Some things just get stuck in your head and you can’t shake them. Here I am, four and a half months after WEFTEC 2014 and I keep coming back to the keynote address at the opening session. If you were there, you recall Luke Williams giving a rousing talk on Embracing Change in a Disruptive Age. He began congratulating us on the diversity of our gathering. Hailing from 84 countries, we were 20,385 strong. But he also pointed out a few things that we know about ourselves that may have been uncomfortable.
We are a community of slow adopters.
He demonstrated that by pointing out the number of us still wearing wrist watches (guilty – though in my defense it is my running chronometer too), or clinging to our Blackberries in an age of smart phones.
He encouraged us to stop measuring success by ROI, but instead, embrace that the key metric for our success should be our rate of experimentation. I remember the feel in the room – YES, YES, YES! Let’s innovate. Let’s experiment. Let’s disrupt. Let’s not just think outside the box – let’s throw away the box!
Then he said something that frankly struck to the heart of fear in this consulting engineer. He said, you need to accept that you will fail 1000 times for every success. FAIL? I can’t FAIL! My clients can’t FAIL. It felt like someone had let the air out of the room. The other folk at my table shifted uncomfortably, and started glancing toward the exits.
Let’s face it. Consulting engineers are not willing to accept failure. Their clients are not willing to accept failure. So how do we move innovations forward? I know in my career as a consultant, I did do a few innovative projects, first of their kind applications in municipal markets. I looked to industry, often the chemical industry that I was familiar with, for innovative solutions to problems. From there, I could look at the data and develop the comfort level to know that the technology would work in the municipal application I had in mind. But I recognize that not all consultants have the background or the skill set to be able to look to another industry.
So how do you move innovation forward? Who develops these innovations that we need so badly. I have to say, I came away with even more respect for the true innovators in our industry – the university research folk and the equipment developers who continue to push and pull us into the innovations that our industry needs. These are the folk that look to their rate of experimentation as their key metric for success. They are willing to take a page from Thomas Edison who, while developing the lightbulb stated, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Even after you have found what will work, getting it implemented into real projects can still be a struggle. You still have to overcome the fear of failure in the rest of our industry. You must be able to demonstrate to a skeptical community that you have indeed “done it”, that your solution will work.
In future articles, we will explore how the right mix of copy writing can help you make your case. Together, we can take your disruptive innovation to the next level!
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