Too much consistency kills innovation

The consistency / innovation spectrum

In any organisation, there is a natural tension between innovation and consistency. It is important that both are understood and embraced to maximise their value. Using one approach to the exclusion of the other will lead to sub-optimal results both in the short and long term. Your organisation or team is always somewhere along the spectrum. Being too far left (consistent) or too far right (innovative) may harm your business.

Finding the right balance between the two will deliver optimal results for your organisation, allowing it to optimise costs, and maximise future revenues from new and innovative services/products at the same time. It is not that easy though, and requires constant vigilence, attention and care.

Consistency

Definition: Always behaves in the same way or achieves the same level of success and delivers the same result with known inputs every time.

Consistency is all about satisfying expectations in the present. Consistency never exceeds expectations.

Consistency is:

• Always using the same development process / patterns
• Mandating one set of tools for your development teams
• Mandating architecture practises e.g. always use event driven architecture to the exclusion of everything else.

Consistency delivers conformity. Everything looks, feels and behaves the same. Conformity is the enemy of innovation.

Innovation is very rarely driven out of consistent processes.

Innovation

Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that results in the introduction of new services, or significantly enhances existing services for an organisation.

Innovation is all about guaranteeing the longevity of an organisation and exceeding expectations in the future. Innovation always breaks consistent patterns i.e., they break the “we have always done it that way” process.

Innovation is driven out of culture, freedom for teams to explore all possibilities without the fear of failure and is the product of happy teams. Grumpy people do not innovate.

When/What to use

All organisations need both consistency and innovation. Depending where they are on the product lifecycle will require both in varying degrees.

For example, at the beginning of the product lifecycle, innovation will be key, and consistency will slow progress. Teams need the ability to try new things, fail or succeed and carry those learnings forward. With a consistent approach the team would only use processes and techniques previously used, and therefore all results/outcomes would be the same as previous attempts.

If a team is given true ownership from the beginning, then they are free to try new novel approaches, which may deliver improved outcomes over the consistent approach.

Further along the product lifecycle, consistency will be key, and innovation will take a backseat. There will still be innovation, it is just that it will now be at a feature level, rather than on the whole product. If innovation were embraced too tightly at this stage, the team would be changing the foundations of the product, and therefore potentially destabilising anything built upon the foundations. This would also lead to variable durations and cost when producing estimates for the work to be done.

Consistency will make clients happy as they know what to expect, and when. Consistency allows the teams to provide better indicative costs and timescales for features and is the sign of a stable mature product.

It would be nigh impossible to provide predictable, achievable timescales and costs at the beginning of the piece of work, as there are too many unknowns in the work and/or variables.

When and how to encourage consistency

Consistency is required to build trust in the process, the team, and the vision of the product.

Trust is the currency which will see the team weather the inevitable rough seas of software development and allow the team to innovate and build in a secure space.

If a team is highly trusted, then they create a space where they can experiment and fail, and this process is accepted and understood by the business as worthwhile investment.
In an environment where there is no trust, every misstep is over analysed, and ownership is taken away from the team. This is the type of environment where people do not thrive and is toxic to the work culture.

So how do the team build this trust in themselves? We build repeatable, consistent, repeatable processes that guarantee consistency and allow for expected outcomes. For example, most teams will use automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes which ensures consistency in test and release of the software product.

Over time the team optimises the process to include additional features such as automated security testing, code validation and peer reviews to further improve the predictability of the processes. The team are then able to communicate to the business how long the release process takes, and each release should be as stable as the last, which builds the levels of trust the stakeholders have in the team.

Consistency also allows new joiners to the team to come up to speed and be productive a lot quicker. A single approach/process is quicker to understand and adhere to than an environment where there are different processes dependent on the work you are doing.

When and how to encourage innovation

Innovation is to be encouraged at the beginning of the project. I like the double diamond model where all ideas are entertained, and then filtered down to a focused few for execution. This ensures that the team have the time and space to imagine all ideas, and then deliver the key few that are achievable and are known to deliver business value. It is during this period on any activity that the business will get worried that progress is not being seen, but with enough trust in the process/team, they will come through and deliver absolute gems.

This is not the time to lose faith, as then it stifles innovation, and the team will revert back to delivering a consistent approach, with no ground-breaking ideas.

Innovation cannot be consistent!

I have worked in several environments where consistency was valued over all else, and the organisations then tried to force innovation into the mix because they realised, they were being overtaken by other competitors.

The approach failed in all those organisations, as they failed to recognise that their relentless focus on consistent process, timescales and expectations killed innovation.

Consistency did not allow space for trial and error. Whenever a novel idea was raised, the counter argument of “we have always done it this way” prevailed, smothering the idea before it had a chance to germinate. Consistency is also the anti-thesis of taking a risk. With a consistent approach, everything is scripted, and the outcomes are predictable, meaning that risk is low. With an innovation approach, the team are trying things that have never been attempted before, and therefore the risk is high.

In short,

Trust your team, give them true ownership/autonomy, give them space to be innovative, and once they get into a regular patter, then allow them to automate the consistent practices and build the frameworks.

If your organisation is to be successful, it needs to be innovative and it needs to be continuous.

How do you enable innovation within your organisation? Stay tuned for a future blog post.