The Emergent Possible

originally published in Research-Technology Management

After facilitating a strategy retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I had six hours before my flight to hike in the Grand Tetons National Park. For my first visit ever to the park, I consulted the Internet, hotel staff, and a park ranger to plan the perfect loop, a route that  promised to bring me close to the Snake River, provide the chance to see some wildlife and views of the iconic Teton Range, and get me back to the airport with time to spare.

Ten minutes into my walk, that plan went out the window. Around every bend, the trail brought new animals to see, incredible vistas of the mountains, and beautiful pictures to take. Again and again, I deviated from my route to see better or to get that perfect picture. I was the last one on the plane; I dropped into my seat sweaty and mosquito bitten but immensely happy after a frantic run back to my car at the end of the trail. My perfectly designed plan was replaced just after my first steps into the unknown, and the result was beyond anything I could have expected.

I was reminded of this experience recently at a workshop where participants were asked to “backcast”—work back to the present from a future vision. It’s a technique NASA used to get to the Moon, an exercise meant to show how a difficult goal can be achieved by starting at its completion and figuring out what has to happen just prior to that success. The imagination of the moment just prior to a success is repeated multiple times, all the way back to the present state. One participant challenged the exercise, arguing (correctly) that each milestone in innovation can open up entirely new possibilities that were not imaginable before. Starting from a predetermined future end state could force convergence to a plan before better, not-yet-visible possibilities can be explored.

In other words, the future is very much like my first trip to the Tetons— you can research, talk to experts, and build a plan, but understanding how things will really go before you experience it is impossible.

For some companies with significant success in innovation, that acknowledgement is enough. Confident from taking chances in the past, they boldly commit resources to new products, customers, or business models. Knowing they cannot predict the challenges or opportunities ahead of them, they adopt short development cycles and bring their customers in early to learn. These build- test-learn loops continue, with course changes along the way, until the product or service is at scale.

This is the Lean Startup methodology that has begun revolutionizing corporate innovation processes. Propagated by Eric Ries and Steve Blank beginning in 2008 and growing as a movement through the Startup Lessons Learned Conference in 2010 (later called the Lean Startup Conference), the concept combines approaches from Lean manufacturing, Agile software development, and customer development. It has now been adopted by hundreds of companies, from startups to industry heavy- weights, which use the methodology to sense consumer needs and find the best ways to serve those needs. Procter & Gamble and GE have both embraced Lean Startup to counteract the new niche players stealing market share and growth (Lashinksy 2018).

It may seem odd in a column on foresight to tout the successes of a Lean innovation methodology that eschews long- term plans, instead advocating that users just start, test, and be ready to pivot. But foresight can support Lean methodologies in important ways. It can improve the ability to sense ideas beyond immediate market needs and lay the foundation to sustain organizational commitment to very large and new endeavors that require patience and long-term investment—and many pivots.

SENSING THE BIGGER OPPORTUNITY

In “Killing the Official Future,” I wrote about the dangers of not challenging an organization’s current mental model about the fundamentals of the market and industry (Crews 2015). People inside organizations harbor assumptions about their business, assumptions that can lead them to miss important new developments because they unconsciously reject or adjust new information to fit those assumptions. Moving into Lean Startup mode without questioning those assumptions means companies are building new products, services, and business models based on old data. The result can be a large migration to incremental innovation. While companies are shaving years off the process of scaling products to market and reducing the impact of failures by recognizing them before they make significant investment, they may be missing entirely new ways to create value for customers. Foresight can help sense these new opportunities and identify what customers and what value propositions to test with a Lean Startup approach.

A famous psychology experiment proves this point. Researchers showed participants a video of people passing a basketball and asked them to count how many passes one team completed. In the middle of the video, a woman dressed in a gorilla costume walks through the players, at one point dancing in the middle of the screen, before exiting. In all, the gorilla-wearing dancer was in full view for a full nine seconds (DiSalvo 2010). Incredibly, 40 percent of participants never saw the gorilla; they were totally focused on counting the passes. While the experiment was intended to illustrate the phenomenon of selective inattention, it also shows how focus on a known task can blind you to the unexpected.

