The Balancing Act of Innovation and Operations
Mark Zuckerberg famously started Facebook with the motto, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Eventually, they abandoned that motto after they broke a few too many things.
I relate to this struggle more than most. Some lean more toward operational stability. Some lean more toward disruptive innovation. I’m squarely in the uncomfortable middle.
Operations
I’ve been accountable for operations my whole career. Twice now, I’ve been explicitly hired into a company because they really needed some operational rigor. Things were breaking all the time, I needed to bring stability.
My mindset is really well aligned with this task. I can remain calm in a crisis. I’m very slow to cast blame on any individual, rather I look to our systems, processes, and leadership practices to provide the solution to most stability issues. I make it safe to point out near misses, so we can get better.
Additionally, I’m genuinely fond of well-architected resilient systems. The engineer in me sees the beauty in it. I believe it’s quite elegant when a system can experience a major site or component failure, and automatically failover and adjust to minimize the impact of that failure to the end user. It gives me joy to witness those systems working in real life.
Change
Do you know what disrupts operations more than anything else? Change. It’s not the only thing, but it’s the most common. Yes, we perform our change control procedures, and our QA processes to make sure that changes won’t disrupt operations, but those controls are not 100% effective, and inevitably, we get bit by change anyway.
This leads many with an operational mindset to resist change. Change becomes the enemy of stability. Some love stability so much, that they look for ways to make change harder. They want to add more hoops to jump through and add lots of onerous change freezes on the calendar. They lay in bed at night and dream, “Wouldn’t life be grand if there just wasn’t any more change?”
Innovation
I love innovation. You’d think that would come with the territory since I work in high-tech, but I love innovation more than most. It’s a strong motivator for me. At a prior company, I won several awards for innovation. At CHS, I helped lead several years of “hack-a-thon” style innovation events. I experienced a career high last year when one of my teams at CHS won a Tekne award, which is a state-wide recognition for technology innovation.
Everyone who works with me knows that I love being in pilot groups to be among the first to experience any new technologies we’re working on. I’ll get the new OS, the latest hardware, the new security features, the cool new mobile app, the AI tools, and anything else I can get my hands on. I can accept that they may be a little buggy. That’s okay. I prefer the new to the stable for my own experience.
Innovation and stability seem like diametrically opposed forces. Innovation is novel, not completely baked, and disruptive.
Trust
Let me now draw the common element that I believe bridges the gap for me, and perhaps for others.
Operational stability is all about creating trust. When critical systems are flaky no one can trust the system. That really slows everything else down. Furthermore, that transcends into a lack of trust between IT and the business. Since everything is down “all the time.” IT has a poor reputation, and that creates its own downward spiral. If you are reading this and are in this situation, know that you can pull out of it. I’ve done it many times. You can too.
When you have stable systems, that earns you the right to have a seat at the table to do more strategic things with the business and your customers.
When you’ve built the trust to do strategic things, that earns you the right to do innovative things. And yes, when you do innovative things, sometimes they break.
How severely it breaks and the consequences of that is something to keep an eye on.
Think of it like a bank account. A stable production system is a deposit. A system outage is a withdrawal. A successful innovation is a deposit. A failed innovation of low consequence is neutral. An innovation that goes awry with negative consequences is a withdrawal. The bank account is trust, and you need to ensure you have a steadily increasing balance. Sure, some days there will be withdrawals. That happens, but make sure you are making more than enough deposits to make up for it.
That’s my leadership lesson on the balancing act of operations and innovation. Can the two coexist? Yes, I believe they can and they should. You don’t need to be good at one or the other. You can be excellent at both.
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