It might be the most obvious innovation infarction of all.

Nonetheless, quite deadly.

The latest innovation self-suicide factor is simply avoiding hard work.

People, innovation is Never easy. You might be fooled now and then when something goes smoothly, but I’ll bet you a dime to a dollar (a pence to a pound) it’s an incremental innovation. Nothing wrong with that, but breakthrough’s require hard work — blood, sweat, and tears. Cue Paul Robeson  singing Old Man River. Or maybe we recall the famous words of Ringo Starr “Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues, and you know it don’t come easy.”

Innovation — it don’t come easy.

I’ve observed recently an organization that has done considerable and expensive research into a critical  marketing problem. The good news: the solution sticks out like a sore thumb, it is really quite obvious what they have to do (no idea generation necessary). I’m not saying it would be easy, frankly, it would be a sonofagun. And yet, it’s very doable. If they moved forward with this difficult idea and change they would solve their problem. They would be looking at dramatically improved results in less than a year. Painful, oh yeah. Complicated? Very!  The solution requires a lot of back breaking hard work and team collaboration. It’s not that risky — there is a clear path to a big win and lots of evidence it will work.

And, they are choosing not to take this path — the one where they have to climb a mountain of hard work. Instead they are seeking other ideas that fit more easily into their existing structure. They may succeed in skinning the cat another way, I wish them well. I hope they aren’t deluding themselves though, the choice is putting them at risk of an innovation infarction. They are simply dodging hard work.

How do you avoid this hard work avoidance infarction? It’s easy — you roll up your sleeves and tackle the obvious, difficult, complex problem. How do you show a team or an organization the heart attack ahead? The best you can do is paint a grim future scenario and try to motivate by creating a perceived crisis. People choose to innovate when they are faced with disaster if they don’t innovate. Put that grim picture in their head and, just maybe, you’ll push them into the hard work necessary before it’s too late.

Don’t dodge hard work. If you do, you’ll be singing Yesterday, and thinking of what might have been.