How innovation tokens can change your life

Change is never easy. Some changes can be valuable and costly, whilst others are only costly. There is only so much a human can tolerate, so choose the most valuable improvement first and let the dust settle before you change something else. Too many changes and all your hard work may become undone. Too few changes and you may miss out on new opportunities. Innovation tokens are there to help you decide.

Resistance to change

Back in 2015, I came across an inspiring blog post by Dan McKinley about choosing boring technologies. It initially resonated with me because the company I worked for, was recovering from a major layoff and had a fairly overcomplicated technology stack. In his blogpost Dan wrote:

Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. You might get a few more after you achieve a certain level of stability and maturity, but the general tendency is to overestimate the contents of your wallet. Clearly this model is approximate, but I think it helps.

The concept of innovation tokens sounded useful, and I added it to my mental toolbox, ready to be forgotten until such a time where I needed it. And indeed I mostly forgot about the boring technology (only to remember innovation tokens; Sorry Dan..).

So what are innovation tokens?

The concept of innovation tokens started to slowly change in my mind: it became less of an argument to constrain “new technology” and more of an argument to be very conscious about what “new” technology to introduce.

As a consultant I noticed that even the introduction of “boring” technology is sometimes perceived as too big a change. In essence innovation tokens simply model an organization’s willingness to change, where every token represents, or pays for, one major change. Run out of tokens, and you will pay for the next major change with a negative currency like anger, frustration, or even sabotage. On the other hand, if you wait for enough time to pass, a token regenerates: you’ll find more willingness to accept change. Testing this hypothesis on different teams, projects, and even friends, family, I noticed that 3 tokens are an accurate maximum for each and everyone.

Personal innovation tokens

Each of the following changes, or events, may cost a token in your personal life:

• Marriage or breakup
• Buy a house
• Become a parent
• Change of job or function
• Learn a new skill or language

Now imagine 2 of those in a short time. How about 3 or 4? You’ll probably want a bit of stability before you can take on something new (and disruptive). A cooldown period of 1 year per major event sounds reasonable. I still consider initial negative changes as innovations, because they disrupt and eventually will make you stronger/better/wiser. I reason it’s the same for any entity, whether it’s an individual, or a team, company, department, project (or any other social construct): in essence they are all just human constructs, and therefore experience a similar resistance to change.

Innovation tokens in consulting

Hardly any company contracts a consultant because “everything is fine”. In other words: (almost) every assignment is about bringing major change to the client. Effectively, as a consultant, entering a new assignment is already spending 1 token on fixing the “thing that needs to be changed”. This leaves a maximum of 2 tokens for you to address “other issues”. This is important because a consultant should bring about change. If change resistance prevents you from performing your assignment, you should fire your client.

Consulting example

Consider the following example:

Company X wants me to implement their new data platform on a public cloud. Their reasoning is sound and the responsible team welcomes the change (1 token: no matter if the team welcomes it or not).

You also notice the following innovation opportunities to spend a token:

• The team has experience with other public clouds (just not this one), but no experience on Infrastructure as Configuration. You deploy their infrastructure using Terraform.
• The team has automated everything via manually executing scripts. You implement full CI/CD using Git.
• They are also not using separate environments (accounts/organizations) to test their infrastructure changes.
• All their scripts are written in .NET, and you are not proficient in it. You write your code in your favourite (scripting) language.

Without the concept of innovation tokens, performing all the major changes from the example will almost certainly fail the entire assignment, possibly even resulting in the company to abandon their data platform migration. Being conscious of the tokens, you can make a better informed decision on which “battle to fight”. Maybe some of them are “simply not worth” spending your (and the client’s!) energy on.

Conclusion

A human can only tolerate so much change:

• You pay 1 innovation token for each big change.
• Once you run out, you have to delay your next major change, or risk failure.
• Innovation tokens slowly regenerate over time.
• Although it differs per person, a good rule of thumb is a maximum of 3 innovation tokens, with a regeneration rate of 1 per year.
• Organizations are a group of humans, therefore they will collectively behave in a similar way when it comes to change.

I’m not saying innovation tokens are the solution to all your change problems, but they certainly help me to deal with mine.

Photo by Kalpit Visavadiya on Unsplash