Super Bowl scale innovation
Almost exactly 29 years ago this month, I was working at my second job ever (The first one didn’t go so well. You may have heard about that in another story (video). That month, I discovered one of the most important lessons about innovation of my life. These were the ingredients: A team + a goal + ideation + a constraint. And here’s how it worked.
It was 1995. Taylor Swift was six. The San Francisco 49ers were in the Super Bowl that year too. Only that time, they were playing against the San Diego Chargers. Also, San Francisco didn’t choke… but that’s not important to this story.
While I was working at this organization, I had the pleasure of working with a leader who was one of my all-time favorites. She was one of the first leaders to show me that teams only achieve innovation as a result of reinventing the way they get work done.
Innovation is the thing that results from reinvention
The work that we did on that team is hard to describe, but it was a little like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces of this puzzle are coupons in the newspaper. You have to make them fit together without making any of the customers mad. Why would they get mad, you might ask? Turns out that sometimes consumers don’t want to see a box of cereal and a box of dry cat food right next to each other.
One moment in particular stood out across all of my time on this team. It happened just a few months after I joined. Under this leader’s leadership, our team would try to come up with tiny adjustments which we could implement to make our team better. Every one of us was invited to try to imagine at least one thing that we could do to make the way we work better, our performance better, our communication better, or our products better. We would write those tiny reinventions on a piece of paper and put it in our “Team Reinvention Box”.
But coincidentally, this was the start of the calendar year.
And at the start of the year, the Super Bowl was right around the corner. So to gamify this reinvention challenge a little bit, we did the following. For every idea that each of us suggested, we also got to select one Super Bowl square.
We started the month of January with the status quo and 100 empty squares.
Super Bowl squares are a betting mechanism in American Football. The digits are listed at the top of a sheet of paper. Then the same ten numbers are listed at the left edge of the paper. This creates a matrix with 100 squares. After the game, the last digit of the score for each team is mapped onto the grid. The final score that year was: San Diego: 26 and San Francisco: 49
The name with the blue star won.
So we spent the month of January sitting there in our beige, 1990s cubicles, surrounded by letter-trays, manila folders, and ink pens and we thought of things that we could do to reinvent the way we work. We raced to choose squares from the board. There were prizes.
There were 100 squares!
That seemed like soooo many! This goal pushed us to fill the board. No one wanted to have any empty spaces left over. But as we got closer to filling the board, then we realized this…
There were ONLY 100 squares!
There was a limit. A constraint. And that pushed our team to prioritize. As the squares filled, it pushed us to think of the best ideas. I remember taking some of my original suggestions out of the box in order to replace them with even better ones. Without a constraint, people on teams are not actually prioritizing.
That month, we reinvented the way we worked by leaps and bounds. Many of those reinventions got implemented soon after.
We all LEARNED new things.
We all TRIED new things.
We improved the way we SHARED information.
We reimagined the way we made DECISIONS.
We threw out some of the paper and replaced it with TECHNOLOGY.
Remember those 5 things. They’re going to keep coming back up.
In 1995, we made a lot of things. But the thing we made the most, was a better 1996.
p.s. That leader is still practicing innovation today – she runs this place now.