You Know Too Much to Innovate

Innovation comes from beginners, so are you enabling them?

There’s a paradox in leadership that I see ignored by too many managers that absolutely stifles innovation. The simple fact is that the more experienced and knowledgable you become on a topic or industry or your own company, the less equipped you are to be truly innovative. Read that again and let it sink in.

Here’s what you might be thinking:

“But how can that be possible? I’m at the top of my game and I’ve seen it all. I know what works and what doesn’t and have learned some hard lessons. Surely if anyone is in a position to come up with something new, it’s got to be me.”

Let’s pick that apart a bit.

“I know what works and what doesn’t”

This might be true, but likely it’s not. Implied in here is that you know everything that might work and might not work, which is obviously impossible. You only know about the things you’ve tried, which again, can’t be everything. And in the event you’ve tried a lot of things, you likely haven’t objectively evaluated everything about them in a systemic way such that you can apply really good lessons based on data and not past, gut experiences or memory.

“…if anyone is in a position to come up with something new, it’s got to be me.”

There’s so much wrong here that I’m not sure where to start (besides the fact that this is an absurdly arrogant statement that if you said out loud would likely have people running in the other direction). The base assumption here is that because you know the market, the customers, the product, etc…you have to know what else is going to work well. That is a false assumption. IF you actually knew this, my question would be why you haven’t done it already?

The bigger assumption that’s made is that just because you’re the expert in how things are NOW doesn’t mean you’re the expert in how things COULD be. That’s the part that too many leaders and companies miss.

Story time. Way back in the day, I worked in sales and marketing for a big pharma company. When I was at the big pharma company, we worked with agencies that ONLY worked on pharma marketing. That’s all they did. The predictable result was that every bit of pharma marketing looks the same. I wrote about this in the past in an article called “The Bizarre Consistency of Pharma TV Commercials.” Heck…creating a pharma TV commercial is so formulaic that I even created a tool to make your own! (https://dose.co/dtc/). I then transitioned to a digital agency that did a little bit of healthcare, but mainly consumer products (think: Pringles, Bounty, etc…P&G was a big client).

The argument for using these agencies was that “they know pharma.” What everyone really met was that they know all the regulations around pharma marketing. But anyone can learn those rules…they aren’t complicated. When I led new business at the digital agency, that became my pitch. We have people that know the rules (like me), but the people actually coming up with ideas know nothing about the rules. They know nothing about what’s ever been done in pharma marketing. They DO know consumer marketing and have to regularly come up with wildly creative ideas to sell paper towels and detergent. So, that was the message: “Get the team who works on Pringles to come up with ideas, but with a bit of supervision from someone who knows the rules.”

And we won some big accounts. When we brought our first ideas, what do you think the reaction was? Right! “We’ve never seen anything like this!” Of course they hadn’t because they’ve seen the same things from the same agencies and same people over and over. And all those people ever looked at was more pharma marketing leading to very predictable results.

This might seem like a really obvious example, but it parallels pretty much every company. You put people in charge of innovation (including yourself) who are experts in a narrow area. Instead, bring in beginners. It might seem counterintuitive, but it will work. You only need to give broad guardrails and make direction tweaks along the way, but let these people come up with your new ideas.

It means you have to look honestly at yourself and how your teams are set up in order for this to work. Just admit you might not be the best source of innovation and then find the people that could be. Look to “beginners” that you can find among your more junior team members. Look for people from other industries who recently moved to your company. Look for people in different teams in your company who don’t know the “rules” (e.g., product teams looking at what sales teams do).

But do it today before it’s too late.

Jonathan Richman (your friendly author) has spent more than 25 years learning hard lessons about business (and life) across multiple industries and all sorts of different roles. His latest endeavor is the full-service automation agency, Obvify.