Innovative: The Joy of Disappointment
Disappointment – failure – sunk cost.
What happens when my innovative product or service doesn’t meet expectations? How do I respond to the eye rolls and cutting criticisms against me and the innovation I was trying to create?
This may be the most important blog post of this series – simply because data shows that most innovations never make it past the “attempted” stage.
Maybe the innovative product didn’t work as hoped. Maybe the new service was too far beyond the target market’s comfort zone. Maybe I will never really know why the innovation fell flat.
How do I respond to an innovation that became a “ho-hum” product or a dismal failure?
Here’s what we do. We cut and paste a section from my previous post on overwhelming successful innovations. Yes, that’s right, we take the success playbook, and, with very little modification, we run it.
Watch how this works:
So, what do you do when everyone nobody wants to participate in your innovation?
You celebrate. So often, we focus too much on what we have defined as success. Any failure to achieve that nebulous goal causes us sorrow and grief first. But, instead of grief, what should be first? Celebration:
Celebrate that you were willing to innovate. Pushing the envelop and being creative are powerful positive contributors to personal and business success.
Separate the effort from the result. Find what you did well. Highlight the extra efforts and creativity. A failure endured in spite of a strong effort is far more valuable than a victory won with little effort.
You grieve. There is a loss. A dream didn’t become reality. Take the time to grieve. Grief is an emotion and it needs its own space. If grief invades any of the other steps, it can quickly become blame. Grief is an honest emotion. Blame is a toxic poison.
You look deep into your heart.
Why did you develop this innovation? Was it to be unique or to transform normal?
How much of your identity is wrapped up in this innovation?
Do you have the courage to modify or drop your innovation so that a new innovation can rise from its ashes?
You brainstorm like crazy. This is where the ashes of failure can become the fertilizer for new and better innovations. Brainstorm:
Where did this innovation have strengths? Is there a market for those strengths?
What caused the innovation not to meet expectations? Were those expectations accurate?
What gems are hiding in the feedback from the failure that may be the seeds to either redeploy this innovation or to launch a new innovation?
You keep growing. Innovation doesn’t just grow new products and services – it grows new qualities in you, too. Keep growing and stretching. This has been one failure. You have celebrated the good things in it. You have grieved the loss it brought you. Now you can brainstorm for new innovations. Keep growing. Life is a long-distance race. Each time around the track is another conquest, but victory comes to the one who makes it to the end of the race!
Don’t just keep going; keep growing
An Example: The Post-it Note
I think everyone already knows the story of the 3M Post-it Note. However, like any timeless story, we need to revisit it often as it contains powerful lessons for us.
Here is a link to the story on the Post-it.com website:
https://www.post-it.com/3M/en_US/post-it/contact-us/about-us/
I have found some significant guidance as I have read the Post-it Note story over the years:
Create an innovative environment: I found this point in the book, Built to Last (James C. Collins, Jerry Porras © 1994 Harper Collins). William McKnight had taken over a failed mining company. He quietly built an innovation incubator. Its first innovation to glue crushed mining slag to paper – making sandpaper. The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (now known as 3M) would go from that humble beginning to create probably thousands of failed innovations – and hundreds of amazing products we use daily.
Don’t throw away the failure: Dr. Spencer Silver was trying to develop a strong adhesive. The adhesive he created was weak. It stuck but could easily be pulled off again without damaging the surface it had adhered to. Dr. Silva could have thrown away his failed adhesive product. It didn’t have the strong hold he was trying to develop. But it was innovative, and he thought there might be a use for it. So, he kept it.
Be persistent: There was a six-year gap between the invention of the temporary adhesive and the first potential use case for it. For those six years, Dr. Silver kept trying to find use cases. He put it out to others in the innovation incubator at 3M. It was one of his coworkers, Arthur Fry, who found the first use case – sticky bookmarks.
Don’t despise or miss the small victories: The first use case was as a sticky bookmark in a choir book. Then, they found that they tended to write notes on these sticky paper tabs. So, they made them bigger. Then they began to use these re-stickable notepads within 3M. Each of these small victories refined and developed the innovative product in small steps – even before it had its public launch.
I love the story on the Post-it.com website even though it understates a few things. On the 1980-1986 section, it declares “A Star is Born”. The Post-it Note star was actually born in 1968 in the form of a failed adhesive experiment. It’s first glimmer of light happened in 1974 as a choir book bookmark. It wasn’t an “overnight success” until the 1980’s – oh, but what a success!!