Beware the Tyranny of Incrementalism

Late in 2009, our team was trying to bring some efficiency gains to the mechanics of "how we got stuff done".  One of the reporting dashboards we regularly created was the Contract Tracker.  This 20+ MB excel file captured signed deals, contract value, terms of renewal, etc.  Very helpful for our most senior business leads in understanding our business prospects.  Right?

The nature of creating this file was highly manual, referenced myriad internal databases, and was a 10%-15% project, before any meaningful insights were gathered.  

Rather than making the tracker more efficient, which would be entail a multi-month project of process reengineering, we tried something more transformative.  We stopped creating the report, stopped sending it out, and waited for the inevitable fallout and escalations.

It never happened.  Some of our most senior sales leads didn't realize they weren't getting the report every Friday for a period of many weeks, if not months.

It is ever so easy to get caught up in the daily grind.  It is so easy to think about the marginal improvements that sound so powerful in making your daily work lives better.  True organizational change, though, requires transformation.  It is, by definition, disruptive.  It won't always work.  But it is the very essence of what is required to succeed and thrive in an increasingly competitive work environment.

Rest in Peace, Roger Enrico, former CEO of PepsiCo, who coined the term "tyranny of incrementalism", talking about innovation in this powerful excerpt still amazingly relevant 30+ years later:

"If the United States is to ensure that its innovation system remains world class, and that its companies have the trained talent they need to succeed, it must inspire greater numbers of young people to pursue science and engineering careers...
Mr. Enrico cautioned that dramatic change such as this “will never come about if we first don’t free ourselves from the tyranny of incrementalism…the belief that somehow dramatic results will come about from un-dramatic actions.” "