The drama of innovation and the innovators drama

Innovation is a dramatic experience, but it's not the drama of innovation that leads to the low impact of innovation efforts... it's the innovators dramas that mess things up.

Innovations don't just happen, and certainly not at once. Even if a eureka moment occurs, a lot of works by a lot of people will shape the outcomes and achievements of innovations downstream.

The innovation operations, which encapsulate all choices and actions, considerations, and reactions, are the mechanism through which creative impact is established. Within the innovation operation, multiple interruptions and complications determine how dramatic the innovation really is. At the end of the day, dramatic innovations are not always fun and exciting or contributing. They can also be frustrating, exhausting, and unproductive.

There is a fascinating feedback between the dramas of innovation (complexities and challenges of innovation as a whole) and innovators dramas (subjective reactions and experiences of individuals in the innovation process to their own complexities and challenges that stem from dramas of innovations).

Dramas of innovation can be anything from minor misunderstandings and miscommunications to significant delays, cost spills, and undesired repercussions.

The innovators dramas can be anything from occasional inconveniences and newly discovered obstacles that require attention to toxic development environments and restricting work conditions.

There is a strong causal link between dramas of innovation and innovators dramas, even though it's not always clear and, in most cases, not so quickly acknowledged.

The feedback effect between innovation dramas and innovators dramas has a strange effect on the innovation operations. Sometimes the mix between Innovation and innovators dramas acts as a catalyst to breakthroughs, and sometimes, the mix between innovation and innovators dramas acts as a catalyst of breakdowns.

Drama is a powerful social technology that can guide our attention towards systemic issues and chart an explanation towards their particular and personal sources.

But when different types of dramas juxtapose, they trigger an adverse chain reaction that escalates rapidly and makes it even more difficult to untangle.

If we want to prevent adverse chain reactions between the innovation dramas and the innovators dramas, we need to manage dramas better.

This means noticing them more frequently than avoiding or ignoring them and deconstructing them carefully, so they don't blow in our face.

Despite our instinctual tendency to avoid dramas, because we know (and probably already experienced) their potential downsides, we need to pay attention to dramas in order to avoid paying the cost of their escalations.

When we don't recognize dramas of innovation and innovators dramas in time, we undermine our capacity to utilize sensitivity and empathy effectively. As a result, our emotional intelligence is disoriented, and our abductive reasoning becomes increasingly biased. When this happens, Over time, our capacity to respond efficiently to complications is reduced.

If we consider innovation operations as an ad hoc factory for building a growth instrument, we will lose a valuable opportunity to improve our skills and capabilities. When innovations are used solely as a short-term prosperity effort, innovators delay attention to knowledge gaps, capability gaps, and experience gaps that eventually grow so wide that responding to innovation dramas (unexpected complications or overwhelming challenges) becomes seemingly impossible.

Because the innovators dramas are relatively easy to spot, they are a powerful indicator for dramas of innovation. Moreover, they allow us to respond much faster and much better to interruptions in innovation operations.

But even the relative easiness of spotting dramas is not enough to address innovators and innovation dramas effectively and efficiently. Everyone knows that The cost of handling dramas can quickly escalate when we mismanage dramas, and they blow in our face. And this is why even as we increasingly understand the importance of empathy and accountability as productivity levers, we still don't practice them diligently enough to see the results.

I've felt this drama for years. Multiple unexpected friction points in creative developments of innovations increased the cost of innovation and reduced their quality and impact. In addition, personal entanglements and unaddressed individual lacunas of participants in the innovation operations (mistakingly referred to as ego issues) transformed simple problems into wicked problems and relatively simple issues into slippery slopes.

To manage dramas more easily, I've developed a simple approach I call things to be done, which helps articulate innovation dramas and address the innovators dramas more effectively and efficiently.

Using the Things To Be Done approach, I've managed to convert adverse dramas of stuckness quickly, suggest ways out of acquired ignorance, and reduce the amount of exhausting efforts that failed to deliver significant value - into positive dramas of excitement, learning development, and success.

Dramatic chain reactions in collaborative innovation projects don't have to be so adverse or overwhelming. They can be reversed quite easily. And it's undoubtedly crucial if we hope to innovate more while spending less, transform faster than the speed of change, and push through pushbacks more effectively, efficiently, and mindfully.

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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash