M.011 What corporate innovation can learn from South Park

It's not the process, it's what you put into it.

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Six days to create an episode. That’s how long the South Park creators give themselves. No design thinking workshops. No innovation sprints. No lean startup methodology. Just creative, smart and talented people locked in a room, committed to a strict deadline.

In the mini-documentary “Six Days to Air”, the South Park creator’s remarkably simple innovation process is shown in its full glory (or gory). I first watched it many years ago, and have repeatedly been thinking about it since because it raises an interesting question about innovation processes:

What is actually driving innovation success if not a structured process?

Innovate (with this specific process) or die

Innovation is, unsurprisingly, everywhere. The world is changing fast, and the old way of doing things will be outdated sooner or later. As innovation is seen as the saviour that will help companies keep up with changes, or even lead the way, it certainly deserves a lot of attention.

In line with this steadily increasing innovation fever, structured innovation processes have seen a marked surge of interest over the last 15 years. Formats and processes like design thinking from IDEO, innovation sprints from Google, and Eric Ries’ lean entrepreneurship, all provide a structured, stepwise process for innovation.

There are differences across these processes, but they also have much in common. All are easy to understand. All embrace a user-centric view to innovation, and a time-constrained iterative process with rapid cycles to quickly test hypotheses now to avoid bigger failures later. And all (implicitly) suggest that anyone can be innovative as long as they follow certain key principles and procedural steps.

If you add their broad adoption, enthusiasm from users and endless success stories, it seems like the holy grail of innovation has been found. Or?

While the appeal of these structured and rapid innovation processes are imminent, they have received criticism from both academics and practitioners (e.g. here, here and here). One major criticism is for being incremental and not being suited for creating radical innovations.

But since there is more to life than radical innovation (just think of the value Apple has created from incremental innovation of the iPhone since 2007), their value could still be immensely high. After all, most of the innovation that takes place in companies are incremental rather than radical.

I have no problem accepting such a premise, but there is another question that I keep revolving back to whenever I hear a success story about how one of these processes lead to innovation success:

Was is it really the processes that caused innovation success, or was it something else?

South Park’s success with their radically simpler approach suggests that the latter might be the answer.

Not if it works, but why

It’s easy to be seduced by success stories. Airbnb uses design thinking and succeeds with innovation. Google runs innovation sprints and generates breakthroughs. Successful startups credit the lean startup methodology. And you might even have had innovation success with one of these methods yourself.

But correlation isn’t causation. Just because innovative companies use these processes, or just because you had success with it, doesn’t mean that it's the process causing the success.

An alternative explanation is that success comes from what you put into this process, not the process itself. Google and Airbnb have many smart and creative people, and a culture for innovation and novel thinking. Any successful innovation coming out of a design thinking process in these companies might just be the result of their smart creative people and their culture, more than the processes themselves. If the same people followed another process, the results might have been similar.

Another alternative explanation could be that a more subtle benefit of all the structured innovation processes is that they focus people's effort and attention. Giving people the time and mandate to step away from their operational day-to-day work, be creative and solve an unsolved problem, makes it more likely to succeed than to just carry on with business as usual and hope for the best. Regardless of the the steps or logic that people actually have to go through.

If these alternative explanations are true, it suggests that a much simpler version of the rapid innovation process could also work well: Step 1) gather smart and creative people. Step 2) give them time, mandate and a strict deadline to come up with a novel solution to a problem.

Or in other words, just do like South Park.

The South Park Way

The innovation process detailed in the “Six Days to Air” documentary was remarkably simple:

The team (all smart and creative people) meets up in the South Park studio exactly one week before a show is scheduled to be aired. Then they focus all their creative efforts on writing, animating, and producing a full episode before this deadline. The incentive is simple and powerful: If they fail, Comedy Central won’t have an episode to put on air.

And it seems to work. The South Park team has created over 300 episodes with this process. While some episodes are better than others, the creativity of each is more often than not incredibly high.

They do it without adopting a user-centric view, without quick prototypes or feedback cycles with customers, without hypothesis testing on users. They just lock a bunch of smart, dedicated creatives in a building with a strict deadline, and then the rest seems to fix itself.

Testing It Out

After re-watching this documentary a while back, I decided to see if the “South Park innovation process” could work also in my setting of academia. I reached out to my research group at NHH (a group of smart, dedicated and creative people), and pitched the idea that we should try our own version of the South Park innovation process: Not six days to air, but seven days to paper presentation.

