I was talking with an Engineering Manager who said that the Product Owner (PO) and PO’s boss were concerned that the team was spending too much time reducing technical debt, improving quality and gaining velocity. While the PO agreed on the priorities, the PO wanted more innovation delivered to customers. On the other hand, the team was feeling that these critically important debt-reduction, quality and velocity improvements were not valuable to the business, that they were not doing anything innovative, and that management didn’t acknowledge their progress. Net-net, no innovation means no customer features, no business value and no rewards.
Reaching for my trusty keyboard and browser, I searched for the definition of innovation and found from Wikipedia.org, “Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services”. I pointed out that innovation is also practical improvements, confirmed by Wikipedia.org no less.
While customers may not be blown away by some long overdue restructuring of code to improve reliability or performance, they would call support less often to complain. While customers may not see whizzy new UX features, they would appreciate ceasing well-known, frequent UX workarounds because the UX bugs were finally fixed. While customers cannot see that the team is becoming more efficient, they will appreciate that over time, the team is delivering more new features every quarter. The Engineering Manager appreciated the perspective and headed back to engage the PO and team with a new perspective about innovation.
I started to realize that high technology lauds innovation of the new products, new services, and new business models. Employee performance evaluations often have a section related to the employee’s innovation during the past year. This implies the more impressive the innovations, the higher the performance rating. Gaining access to the high rungs of the technical ladder requires patent grants, new products and new features in the candidate’s recent accomplishments. Executives sponsor innovation days that allow teams and individuals to work on something innovative and new, and to break their daily monotonous routine.
The notion of ‘1% inspiration and 99% perspiration bring new products to market’ floats into my head. Does that mean that we personally only spent 1% of our lives innovative? Does that mean that we, as individuals, have 1% of people who are spending most of their time being innovative? Does that mean that we, as teams, have 1% who are spending most of their time being innovative? Does that mean that we, as organizations, have 1% who are spending most of their time being innovative? What if I’m in the 99 percentiles personally, individually, team-wise and organization-wise? Am I relegated to an existence without being innovative? Looking back at my career, I am clearly in the 99% and yet, I know that I, my teams, and my organizations have been highly innovative.
How does the above notion mesh with my experience with agile transformations where teams, leaders and organization literally rethink and refactor almost everything they do? They refactor how the communicate strategy and set goals. They refactor how they architect, build, validate and deliver their value. They change their expectations of teams, individuals, management, product managers and architects. They rethink their relationships with internal partners and external customers. In short, they implement a pragmatic new development and delivery system that improves quality and speeds new value delivery to customers. Using the innovation definition, it seems that those who improve both how and what they deliver to customers is worthy of being called innovative.
So, why do high tech companies seem to value new breakthroughs or major innovations more than on-going, constant improvements by implying one is innovation and the other isn’t?
Maybe because it’s easier to recognize and reward the infrequent, yet highly valuable breakout features and products. We cheer major accomplishments more than the on-going, constant flow of incremental improvements. A patent is tangible, demonstratable and rare. Having a patent wall to celebrate the achievements makes good sense. A well-received product launch where the press and analysts’ sound bites reflect the innovative new features, is easy to reference. Audiences like sound bites.
Whereas a constant sprint over sprint improvement of 1% in team velocity is abstract, gradual, and too small to be noticed or recognized. Beyond the team, who cheers this accomplishment? Same is true for all the numerous on-going improvements that a Scrum team makes from retrospective to retrospective. These small improvements are critical and yet too small to take note.
Maybe we are missing the notion of wonderment, or the state of awed admiration or respect. I am fascinated by a child’s wonderment at the small things they encounter, the recognition of a familiar face, their first mobility, their first verbal communication that yields a result, their first success in their classroom, their first friend, and their first financial transaction (You can get candy if you give them this round shiny thing?!?! Who knew?).
Equally, I’m fascinated by an organization’s wonderment at small things they encounter on their agile transformation, their first meaningful standup, their first successful sprint goal being fully met, their first planning or review meeting conducted solely by the team with everyone in the correct roles, and their first incremental delivery to a high-quality definition of done.
What if we expressed our wonderment at every improvement? What if wonderment encourages more innovation in both small and big outcomes? Imagine if leadership would spend time sharing their wonderment with all the innovations that their organizations including the small, incremental improvements.
Maybe it’s too time consuming to express wonderment at all the small improvements, however, it’s easy to see the resulting trend improvements (better velocity, quality, meeting effectiveness, reduction of technical debt and efficiency) when using Scrum. Maybe expressing wonderment for the positive trends would suffice to encourage teams to continue doing both the small and big innovations.
