The Breakthrough

I kicked off a table-top session at work about innovation this past week. I wasn’t going to post the transcript but a follower on TikTok just asked a question about future-casting so I thought it might be useful to him. Note that I edited out anything specific to my company. The rest of you can ignore this post. :)

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When I think of innovation, I think of an old comfortable house.

Each room in that house is built around one idea--it could be tech... it could be a process... but whatever it is, each room solves a problem.

You walk into that old comfortable house every mornin'. You walk up to your room . Your team's there. It's well furnished, well decorated. There's hot coffee. It's actually kind of comforting.

The only problem-- and it never seems like a problem-- is that there are no other doors or windows in that room you work in. Just the one you came thru.

If you want to let some light in, you're gonna have to tear into a wall.

If you have young kids, you know that they love windows. It's not just the light. It's the idea of possibilities. And what children know-- especially my boys because they're terrors-- is that rippin' a hole in a wall (just to get some light or a chance at goin' outside)-- rippin that hole isn't a crime in our house. It's like drawing on the wall. It's play. It's encouraged.

Well. That all got me thinkin'.

A while back [the founders of our company] built a tiny little house. A small comfortable place. That a bunch of people from your past-- our past-- grew into a larger, more comfortable, better-decorated old house. FIlled with people you want to be with.

You and your teams show up every day to one of those rooms… [And]

The important part is that you've probably spent most of your career decorating that room or one like it… when the best possible decoration would be a window or better yet, a second door... to a new room.

That's innovation.

It's you tearing down a wall or two. Not to be destructive. But for the light. For the chance at play. To leave your mark by helping build a bigger, more comfortable house.

So what we need to figure out-- together— is how we're going to grow this house. Which walls are we going to tear down?

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Two steers from me on this exercise. The first is the same one I give my boys [my sons]-- don't worry about the walls in your sibling's room. What do you want to do with your walls?

And steer #2: remember that there's a reason it's called a breakthrough.