(Jon 'ShakataGaNai' Davis, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
In 2007 I purchased the first Kindle. It had been announced and, as an avid reader and early adopter, I had to have one. That same device is sitting here on my desk, still takes a charge, and I can boot it up. I understand that it won’t fully work with Amazon’s services as of this year, but 15 years for a device to work is an eternity these days.
The machine is crude. It has white chicklet keys, oversized and too-easy-to-press page turning buttons. The on/off switch is on the back. A funny line rides up the right side of the device and grows a silver bar as the machine thinks, showing you that it is working. The bar tracks progress as well. The black and white display is adequate, but far from the screens of today.
In fact, right next to it on my desk is a Kindle Fire tablet device. It boasts many more times the memory, runs android apps, has a beautiful screen for watching videos, has multiple ways of connecting, is flat, sleek and fast. It is the culmination of years of incremental improvements and can be purchased for about one third what a paid for the Kindle #1; and that is without adjustment for inflation.
Of the two devices, Kindle #1 represents something very different that the Fire tablet. Kindle #1 was a disruptive innovation. The device used technologies that pressed the limits of what they could do. The designers were attempting to do things we take for granted today. The device could stay on for days, could be continually connected (at no cost) to cell phone towers and attempted to do one thing really well: let you read Amazon e-books. While there were other e-readers available in 2017, there was nothing like this device. Since 2007, we have seen the havoc Kindle has wreaked on the publishing industry.
The Fire tablet is an example of iterative innovation. From that first generation the designers learned, changed, modified, and borrowed ideas to make something quite amazing. This latest device can do more than simply deliver e-books (though it does that well). I just took a flight and used it to watch movies, check email, and read the news. Oh, I read a novel on it as well, but that has become an expectation for a device like this, the original innovation fading in my mental map of incredible breakthroughs. The value of what it delivers far exceeds that of Kindle #1.
That first device was a classic first-to-market design. It shows the immaturity of things that were soon worked out with better solutions. For example, to wake up the device, you press the ALT key while simultaneously pressing the A key. How intuitive is that? Not very. But it worked well enough (there was a notice on the screen telling you what to do). What it did do well was prove that a device could replace a physical book. It was convenient enough to make the point. Its designers did just enough to usher in a new era of digital book reading.
What I want to point out is that Kindle #1, the disruption, took a very different kind of thinking than the current Kindle design team must take. Team #1 was seeking to do something revolutionary; the current design is doing something evolutionary. The first was focused on overturning the status quo, the latter, leveraging the status quo.
Both types of innovation are necessary and even though we tend to see disruptive innovation in almost soteriological terms, iterative innovation is what we most often experience. But the people who do each type of innovation must think differently, take different risks, and make different decisions.
Ministry innovation, as far as I can tell, is almost completely iterative. Seldom do I find leaders who are thinking above and beyond changing the status quo. To be fair, innovation in ministry is much more difficult than it is in business where the competition is more defined and the metric is money (perhaps I can write about why in the future). Yet, we struggle to find new ways to do ministry, preferring to improve the status quo rather than overthrow it.
A fundamental shift in who we bring together to innovate might be in order. If we are asking our teams to take the current paradigm up to the next level, we are not going to produce disruption. Ministry leaders who are focused primarily on growing the existing ministry will focus on iteration by default. This is why authors like Vijay Govindarajan suggest a “Three Box Solution” to innovation in which we set aside specific resources to innovate outside of the existing structures of an organization.
The designers of disruptive innovation need to be freed from the mental models that drive the status quo. That takes a special kind of team. It takes leaders who are willing to let the innovators off the leash that binds the ministry to the status quo.
And that is hard.