Innovation that Sticks.: Reach success as a Leader in your Field with the Spaghetti Principle

By Lars Sudmann

How do you innovate, how do you structure your organization, your team, your personal life? You need a detailed plan and everything laid out for the future! Really? Well, maybe not always. Maybe you need to operate also with the Spaghetti Principle.
Discover how you can embrace this special principle and really make innovation stick. Specifically, you will learn how to deal in today’s dynamic and uncertain environment.
With practical examples from leaders and companies you will see how a totally different approach to strategy and innovation can revolutionize your work. With examples from fields as diverse as the Startup world, nature, opera, TED, Lars Sudmann will awaken you to an inspiring and thought-provoking journey of innovation. You will see innovation and experimentation with different eyes after reading this book.
Lars Sudmann has been a CFO and a strategy manager at leading organisations. He is now a corporate advisor, university lecturer and explorer of what makes innovation and change possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lars Sudmann - Lars Sudmann is an explorer of innovation and leadership. He searches for the tools and strategies that the best leaders on the frontiers of leadership use and apply and makes these available for everyday users. His TEDx talks on leadership and innovation are top-ranked with more than 500.000 views, and he has been featured on Fast Company, BBC Capital, The Economist Career Network, Trends, The Chicago Tribune and many more. Professionally, he has had various roles, ranging from Innovation Portfolio Strategy manager, CFO Belgium at Procter & Gamble, Guest Professor on Decision Making, and Startup Board Advisor. He now advises corporates, SMEs, startups and high-performing individuals. More about Lars Sudmann can be found at www.lars-sudmann.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Die Keure Publishing
• Release date: Jan 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9789048638291

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1

The Spaghetti Principle

Guill Anyone who knows exactly where they are going from the beginning will never get far.

NAPOLEON I

How does planning usually work?

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Throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks.

So, this is it. This is the Spaghetti Principle. You might say, what’s so special about this? What’s the big deal? It’s obvious.

Well, I don’t think so. Let’s contrast this approach with all the others that one sees. What does normal the process for planning any project or life endeavor look like?

You come up with an idea and write a great plan and roadmap.

You sit together and discuss it with others.

You do the work.

You coordinate and update.

You implement, do the follow-up, finish up, and move to the next one.

Right?

RIGHT?

Well, if it works like this for you there are three options:

•You are either lying to yourself.

•Or you are not really doing something new and challenging.

•You are a genius; in this case I want to hear from you asap.

In my experience, reality often looks very different from the above process. People plan, people do the work, yes. But often, they procrastinate, find problems, go off track. Or they develop and implement something that is complex and difficult. It is the perfect solution… on paper, in the head, in the conference room. But not for reality.

So they implement, and fail. They are frustrated about their progress and make up excuses and create a story on why it never worked.

The Spaghetti Principle can avoid this.

The real science behind the Spaghetti Principle

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Why does spaghetti stick?

The starch released in the spaghetti makes it sticky. After cooking, pasta has a lot of free surface starch ready to bond like glue. You will notice this when you leave spaghetti too long in the pot after draining the water.

This is the simple reason it sticks to the wall once cooked.

When discussing this with Italians they regularly point out that, whenever it starts to stick, the spaghetti is already overcooked… but this is a whole different matter.

The fallacy of the Homer-mobile

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The problem with over-planning and over-optimization in one’s head is that we might end up with the Homer-mobile in our minds.

The Homer-mobile was a car designed by Homer Simpson, the father figure in the highly successful cartoon series The Simpsons. In one episode, Homer was hired by a car company to design a car that would appeal to the common people. And design a car he does. The car had all the features that Homer liked and thought necessary – multiple horns playing La Cucaracha, gigantic cup holders, a soundproof bubble dome – to name just a few.

However it missed some important facts. Nobody would actually use a car like it. All it showed was where Homer’s thoughts were on what a great car for HIM might be like.

