Routine Work vs. Innovative Work: Or When Killing Your Babies Is a Good Thing

This post is a translation of the original Arabic article.

In the previous post in this series on innovation leadership and entrepreneurship, I talked about the importance of failure and mistakes and how a leader turns those mistakes into a chain of successes (here). The importance of mistakes I discussed before becomes even clearer in today's post, where we talk about the difference between routine work and innovative work.

The Two Core Definitions

Routine Work: Routine work aims to look at the work in the same old way we always have, and to minimize variables and avoid mistakes.

Innovative Work: Innovative work aims to look at the work in new ways, to increase variables and expect a high error rate.

What a Leader Must Understand

First: Some people believe routine work is unimportant and should be avoided. This is a major mistake that many entrepreneurs make.

Second: There is a strong connection between innovative work and routine work. Products start with innovative work (idea, experiment, fail, learn, idea, experiment, fail, learn...) until we reach the product we want. Once we reach that level, our goal becomes minimizing variables as much as possible, improving quality, and reducing errors.

Example: One of the clearest illustrations is a product called "WD-40", a lubricant and protectant for machines and equipment. It is named WD-40 because of the 39 failed attempts in developing the product (the innovative process). When the product reached version 40, the routine work began: we want to produce the same product every time, in the same way, with as few errors as possible.

Third: It is natural for many creative ideas to die before they ever see the light of day.

Example: One toy company identified 4,000 ideas in a year. Of those, 226 survived and became drawings and prototypes. About 12 of those products were sold, but only two or three products achieved actual financial success in the market.

Fourth: The Importance of Killing Your Children — Your Best Ideas

A leader must understand the importance of killing their own children. By that I mean their best ideas, the finest ones. It is easy to fall in love — yes, in love with a specific idea — which makes it hard to kill it.

The problem with good ideas is that they are the children of our own creativity, so we develop an intimate bond with them. Killing bad ideas is easy because they are bad. But killing good ideas is hard because we are emotionally attached to them. And yet this matters enormously for several reasons:

• An idea may be good but not yet mature, and our desire to hold onto it may be driven by fear that we will not find a better one.
• Entrepreneurs work hard and fast to get a product out and may cling to the first good idea they find, even if it is not fully developed.
• Learn that early closure is the enemy of innovation. When you start innovative work, you naturally produce many good ideas. Do not surrender to the first one in front of you, because you may miss even better ideas if you keep going and kill the early good ones.
• Killing good ideas also saves you effort, energy, and resources, since ideas need nurturing and development, all of which has a cost.
• The exercise of killing good ideas creates a competition among your ideas, so the best of the best survives and you focus on it, because you cannot work on all your good ideas at once.

Steve Jobs used to say:

"Killing bad ideas isn't that hard. All companies, good and bad, do that. What's hard, and what distinguishes great companies, is killing lots of good ideas."

Further reading: Bob Sutton's article "Wisdom from Steve Jobs: The Importance of Killing Good Ideas" and Diego Rodriguez's "Killing Good Ideas is a Good Idea".

Fifth: Using Scientific Methodologies

Know that no matter how well you do everything, you will still fail. But take comfort in the fact that you are producing something new for the world. Remember that for your innovative work to succeed, it must be desirable, feasible, and viable.

You can reduce the rate of failure by following a scientific methodology for innovation, such as Design Thinking, which in brief starts with defining the goal, then research, then idea generation, then prototyping and testing, then selection and implementation, and finally learning from the experience.

Next in the series: The True Leader is Attuned and Assertive