Promoting Innovation and Collaboration

About this Episode

The panelists discuss innovation and collaboration, particularly in engineering and beyond. Mike kicks off with a personal anecdote about his musical education, highlighting the limitations of conventional music lessons that focus heavily on theory and reading music, rather than fostering creativity and improvisation. This experience ties into his broader theme of innovation, suggesting that traditional educational methods might stifle creativity, which is essential for genuine innovation.

The conversation shifts to practical applications of fostering innovation within organizations. Mike uses the analogy of his own gardening experience, where allowing a garden to overgrow led to unexpected and beautiful variations in his plants. This metaphor extends to the workplace, where Mike argues that allowing some processes to be unstructured can lead to innovative outcomes. He stresses the importance of making space for collaboration and letting ideas "go to seed," which can spur development and bring forth new, valuable changes that wouldn't occur in overly controlled environments.

As the discussion unfolds, Will and other guests explore different aspects of innovation in the workplace, including the potential pitfalls of too much freedom or too much control. They debate the merits and drawbacks of Google's famed 20% time, where employees are allowed to spend one-fifth of their work hours on projects they're passionate about. This leads to a broader reflection on how companies can balance structured and unstructured time to foster an environment where innovation thrives without sacrificing operational efficiency. The episode concludes with a consensus that while not all innovative efforts will succeed, the potential for groundbreaking ideas makes the endeavor worthwhile.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike. I'm going to be hosting again today. With us, we've got Justin, and Ramses, Eddy, and Will. Will, I think, is joining us for the first time. Welcome, Will.

WILL: Happy to be here.

MIKE: Happy to have you here. As usual, I'm going to give a lead here and kick off our meeting. I'm going to start with actually two stories today, and both of these are outside engineering. And I've given several music references. I'm going to do another one today [laughs]. It's a deep well to draw on.

When I was a kid, my mom signed me up for piano lessons [chuckles], and I was nervous about it. I thought...like, everybody else talked about it being dreadfully boring, and I thought it would be as well. Actually, I enjoyed it. I loved it. I took lessons for a number of years, nine years, I think.

And, in those nine years of lessons, I think I had zero lessons on improvisation or creativity. And I think I'm nowhere near unique in that respect. I think most people who have music lessons learn how to read music. And honestly, I think that's kind of a travesty. I've read from a mathematician, so there's something worth looking up. It's A Mathematician's Lament. And he actually gives music as an example. He said, "Imagine that music was taught by everybody learning to read music, but you never listened to it," because he took that idea to its logical extreme.

You learned how to write notes, do all this notation, study chord structure, and maybe when you got to, you know, like, your teens or the really advanced students would be able to start listening to music. You know, in a world like that, of course, everybody would hate music. But music is often taught, not quite so badly, but kind of because we learn to read it, but not to write it. It's not given equal weight, and I think that's really unfortunate. Because if you don't give time for somebody to learn to create something on their own, they'll never learn. How could they? If there's not time, there's just no way.

When I was in high school, I took a guitar class [chuckles] and learned to play guitar. And I loved it. And suddenly, for the first time, music theory made sense. I looked at the guitar. I was like, "Oh, there's this circle of fifths thing, and, you know, let's see how this all works."

JUSTIN: [laughs]

MIKE: Then I started, you know, playing chords and chord progressions, and it was great. Later, I got a bass, and it was kind of the opposite of piano. Piano, you have all this polyphony and the bass; you just got one note you're plucking away at, and I loved it. You're thinking of, you know, I was able to improvise, think about just kind of the pure baseline there.

And I've had many experiences that I've really enjoyed, like laying down a bass line. Somebody's playing, or somebody played something, and I try to come up with a bass line to it, or, you know, I've kind of come back to piano in the last few years as well. I enjoy making music with other people, and I like creating music. And I probably do more creative stuff than reading music, to be honest. I flipped the tables because I had time to do it, and I was given a structure that allowed me to do it. And it made all the difference, and it allowed me to enjoy music in a way that I wasn't able to before.

One more story. So, I want to do something different from music. We've done lots of music references, so I'm going to do something very outside of music. I've got a garden behind my house. I like greens. I'm a fan of greens, but I'm particularly fond of red Russian kale. But I'm actually not going to talk about red Russian kale. I'm going to talk about a different green, which is mustard greens. I've got a variety called Ruby Giant. It grows big, beautiful leaves that are red on one side and green on the other side.

