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L16. Why Companies Do “Innovation Theater” Instead of Actual Innovation -…

- - - - HR processes, legal processes, financial processes, acquisition and contracting processes, security processes, product development and management processes, and organizational forms etc. All of these are great strategies and tools that business schools build, and consulting firms help implement.
        
        Process is great when you live in a world where both the problem and solution are known. Process helps ensure that you can deliver solutions that scale without breaking other parts of the organization.
        
        These processes reduce risk to an overall organization, but each layer of process reduces the ability to be agile and lean and most importantly responsive to new opportunities and threats.
- - - - The result of monopolist behavior is that innovation in that sector dies until technology/consumer behavior passes them by. By then the company has lost the ability to compete as an innovator.
        
        Many agencies outsource product development to private contractors, leaving the government with mostly process people who write requirements, and oversee acquisition, program management, and contracts.
        
        However, when the government is faced with new adversaries, new threats, or new problems, both the internal process people as well as the external contractors are loath to obsolete their own systems and develop radically new solutions.
        
        For the contractors, anything new threats, the real risk of losing a lucrative existing stream of revenue.
        
        For the process people, because the status quo is a known and comfortable space, if the contract and contractor are large enough, they put their thumb on the scale and use the political process and lobbying to maintain the status quo.
        
        The result is that legacy systems live on as an albatross and an impediment to making the country safer and more secure.
- - - - These activities shape and build culture, but they don’t win wars, and they rarely deliver shippable/deployable product.
    - - Efforts to reform and recast these are well meaning, but without an overall innovation strategy it’s like building sandcastles on the beach.
    - - The consultants reorganize the company (surprise!), often from a functional organization into a matrixed organization.
        
        The reorg keeps everyone busy for a year, perhaps provides new focus on new regions or targets, but in the end is an inadequate response to the need for rapid innovation for product.
        
        The result is process theater.
        For most large organizations these reorgs, activities, and reforms don’t increase revenue, profit or market share for companies, nor do they keep our government agencies ahead of our adversaries. One can generously describe them as innovation dead ends.
- - - - Large organizations lack shared beliefs, validated principles, tactics, techniques, procedures, organization, budget, etc. to explain how and where innovation will be applied and its relationship to the rapid delivery of new product.