It is easy to confuse “innovation” with not knowing what you’re doing. Good innovation is quite the opposite: you know exactly what you’re doing, it is just the outcome that is uncertain.

For organisations attempting to do something that is new for them, it can indeed be hard to know what they’re doing. This doesn’t mean that no-one knows how to do that, or their aren’t well established ways of doing that thing.

For example, a company that rarely innovates its product offering can see new product development as uncharted territory. But for product development professionals, this is a standard day in the office.

And so it is with corporate innovation in general. This is not a new field. There are established playbooks that you can use to kickstart your own tailored process. There are professionals you can seek support from. And whilst innovation is certainly exciting, it pays to remember: Innovation isn’t meant to be fun.

Innovation fails in its legitimacy as a profession when it becomes an excuse to avoid rigour. If you have a pre-defined end state in mind but you throw out the process, it’s not innovation… it’s poor delivery. If you have neither an end state nor a process… it’s messing about.

Messing about matrixA recreation of a diagram I first drew on our office walls in 2015