Tinker, Tailor, Strategist, Innovator

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I’m still not entirely sure that I know, so it’s slightly scary when people ask for my advice on their career choices. Fortunately, being a technology architect means that I’m always prepared to express an opinion on something I don’t completely understand.

Two of the career choices I am asked about most frequently are technology strategy and innovation (probably because I have people that do both of these types of work in my team). Here is some of the advice I offer people to help them figure out whether these choices are good for them, and what kind of qualities they need to do this work well. (Like all advice from a technology architect it is well meant, but possibly wrong.)

Strategy

People are often attracted to strategy work because it offers the opportunity to shape their enterprise, to be part of big decisions. It also seems to offer a chance to understand what is reallygoing on: to get the context behind the day to day choices involved in running a company.

It’s unsurprising that people doing technology strategy work need to exhibit vision, but they also need to be expert analysts and communicators, and they need to display humility.

Vision is undoubtedly essential: doing strategy work entails figuring out the opportunities and challenges of tomorrow, and shaping a response to them. But vision without analysis is no more than attempted prophecy: sharp, detailed analysis rooted in metrics and measures enables us to construct a chain of reasoning from today to tomorrow.

And strategy without communication is no more than an idea. Strategists must be prepared to convert their strategy into messages which are simple, easy to understand and respond to. This is not because strategists are smarter than other people: it is because their strategy will need to survive transmission through many voices, the passage of time, and contact with reality: nuance will be eroded while simplicity survives.

And strategists, particularly those in technology teams, must be humble. They must first recognise that getting to do strategy work does not always (or even often) mean that they get to decide the vision. They will often be refining and developing the vision of someone else, and they need to understand and embrace that vision.

If they are a technology strategist in a large enterprise, they must also have the humility to recognise that they are probably not as good at strategy as their business counterparts. Business strategy is simpler a more mature and deeper discipline than technology strategy . . . and they teach it in business schools. Those of us who try to be technology strategists would do well to hang about with business strategy folk and learn from them.

Innovation

People are often attracted to innovation because it offers the opportunity to shape the future, to bring great ideas to life, to embrace the new and the different. It seems exciting and glamorous, and may seem free from the constraints of corporate life.

People who wish to be innovators in large enterprises need, of course, to display imagination, but they must also show extraordinary amounts of persistence, as well as a strong and unyielding commitment to the truth, even when that truth is unwelcome and unpalatable.

The imagination needed for innovation comes in multiple forms. Innovation does not always (or often) mean completely new invention, or the creation of concepts that have never been conceived before: rather, it may mean the application of existing solutions in new contexts, or the connection of existing capabilities. But it takes imagination to spot them.

However the ideas, arrive, though, persistence is a constant of successful innovation. It is theoretically possible that everyone will instantly understand and support a great idea, and immediately back it with money and effort. But it’s much more likely that someone with a great idea will need to scramble for support, explain and explain again, fight for attention against day to day pressures, and discover that innovation is no freer from the constraints of corporate life than anything else. This is not a bad thing: the need to justify one’s ideas and win backing is a great test of the quality of those ideas - and of the persistence of the person who came up with them.

Innovators should not, however, persist in contradiction to reality. Not all of the scepticism facing people who want to innovate is unjustified: sometimes people are sceptical because the idea is bad. Innovators must find ways to test their ideas through experimentation and then display a commitment to the truth: experimentation is a way to probe reality, and we often find that reality is not what we want it to be.

Types of Work

We should also recognise that strategy and innovation are not always jobs or roles: they are types of work, thought and behaviour. It is possible for most people in most roles to think strategically and to think innovatively, to show vision and imagination as well as analysis, communication, patience, humility, persistence and a commitment to the truth. That’s a long list of skills and virtues, and they’re worth practising, whatever your job.