Last year, I let some of those go to seed, and when it gets hot, they do that. They go to seed, and they leave seed all over. And then I let the seeds grow, which looked kind of weedy, to be honest [laughs]. It was kind of messy in that area of my garden, but I was curious what would happen. And in the fall, I got a lot of mustard that grew up. And one of the mustard plants that came up was pure red. Usually, like I said, they're red, kind of red mottled on one side, and the other side, it was green. But this one was red, just deep burgundy all the way through. It was an amazingly beautiful plant, tasty, too [laughs]. That's some of it. I actually pickled some mustard greens. And I hope that it comes up again this year.

The point that I'm getting to is, if I had not let the garden get a little weedy, you know, get a little overgrown there and go to seed, I never would have had that second generation. I never would have had that innovation in my garden where I had something that I never had before. If I just kept everything nice and tidy, that would have been it. I would have had that first generation. I never would have had something new. I gave it space. If I had not given the space for something to be a little messy and go its own way for a while, then I never would have had something that was genuinely different from what I had before.

There's my two-lead story. Today, we are talking, and I don't know if I've mentioned it before, fostering innovation and collaboration among engineers. But I haven't talked about engineering yet, but these stories speak to me about what it takes to promote innovation or collaboration. I guess they're somewhat related. If you want collaboration, I think you have to make space for it. And you can't enforce it. You have to let it go to seed a little bit. So, there's my take. Thoughts? What do y'all think?

WILL: I'm kind of curious, like, what do you mean by, like, sort of innovation? In that, for most of the work that we do, innovation is really more customer-facing than technical-facing. You know, like, there are companies and organizations and stuff like that that are actually sort of cutting new trails technically. But by and large, I think the overwhelming majority of innovation is, like, delivering things to customers. And we're not necessarily, like, writing our own database, or writing our own operating system, if we're doing a new LLM based on sort of, like, existing open-source work.

And so, when I think of innovation within engineering teams, generally speaking, it comes in one or two flavors, one of which is a little bit of an anti-pattern and one of which I think is really, really healthy and good. Like, one of them is honestly, I mean, it's sort of, like, engineers gone wild because you've got a bunch of smart people who are maybe underutilized, you know, they're kind of chewing the walls a little bit.

And so, you'll find just shiny object syndrome, you know, the sort of, like, JavaScript flavor of the moment, you know, just because people are bored. People are bored at work. They want to play with shiny, new toys. And, you know, you'll find yourself in a situation where, like, they're reinventing things that aren't really generating a problem. And that's a little bit of an anti-pattern, but that's the evil twin.

The really good part about it is when you have had a nagging, constant pain in an engineering organization and figuring out a solution to it. And so, you need to be, I think, disciplined, you know what I mean? Like, are you solving a real problem? Is this thing better, or is it just new? There's actually technical innovation that is sort of, like, customer-focused and facing, which, you know, I love but isn't necessarily an engineering question. I hate to buy into the grossly incorrect notion that only product could ever come up with technical customer-facing innovation.

MIKE: [laughs]

WILL: I think that's incorrect, borderline offensive. But, like, within the context of a sort of engineering organization, that's where I'm coming at it from.

MIKE: I've got a couple of examples I can think of just off the bat. We have taken times in the past that I think we still got on the calendar, what we've called 5% time. It's just every other week in the afternoon, we have this space to collaborate on something, a time to scratch that itch to work on something together.

And a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago [chuckles], sometime in the last few years, some of us chose to take that time and extract an important service out of the main application we were working in. And that service became actually kind of critical to the company because it's our merchant API, and it allows them to get information. I don't want to go too much into technical details about the company. We were able to extract this application. It ended up being a really valuable extraction and would never have happened. It wouldn't have had any legs at all unless we had just taken that time to pull that out.

More recently, we've done something similar. We had a DevDay project, worked on something that we wanted to get done. We took a, basically, it was a message queue [laughs] that some agents were using, and we pulled it out of the database, put it into Redis to make it perform better. And it was really volatile data anyway. And we put it over there, made it into production. And it's how it's running now. And it's been working [laughs], right?

