My experience and observation of innovation cultures has led me to classify approaches to driving innovation in two broad categories, which the title of this post rather obliquely refers to.
One approach is characterized by a focus on creating major breakthroughs, the giant leaps forward, which typically involve creating some form of deliberate organizational tension, much like a catapult, and then releasing it to propel the subject forward. I have heard this referred to as riding the roller-coaster, plumbing the dark and uncomfortable depths of a downward arc, sticking with it, and then hurtling back up at a dizzying speed and going way beyond any height we could have scaled through an incremental ascent from ground level.
This approach is suited in a context where practices are heavily entrenched in established ways of working and thinking – a culture that is change averse. In such contexts, a roller coaster creates the means of breaking out of orbit – to mix metaphors. The challenge in this approach is that while it creates epiphanies and flashes of brilliance, the fact that it has been done in such extraordinary ‘lab conditions’ of engineered discomfort means that it takes a lot of painstaking interventions to incubate it and bring it to life. This in turn implies an almost constant reliance on consultants, and a sense of “being done to” in mystic charades which such engineered conditions run the risk of feeling like.
This is the culture of the oracle mind, of concentrated cognition and control. It calls for orchestration, and lends itself well to the organization becoming consultant-captive, because every breakthrough needs the finest delicacy to carry through. Organizations that subscribe to this school tend to have highly-strung cultures, marked by a boiler-room intensity, where the clanging din of operations can only be drowned out by something so big and fantastic that it takes a tour de force to engineer. These kinds of organizations do their prototyping with sleek and stunning models.
Another approach to innovation involves incremental and seemingly mundane steps, driven by a constant childlike excitement and wonder about what is possible and what lies beyond. Here, the fuel is a mindset of constant exploration and a culture of looking at the 1% possibility of success rather than the 99% possibility of failure. However, for this kind of intellectual and cultural mobility, the company needs to feel more secure that its fundamentals (values, cultural norms) are anchored well, and that it will not become existentially and strategically confused by constant tinkering and tampering. It needs a predictable and reliable infrastructure.
This is the culture of the hive mind, of distributed cognition and control. This school creates more self-reliant companies, not dependent nearly as much on consultants. Also, I believe this type of innovation is more fun in the making, as it is about serendipity. It calls for a relaxed culture, where loose guidance and little baby steps result in big breakthroughs. This approach prototypes with straw men – cheap and rough models, that are played with until they get the design right.
To crudely and rather unimaginatively illustrate the two approaches, one can think of sitting blindfolded in the bedroom of a house wanting to step out into the street. You take many baby steps, none being particularly purposeful individually, but guided with a broad aspiration to move out of the house, and feeling your way forward. At some point you are standing on the doorway, and then you just take one more little baby step, and lo and behold you are out on the street. The other approach is to stay in the bedroom, run a few steps in a direction you think the window might be and leap headlong as far as you can go, hoping you crash through things and end up on the street – which you might well do, but not without a headache, or even a broken limb or two.
So where does my cute metaphor of aphids and elephants come in? It’s a little bit of a stretch. In one moribund tradition of evolutionary biology, there is a concept called r/K selection, which suggests that in determining the traits to “select” in the evolutionary journey, species focus on either increased quantity of offspring at the expense of individual parental investment, or reduced quantity of offspring with a corresponding increased parental investment. Aphids focus on quantity (the “r” in the r/K model), which occurs to me to be loosely synonymous with the incremental step model of innovation. Biological “innovation” here takes place through distributed fecundity, rapid-fire mutations, experiments, and variations. Elephants use the “K” model, where innovation takes place through a few big bets.
From a user standpoint, I’m with the aphids. While the metaphor is not very inspiring, to a participant in that ecosystem the incremental model feels like a hothouse of ideas, a sense of empowerment, and effortlessness – so you’re not just having fun after the innovation, but also in every step of the way there.
Notes to Self 
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