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Why Is It Like This? Why Does It Stay Like This?
2013
It was a glass-walled conference room at the sleek headquarters of a well-known hospitality brand. Everything in that space, from the modular tables to the bins full of multipurpose children’s toys, felt too precisely calibrated for innovation, too aggressively designed to spark creativity and collaboration. Performative, maybe.
Some of the company’s most senior executives were gathered around the table: the CMO, CTO, and chief innovation officer. Opposite them sat our small team: an embedded strategist and two developers from a digital innovation lab we’d carefully crafted and staffed within one of their flagship hotels, a strategic move to accelerate long-overdue breakthroughs. I’m there, as the strategy director and project lead for Undercurrent, a digital strategy firm where I worked from 2009 until its untimely demise in 2015.
After weeks of immersive research and live prototyping with real hotel guests, we were finally presenting our insights. Midway through our presentation, the CMO abruptly grabbed a large, impressively bound document from a side table: a colossal portfolio of ideas previously generated by one of the world’s leading innovation consultancies. He flipped to a specific page and pointed, grinning.
“You’ve just validated their concept,” he said. And he was right. On that glossy page sat an impeccably detailed two-year-old prediction for a digital service strikingly similar to what we had just presented, complete with slick illustrations, clear implementation strategies, and thorough risk assessments. It was beautiful work, exhaustively researched, and had cost around a million to produce. Yet here it sat, untouched, gathering dust in the strategy room.