And, again, it wouldn't have gone forward unless we'd taken that opportunity to schedule some time and say, "Hey, go do an experiment." We didn't finish the experiment on that DevDay, but it gave us something. We actually ended up scheduling [inaudible 08:35] engineering organization because it solved several problems, removed some old code that we needed to get rid of, and an aging library, you know, solved a problem.

And I think to your point, Will, if you just set a bunch of people free and said, "Hey, work from wherever you want to for as long as you want to," and there are some organizations that do that, I think, you end up with a lot of ivory towers that don't accomplish much [laughs]. You know, people build this amazing, perfect software that doesn't solve any problems. But if you box it in a little bit, and I've seen this a lot of times, you box in creativity a little bit, it actually tends to grow. If you restrict the number of options, then people have something to work with. You know, if you've got a riff to play against, well, now you've limited the options, so you can make some music on top of that. It works a lot better.

EDDY: You know, Mike, you mentioned 5% time, and I'm pretty sure that's based off of Google's 20% time. It's just fractioned off a little bit. I want to go on record in saying if I remember correctly, I think some of their best products that Google uses right now on their subscription base was because of their 20% time that they fostered. I want to say some of those were, like, Gmail, for example, and, like, I don't know.

MIKE: I think Gmail did come from that. Yeah.

EDDY: Yeah, and, like, Google Maps, I think. It's been a while since I read that list, so I don't have an exhaustive list. But that's just a prime example of if you foster innovation in your team, you know, you get some really solid projects.

JUSTIN: I think part of that is people who are in charge have the ability to recognize when something has legs as well, you know, a little bit of guidance there from management where they can recognize, hey, this project has a potential to solve a problem. Let's gently encourage people to continue working on it.

And then, also, the flip side of that is maybe those same people look at stuff that other people are working on and say, "Hey, you know, maybe you should be working on something else," or helping them recognize, "Oh, is this a dead end," or "Is this something that you want to keep on going on?" and giving useful feedback that way. You don't want to, like, nip things in the bud necessarily, but at the same time, I think giving useful feedback and being able to receive useful feedback I think is key to being successful with these side projects that become big things, big successes.

WILL: I think if you're doing 5% time, then you sort of, I mean, I don't know, maybe Mike could, like, maybe this isn't how it went down, but I feel like you guys found something good in 5% time and exactly like that, like, management, like, saw it. And they're like, "Oh, this is kind of cool. Okay. You know, like, I'm going to feed this a little bit. I'm going to get this onto some sprints so that it could actually, like, go."

I don't know, I personally favor, like, this 20% time because I don't think 5% is enough to ship a product, you know what I mean? If you actually want to ship a thing that somebody could use, 5% time ain't going to get it. And, like, the thing about, like, sort of, like, management is management has their own priorities, and management gets their say. They get their time. It's not like management is doing a bad thing, but I mean, the idea of unstructured creative time is stuff that isn't on management's radar.

And I think, I mean, I'll say it directly, like, I think management is not as good at innovation as they think they are. It's not that they're bad necessarily, but, like, they don't have more good ideas than the whole of the organization, you know what I mean? Like, really tying people loose will come up with stuff. I mean, and, like, hear me, you have to be, I suppose, like, maybe more specifically what I'd say is that sort of, like, wide open 20% time, you're going to have some duds. You're going to have a lot of duds. You're going to have a lot of stupid, boneheaded, dumb go nowhere ideas. There's going to be some dumb stuff that comes out of that unstructured time.

And management is a little bit...I think they're naturally resistant to just transparently stupid ideas. But you're also going to take stuff that's a good idea, but it's, you know what I mean, a little wild for, like, you know what I mean? Like, you'll never get it into a sprint plan unless it's done, and it's like, oh, wow, this is cool, like, you know what I mean? The Google projects are a classic example of that. They did a lot of stuff that was really, really big, but they also stopped doing it because nothing makes as much money as ads in search. The manager was like, "This is cool."

Everybody loves Google Reader, right? Beloved dead product. Or another one, I mean, like, and this is maybe the other side of the coin, Google Voice, right? Google Voice, right? What a stupid idea. And it never made any money, and it never did anything. Oh, wait, here it is, 2023. We have this absolutely gargantuan corpus of voice data that we have been snarfing up for literally a decade. Man, our LLM would love that, wouldn't it? [laughter] You know, I mean [inaudible 13:37],

EDDY: You just suddenly stumbled upon having a full database of the stuff that you would kill to have, and you have it by accident.