We first settled on a simple set of rules: 1) if you agree to join, you commit to clearing the entire week for the experiment, 2) it’s not allowed to discuss ideas in advance, 3) if you need to leave, take a call, or answer an email not related to the project, you are fined, 4) all fines are used on beers to celebrate completion.

Then, to kick off the experiment, we sent a seminar invitation to all the faculty at NHH. It said that they were invited to a paper seminar for a paper that had not yet been written, but would be in the week to come. We also promised to send out the finished paper to everyone the day before the seminar (the 6th day).

Long story short, this process resulted in both one of the best-attended paper seminars at our department, and a complete working paper that was later published. The paper wasn’t a radical innovation in any regard, but it did hit a nerve. Currently it has 250+ citations on Google Scholar (read it here if curious).

I have also tried a similar set up in a more business-like setting with my EMBAs. As detailed in this post, we challenged the group with building a tech startup in just a day, which resulted in six investable pitches. Once again, smart dedicated people plus constraints produced innovations, without any elaborate innovation process.

Innovation starts before the process

Instead of endless discussions about which processes are better than others, I think we should spend more time thinking about the underlying drivers of innovation success. And especially: Tapping into people's creativity.

It's natural to credit innovation success to the process or place where an idea first was raised and started to take shape. But an innovation process doesn't start when people enter the room. At this point, it has already started.

As I explored in an earlier post, all of us already carry vast clouds of knowledge particles in the form of observations, experiences, and learnings gathered over time. The gravitational pull between these particles is always at work in the background, with connections forming and dissolving in our more or less conscious minds.

But sometimes these knowledge and experience clouds need a push to collapse into something concrete. And this is where constraints and commitment serves a purpose. The six-day deadline doesn’t create South Park’s creativity. It forces the gravitational collapse of ideas that were already latent in the creators’ minds, and it forces each team members to externalise their ideas so they can combine with the insights of the other team members and form yet new ideas.

The innovation sprint, with or without structured steps, isn’t generating creativity from nothing. It’s providing the pressure needed to transform the nebula of existing knowledge particles into a protostar of an actual idea. The constraint becomes the force that kickstart this process. The process becomes a focused release.

Seen this way, innovation processes with sprints and short cycles can still be highly valuable, but for a different reason than their elaborate steps being the only right way to innovate. It's more that they can focus attention and create the right kind of pressure at the right time to release latent creativity that’s already there.

But the quality of the latent creativity that can be released from such a process? That likely depends very much on the people you have available to put into the process.

What Really Matters

While companies and leaders alike continue to be seduced by the seemingly quick innovation fixes of structured innovation processes, both South Park and our simple experiments with papers and EMBA students suggests that we should first get the fundamentals right. Regardless of which process you rely on.

And with the fundamentals in place, the South Park creators have shown that just by putting smart creative people with rich clouds of accumulated insights in a room with a strong enough constraint, innovation will happen. It could very well be better with a certain process, but a good process cannot correct for missing fundamentals.

The grander point is that successful innovation simply can’t just be about following any specific process steps. If it were, then everyone who learned these steps would be as innovative as Google and their likes.

Innovation is about gathering the right input, creating the conditions for focused creativity to collapse into form, and walking the final mile to make it a reality. Freeing up smart, creative people from daily distractions and give them a clear goal and deadline to come up with something new, is a straight forward way to achieve the first steps. Doing the same thing within an structured innovation process is another.

This doesn’t mean that structured approaches are worthless. It just means that understanding the fundamentals of innovation helps us use any process more effectively. And those fundamentals are often to get the right kinds of people into a situation where the conditions for creativity and innovation are right.

More than being a universal recipe for innovation success, I therefore think the choice of which innovation process to follow should depend on the challenge at hand. User centric innovation, rapid hypothesis testing and prototyping can all be very useful when they fit the problem you are trying to solve.

So if you’re thinking about arranging some sort of time-limited innovation effort to accelerate innovation, I personally wouldn’t start by worrying too much about which exact process to follow. That should come later.

Instead start by getting the fundamentals right: smart, creative and dedicated people with rich knowledge clouds, combined with clear constraints that force collapse and full commitment.

Or in different words: learn from South Park.