Foresight, by forecasting novel implications of today’s trends and juxtaposing seemingly unrelated trends to discover new sources of change, can open the view of the organization to some of those new opportunities to serve customers, at least some of which are likely to be very different from the company’s existing model. The value propositions of these new opportunities can then be tested with Lean methodologies, allowing the organization to grow entirely new businesses.

LEAPING THE CHASM

Of course, some innovation is not amenable to Lean methodologies. David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War I, said that “there is nothing more dangerous than to leap a chasm in two jumps” (Lewis 1941). Some things, some innovation projects, cannot be done in steps. To make those leaps, the organization must have a shared belief in the future and enough conviction about the opportunity to commit significant resources. Some companies with a record of success and an innovation mindset can make these jumps relatively quickly. Bell Labs famously approved funding to pursue the most important scientific advancement of the 20th century, the transistor, based on a one-page request (Allison 1969). Today, companies such as Google, Nike, and Apple are accustomed to inventing the future and are comfortable taking large innovation risks. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has institutionalized its comfort with risk by creating an enterprise devoted to moonshots (Thompson 2017). But many companies need a vision and a clear bridge back from the moonshot to today to commit resources. This kind of project might be an acquisition to allow entrance into a transformative new space, pursuit of a promising technological product break- through, or reorganization of your business to make it fit to purpose for the future—for instance, the commitment to becoming a digital enterprise, from embracing digital product creation on the front end of innovation, to smart, connected manufacturing and machine learning–enabled marketing and business models out to the consumer. Some companies facing the leap to digital try to start with pilots across the innovation value chain, but truly understanding the impact on the business requires a larger commitment of time, money, and processes. As a result, these companies end up stuck in what McKinsey calls “Pilot Purgatory,” with little transformative impact to show for the effort (Behrendt et al. 2018).

Foresight can be the bridge out of that purgatory (or the guard against ending up there in the first place), by helping build the shared view of the future and organizational alignment around the opportunity the company needs to make the big leap. Like NASA’s use of backcasting, organizations can start with the vision of the end state— for instance, the fully digital enterprise—and build a path back to the present. Once the journey has begun, Lean Startup methods can be used to test consumer sentiment along the way or help pivot the investment.

THE EMERGENT POSSIBLE

Whether a company starts small and reassesses progress at each milestone of the innovation process or takes a leap that requires a major upfront investment, the path will be unpredictable. Foresight does not grant the power to predict. But for both types of innovation, it provides a unique ability to sense and react to the future as it unfolds.

For Lean Startup approaches that take small steps in build-test-learn iterative cycles, thinking ahead ensures the official future does not obscure opportunities when they emerge. For moon- shots, it builds the organizational will to see through the assumptions of the present to what is possible and go after entirely new ways to create value. A formal process for thinking ahead is essential for whatever type of innovation a company chooses to undertake.

REFERENCES

Allison,    D.    1969.    The   R&D  Game.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Behrendt, A., Kelly, R., Rettig, R., and

Stoffregen, S. 2018. How digital manufacturing can escape “pilot purgatory.” McKinsey, July. https://www.mckinsey. com/business-functions/operations/ our-insights/how-digital-manufacturing- can-escape-pilot-purgatory

Crews, C. 2015. Killing the official future. Futures Praxis. Research-Technology Management 58(3): 59–60.

DiSalvo, D. 2010. Did you see the gorilla? An Interview with Psychologist Daniel Simons. Psychology Today, August 15. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/neuronarrative/201008/did-you-see-the-gorilla-interview-psychologist-daniel-simons-2

Lashinsky, A. 2018. How the Lean Startup turned Eric Ries into an unlikely corporate guru. Fortune, February 22. http://fortune.com/2018/02/22/lean-startup-eric-ries/

Lewis, F. L. 1941. Design for Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Thompson, D. 2017. Google X and the science of radical creativity. Atlantic Monthly, November. https://www.the-atlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/x-google- moonshot-factory/540648/