What the Homer-mobile didn’t have was a rendezvous with reality. Only reality will tell you if an idea works. Everything else are mind-constructs that might or might not work. There are endless examples like this in all areas of life.

Drawing the 2 x 2 matrix for throwing Spaghetti

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Where do we need the Spaghetti principle? In all areas of life? No. Let’s look at the masters of uncertainty for inspiration here: technology startups. Entrepreneur and author Eric Ries has created a standard reference for startups and for doing business under uncertainty with his book The Lean Startup. In there, he challenges everybody to define the expertise level and the environment that they are dealing with.

Let’s draw a graph of the world and create a simple 2x2 matrix with the following two dimensions:

•Operating history in a given field – How much operating history do we have with this new process, idea etc. Short or Long?

•Dynamism of the operating environment – Stable or Dynamic?

This is what it looks like:

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There are two extreme opposites in this chart, and they describe quite well the dual choices that many of us are confronted with in business and life.

Historically we have tended to operate in the upper left quadrant of that field: long operating history, stable environment. Think building industry, steel production etc. Some plant operations have 15-year contracts. Here you build and create, you exchange and interact. This is all fine and great. The long development process, predicting and planning makes a lot of sense. This is a bit like chess. A difficult game, but with clear rules, long operating history, and so on. There is also a clear path for learning it. Trying out some random stuff like using other figures would not take you very far.

On the other end of the spectrum, the world looks completely different: where there is no operating history and an extremely dynamic environment, we cannot have the same approach and mindset. The same can be said when we want to deliberately break the current static situation.

In fact, almost all new business areas are like this. Pretty much the whole area of digital innovation faces this. These are the fields of uncertainty, of dynamics. The field of true innovation. And for this field, new rules count.

The words of Joseph Campbell ring true:

Guill If the path before you is clear you’re probably on somebody else’s.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Throwing Spaghetti: The best modus operandi

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Of course, you could copy others on the trail they have already blazed and several startups and corporations take this approach. However, most of the time we are charged with creating something new. We could now spend endless time thinking, or just follow the same approach that we always did before (and that is totally untested in this new field). The problem is that we just don’t know and in order to operate and learn here we have to completely switch gears. Here, the Spaghetti Principle comes into play.

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As soon as you realize that you are operating in a dynamic environment with short operating history you need to switch gears and throw Spaghetti at the wall. What could those strands of Spaghetti be? As we will explore in-depth later, it’s anything that can be tested and tried out in real life:

•A product

•An app

•A process

•A method

•A technology

•A technique

•An ingredient

•…

Anything that you can try to get results in reality, the real world, we’ll throw at the wall and see if it sticks. If it does, we keep it. If not, we let it go and try something else.

Throwing Spaghetti puts your ideas to the ultimate and only relevant test: reality

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Why do we need the Spaghetti Principle, and why is it so important? Because, on top of the above-mentioned biases that guide our thinking and can lead to overthinking, there is another issue. Neither we, nor a team or organization can look into the future and understand the world. We think we do, that is one of our fundamental biases and issues. But we don’t.

Humans constantly under-estimate effort and over-estimate their own control and ability to forecast. Companies in 2007 thought they understood subprime mortgages. They didn’t. Some company founders and freelancers think they have the perfect plan when they start their business… they don’t. People out of college have the perfect career laid out for them and how to approach it, but it is rarely that straightforward. New parents have the perfect method of how they will raise their children and then it all develops differently.

Individuals are often either lost on what to do with their life and their investments, or they are over-confident that the one plan will work out for them. Both approaches have flaws, both approaches come from over-thinking.

The mind, individually or collectively in groups, is such a great tool but is also fantastic at making things up. The result: massive corporate planning processes. The celebration of ideas. People fall into the trap of thinking they have it all figured out.

As the startup world knows: Ideas are cheap, and execution is king. It’s the implemented idea, the idea that was confronted with reality that matters. That is why we have to move as