Innovation is not for everyone

I used to work at a big financial news publication. This was one of my first (and only) corporate jobs. I had a journalism degree behind me and was deeply embedded in the Web 2.0 movement. Wordpress had just begun to boom and “citizen journalism” was fast becoming a mainstream reporting practice. Blogs were exploding and the narrative was shifting from journalists covering the news to citizens creating their own publications and putting out their own news.

Said another way: The company I worked for was in trouble and they didn’t know it yet. Their traditional reporting model was fast becoming outdated and their ancient practices were holding them back in the new and immediate world of reporting online.

As a recent hire in the new media department of this publication, I was placed in a cubicle next to the existing website editor. She was a lovely lady in her 50s. It was 2006 so her job was relatively new. Each day she and I would transcribe pieces of content from the main magazine (a weekly publication) to the website. It was a static website without comments, without sharing (because social sharing wasn’t really a thing, hell, Twiitter hadn’t even launched yet) and without any real-time functionality.

This lady, let’s call her Jane, could not see the wood from the trees. Jane was too deeply engaged in a job that she had been doing for too many years to be able to stop, look up and see the changes coming her way. She was grinding on deadlines each day and each week, repetitively completing tasks assigned to her. She was being rewarded by the senior editors for doing a good job, a job that she was trained to do, a job that she knew how to do and a job she had been doing for many years.

Unfortunately, working in the online space meant that her job was evolving faster than she was.

Her salary and bonuses were not dependent on her ability to adapt to the world around her. She was given a task and was rewarded for doing that task effectively. She was not incentivised to creatively problem solve, to be curious or to experiment.

This was a problem that she did not create and thus a solution she could not find, let alone implement.

She was in a position to innovate but was not capable of introducing anything new to create opportunities, grow and evolve the online reporting tools and platform that she had efficiently operated over the past few years.

CURIOSITY

There is research that shows that most people lose a sense of curiosity after just 12 months of doing the job they were hired to do. 12 months is not a long time.

What happens is that people are taught to do their work and generally they are smart enough to understand how to do the job efficiently, effectively and well enough that they are rewarded for completing the tasks every day. They become more efficient every day and are incentivised accordingly.

These are the dedicated, hard-working and dedicated members of a team who keep a business running. These are the very important cogs in a machine that must keep moving to create income and survive. Every business needs these people.

But these are not the innovators.

You cannot ask someone who has been doing a job in a very specific way and who has been rewarded and incentivised in a very specific way to all of a sudden stop doing their work and create an innovative outcome. It is very unlikely that this person is able to read the label from the inside of their own bottle. They are trapped in the bottle and very few are able to climb their way out of the slimy glass walls, out the spout of the bottle and crawl down the side to walk far enough away to read the label and figure out how to change the ingredients.

If you are leading a team right now and expect your hardest working and most trusted long term employees to solve big, hairy, audacious problems then you are in for some trouble. These people can definitely assist in explaining how things currently work but will not be able to introduce completely new business models, revenue lines or ways of working.

Curiosity is the god particle of innovation.

Asking someone who has been doing the same work for five years to all of a sudden discover their curiosity for different ways to do their job is not an easy task. It’s like asking a squirrel to put down its acorn and find a different kind of food. Possible, but very unlikely.

Diversity

One way to spark curiosity is to find a diverse group of highly talented people and assign them the task of thinking about the biggest problems in your organisation.

Let’s go back to Jane and her online media job. I was placed in Jane’s department but given absolutely no power, no ability to experiment, no resources and no internal support. We had the chance to create something innovative, to launch a blog network that allowed our journalists to post frequently, update their articles and engage with our readers but the senior editors could not be moved from their legacy thinking.

We should have hired a diverse group of people who had skills in software development, citizen journalism, new media and front-end website development. We should have been given a small monthly budget to launch new and interesting projects and test out what worked and what did not. We should have been allowed to freely fail and learn from our experiments.

Jane should have been allowed to carry on doing her work as before and maintaining the business in the state that it was until the small skunkworks team had learned verifiable lessons to implement on the main website.

INNOVATION IS NOT AN ACTION

Innovation is an outcome.

Innovative outcomes are achieved when diverse and highly skilled people are given budget, freedom and time to experiment. These people must be allowed to be curious, inefficient, and to build, test, learn and fail while iterating and building more robust solutions.

There is no straight line to creating innovative outcomes and allowing people the freedom to be curious is scary and not always the most efficient way to build the future but without a doubt, this is the most effective way if your organisation is committed to continually creating innovative outcomes over a prolonged period of time.

One-Trick Pony

I’m a curious person.

I’m also an obsessive person.

This combination can be magical but also infuriating.

Magical because I explore everything and anything that interests me. I mean it when I say that. I can’t turn my brain off. The other day, for no good reason, I investigated the history of peanut butter. Turns out that peanut butter has a reasonably interesting history tied to the Incas and Dr Kellogg, yes the cereal guy. Outside of being interesting the peanut butter research was pretty useless. I abandoned the article and wasted about 2 hours of my day.

