Innovating Into New Jobs

You could find yourself out of a job by adding a ton of efficiency. If you automate everything, maybe you won’t be needed anymore. Maybe you won’t enjoy what’s left to do anyway.

The good news is that if you want to innovate, efficiency might only get you so far.

The trick is to innovate yourself into new jobs.

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You could innovate by turning up the build quality a few more clicks. The time you save lets you invest more into reviewing the work, polishing the work, questioning the work.

You could innovate by re-creating a new version of your whole product, but cutting it to just the pieces that are core. Give it a different name, or call it the lite version. No need to tell anyone yet, just test the new boundaries, see if the product does the job.

You could innovate by going upstream and questioning the job the product is hired to do. You could reconsider it for today’s world, and shape the outline of the new direction.

You could innovate by considering the things that never change, like speed, price, service and story, and seeing what combination of those would feel fresh and new.

You could innovate by following your enthusiasm, by following your hunch, by following your care. And people will tell that you’ve not afraid like everyone else.

You could innovate by playing, by being deliberate, by being random, or by, let’s be honest, not changing a thing at all.

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A person who says “this thing, right now, for me” is a person who is making progress.

There’s no other way to innovate, than to find out how your people want to make progress, on something that hurts, and being there at the right time with something that gets them moving.

Help people go from here to there. That’s our job.