Measurement always falls behind innovation
Data can only measure the past, so it can’t tell you if a new idea will work. Calvin Ross Carl on why companies want innovation but punish it.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl names the core tension: companies want innovation and know they need something new to stay relevant, yet they build organizations that punish it. As an org grows, elaborate org charts make anything outside them feel scary, unreliable, and unknown. The deeper problem is that measurable data can only measure the past. It can measure old best practices, but there’s no way to measure whether an innovative idea will succeed, which makes innovation inherently risky. Measurement is always behind innovation.
Highlights
- Companies want innovation but build organizations that punish it.
- Measurable data can only measure the past.
- There’s no way to measure a new idea before it happens.
Key insights
Scale breeds caution
The bigger the org chart, the more anything outside it looks like a risk.
Data looks backward
Metrics describe what already happened, so they can’t vouch for something that hasn’t.
Detailed analysis
Calvin connects company structure to the limits of data. Large organizations rely on measurement to manage complexity, but that same reliance makes them blind to ideas that have no track record. As long as decisions require proof up front, innovation will always lose the argument, because its proof only shows up later.
Conclusion
If you wait for the numbers, you’ll always be late. Innovation has to be judged on conviction.
That is the challenge: measurement is always behind innovation. So the tension here is that companies want innovation. They know they need to do something new to stay relevant, but they usually build organizations that punish it. At some level, your org gets so big you start having elaborate org charts, and anything that starts falling outside of that gets scary. It gets unreliable. It becomes unknown.
But the problem with measurable data is that it can only measure the past. It can only measure the old best practices, and there’s inherently no way to measure if an innovative idea is going to be successful. It is inherently a risky process. That is the challenge: measurement is always behind innovation.