When routines fail, opportunities to innovate flourish
By: Andreas Hoffbauer
Tags: Innovation, Business, Startup, Creativity, Experimentation

Businesses everywhere are experimenting with ways to tackle the obstacles imposed by the pandemic. For most, this is a process of trial and error. They either apply existing solutions that they are personally familiar with or copy as best they can what others around them are doing. But in some instances, like ETEN’s repurposing of micro-greenhouses, experimentation leads to genuinely novel solutions that reimagine products and services in new and exciting ways.

So how do we go from deploying existing solutions to generating inspiring new approaches? It starts with how we think about resolving challenges: do we try to reconstruct the preexisting experience (even if they are at best Frankenstein-esque recreations), or pioneer new paths to discover new possibilities?

Reconstruct: restoring the status-quo, or some version of it

Much of our day-to-day actions unfold without much thought. We repeat routines and behaviors, allowing our experiences to guide us. The more ingrained and institutionalized they are, the less we think about them. For instance, before the pandemic, eating close to others was the norm, never crossing anyone’s mind as a serious threat to public health. As creatures of habit, we go through life like this until one of our habits or routines stops working as anticipated. When this happens, the particular stream of action we are in hits a roadblock, bringing the conflicted situation to our conscious awareness. With our automatic responses impaired by the roadblock, we consciously evaluate what other options in our repertoire of personal or socially observed experiences might help us restore the situation so that we can carry on.

In most instances, quickly deploying a readily available alternative is sufficient to restore the situation. We saw this happening all across the country after states and municipalities imposed social distancing measures. The overnight introduction of takeout and make-at-home kits by elite restaurants in New York City, like Masa and Rezdôra, are prime examples. Neither strategy was part of their standard playbook, however without the ability to host guests and exorbitant overhead costs pilling up, they had to explore new ways to generate revenues. While takeout is novel to elite three-star New York Times reviewed restaurants, it is standard practice for most. This provided an immediate and easily deployable solution that, apart from the price-point, was familiar to their customers.

Rezdôra’s make-at-home meal kit instructions

Ultimately, Rezdôra, Masa, and, most recently, Eleven Madison Park, are trying, as best they can, to continue serving their customers within the parameters of government restrictions. All with the hope of weathering the storm and returning to their pre-pandemic operations and interactions with their guests. Omakase, after all, is an intimate and evolving interaction between you and the sushi master. If they cannot react to your every expression, playing to your likes and curiosities, the experience falls flat.

Sushi masters at Sushi Gen in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo

Reimagine: pioneering a new path to new possibilities

Ruptures in established routines and behaviors offer unique opportunities to reimagine how we think about and do things. During stable times, the social structures we are enmeshed in sustain and reinforce our routines and behaviors. We have all experienced the power of peer pressure. When we try to deviate from the norm, the group’s force pulls us back in line. (These same dynamics are at play at the organizational level, constraining how businesses think, act, and look.) When ruptures are systemic, throwing everyone into disarray, the power of conformity briefly loosens its grips. During these moments, we have the unique opportunity to construct new routines and behaviors, with the potential that they will catch on and become the new norm.

So, how do we start pioneering new paths and possibilities? Especially given that how we see the world around us is hemmed in by our past experiences, social contexts, and technical constraints — all exerting forces that narrow our field of vision?

Expanding our field of vision begins by replacing our current lenses with ones that provide new ways of seeing what we are tackling. Stripping down products and services to their core fundamentals is an effective way to gain new perspectives. Focusing on the fundamental characteristics of what we are exploring exposes the taken-for-granted assumptions and expectations that we have come to accept unconsciously. Through this awareness, we can ask how we can approach these core characteristics in new ways that better meet consumers’ evolving needs, wants, and desires.

Apple did precisely this in 2007 when they introduced an entirely new take on what a mobile phone could be — leaving BlackBerry and the rest of the industry barreling down a path that no longer reflected consumers’ evolving desires. Yet no one apart from Apple seemed to see the emerging rift. Research In Motion, the creators of the industry-dominating CrackBerry (as many came to refer to the addictive divide) paid dearly for not returning to the fundamentals and exploring how else they could address the shifting preferences and desires of their consumers.

Ferran Adrià, regarded as one of the most innovative chefs in history, attributes his team’s ability to imagine new possibilities to their rigorous approach to challenging the status quo. To create the awareness required to make apparent what we have taken for granted, his team starts by deconstructing what they are investigating to its first principles. Their approach includes breaking down definitions, classifications, cultural contexts within which the thing lives and is expressed, the end-to-end production, marketing, and sales processes, how different groups experience it, and the consequences and implications of these experiences. To add further depth to this complex web of knowledge, they also track each element’s historical trajectories to understand their evolution from conception to current iteration. With this foundational understanding, they can move from asking “what is” to “what could be” questions, guiding exploration and experimentation into the new and unknown.

While it is not always necessary to go to the extent of Ferran Adrià, we must approach moments of rupture in our routines by exposing the taken for granted assumptions that they are built upon if we hope to create new possibilities. Sakichi Toyoda’s Five Whys interrogation methodology is an excellent start to provoking the awareness required to see things differently and open ourselves to new and unanticipated possibilities.

Approaches on a continuum: or, how much new perspective must be gained?

Moments of rupture in our day-to-day routines and behaviors offer us tremendous opportunities to bring about change. Rather than trying to reconstruct our pre-pandemic lives, we can create new possibilities. Or, at the very least, meaningfully transform existing ways of thinking about and doing things.

Understanding which of the two approaches to use, however, isn’t so clear. It requires us to take a step back and ask if an area of life is worth preserving, and if so, why. Are we holding on to something just because we are used to it, or does it offer us meaningful value that is worthwhile preserving? At the extremes, it is easy to decide what approach to take. Preserving the intimate interaction between a sushi master and guest offers us rich experiences with the possibility of exposing us to new things. Let’s bring those back as soon as safely possible. Going to the office five days a week, just because we have done so since the invention of the clerical class during the industrial revolution, should be reimagined. Let’s not fall back on old paradigms of work.

Challenges that fall between the two poles are the most perplexing to resolve. Areas of life that require a mix of reconstruction and reimagining. Here we need first to identify what is valuable to hold on to and where opportunity spaces exist to reimagine the fundamental characteristics of the thing we are tackling.