THE THREE HABITS CONNECTIONS

OF

INNOVATION-

HABIT

-MAKING

UNUSUAL

If the idea is not at first absurd, then there is no hope for it New ideas are the resource for growing businesses and they can come from any direction. Many new business break-through occurred at the points of intersection across industries, yet every profession, industry or organization no matter how enthusiastically it endorses innovation is not free from a nagging and purely self interested resentment of newness. Many new ideas apart from coming from nonvalid persons, places and things, also endanger the interests vested in established systems, know-hows and competencies. Gatekeepers of the enterprise thus need to keep their mind and culture gates opened to welcome those new invalids and make the connections necessary for the unusual birth of a new project, business and even industry. The well known story of the sachet water industry, a viral business that now employs many start ups and meeting a major household need in Nigeria is a fine illustration of why this critical habit must never be taken for granted in the universe of any organization. Habit 2 can best be described by how the major pharmaceutical companies in Nigeria who should have originated this market failed to capitalize on the massive business opportunity at their nostrils. They already have the proprietary knowledge and patent technology to produce the sachet bags, had the regulatory license by NAFDAC to produce water as a consumable along with the financial and distribution infrastructure to deliver it to the consumer, but as long as there was no unusual connection to intersect drug and food this massive opportunity would probably have forever remain untapped. It took a visitor to a hospital who was waiting for a sleeping patient being transfused with intravenous fluid to make the necessary connection: the idea occurred to the visitor that the same bag might also dispense water orally and the result as they say is now history. It would have been natural for the pharmaceutical companies producing the IV fluids in Nigeria to easily create and capture that market but they couldnt make the unusual connection between these two different but yet similar consumables. The navigation of this paradox of similarities and opposites underpinning the exercise of habit 2 is one that all willing to exercise it for the benefit of their businesses and employees must learn to navigate. As a result of the failure of habit 2, the pharmaceutical companies have been consigned to coming into an industry that should be rightfully theirs from behind as fledging Latecomers. The socks & stocks story of Sears, the American household retailer is another example of how making unusual connections in the business you do can lead to the birth of new businesses and industry. When businesses are dying it is time to reinvent, the challenge with that intent is always that when those in leadership even know re-invention is needed, they never always see themselves doing something entirely different from what is presently dying. In this, most business

leaders resemble a school child who doesnt know how to get the right answers to his sums but however, kept his face stuck to the book as if looking harder at the problem will be enough to bring about the solution. We will need to put on new pattern breaking caps to shift our thinking and the worldview of the business to get across this conceptual block. The management of Sears put on the pattern breaking cap to think about their business differently from what it currently seemed to what they deemed it to be, the result was the rejuvenation of a dying American institution into a model for what an innovative enterprise should be. Sears branched from retailing into Banking, Mortgage and Insurance, all of these businesses were in industries in which it was deemed and did seem Sears had no experience or competence to function in. But ten years later, Sears had raked in $90B from all the businesses, tripled her stock worth and profit levels including the provision of the most affordable credit card service in the world! The explanation Sears leadership gave to the skeptical but now stunned analysts about her remarkable turnaround was that banking, financial transaction and insurance are all retailing businesses! In other words the basic skills required for supermarket retailing transactions were the same competencies needed to succeed in those industries, so Sears leadership deemed those businesses their kind of business and proceeding from the angle of their intimate knowledge of their customer base recorded unqualified success with the socks and stocks strategy. Making unusual connections can be made possible and there are tools to help individuals and organizations get out of their comfort mode of thinking into new and uncharted territories. The human mind and organizational culture must be understood as self organizing systems that form asymmetric patterns, in order to laterally move across these patterns tools are employed to set up deliberate provocations in the thinking and organizational system, once the predominant system of thinking and seeing the enterprise is shifted, chaos emerge from which new possibilities are unleashed to rethink and test the limits of propriety that confines the business. Gbolade Adegbesan- kadegbesan@gmail.com