Most well-run corporations are a lot like successful symphony orchestras: they have whole sections of people who are highly skilled at playing their instrument (think: marketing, manufacturing, finance, etc.) and at interpreting a score (think: corporate culture) that’s open to interpretation but is nevertheless formalized.
Those ensembles, however, are not designed for improvisation. (Think: innovation.) It’s simply not the skill set they’ve spent years learning and refining. So when a CEO declares that “the company must innovate or be left behind,” and “it’s time to bring innovation in-house,” there’s a structural problem. My musician friends would say, “Dude – that’s a whole ‘nother thang.”
Before I broke down and went to business school, I made my living as a professional musician. (Turning up at MIT and being surrounded by over-achievers was a bit of shock.) To this day, I still perform regularly as a guitarist and singer, and I’ve found there are all sorts of lessons one can take from a good blues jam and apply to innovation.
That’s what led me to develop The Blues-Print for Innovation-a practical framework for thinking about innovation in large organizations.
There are many parallels between an innovative team and a good blues band: they both require a blend of discipline, creativity, domain expertise, collaboration, willingness to take risks, and the resilience to keep playing when the risks lead to dreadful notes. This article outlines that framework. In my keynote presentation, I bring my guitar on stage and weave musical examples into the content. Audiences tell me that the talk is memorable and immediately applicable (translation: not just theory…).
An Important Preface
Before I dive into The Three Pillars of Innovation that I focus on in the talk, there’s a very important caveat: DEVELOPING A SKILL SET TAKES PRACTICE.
The musicians in a symphony orchestra spent years locked away with their instrument. Your manufacturing team spent years training in the five-phase DMAIC approach that’s fundamental to Six Sigma. It’s true across the board.
There are two implications of this:
First, you should not expect to become good at improvisation—or innovation—overnight. It takes time and practice to unlearn old habits and acquire new ones.
Second, we get good at what we practice. If we practice the wrong things then we get good at the wrong things. It’s kind of pointless to unlearn old habits only to replace them with new bad habits.
Let’s talk about the three pillars of innovation. Yes, I know – there’s a lot more to innovation than these three things. But if you get deeply into the weeds and forget these three pillars, I fear for you.
Pillar #1: Understand the Structure
When you introduce a tune to your musical mates at a blues jam, it’s common practice to outline the structure of the tune before you jump into the performance. You might say something like, “It’s a 12-bar medium tempo blues in B minor. The IV chord is Em, then back to the B minor. For the final measures, it’s G major, then F# major, then back to the B minor. It’s called The Thrill is Gone. I’ll count it in.” Then you cross your fingers and jump.
In the corporate environment, there’s a little more to worry about. You must not only understand the structure of the marketplace, but also the structure of your company’s approach to innovation.
In the marketplace, you’ll want to explore basic questions like, “How will we manufacture our product? Where will people expect to buy it, and do we have connections within that supply chain? Are we already known by our customers in this category, or do we have to do some evangelical work in order to make them aware of us?”
However, there’s an equally important structure that you really must understand, and that’s within your company. “Innovation” means “We’re doing something we haven’t done before,” which means, “We’re going to take some risks.” And that means, “Some of our efforts will be unsuccessful, while we figure this out.”
If your innovation team reports to a group that has spent years squeezing the risk out of your operations, they’re going to look at your efforts and say things like, “I don’t know, Charlie – this looks pretty risky to me… I’m a little uncomfortable committing funds to something like this.” If you can’t rewire some of those long-standing habits, your innovative efforts aren’t likely to go very far.
Pillar #2: Pick the Right Collaborators
If you want to play the blues with others, you (and they) have to be able to listen as well as play. You have to absorb what they’re doing while they’re doing it and respond supportively – and do it in real time. It’s a skill that takes time to acquire.
With the wrong collaborators, your jam session is a train wreck. But with the right collaborators, your musical adventure is magic – and the audience knows it when that lightning strikes.
In the corporate context, you’re breaking new ground and almost no one gets it right the first time. The right collaborators will make all the difference. And the characteristics of the right collaborators are the same as they are for playing the blues.
You want:
- Domain expertise – they have to know how to do their part
- The ability to listen at least as well as they play
- A willingness to challenge each other – respectfully and with the goal of creating something great
- You trust each other enough to be comfortable taking risks – sometimes outlandish risks, because sometimes that’s where the real opportunity lies.
- Enough sanity to know when you’ve gone far enough and it’s time to try a different idea
Pillar #3: Read Your Audience
Oh Lord- this is critical for a performing musician.
If the audience wants romantic ballads and you’re playing head-banging heavy metal, your gig will not go well. You have to be able to read the audience as the night goes on. Sometimes you lead them into discovering music they don’t know, and sometimes you respond to their changing mood by modifying what you play.
On a good night, that bond is organic and intuitive. On a bad night, you go home questioning your decision to be a musician. (Yes, I’ve played places where they asked us to be a little quieter so they could hear the TV. It was soul-crushing. Wrong audience for us.)
For an innovation team, the “audience” is of course your customers. If you fall in love with your technology and fail to ask, “Does anybody besides me think this is a good idea?” then you’re in trouble.
It’s so easy to read reports and conclude that your audience needs your technology – “See here – look at all these people who need to lose weight! Our foolproof solution is to sew your lips shut.” It’s not so easy to determine who WANTS your solution badly enough to pay for it repeatedly.
This third pillar is probably the most important of the three, since in many ways, it’s the final determinant of whether or not your innovation (or your musical gig) is a success.
To Summarize
A well-run corporation is much like a symphony orchestra – each group has spent years honing their skills at executing their part of the score, guided by a good conductor. But that skill set is different from the improvisational nature of a blues (or jazz) ensemble.
If your corporation has decided to “bring innovation in-house” and you are part of that effort, you have a great opportunity but also a major task in front of you.
That’s why my keynote presentation, The Blues-Print for Innovation, focuses on just a few core ideas. If you’re going to build a new capability, you need something that can be applied immediately and practiced productively—and something people can actually remember. I’ve found that the best content in the world doesn’t do you any good if it doesn’t stick.
If you take nothing else away, remember these three pillars of innovation:
- Understand the Structure
- Pick the Right Collaborators
- Read the Audience
If you keep those in mind as you navigate the inevitable complexity, you’ll be far more likely to make real progress.