“Are You Engaging in Innovation Theater?”

That’s the title of this article by Mike Shipulski on Braden Kelley’s Innovation website.

It’s worth a read if you are involved in innovation efforts in any domain.

It hit the nail on the head with my experience with mature companies that do things that fool people into think the company is innovating.

Many folks engaged in this innovation theater aren’t aware of it. They are like characters in a play that don’t realize they are fictional characters in a play and will reject the notion.

This is a good taste from the article:

If a return on investment (ROI) calculation is the gating criterion before starting an amazing project, that’s innovation theater. Projects that could create a new product family with a fundamentally different value proposition for a whole new customer segment cannot be assigned an ROI because no one has experience in this new domain. Any ROI will be a guess and that’s why innovation is governed by judgment and not ROI. Innovation is unpredictable which makes an ROI is impossible to predict. And if your innovation process squeezes judgment out of the story-line, that’s a tell-tale sign of innovation theater.

If the specifications are fixed, the resources are fixed, and the completion date is fixed, that’s innovation theater. Since it can be innovation only when there’s novelty, and since novelty comes with uncertainty, without flexibility in specs, resources, or time, it’s innovation theater.

If a steering team is involved, it’s innovation theater. Consensus cannot spawn innovation.

Mike Shipulski, “are you engaging in innovation theater?”

Characters in the play will scoff at the notion that using ROI as a gating criterion is fruitless because innovation is unpredictable. They cannot imagine any other way of doing it. They are linear thinkers who have been told all their life that they are smart because they can solve linear problems really well — like acing tests by studying more.

If you suggest that ROI is unpredictable, they will think you don’t know how things work or that you might be little crazy. They can’t imagine any other way. How can leaders decide which ideas to work on if ROI is unpredictable?

They miss the blindingly obvious reason why predicting ROI doesn’t work. If it did, then the company should have a steady pipeline of innovation successes and the folks predicting ROI of new ideas should be making a lot of money. If not, they’d probably figure out real quick that they should leave and start their own VC firm.

So if predicting ROI doesn’t work, what does? It’s not a big secret. Many highly innovative companies and startups use it.

I saw it for the first time when we presented a new CEO of a mature company with a slate of new ideas for the next year so he could pick the 2-3 he wanted us to work on, (as if he had the secret ROI calculator to predict winners), like we had done with previous CEOs (who thought it was their job to predict winners).

He said, “How am I supposed to know? Why can’t you try them all, even if in small ways, to see which ones have the most promise?”

We did and we had the most innovative time in my career for the next few years, resulting in a culture that I’ve been trying to recreate since, without success, because the characters in the innovation theater don’t realize they are reciting lines of a play.

Good podcast on Pro/Rel from 3Four3 and my thoughts on how Pro/Rel makes a big difference at the grassroots level to help young players develop

I think Gary & Joey do a great job discussing how an open system changes soccer at the grassroots.

Most pro/rel discussion centers on what happens with the pros, so it was refreshing to hear someone talk about the effects it has all the way down to the grassroots at the local youth clubs and contrast youth clubs in the U.S. with youth clubs in pro/rel countries.

The podcast is available on iTunes and here: The Ongoing U.S. Open Cup Fiasco, Pro/Rel, and Are There Any Real Clubs in American Soccer?

I want to tie in a point another frequent 3Four3 guest, Kephern Fuller, made years ago on the podcast and I wrote about it here.

Fuller said, based on his experience, youth players in Europe have a better sense for where they want to go, while kids in the U.S. are just happy to be the best on their current team and are okay as long as the team seems to be having some success.

I believe the differences Gary & Joey discuss in this podcast are why youth players in Europe have a better sense for where they are headed.

Here’s why…

In the U.S. individual youth teams are insulated from each other and senior and pro teams. Even within larger clubs, players on a team might only get some visibility to one or two other teams — the teams they share a practice field with.

Kids are happy to be the best on the team, as Fuller pointed out, because this insulation provides no other good points of comparison.

They don’t pay much attention to pro games. They don’t pay any attention to their high school varsity games. Clubs, in fact, are forced by state high school athletic associations to not be involved with high school teams. The senior kids disappear from youth clubs during high school soccer season.

As a coach, I tried to get kids interested in watching the higher level teams so they could see where they were headed. It was a hard sell. They just didn’t connect with players they didn’t know.

What about competition, you might ask? Isn’t that a good point of comparison?

Not if the competition suffers from the same insulation as your team. You can tie 3-3 and think you are doing just fine, never realizing that both teams way behind.

