Two goals, two mindsets
Optimization minimizes risk, while innovation creates possibility. Calvin Ross Carl on why those two goals need two completely different mindsets.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl explains that innovation and optimization have two completely separate goals within a business. Optimization wants things cheaper, faster, more profitable, more dependable, and more reliable, and it’s easier to sell to your boss. Innovation questions whether something should exist at all, and when it does, it creates new systems.
Highlights
- Optimization minimizes risk; innovation creates possibility.
- Optimization aims for cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
- Innovation questions whether something should exist and invents new systems.
Key insights
Different questions
Optimization asks how to make something better. Innovation asks whether it should exist at all.
Why optimization wins the meeting
Optimization’s goals are easy to measure and easy to sell to a boss, which gives it an edge over ideas that can’t be proven yet.
Detailed analysis
Naming the two goals explains why teams talk past each other. A new idea judged by optimization’s yardstick will always look risky, because it isn’t trying to be cheaper or more reliable. It’s trying to create a possibility that doesn’t exist yet.
Conclusion
Judge each idea by the goal it’s meant to serve, not by the other side’s standards.
Innovation and optimization have two completely separate goals within a business. One minimizes risk, and the other creates possibility. Optimization wants to do things cheaper, faster, more profitable, more dependable, more reliable. That’s the goal of optimization, and it would also help you sell things to your boss. Innovation challenges whether something should even exist at all, and if it challenges whether something should exist, it then creates new systems. That is the job of innovation: to invent new systems and question whether something should continue to exist.