Idea Killers
Posted by Trey Reeme on October 4th, 2007
Guy Messick brought up four Collaboration Killers in his Symposium keynote yesterday; the collaboration Guy was focusing on is related to CUSOs, but I think these four killers apply to any new idea:
- People in your organization who don’t have the time to devote to doing something new.
- People in your organization who don’t adapt well to change.
- People in your organization who don’t want to give up perceived personal power.
- People in your organization who don’t understand the collaboration/idea.
I try to not be one of “those people,” but I always have to work on it.
Case in point, I never wanted us to start Open Source CU.
Two years ago, I didn’t think I’d have the time and didn’t want to change my routine to fit social media into my schedule. I had to get started with my day earlier. I had to get a feed reader. I had to get out of my comfort zone. I had to be transparent about how small our company was/is. But I’m pretty happy that I stuck with it.
This all got me to thinking, what’s the biggest idea killer of all?
“No one else is doing that.”
Idea killer: “we already tried that, and it didn’t work.”
one of the best come-backs I’ve ever heard to that was in a meeting when somebody told the person who said it “you may be right, but this time we’re not going to let you run the effort”
what about “we have no money in the budget for that”?
It took me a while to realize that when my initial reaction to some new idea is visceral opposition, it’s probably a good idea.
Ron, I love that.
I am tired of people who shut down innovation because they don’t understand it or because they didn’t know how to successfully execute the plan.
I don’t think I have the testes to drop that bomb on a client, but you never know what kind of mayhem two cups of Irish coffee might cause.
You’re never hear this officially but…”we are much more concerned with the level of “perceived” disruption than the benefit or gain”
@ Ron – Hilarious. Perfect. So wish I coulda met you this week!
I’m concerned about ROI…and no matter how good you think that calculation may end up, I’m mostly just concerned about keeping the I to a minimum.
One of the biggest innovation killers is when the people involved have not really kept up with technology and advancements, and hence have little framework for considering a new idea.
As an example, when we first added RSS feeds to the Jwaala MoneyTracker product in 2006, many folks we pitched to could not understand the value of this because they never heard of RSS, and I guess had never seen the little orange icons all over the web. And if you have every tried to explain RSS to someone, it is actually pretty difficult since the initial reaction is usually “why not just use email”.
When we do pitch to a group that is familiar with RSS, they immediately get the value of using it as another alerting channel for financial transactions.
Innovation killers come as often from the “innovators” who are unable or unwilling to articulate the intangible and tangible benefits of the proposed innovation. There are tons of interesting and new things done everyday that are not well thought out and do not end up even approaching their required investment by any measure. Some can even have quite negative consequences.
Clearly a controlled leap of faith is warranted in some cases, but time must also be spent to analyze and articulate the expected benefits and planned implementation. New ideas that are not completely understood by the “deciders” (can you believe the knucklehead who actually used that term!) are more difficult to support, but that just means they require more work and creativity to evaluate and articulate.
Of course, when in the process of brainstorming, all ideas should be accepted without prejudice before being subject to the critical evaluation warranted during the selection process.
“No one else is doing that” is the modus operandi at the CU I work for. It’s actually the first thing I’m told when I bring a new idea to the table. “Go find some examples from Wells Fargo or BOFA, etc.” Of course, since I”m trying to be current, there are no examples because they aren’t doing them. Yet.
Perfect example: blogs. I proposed a senior management blog a year and half ago. First, I had to explain just what the hell a blog is. Then I was tasked to find examples, which, a year and half ago, there were none. For that reason, it was shelved. Of course now Wells and others have them and now I’ve been tasked to get one going for our youth section.
Dah!
I just got done speaking to a room of volunteers on blogging. JDV – spent the first 30 minutes explaining what it was.
Then, rather than talking about credit union blogs, I had them think of a blog around THEIR passion, hobby, interests, whatever.
To show that you can blog about anything I brought up (live – I love when conference rooms have wifi) the coolest blog I’ve seen in long time (besides this one of course).
http://burritobracket.blogspot.com/search/label/musings
I explained that it has created quite a bit of buzz in this Chicago neighborhood.
One guy in front was just shaking his head. I asked him what was wrong. “Well,” he said, “I don’t live in a big city so I don’t think that will work. I’m spread out among one big rural county.”
I had to explain the world wide web….....it sounds big but makes life small again. Am I right?
Innovation killer number 354: “Our IT won’t support that.” Being held hostage by your computer system makes no sense!! Isn’t technology supposed to make it easier???
to JDV above…
Exactly, I call this “being granted permission”.
When BofA did pictures and device ids for MFA, the side effect was that they gave “permission” to the whole CU industry to do the same.
Now that they have done optional out of band authentication, once again they have given “permission” to CUs to do the same.
I call it permission because so many CUs think they cannot do something until a big bank does it, which sounds like “permission” to me.
The one thing that kills innovation is control which seems to exist for itself. I saw this in discussions in Indianapolis and Niagra Falls this week. We want to innovate, move forward, become a creative credit union that is responsible to its owners. (we tend to call them members and I wonder why sometimes, owners gets some people upset). The elephant that didn’t get debated was those that want to control. We are an industry that needs controls because of the nature of the business. But the controlling innovative-destroying mindset just makes us weaker. One question I heard about a CU blogging – ...but how would we control the negative comments?...Get over it just like the last speeding ticket.
The biggest innovation killers (in my opinion) are the following:
Cam,
I love your constant calls to action - it’s important to execute on ideas. However, I think it’s still very important to share and discuss ideas even if they’re not always accompanied by an immediate prototype. One of the most frustrating things that I’ve learned from experience over the past few years is that I can’t execute every idea that I have. I’ve tried - the problem is that the next idea always comes around during the middle of the execution of the last one. So I have to pick a few ideas that I can run with and then share the rest of them for the next person to pick up.
And I’m not even close to being the most creative person in the world of CU bloggers! I like the fact that so many people are sharing their ideas, even if they’re just shooting at the moon. I have a feeling that more of those ideas are being executed right now than we know, and those that aren’t probably deserve to die.