We are often more certain than the evidence really allows.
More quotesMost innovation decks are historical fiction. They draw a clean arrow from clever idea to glorious outcome, as if somebody ordered the Industrial Revolution from a catalogue and the fabric shops merely delivered it.
The hummingbird effect is messier and far more interesting. A smartphone camera becomes a cheque scanner, a QR reader and the eyes of a dozen new businesses. Cheap online payments escape the checkout page and give small subscriptions and digital marketplaces somewhere to live. GPS stops being “a better map” and quietly rearranges taxis, takeaways and dating. Nobody needs to have planned the chain for the chain to become enormous.
This is why I distrust the standard demand for a five-year business case around a genuinely new capability. The spreadsheet asks the newborn tool to name all its future children. Unable to do so, it loses to a familiar project whose mediocre returns can be described with three decimal places. Corporate certainty beats useful weirdness. Again.
I would still resist the opposite nonsense: calling every side project “transformational” because one customer used it oddly on a Tuesday. Most novelties remain novelties. The clue is reuse. Are people dragging the thing into jobs it was never sold for? Has an expensive action suddenly become cheap? Are unexpected businesses appearing on top of it?
Roadmaps track requested features. The bigger opportunity may be the misuse nobody requested. Watch the misuse.