Experiment, Adopt, Achieve

I’ve just finished reading Geoffrey Moore’s Dealing with Darwin and while there is a fair amount of content that, as far as I can see, doesn’t necessarily reflect a lot of what is to be found in the academic literature regarding innovation, there is one very important concept tackled that is at the heart of firms’ ongoing desire to actually benefit from innovation initiatives undertaken. This is the concept of “repurposing context for core”.

Context is that required effort to “keep this thing going”. It’s the overhead involved in keeping already existing services and products getting to market. Most obviously it’s the Operations department in most service organisations and the Marketing and Sales department in product organisations. But it’s also everything that supports those departments: Finance, HR, IT, etc. 

Moore talks about the organisational inertia created when increasingly more resources are invested in context than in core. Although he says inertia is not the enemy of innovation (since the inertia of the previous innovation allowed the firm to stay it’s course), it does resist things at the point of change. It is at this point where executive management needs to pay special attention to be able to deconstruct organisational inertia and repurpose the resources it consumes in favour of more innovative undertakings. To this end, companies create new departments with the aim of completely freeing them up from context. Sometimes they go a step further and create an entirely new spinoff company. Read Meeting the Challenge of Dispruptive Change by Christenson and Overdorf for more.

On the other hand, core “is that which differentiates your company to create sustainable competitive advantage”. Moore indicates that while context might outweigh core by organisational resource allocation, but core outweighs context in strategic importance. Putting resources into context pays off next quarter; putting resources into core pays off next year and hopefully for the next few years.

This whole situation can be applied to a software development team as well. We are constantly looking to “repurpose context for core” (or at least reducing the effort and attention required by context) by automating testing, automating deployments, reducing process friction, refactoring to a more agile codebase and reducing wasted effort like not building the right thing or the thing right. Doing these things successfully buys us the ability to spend more time and attention focusing on things that can increasingly set us apart from the mediocre, like better usability and quicker response time to market of newly developed features and products. Of course it is common to find that driving down the effort required by overhead is often done “to make life easier” or to “cut out mistakes” rather than with the explicit goal of freeing up resources to focus on differentiation.

I think it is a compelling argument to begin using time gained by doing things in better ways, to doing things that differentiate your product or service.

“There is no new technology in the iPod.”

- Geoffrey Moore

With January safely put to bed, and with it the threat of making goals that get taken less seriously and have not much chance of survival, I thought I’d blog five sufficiently woolly (read achievable) goals for myself, with the aim of retrospecting come December 2010.

1. Write more: They say writing is a muscle, and I intend to train that muscle more this year. I intend to blog both here and (more frequently) my work team blog to practice writing coherent, readable and perhaps even interesting content.
2. Read more: I was never really a reader until a few years ago but since moving to London where books are a lot more affordable (vs South Africa), it seems counter-intuitive not to make good use of Amazon. Also very compelling but ‘recent’ is  the utterly trivial effort one has to put in to access the top 1% of any particular topic making it so easy to read only the best rated stuff. I am hoping that my Msc will only keep me down to 1 book every month or so.
3. Pick an interesting dissertation subject and start on the research: At the moment I’m thinking about doing something related to Evidence-based Management. Starting a dissertation in the first year of a two-year Msc is ahead of schedule though so this strikes me as a good goal to have.
4. Health and Fitness: Last summer I was going pretty well with sport and gym until I tore my calf muscle playing a tough game of squash. The 3 month layoff after that made me lazy and the Winter has delayed any real come back. This year I want to regain that fitness and stay injury free.
5. Learn more French: I have done some basic courses but I want to attain the next level in the summer with another course. In a few years when I have more time for different things I plan to become conversational, but I’m happy to limit it to 1 step towards that this year.

Well that wasn’t so hard. I guess the hard part is sticking to them! Let’s return in 11 months time to see how I’ve done.