[laughter]

WILL: Yeah. Oops! You know what I mean? And that's kind of the thing, you know, I mean, it's, you know, can you afford it? You know, I mean, there's good and bad points. But, I mean, like, the management control I think it's just a flavor, you know, like, somebody likes chocolate, somebody likes vanilla, and it is all heavily directed by business constraints. Google prints money. They print more money than anyone has ever seen, ever. And it just keeps on coming. So, they had opportunities to do that that people with tighter budgets maybe don't.

EDDY: You know, what I feel like companies typically don't do is they don't reach out to people who are out in the field, you know, doing a bunch of that customer interaction. Let me give you an example. When I go into a restaurant that I haven't been to before, my general go-to rule of thumb is talk to the individual who is in the front-facing. And I'll ask, "Hey, what is your favorite dish from your menu?" They're probably going to have a more concise answer than someone who's up in management because they're consuming the product at a different level.

But not only that, let me take it a bit further. There are individuals who I ask, "What do you do differently to the products that you sell that make it taste better?" Do that sometime. I promise you, nine times out of 10, they're going to give you a different menu item that's not publicly available. But let me tell you what, it tastes so much better because that's not something that they typically offer. If you're trying to promote innovation, reaching out to the people who have the ability to play around with your product is probably the best thing.

To add to that, when I started at Acima a couple of years ago, part of the onboarding process was speaking to people and agents who are talking on the phone, who actively use the product that we develop on a daily basis, and I got to speak with them. And I'm like, "Hey, what would you like the app to do, something that we haven't considered?" The amount of input that they have is insane. So, I feel like there's some lost potential there that we could harness or any company can harness.

MIKE: Absolutely. You know, I mentioned you have to have an untidy corner in your garden if you want something new, and not everybody's going to like that. It's going to make the neighbors uncomfortable [laughs]. It might make some people in your own home uncomfortable. They're like, "Well, no. Why don't you just level that out?" I just want to see some bare soil." But that's kind of the price you have to pay. You have to have some of those wild ideas, some of the dumb ideas, some of the things that aren't going to work because that's what innovation looks like.

You know, to Will's point, management is not uniquely qualified to have smart ideas. What good management does, and this also builds on what Eddy was saying, is that they look for those ideas. It's not, hey, the idea was mine; rather, I found a good idea that somebody had, and I'm going to promote that because it's a great idea.

JUSTIN: I think that's one of the best talents that good leaders have is the ability to recognize good ideas. If you look at Steve Jobs, I mean, he's acknowledged for his designs and everything, but he also has the ability to recognize, you know, hey, what is a good idea? What all fits together? What could fit our company? Or what do people potentially want? And it's not all just him, of course, but it's his ability to recognize that.

And Apple has a way of doing things that makes them one of the top companies in the world. And so, if you look at that, it's like, obviously, as a company, they're generating great ideas. They probably have a dozen misses for every hit they have. And so, being able to have a place where you can have a dozen misses and not be fired, and being able to do what you want to do to encourage that, I think, is key. Having a wild garden or a place where growth is encouraged.

MIKE: Yeah. You mentioned Steve Jobs. One thing I've always been struck by is, as a kid in the United States, a lot of times we hear about Thomas Edison, this great inventor. And you picture some guy in a lab, just some guy in a lab. But if you actually read about his lab, he had, like, a hundred employees [laughs]. His job was not sitting there at a bench inventing stuff. His job was to lead a team of engineers.

And what made them successful wasn't one guy being brilliant. It was a team of engineers being given the space to work on good things and then filtering down the ideas and channeling them. It's a department effort with good leadership from the top that makes a difference. That guy's name's on it, but it really wasn't him who came up with most of the ideas. He just led a team.

WILL: But, I mean, like, if I'm being honest with you, I mean, like, most of the corporate managers I know were not selected for their ability to innovate, you know what I mean? Like, how do you become a manager, right? Well, you know what I mean? You have, like, sort of technical expertise, and you have the ability to, like, sort of, like, organize a team. And a line-level manager is not really an innovator. That's not really the job, you know what I mean? Like, the job is to sort of, like, organize and implement somebody else's ideas.

