“If you do what others do, you will get what others get.”
Do better answers, start with different probing questions? How helpful is it to get the right answer to the wrong question?
Why is it that the more companies compete, the more they look the same? If ‘the medium is the message’ is the secret sauce in the method companies use to become strategic and innovative? Can one really sprint to strategic insights, and genuine innovation in days?
When companies ask, “How can we do it differently from our competitors?” they generate far more bold, original ideas than when they ask “How can we do it better?” Think of genuinely innovative products — Netflix, Tesla, IKEA, M-Pesa. They weren’t the best. They were different.
Today’s markets in Kenya and East Africa shift faster than traditional drawn out strategy cycles can handle. Organisations that thrive innovate continuously, make bold strategic choices quickly, and experiment intelligently.
More like a neurosurgeon
First step is to make the distinction between a plan and a strategy. And, to realise the days of 5-year plans are dead. Strategy begins with an MRI like diagnosis, both hypothesis driven analytical problem solving, with a dash of ‘out of the box’ creativity.
Second step is to realise that the scrum method originally used in software development, can be applied in a strategy innovation sprint. Using a fun engaging, intensive, high-impact sprint approach can help leaders and teams break out of old thinking patterns, generating workable strategies in days and weeks, not months and years.
Despite the name, a ‘sprint’ is not a sloppy quick fix. Think of it more like a skilled neurosurgeon and team, focusing their efforts over a short time, to repair a life threatening aneurysm.
To develop breakthrough strategic ideas, one has to use cutting-edge tools—platform strategy, rapid experimentation, and systems mapping—to uncover bold, high-value opportunities others miss.
Is it possible to collapse months of strategy work into days, by following a structured sprint workflow where the team moves from ambiguity to clarity, from ideas to actionable strategic priorities in record time?
To succeed requires building an innovation-driven culture with fast learning cycles, problem reframing, and collaborative decision-making.
See the unseen
“Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought,” said Albert Szent- Györgyi.
Basically, there are three types of innovation, according to Clayton Christensen: cost, sustaining and disruptive. Cost innovations reduce [fixed and variable] expenses, while maintaining or improving on quality, sustaining innovations are all the [normal practice] improvements an organisation makes to stay current, just to be able to compete.
Disruptive innovation is the game changer that can transform a company, industry, or non profit. Christensen’s ‘innovators dilemma’ is that managers in corporates are taught to grow existing product lines and maximise profits.
This leads them to missing disruptive innovations that come from small troublesome start-ups on the unseen periphery, not following the traditional ‘by the book’ corporate ways.
It’s likely their innovations may, for instance, at times not work, focus on a small unprofitable niche, or be costly. But with time, history shows that the disruptors, gradually move up the value chain, gobbling up market share and profitability.
Before you know it, the once tiny disruptors are the market leaders, with the sleepy big corporates, bleeding red ink, wondering what happened.
Following disruptive start-up practices, in the strategy – innovation sprint risk is reduced through rapid validation. Aim is to test assumptions early, avoid costly strategy mistakes, and focus resources on what works.
Rapid immediate testing of what works
“At its root, a scrum sprint is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it's actually what people want? And question whether there are any ways to improve how you’re doing what you’re doing, any ways of doing it better and faster, and what might be keeping you from doing that,” advises Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of the scrum method.
A scrum like sprint applied to strategy and innovation is based on the way people really work, not on how they think they work. Aim is to take a step by step approach, breaking the work down into short term goals, with a constant assessment of progress, along with an agile adaptive approach to problem solving. Impact in terms of speed and quality can be seen almost immediately.
Yes, planning is useful but blindly following plans is stupid. “It’s just so tempting to draw up endless charts. All the work needed to be done on a massive project laid out for everyone to see—but when detailed plans meet reality, they fall apart. Build into your working method the assumption of change, discovery, and new ideas” says Sutherland.
Inspect and adapt – is key in the sprint. Every little while, stop doing what you’re doing, review what you’ve done, and see if it’s still what you should be doing and if you can do it better.
Change or die
“Clinging to the old way of doing things, of command and control and rigid predictability, will bring only failure. In the meantime, the competition that is willing to change will leave you in the dust. Fail fast so you can fix early. Corporate culture often puts more weight on forms, procedures, and meetings than on visible value creation that can be inspected at short intervals by users. Work that does not produce real value is madness. Working product in short cycles allows early user feedback and you can immediately eliminate what is obviously wasteful effort,” writes Sutherland.
Much of traditional strategy work and attempts at innovation are often time consuming and wasteful. Scrum sprint co-creator Sutherland states: “When I go into a company, I usually find that about 85 percent of effort is wasted. Only a sixth of any of the work done actually produces something of value. Deep within ourselves, as we repeat the rhythm of our days, we know that’s true.”
