I’m a huge fan of the Marvel Universe driven movies and TV series that have emerged from the dusty archives to modern updated looks and characters. One of the reasons for their immense popularity is that the storytelling is fiction that is so relatable to real life.
Yes, there are superpowers and out-of-this-world special effects. There are also very human plot lines and flawed people gaining immense capabilities to create massive, world-changing events on a global scale.
It turns out that these series can also be very useful in helping us think about breakout growth programs. By taking a look at the arc of these well-crafted stories, we can extract valuable perspectives, takeaways and tips for implementing these programs in our firms.
Let’s put our superheroes to work.
In our firms, organic growth is often initiated by “heroic” leaders. We define these leaders by those willing to find the extra time it takes to form a valuable new way to serve the firm, even though they have a great day job. They are driven to get up early and work late to serve the client, and to do the hard work of finding a way to rally the firm to adopt and scale.
Let’s pivot to a typical episode and see what we can learn.
In our Marvel shows, the episode starts with context setting and some introductory banter with our team and their close confidants. They are usually cleaning up after the last event that nearly ended the human race, and high fiving each other about the great work they did.
Then the new villain arrives on the scene. This is usually a challenge the team has not had to face before, and initially it usually hands them an early defeat. This forces the team to reach deep and rally to come up with a new solution – a new way of using their superpower that will allow them to defeat their new foe. The episode then shows the team in triumphant action, followed by the epilogue, which almost always ends highlighting some long-term negative consequence that using the superpower is creating. In Iron Man, it’s the corruption of his circulation system. In the Flash, it’s the negative effects of time travel. There is always some irreconcilable issue they are all quietly facing.
A Process to Avoid the Epilogue
Our growth projects tend to follow a similar trajectory. We start out with our core team and a piece of deeply held customer insight (our client is infected with a “villain”). An issue is keeping our client from achieving their needs and we are the ones to solve it.
And guess what, we tend to fall into the same “early win” trap. In working with many product and service teams, you would be surprised how often groups quickly get locked on to the first idea and move to what I call the optimization spiral. The optimization spiral is that work that takes a new idea and completely perfects the fine details and readies it for high volume mass production. This is a capability we have taken years to build into our enterprises – and we are good at it.
Because as human beings we want to quickly move to our zone of competence, we short cycle understanding the nuances of how our solution actually plays in the life of our client and move on to the “how of” scale. These teams move quickly from the internally-generated solution to the “how” of implementing it at scale. They create a virtual or paper solution that appears to fill the need as it’s presented to them. The next step they jump to is how to improve it, and they get to work making it more robust.
This leads to short cycling the work of real field testing. It is hard work to get outside the building and trace the path from your work all the way to the market and the real life of the humans your new idea serves.
Just as our superhero team tends to jump to use their extraordinary powers, our firms too want to apply their optimization super power too early. This leads to a great story arc as it set up next episode in the series. Our work as innovators however is to solve our clients issues in a way that does not lead to the need for “serial heroic events”. There is an old adage that a superior pilot flies in a way that doesn’t call for the use of his superior skills – in other words great innovation work involves anticipating exposing the unintended consequences.
A useful process that I share with clients to do the hard work of the “reality finding” is the STRIDE process – see posts here, here and here. The key takeaway is that you need to put in the work in the front end of the project to carefully and completely understand that full impact of the project on your client and firm, with the full expectation that reality is going to bring you unanticipated inputs and clarity. Building in a robust, efficient discovery system enables you to set realistic goals for the team,communicate better with your leaders and use resources well.
And yes, a well structured reality phase keeps us from having those sinister issues pop up after we think we’ve got the new product or service in play. Many great firms find themselves on the wrong side of this issue and wind up with recalls and expensive in the field fixes.
Embracing the Reality
The truth is that if there is no learning coming forward from working with production, distribution, sales and the client you may not have reached out beyond your current boundaries. The most significant and long lived intellectual property (IP) is always found during the hard work of implementation to scale. Those are the patents, trade secrets and know how that place your group and firm sustainably ahead of the pack.
If you’d like to develop the rich IP that comes with a well-structured learning phase, it would be good to talk. There are many small tactical decisions that make what I have described above work – and it’s the kind of thing I help with during my coaching, speaking and consulting work. If you’d like to talk just give me a call at (847) 651-1014 or use this link to set up a 20-minute, (no-strings-attached) consult.
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