Not having good points of comparison outside the team is why kids end up comparing themselves to teammates. That’s all they can really do.

The result is few youth players in the U.S. have a long-term benchmark for where they should be headed as a player.

Contrast that to the environment of youth clubs in Europe, where the local club’s senior team plays a similar role as our local high school varsity team, with a few exceptions.

One exception is there isn’t a divide forced between that team and the rest of the club by the state’s high school athletic association.

That has several positives that contribute to youth players in Europe having a better sense of where they are heading.

One is that clubs rely on those senior players to help coach younger kids to keep club costs down. This allows the younger players to get to know the senior players personally and develop role model relationships. A lot of these kids then develop a natural interesting in wanting to watch their coaches’ games, which gives them a point of comparison beyond how their current team and a vision for, where they are headed.

In that environment, whether a player is best on his U9 team or the team wins by 7 goals matters, but players also have another gauge on their performance. For example, they might more readily realize they won by 7 goals because the opponent was subpar, not because they played the style of ball or executed the positional roles like the senior team does.

Media Trick: Technically Correct rather than Contextually Correct

The NBC News article linked below provides a good example of a common media trick — while technically correct, it’s not contextually correct.

The article is the follow-up on a back-and-forth between Jimmy Kimmel and Aaron Rodgers: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jimmy-kimmel-blasts-aaron-rodgers-monologue-jeffrey-epstein-comment-rcna132999

Here is how the article is headlined:

Headline: “Aaron Rodgers offers no apologies after Jimmy Kimmel blasts him for Epstein comment”

Sub-headline: ‘Speaking Monday on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the late-night host called on Rodgers to apologize for saying he would appear in court documents associated with Epstein. The star quarterback declined to do so Tuesday.’

Both are technically correct based on what is presented in the article.

But are they contextually correct?

In other words, do these headlines accurately represent the true context of the back and forth between Kimmel and Rodgers, as reported in the body of the article itself?

I don’t think so.

I think most will take from the headline that Rodgers said Kimmel would be on the Epstein list and hasn’t apologized for it.

But, the rest of the article shows that Rodgers didn’t say Kimmel was on the list and explained what he meant by the original comments.

A technically correct headline for the story would be “Kimmel seems to have falsely accused Rodgers for saying Kimmel was on the Epstein list”

While that may not be contextually accurate, either, it demonstrates the wide latitude journalists have in writing technically correct headlines to frame how they wish readers to see the facts. That is near the exact opposite of the original framing, yet technically fits with the facts presented in the article.

I think this is a big problem with media. Too many stories are technically accurate but not contextually accurate.

I believe this is so media organizations can play innocent and have plausible deniability to say they accurately reported facts and can’t help that readers did not read those facts carefully enough.

A technically and contextually correct headline would be, “Aaron Rodgers says he did not mean to imply Kimmel would be on the Epstein list, rather that Kimmel would be disappointed that something he chided as a baseless conspiracy theory turned out to be true.”

I’d say that’s the most accurate representation of representation of the body of article, yet, it’s boring and doesn’t help paint Rodgers as a wacky conspiracy theorist.

Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

A recent Elon Musk X post:

“From an amazing Michael Crichton talk:

‘Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amensia effect.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward–reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.

But, when it comes to media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper.'”

Unemployment ending?

Well, not quite. According to the news, 1.3 million will be losing unemployment checks as the extended unemployment benefits come to an end.

Note the extension was from 26 weeks (~6 months) to 99 weeks (~2 years) at one point and, if I’m reading the article correctly, 73 weeks (~1 year and 3 months). All of those periods seem long for something that is meant to be a temporary stop-gap.

One lady who will stop getting unemployment checks interviewed on one TV news spot that I watched said she was going to have to start spending more time looking for a job and less time on school. Isn’t looking for a job a condition of receiving unemployment? Don’t be to harsh, but unemployment isn’t meant to be a ‘take time off from work so you can go to school’ program.

Another news spot said that unemployment benefits help the economy because recipients spend the money. It didn’t say where that money came from. (Answer: A taxpayer, either now or in the future, who could have also used that money to ‘help the economy’).

Another lady who will stop receiving unemployment checks was asked what she thought about Congress going on break without extending ‘her’ benefits. She said something like (paraphrased from memory), My benefits shouldn’t be dependent on the whim of other people like that. Apparently, not realizing that her receiving the benefit was dependent on exactly that whim.

Of course, none of the folks who will not be receiving unemployment checks any longer took the time to thank their fellow taxpayers for helping them out. How rude.