Things the humble burrito can teach us about innovation
Last night I dreamt that I gave a TED talk titled “Burritos: the greatest food known to humankind”. However, this was not just a version of the rant from the foodie who cornered you at your friend’s house party last weekend. It was an allegory for the many lessons I’ve learned over decades of working with some of the world’s most innovative companies to launch new businesses and reinvent their existing ones.
And while I certainly have an opinion on whether L.A., Mission, or California-style is the superior specimen of burrito, let me cut to the chase and offer up the central thesis:
like a burrito, innovation is combination (and can get messy);
this combination should not be random; disciplined practice is required to achieve a good result;
leaders seeking to foster innovation need to create an environment that honors points 1 and 2, holding things together as expertise intermingles and perspectives collide.
Innovation is combination (and can GET messy)
Meaningful innovation almost never occurs within one field of expertise and is usually the product of synthesis across domains.
Frans Johansson’s book, The Medici Effect , covers this phenomenon, provides many examples of how breakthrough ideas occur when concepts from one field are introduced into a new, unfamiliar territory. He describes both literal and figurative examples of ‘the Intersection’ — a place where different cultures, domains, and disciplines converge, allowing for established concepts to clash and combine, ultimately forming something new that can change lives, eliminate drudgery or simply delight.
Literature on the topic of innovation highlights the profound benefits of combining the perspectives of both the hedgehog and the fox, and the critical interplay between specialist and generalist. Of the merits of becoming ’T-shaped’ as professionals and building cross-functional teams to tackle our toughest challenges.
Similarly, a growing number of studies have shown that diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and experience makes teams more innovative and higher performing. And an equal number highlight the pitfalls of focusing solely on diversity without paying adequate attention to creating an inclusive environment that allows you to tap into the collective intelligence of diverse teams to build strategies and solve problems.
Bringing together different perspectives and disciplines is necessary, but not sufficient. We must also create an environment that generates creative friction, productively channeling the inevitable discomfort that comes with collision of different cultures and perspectives.
Fail to give this attention and you risk ending up “hopelessly trapped in a goddamn cilantro cavern”.
Innovation is a managed process, not a random event.
It’s like making a great burrito — you can’t just throw in any ingredients and expect a good result. You need to carefully curate and combine flavors to ignite an explosion of taste and texture.
Understanding the interplay of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is crucial in any cuisine. Master these four elements and you master the kitchen. One of the reasons the humble burrito is both the perfect food and the perfect allegory for innovation, is the intricate interplay of these elements and the multitude of permutations which can emerge from inventive and intentional (re)combination.
Watch the novice trainee at your local Chipotle struggle to wrap the overstuffed monstrosity that is America’s mainstreamed version of the Mission-style burrito and you have a metaphor for the oxymoron that is ‘corporate innovation’. You can follow a formula, put all the ingredients together, and still make one hell of a mess.
Serial innovators, on the other hand, carefully select experiments based on their potential to learn and establish clear criteria for deciding whether an idea should persevere, pivot or perish. ‘Kill some darlings’. ‘Drown some puppies’. ‘Toss a structurally unviable burrito’. Whatever your preferred euphemism, being more disciplined about shelving losing projects makes it less risky to try new things.
Innovation management is both a science and a craft, and by understanding the fundamentals and adopting a disciplined approach you can reliably produce breakthroughs.
Innovation requires collaborative and inclusive leaders
Like a tortilla holding together a burrito’s messy collision of ingredients, leaders play a fundamental role creating the conditions that enable innovation.
Innovation is a drawn out process involving the collision of perspectives, the discovery of novel insights, the cross-functional engineering of a solution, and the transformation of established conventions—whether that’s human behavior, an industry standard, or a category leader. It involves multiple, iterative cycles of invention, adaptation and diffusion. It’s never linear or a solitary act. Like Hemingway said about bankruptcy, it happens two ways “gradually, then suddenly”.
The long and winding road a team or organization must travel takes courage, grit and resilience. You have to be willing to be misunderstood, be interested in being wrong, and have a long-term orientation. None of those characteristics come naturally for most of us. And are even rarer to find as norms in most corporate cultures.
A culture conducive to innovation requires you to manage paradoxical tensions in order to create a psychologically safe, highly collaborative, and nonhierarchical environment that delivers results. To meet this challenge, leaders often need to adopt less directive practices and focus on creating clarity and purpose, cultivating transparency and open communication, providing and receiving timely feedback, empowering teams while maintaining accountability, adopting tools for effective group decision-making, and learning how to identify and mitigate unconscious biases.
In my experience, this is the primary difference that distinguishes organizations who want to innovate from those who do so with regularity. An aspiration to increase or accelerate innovation without a transformation in leadership behaviors is like a burrito with no tortilla.
Ceci n’est pas un burrito.