ambitions.
The recognition you need to have that “employees who find it challenging, even fun, to overcome constraints are the better performers.”
Bowie sometimes deliberately created constraints – something few businesses ever would do, of course, nor should they. But leaning into constraints when they’re a reality can spark creativity that can be a game changer.
I’ve worked with this idea in a few ways with clients. One is to use it in your leader development and succession planning processes. It’s important to recognize, as Haden suggests, that the people who turn constraints into opportunity are your current stars. You can also create laboratories for figuring out who are your stars in the making.
I’ve advised clients to put some of their more junior team members into responsible roles in situations of constraint or difficulty for the business. It’s a professional growth experience for those people. And it gives you a look into whether they are the kinds of high-potentials you hope they are. When your hunch is right, they should be a priority for additional leader development opportunities in your organization.
Another way to use constraints as innovation spurs is to simulate them. In the foresight part of my consulting work I use a variety of methods. One is an exercise imagining ways to overcome constraints that the client organization is, happily, not suffering. We make them up.
My former colleague and a great mentor, Jae Engelbrecht, loved this approach. I watched and helped him many times as he masterfully facilitated groups through it. The result often was some brilliant new ideas for their business.
You want to launch three new products this year?
·What if you only had half your current R&D budget? What would you do differently than your norm to meet the goal? Maybe you would develop very different products than you were thinking about. And maybe they’re better ones, with bigger prospective customer pools. Or maybe you develop them with partners you never imagined working with before. And it becomes the beginning of a beautiful friendship for other new opportunities as well.
You want to move into a new market? Or you’re a government agency, given a new mandate that expands the scope of your mission to somewhere it’s never been?
What if you had to be operational in half the time you think it requires to get there? What novel new sources and means would you leverage to get the talents you need that you don’t have today? How would you accelerate building visibility and trust with customers or constituents that don’t know you, or see you as “not in that business”?
And so on.
These don’t have to be elaborate “research projects” or scenario builds – they’re best if they’re not. It can be a half day workshop with a small tiger team, even a lunchtime brainstorm.
The payoff takes more work, of course. To actually implement the new ideas when you don’t have to – when you could revert to muscle memory in how to use your resources? The right change leader, from inside your company or an outside advisor, is essential. You need to move from the foresight exercise to the organizational culture and process changes that implementing new ideas require.
Using your resources in familiar ways is just fine for producing just-fine innovations. What if you used them in creative ways, inspired by “constraint exercises,” to turbocharge your innovation? And maybe even had some to spare to put to some other creative purposes?
Six GRAMMY awards, including one for lifetime achievement. Over 100 million albums sold. One of the most acclaimed artists in modern music history. It was a pretty good strategy for David Bowie.