“- All right gang whiplash a little”. These immortal words kickstart the famous scene in the movie ‘Whiplash’ where the actor J.K. Simmons challenges his jazz band drummers to not hold back and give it their all.
Andrew, the young drummer with the band, starts playing but according to J.K. Simmons’ character, Fletcher, he’s not keeping the right tempo. The fact is, the tempo thatAndrew is keeping in the scene is almost perfect. According to @djsunkid, who has meticulously analysed the scene, the differences between Andrew’s strokes are but a few milliseconds (BPM). So small in fact they are unperceivable to most of us. Fletcher was simply being an asshole. He was pushing a colleague to outperform and reacting to his gut feeling – rather than analysing and reacting to the right data.
We want to become a data driven company; we have relied for too long into gut feeling and unrealistic assumptions and we’ve been dragging into the path of innovation. Always suffering the burden of less appealing tasks that we perceive as easy to automate, not adding value to you or the business and the list goes on.
We see our competitors utterly fearless when it came to taking chances, and, the further out there they got, the more successful they became. But, let’s start being realistic; there’s only a few companies or individuals that will be leading the new path to the future. A very sensible position for the rest of the mortals is to be a fast follower; which in return may result in a very good ROI (Return of Investment).
“In everyday situations, leaders who don’t understand or trust the data will simply fall back on their instincts. Worse, during a crisis, the pressure to act decisively could lead to inadvertent use of immature data and rush to improper conclusions”. Anthony M. Townsend. Smart Cities. 2013
Start little by little. If we look at organisations with the wider prism we will realize that most of them they are today living in a hybrid landscapes where they have both on premise and cloud applications.
We’ve started planning how to adopt and embrace change in our organisation and now we have a clear roadmap; in case you missed it, check-out this article: “Plan your journey” to get the most of your strategic planning.
As one may note reviewing the impact on manufacturing plants of the arrival of electricity; you couldn't get a paradigm shift simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture and the production process.
Pace of innovation is the speed at which technological innovation or advancement is occurring; because this change is about, people, technology & processes and ultimately is measured on how much output can you squeeze out of the inputs used (productivity). We tend to see apparent patterns where innovations are too slow or too rapid. These rates have effects on people and we have a very limited capacity to embrace change, our brains are just not suitable for that. Less plan and more strategy.