And how do you become, like, a mid-level manager? A mid-level manager is a line-level manager, and a senior manager is a good mid-level manager. And as you go through, like, successive generations, I mean, like, the original person, okay, that's like a Steve Jobs type, right? Which is why Apple went down the tubes pretty quick after the innovative person he left. And so, I mean, like, most corporate managers, being good at innovation is not how you get that job.

So, I'm [inaudible 19:21] for a very large retailer who shall remain nameless. But they have succession, successive generations of these sort of managers, you know what I mean? Who are implementers, you know what I mean? Generation after generation, after generation after generation of these guys, and they're not dumb guys. But, like, that job is not their job, and sort of, like, they've been evolutionarily selected, for, like, particular traits, and then they get to the VP level, and it's just like, okay, innovate. And it's just like, okay. [laughs]

JUSTIN: So, what you're saying is we are selecting for the wrong thing at the manager level, or many companies are selecting for the wrong thing at the manager level. They should be selecting for innovation when they are instead selecting for the ability to manage a Jira project.

WILL: Well, I mean, like, you need the ability to manage a Jira project and sort of, like, what that 20% time was, you know what I mean? Maybe the argument for it is an antidote for Jira itis implementation type stuff in that, like, okay, let a bunch of wild prototypes out and not sort of, like, curating them because you are a tastemaker, which you're not, you know what I mean? But, like, sort of, like, being humble and saying like, "You know what? I don't know what's going to work. Let's just let a thousand flowers bloom.

And when something goes, when we have a winner, when something hooks, even though it wasn't my idea, then I'll take it, and I'll do what I do, which is, like, get this thing over the line in a polished professional setting." Like, that's the counter, right? But it takes a certain level of, like, egoness and, like, a release of control, which is not necessarily how corporate hierarchical management works.

EDDY: You also need a butt load of money to innovate and take that risk, too, right? So, it's not like anyone can really do that.

JUSTIN: That's an interesting constraint. If you are in an environment where you are trying to squeeze every developer efficiency out, allocating 20% time for other stuff that you don't have a guarantee of return on, that's hard.

MIKE: Two things, Will, you said. The 20% is the antidote for everything else. I think that's exactly right. It's the part you set aside that you don't control [laughs], and controlling the rest is actually really important. That 80% is critical to your business. You don't want that 20% to grow to 80% because then you go down the tubes pretty quick. You know, you need to keep that constraint, but you have to have that innovation.

There's a huge risk in being stagnant. In some ways, that's maybe the most risky thing. If you look at the most valuable companies from 20 years ago, it was like Exxon [laughs]; IBM may have been on there. You know, the companies that you don't really think about that much anymore. You know, there's all these tech companies today. And 20 years from now, it'll probably be another set. If you look a hundred years ago, you had train companies or the big oil companies, and they were huge. They looked like they were unstoppable. They were massive transportation company. But they quit thinking about themselves as a transportation company, started thinking of themselves as a train company because they've got all these trains.

And once you start getting that line of thinking where you don't innovate against yourself, you become stagnant, and then an upstart comes and out-innovates you, and you lose your momentum. You have to have that innovation because that's also risky. It's risky to put all of your eggs into that, but it's also hugely risky not to innovate because you will eventually stagnate and die out.

WILL: And I'd also say, like, I mean, a little bit of a false premise in that, like, you think, like, oh, well, we're going to invest 20% time in people coming up with their wild, crazy ideas. Okay. Well, I mean, that's a big risk. But it's also a risk, like, I'm working for a very large company, where bluntly, the innovation stuff is the decisions are made based on VP-level people who did not get their position through being an innovator. And they have vibes, and they have some vibes.

And then, all the chips go to the middle of the table based on one individual who is...and I want to be very clear; they're smart people and hardworking, you know what I mean? Like, they're not bad people. Everybody that I've dealt with has been. Like, they've all been, like, solid folks. But, like, that's not their thing. They've never invented a product, ever, until they get to do it, and then all the chips go to the center of the table.

And if their vibes are wrong, you know, then you're cooked, whereas, I mean, bluntly, if it's 20% time and everybody's just coming up with some wild idea, I will call a spade a spade. You have a much higher standard that that idea has to meet for somebody in management to pick it up and run with it. It's got to be a lot stronger than somebody just having a vibe.