Which brings me to the infuriating part of my curiosity. Sometimes I go wide and then I go a bit wider and then after a few hours I’ve found myself on an obscure Reddit page in the depths of the Internet about a psychedelic trip report focused on hallucinations that people share across locations and time. It can get weird.

My obsession with curiosity also extends to a podcast that I host called the Curious Cult. Recently one of my guests gifted me a phrase that I didn’t know I was looking for. She told me that sometimes you have to investigate your curiosity along a horizontal plane and sometimes you need to investigate along a vertical plane.

Sometimes you need to go wide and sometimes you need to go deep.

But therein lies an interesting conundrum; when do you choose to dive into a specific topic? This is one of the most interesting questions I ask on my podcast and the answer is almost universally the same. Most guests will tell me that they go deep when the absolutely can’t stop themselves. They become obsessed. They just can’t bring themselves to move on. The curiosity grips them and they must know more about the particular topic of interest.

Obsession and curiosity are intimately tied together but often we force ourselves to move on because we believe that our obsession verges on strange, odd or useless.

I don’t remember a world without the Internet. I was ten years old when I first connected to the web and since then I have learned and relearned one universal truth: There is something out there for everyone online.

Your strange curiosity about Italy and all things Italian might feel strange because you live in Djibouti. But it’s precisely this odd interest that sets you apart. Your wide curiosity which differs from the people around you makes you interesting. Embrace it, go deep and lose yourself in it and then emerge and apply the lessons you’ve learned to your own context.

The smashing together of unexpected things sets people apart.

My random deep-dive into the history of peanut butter may not have been practically useful but it really did engage me for a few hours.

What are you smashing together? Comment and tell me about your strangest curiosity and how it has changed your life. I’d LOVE to hear about them all!

Explore your curiosity horizontally and when something inspires or intrigues you don’t be shy to dive in vertically and spend time exploring. Sure, my peanut butter article didn’t amount to anything but I do know that it was invented more than 3500 years ago and that’s pretty cool.

Rapelang Rabana - EP 08 OF THE CURIOSITY CULT SHOW

Rapelang Rabana is one of Africa’s most impressive entrepreneurs. She was a curious child who grew into an obsessive entrepreneur. She read voraciously and turned her curiosity into the need to build solutions to big problems.

Apologies for the sound in this recording!

Rapelang Rabana is one of Africa's most impressive entrepreneurs. She was a curious child who grew into an obsessive entrepreneur. She read voraciously and turned her curiosity into the need to build solutions to big problems. Apologies for the sound in this recording. I'll do better next episode!

Greg Smithies - Ep 06 of the Curious Cult Show

Greg Smithies is currently a partner at BMW's i Ventures where he invests in Hardware, Software, and Sustainability applied to unsexy industries. Before i Ventures Greg headed Finance and Operations for both The Boring Company and Neuralink simultaneously; headed finance, sales, and business development for Versive; and was an early- and late-stage investor at Battery Ventures, an ~$8 Billion Venture Capital & Private Equity fund.

Greg Smithies and I have a long-standing online friendship. He’s called me out on LinkedIn in when I talk shit. He’s helped me meet investors when trying to raise funding and we’ve had some very interesting debates and conversations over the years.

Greg is a talented venture capitalist, CFO and startup-spotter. He has worked with Elon Musk at The Boring Co and has invested in some of the most innovative businesses in the world.

At present Greg is looking for trillion dollar businesses to invest in. That’s a business with the entire world as an addressable market.

In this episode I talk with Greg about growing up in South Africa and taking his skills to a global market. How one finds a trillion dollar business and how, exactly, he manages to stay in front of his curiosity. SPOLIER: He believes in a bit of balance and prefers founders who can actually live a relatively normal life.

IT’S ALIVE! The Curious Cult Show Podcast Launches

For a long time, I have enjoyed talking to smart people about interesting things. My background, aside from building businesses, is actually journalism and I love interviewing people to extract their genius for others to hear.

This year I decided that I was going to start writing my next book. The topic of the book is curiosity and more specifically how curiosity leads to innovation in the workplace.

So I set out to interview some of the most interesting people I could find.

I’m really excited about The Curious Cult Podcast. Each episode features a person that I wanted to speak to and each episode also serves as research for the book which is coming out in February 2021.

In the first episode, I talk to the founder of Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins about his curiosity and how it led the creation of one of the largest gaming empires in the world.

Trip Hawkins is an incredibly accomplished entrepreneur who has a vast breadth of skills and depth of experience. He is the founder and first CEO of Electronic Arts, was crowned "King of the Nerds" by the Economist, he designed, produced and marketed his first game while still a teenager and at that young age mapped out a 10-year plan that lead him to found Electronic Arts.

Head over to my podcast page and subscribe using your favourite platform.

The show is available on all the major platforms and I’ll be launching a new episode every week for the foreseeable future.

A shameless punt: if you listen to and like the episodes that are available, please leave a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify or anywhere else you can!