Can your people redefine success? Disruptive innovation changes the metrics of success.
Yesterday working on design thinking, I came across a great article on an Intuit’s lessons from measuring design thinking. A key insight that struck Intuit was that the value of design thinking is the ability to use research and empathy to redesign what success means and change the metrics of projects. The measures of success in Intuit were no longer fixed.
I am sitting today in conversations about digital disruption at the Disrupt Sydney conference by the University Sydney Business School Digital Disruption Research Group. What interests me is how often we accept assumptions as to the measures of success. We talk about disruption with traditional business measures: revenue, scale, market share, employment, productivity, efficiency, profitability, etc.
Disruptive innovations redefine effectiveness. They challenge traditional measures of success using deeper insights on what matters for real success. They don’t accept the prevailing and predetermined logic of success.
New measures already appear in conversations around us: bump factors, percentage of e-commerce participants, community participation, density of interactions, social good, global reach, food miles, transparency of business models. How do we use these in our work?
Do your employees have the opportunity to redefine success? If they can’t discuss what success means, there will be opportunities and threats that they can’t respond too. How do you create an ongoing conversation about new measures?