JUSTIN: Yeah, I got an interesting story about this. My friend works for Ford pretty high up in the finance department. Ford, a couple of years ago, decided that they were 100% all in on the electric. Then they came out with a couple of electric vehicles, most notably, the Ford F-150 Lightning, which came out to great fanfare, but turns out that the battery is just not there for what people use a truck for. So, all of a sudden, his decision to do this very innovative thing...because Ford is, like, 120 years old or 100 years old, right?

And as CEO, he put all his chips in on this new electric drive train, which I think is awesome. I love electric cars. But, for Ford, their number one seller is the Ford F-150 truck, which is a standard truck that people love, and they love the ability that it gives them to, you know, a variety of things. But one of the main things is like, you know, you can go out and gas it up and keep on working. Whereas with the Ford F-150 electric truck, you can charge it overnight and try to find a charger somewhere else. But if you can't find a charger, you're high and dry, and you're in for an expensive tow.

So, he went in on innovation that perhaps was not ready yet, and he's probably going to lose his job over it, which he probably should, in some ways because that's the CEO. But it's just interesting because I think, yes, you need to recognize innovation and go for it, but maybe not bet the company on it [laughs].

EDDY: Well, fear of innovation is also what's going to put you in serious risk...

JUSTIN: Yeah.

EDDY: Right? Of bankruptcy. As an example, off the top of my head, and it's not a jab at this company, but it is a prime example. Blockbuster was amazing, right? Like, they were a striving company for years. Staple name, staple IP. Everyone knows the name. Even now, you could talk to someone, "Hey, do you remember Blockbuster?" "Oh yeah. They were awesome, you know." They had the opportunity to buy Netflix at the time. And then, they passed up on that because they didn't believe that that was the future. And being scared of innovation it was a prime example of why they went out of business. So, there's definitely [chuckles] a balance with fostering innovation in your company.

MIKE: Yeah. 80% of your company going into innovation is bad, and 0% of your [chuckles] company going into innovation is bad. That suggests that maybe there is somewhere in between that is good.

WILL: Well, I sort of like 20%, and I like releasing the illusion of control. I like releasing the illusion of, like...the reason I like sort of, like, unrestricted 20% time is because you're not predicating your ability to continually successfully innovate based on the smart guy that I have designated. Me, the big boss with my big brain, have said, "These four or five guys, these are the smart guys. I know best, and these guys are the people who are allowed to have ideas. And they will be smart guys and give me the correct ideas. Versus just sort of like, I don't know, we're going to try some stuff, and we're going to pick the winners, and we're going to ditch the losers, and we're going to see how things go.

It's the ego control, like, only I know best thing, which I think is endemic to top-down corporate hierarchy, and they will kill you deader than fried chicken. And I would also like to tip of the hat to Netflix because, like, Netflix, they're doing better than ever. They torched their business, remember?

MIKE: Yeah, they did.

WILL: Remember the DVDs?

MIKE: They did [chuckles].

WILL: [inaudible 28:08] dollar company, and they're just like, "Nah, we're done with that. This is stupid. This mail stuff is dumb, you know?" They are sort of, like, this sort of counterexample to, like, you know, they had a really smart guy who really got it, and he had the right idea. He's just like, "Nah, this is it." I mean, it's great as long as you have a Steve Jobs, and you can continue to have successive Steve Jobs. If you could guarantee that, you're going to do great.

JUSTIN: It sounds like we have a great conclusion here that, you know, yes, there needs to be innovation and, you know, enable our engineers to kind of run with their ideas a certain percentage of time. But is there a way that you can make them more successful? Like, granted, you know, X number are going to be unsuccessful, right? You're going to have a lot of duds. But is there a way that you can help structure their projects that could make them more successful than not? What would you do? Would you encourage project planning, or maybe a deadline, or something, some sort of guardrails, or guides that could help them on those?

WILL: I think you got to go the other way. I think people's natural inherent bias is fear of failure. I think that's baked into our DNA, our bones, who we are as human beings. Honestly, like, I think you have to encourage, like, wild, stupid failures. People don't want to...even if it's 20% time, it's like, it's cool. Fridays just do weird stuff. Nobody wants to go to their boss and say, like, "You know, hey, what'd you do for the past year's worth of Fridays?" It's like, "I just wasted it all. It was all just stupid. It was all a complete loss." Like, think about even if it's like, don't worry, it's not going to affect your performance if you fail more, not succeed more, fail more. It's just the bias that we have to correct for as human beings is a fear of failure.

