The Two Types of Innovation That Drive the Future of Work

Who led the digital transformation of your company? A) CEO, B) CTO, or C) COVID-19?

Back in 2017, Booking.com decided to completely change the way their homepage looked. Instead of showing countless options, they tested new layouts that restricted options and moved buttons and options around to see what converted best and what feedback was like from customers. This series of tests hasn’t stopped, it has actually increased significantly.

Today, “Booking.com quadrillions (millions of billions) of landing-page permutations are live, meaning two customers in the same location are unlikely to see the same version”. The company has grown with incredible popularity since then not because they were trying to catch up to competition, but because they were trying to get even further ahead.

 In other words, they chose to experiment, innovate, and try new things.

Domino’s Pizza, on the other hand, was faced with some critical feedback that could have cost the company their business if they didn’t act. In 2008, customers shared that their pizza tasted like ‘cardboard’, “worst excuse for pizza [they’d] ever had,” was “totally devoid of flavor,” and even that “the sauce [tasted] like ketchup”. Ouch. At this time, Domino’s was nearly $1B in debt and had to make a change. And they did. They brought chefs in to redesign the crust, sauce, cheeses, and how they all were put together. And while it worked, if they didn’t make this innovation, it couldn’t have spelled big trouble for the pizza giant.

Domino’s didn’t choose to innovate, they were essentially forced to.

 In the past weeks, we’ve seen a nation-wide test in remote working, we’ve seen a hint of what Universal Basic Income might look like, and an exercise in moving our offline business online as fast as possible. This innovation has been fast, it hasn’t been perfect, but it has been the best we could do with what we’ve got. Like Domino’s in the late 2000s, we’ve been forced to innovate.

But what if it didn’t take unprecedented times to practice the innovative spirit that Booking.com does? What if we could build a culture of experimentation because we could, not because we feel like we had to?

I’m a firm believer that the future of work is either something we default to and roll with, or it is something we create. In other words, if we fail to proactively experiment and innovate then there will be a day we’re forced to change, rather than choose to. And so, it is our responsibility to not just catch up to competition and the times, but to get ahead position our teams to be more creative.

•  If we’re looking to choose to innovate, consider asking these questions:
• What can we be doing now to get further ahead?
• What might our business look like in 10 years?
• How must the company or people we most admire approach some of our biggest opportunities?

Where are there gaps in our processes, products, and services? 

If we’re trying to catch up and are forced to innovate, we might be asking:

•  How can we do this like our competition?
• How might we keep up with company X?
• What are other best practices around this problem/opportunity?

 Choosing to innovate means there are no rule books, best practices, or guidelines; it requires a culture of experimentation and willingness to fail forward. There must be time and budget set aside to try new things, make mistakes, and garner new feedback.

Forced innovation is quite the opposite. Instead of enabling time to think, process, and analyze, we frantically try to keep up, catch-up, and rush decisions to try and be the same, not better or different. And if this pandemic has taught me anything, it is those that choose to innovate rather than think they’re forced to are the ones that are coming out of this ahead and stronger than ever.