Jump the Groove with Beginner's Mind

Innovation is both simpler and more difficult than most realize. It’s difficult, as it involves risk, change and the unknown. It’s simple, as innovation is as natural to people as breathing. It’s what human beings have done since the beginning of time. But quite often we forget how to do it, so we rely on innovation processes.

Innovation doesn’t have to be a 2-step, 6-step or 10-step process. It doesn’t require specialized techniques, experts, off-sites, focus groups, task forces, laboratories or even “skunk works”. All these things are useful, but the process is not innovation – it’s just process. A mad genius, an expert or a task force can innovate, but so can regular people in their everyday work.

Quite often, innovation is seen primarily as an expensive, risky and time consuming activity that only big government or big business has the resources or patience to undertake. Entrepreneurs, with their addiction to risk are also known for innovating – but only by working out of a garage, mortgaging their house, running up their credit cards and more often than not – failing. Only crazy people and well funded companies innovate.

Special innovation processes are popular. Even though they can be expensive and time consuming, they help people feel a little less risky and a little more reasonable. The process helps everyone feel more “normal”.

Of course, process, techniques, teams, tools and special work spaces do help. A skunk works is a very comfortable environment for innovators to work. Getting away from the office with a good facilitator can help stimulate new thinking. Working through a formula or process can give people comfort when facing the unknown. It can also help determine what is likely to work and what won’t before too much money and time is invested.

But it is important to understand that most of these innovation activities are not what makes innovation happen. Innovation is not an activity, a process, a building, or a department…

…it is a way of thinking, a way of seeing, a way of living.

When people are not innovating every day, they tend to behave like a scratched vinyl record. Before explaining this metaphor, it may be helpful to explain vinyl records to anyone who is not familiar with this older technology.

Before compact discs and MP3 recordings became commonplace, most music was distributed by vinyl records played on a rotating turntable. Sound was encoded on the record on a long groove that started on the outside of the record and spiraled into the center. The groove itself had bumps and valleys inside it that could be read by a small pointed needle or stylus that tracked through the groove and transmitted the sound ultimately to the speakers. The needle was attached to a flexible tone arm that allowed the needle to be dragged through the grooves at an even speed.

When the vinyl records scratched or accumulated dust in the grooves, there was a tendency for the needle to get “stuck”. The music would play normally up to a certain point in the song, then, unable to continue, the needle would be pushed back to a previous point in the song. The song would continue until it hit the obstruction again and started over once more.

If nothing was done to fix the problem, records would continue to play the same few moments of a song over and over again.

There were a couple of ways to solve the problem. Listeners could hope that eventually the needle would push the obstruction out of the way and the song would continue playing on its own. Occasionally that would work, but it would often take a long time to get there. More effective were a variety of strategies to jump the groove; to get past the obstruction by hopping over it to the next section of the song. Those strategies included lifting the needle off the record and moving it past the obstruction, hitting the side of the record player so the needle would “jump” to the next groove or even stomping on the floor so the vibration would jump the needle for you.

In order to innovate a process or product, it’s important to find a way to jump the groove as well. Just as the record player gets stuck doing the same thing over and over with the same disappointing result, companies and organizations often get stuck as well. Perhaps a product no longer sells as well as it used to no matter how hard the sales force works. Perhaps a financial system is no longer providing safe leverage to businesses. Perhaps energy sources aren’t as reliable or as safe as they once were. In every case, the immediate instinct is to try doing the same thing until eventually the needle becomes unstuck by itself. Alternatives are usually seen as too difficult, too risky or perhaps even impossible.

The job of an innovation process is to jump the groove. Just like the record player, once an organization is able to see the problem from a different context, once they are able to jar their sensibility in such a way that they can see alternatives, then innovation is not only possible, it becomes a more rational, safe, even accepted activity. The best processes focus on pushing people out of their current thinking and into a place where they can start over again with a “beginner’s mind”.

As it was eloquently put by Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi, ”In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

But jumping the groove doesn’t have to wait for a special brainstorming session, a project, or for the skunk works. It can be as simple as looking at an old problem for the first time. Instead of assuming that the needle must progress on a straight path through the groove, maybe there is a way to jump out of the problem. Just as Toyota’s Kaizen or Continuous Improvement empowers individual employees on the assembly line to find ways to eliminate waste, improve a process, or even stop the assembly line if something isn’t working, if everyone is encouraged to look at their work for the first time, every time – innovation becomes as natural as breathing.

At least, that’s how habitual innovators do it. I doubt that Thomas Edison, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, and many other innovators ever had trouble jumping the groove in their minds. To them, every problem, every process, every business was a new one. When they looked at something, they looked for the first time, no matter how much experience, knowledge or success they had in the past. That’s how they are able to re-imagine and rebuild answers to questions of products, technology, physics, government. They jump the groove, not by doing what was done before, but by looking at the problem for the first time.

Surprisingly, solutions that are found through everyday innovation are quite often far less expensive and far less time consuming than the alternatives. There are very important innovations that take a significant amount of capital, planning, time and process, but so many opportunities abound for everyday innovation as well. It may be time to encourage everyone to look at their problems for the first time once more.