MIKE: I think you're dead on, by the way [laughs]. I actually have...I'm sitting up where my kids do school. I've got a sign that says...I'm not sure I got it quite right, but I'm going to get close. "Mistakes are proof you are trying." I want my kids to hear that every day. It's so important that they know mistakes are part of this. Mistakes are great. Please make a lot of mistakes because that means that you're doing the right thing.

Now, I want you to pay attention enough that maybe you're not making mistakes that you knew better than. But I want you to be trying new things that you make mistakes on. If you're not trying things that are hard enough to make mistakes, that means that you're not really learning anything.

JUSTIN: Well, maybe that's just the answer then. It's just, like, you go in and set the, I hate saying, set expectations, but you set the expectation of, hey, go out and try this. Go make a bunch of mistakes, and recognize that you aren't going to be perfect. And recognize that, hey, go out and collaborate with your teammates and share ideas maybe with each other. Go out and ask for help. Don't be afraid to share what you're working on. And even if it's a stupid idea, you know, chatting with other people maybe...actually, this may be a separate, you know, encouragement of, like, I don't know, some people may want to go off on their own and do stuff all by themselves, but maybe encourage people to collaborate at least.

MIKE: So, encourage pairing, for example? You're going to be pairing with somebody, you know, X number of hours a week, N number of hours a week, whatever N is, three, two, I don't know. Give your [inaudible 31:27]

JUSTIN: I'm just saying in terms of your 20% time.

MIKE: Got it. Got it.

JUSTIN: Because a lot of times, if you go out and you go try to solo something, that's good. Sometimes you just got to, like, research the heck out of something. But in order to get it to the next stage, you recognize that, hey, I need some help. Let's see if I can convince some other people to join my 20% time project.

WILL: Exactly. I mean, we've been talking about a higher bar, right? The higher bar, like, your manager doesn't have to persuade you. They didn't even have to persuade you that they were your manager, somebody said.

MIKE: [laughs].

WILL: And I'm like, "Well, I don't want to work for Mike." Like, "Do you like getting your paycheck?" "Yeah." "There you go."

JUSTIN: [laughs].

WILL: I mean, like, yeah, the fact that you have to persuade, I mean, that's extremely uncharitable of me, but it's incorrect. It's wholly incorrect to say that somebody just, like, made something up. Like, there's even in management meetings, like, you got to make your case. You do have to persuade people. It is necessary.

MIKE: So, to summarize what we've come up with here, if you want to have innovation, you have to set aside some time for it. You have to make a space, and it has to be uncomfortable. That's not to say you put all your time and space for it. You budget a portion because you got to keep the lights on. You got to keep the business running. And doing most of your business should probably be the biggest part of your priority. But you better put a portion of that dedicated to doing these new things, most of which will not work out.

JUSTIN: It's also worth noting that if you aren't encouraging the innovation inside your company, the smart people are going to go out and start their own company with whatever ideas they had, so...

MIKE: I think that's exactly right.

WILL: And I think, like, as I think about it a little bit more, like, there's a level of, like, it's like venture capital, right? There's a level of scale that you need in terms of, like, sort of, like, 20% time. Like, a company as big as Google, 20% time, it's like, okay, that's a lot of different ideas, a lot of smart people. They can do stuff.

But, I mean, like, if you say, like, "Okay, 10% is going to win," and you've got, like, ten people, you're going to have to bet on having a smart guy. You can't afford a lot of losses. You need a certain scale to just sort of like, let's go! If it's let a thousand flowers bloom, okay, that's one thing, but if it's, like, let one flower bloom or five flowers bloom, you know what I mean? Like, it's going to be more difficult to be assured of a win, you know what I mean? Like, then you might have to put your eggs in one basket and, like, be more judicious about it.

MIKE: That probably just comes down though to management [laughs], and there's a flip side. Like, managers actually can do a good job if they're good. I think that's a good stopping point. And this has been a great session. And I look forward to getting together again in the next episode of the Acima Development Podcast.