As W. Edwards Deming is also credited with observing, every process is perfectly designed to deliver the results it gets. If we believe that innovation is messy and imperfect and unknowable, we build processes that operationalize those beliefs. And that’s what many companies have done: unwittingly designed innovation processes that perfectly churn out mediocrity. They spend time and money compiling data-rich models that make them masters of description but failures at prediction.
