The Boggy Back-End
Coming up with new ideas is the easy bit...
“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.” – Francis Bacon, 1625 1
Organisations must create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness if they’re to thrive in our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
Traditionally, most organisations have not thought about innovation as a culture but as a process for generating new ideas for products and services.
Often referred to as the ‘fuzzy front-end’, innovation viewed as a process begins with ideation to stimulate, generate, or acquire ideas, then screening of the raw ideas to separate the wheat from the chaff, and finally ranking the screened ideas to pick the winners.
It’s generally assumed that if the ideas coming out of the end of this process are any good, the organisation will readily align itself around them, thereby ensuring successful exploitation.
In theory, that all makes perfect logical sense.
In practice, it’s not that easy…
What makes it difficult was clearly articulated 500 years ago by one of the world's first management consultants:
"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new ". - Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
The fuzzy front-end is of course important.
Without new ideas it’s unlikely there’ll be much innovation.
But the front-end of innovation is a walk in the park compared to the corridor-stalking, innovation-killing, progress-sapping swampland of the boggy back-end.
The boggy back-end arises due to legacy ways of thinking, feeling, seeing and being that stem from mindsets, attitudes and behaviours that sustain the status quo.
It’s the cumulative effect of the seeing-being traps of people in an organisation whose sense of self feels threatened by changes that must occur if new ideas are to be successfully realised in the world. 2
The boggy back-end functions like an immune system, serving to protect the organisation from alien ideas, initiatives, and innovations that threaten homeostasis.
And the more compellingly innovative and blockbusting the idea, the greater the threat to the status quo, so the boggier your back-end becomes...
The boggy back-end is the reason why GE, Kodak and IBM failed to commercialise photocopying when Chester Carlson offered them the invention that eventually propelled Xerox to a multi-billion dollar corporation. 3
Ironically, it’s also the reason why, 40 years later, Xerox itself failed to commercialise the technologies created at their Palo Alto Research Center that underpinned the PC, Internet and mobile revolutions.
Instead, those technologies were commercialised by firms like Apple and Microsoft, both now 500 times more valuable than Xerox... 4
Most importantly, the boggy back-end is lurking in your organisation, waiting to silently stifle, smother, and strangle the compelling innovation that would provide the platform to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
Valuable ideas will continue to be stifled, smothered, and strangled in organisations that fail to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility and adaptiveness.
The key to future sustained success lies in finding the leverage to achieve systemic culture change - by focusing attention and efforts precisely and deeply on shifting the mindsets of the key influencers in your organisation.
These key influencers, not always in the most senior positions, are those few people whose mindsets, and therefore attitudes and behaviours, systemically affect everyone and everything else because they originate the signs, signals, cues, and clues that ultimately dictate the way we do things round here. 5
The bottom line: to avoid falling foul of the boggy back-end you must learn to see and focus on the systemic leverage to create a future-fit culture of innovation, agility and adaptiveness.
Only then will your organisation be able to continuously create new value by unlocking collective sense making, decision making & action taking and ensuring these become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation. 6
From Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625) Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626)
Find out more about Seeing-Being Traps, the #1 personal barrier to creating future-fit culture of innovation, agility and adaptiveness, in this seven minute video.
At the time of writing, Microsoft is worth $2,200Bn, Apple $2,600 Bn, and Xerox $4Bn.
Find out more about key influencers and their pivotal systemic role in creating a future-fit culture of innovation, agility and adaptiveness in this seven minute video.
My 35 year career - described in this seven minute video - has focused exclusively on helping people in organisations focus on seeing where to exploit the systemic leverage to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility and adaptiveness.