Your Team Is in an Innovation Rut. Take Them Out of the Building.

The more time my team spent in the office, the more incremental our innovation pipeline became. It was that direct.

Earlier in my career I ran a cross-functional CPG business in the auto market. Great team, fun business, hundreds of SKUs selling into retail channels from Amazon to AutoZone. The permanent challenge was new product development: keeping retail partners and customers interested, balancing incremental improvements against genuinely new products, and still delivering growth and cash flow.

Incremental development is not a sin. It produces consistent performance. But our category-defining work had stalled, and the balance was gone.

Anthropology Day.

So once a month we ran what we called Anthropology Day. Anthropology studies human societies and cultures and how they develop. We diluted the meaning, admittedly.

The rule was that the whole team, every function, left the office to observe something, get uncomfortable and clear out the daily grind. Cross-industry discovery and design thinking were the foundation. There were almost no guardrails. Two people volunteered each month to plan it, usually on a Friday, and the day ended with an event to unpack what we saw.

A few of them:

We visited a recycling plant and watched the machinery pull apart mixed trash.

We watched kids clean a car using various tools and products, with no instructions. A digression: I do this with my own kids. Children are natural innovators. They are clearsighted and not burdened by years of experience and defined process, so they routinely find a faster way to do something that adults do the long way out of habit.

We observed shoppers in categories that had nothing to do with ours, and started conversations with strangers in the aisle.

At a minimum it was good team building. What it actually did was change the question the team asked.

The question is not why. It is what if.

Why gets all the attention and has books written about it. Why is a diagnostic question and it is excellent at explaining the thing in front of you.

What if is the innovation question, because it moves you off the thing in front of you.

What if we built a product that separated this from that? What if we made a tool to clean rims the way that kid did? What if we put this adhesive on toothpaste packaging so it fits in a pocket?

What if questions have no fanfare. They are also the ones that produce new things, because they force you to look at a current problem from an angle your process did not supply.

The same rut happens in revenue operations.

I see the identical pattern now in go-to-market systems, and the cause is the same: people designing a process from inside a conference room, describing work they are not currently watching.

The standard approach is a requirements workshop. Stakeholders from each function sit in a room and describe how the process works. What you get is the official version of the process, which is a composite of how it was designed, how people remember it, and how they would like it to be seen. Then you build to that, and six months later adoption is bad and nobody can explain why.

Here is the Anthropology Day version for a revenue team:

Ride along for a full day.

Not a call. A day. Watch what happens between the meetings, which is where the process actually lives or dies.

Watch someone create an opportunity, in silence.

Sit behind a rep and say nothing while they enter a deal. Count the clicks. Note every field they guess at, every value they pick because it is first in the list, and every place they open a spreadsheet instead. That spreadsheet is the most honest artifact in your company.

Sit with service or support for an afternoon.

The people answering the phone know which promises the sales process is making that the delivery process cannot keep. Nobody asks them during requirements gathering.

Try to buy from yourself.

Fill in your own web form. Wait for the response the way a prospect waits. Time it. Most leadership teams have never experienced their own buying process, and it is usually a bad experience that everyone assumes is fine.

Listen to five recorded calls with no agenda.

Not to score the rep. To hear the words customers use for their own problem, which are almost never the words in your field picklists.

Then ask what if.

What if this stage did not exist? What if the rep never had to type this? What if the field were filled in by the system that already knows the answer? What if we deleted the report nobody opens and the twelve fields that exist only to feed it?

Those questions are unavailable in a requirements workshop, because a workshop is organized around preserving what people described. Observation gives you permission to propose something different. It is also the difference between a system that gets adopted and one that gets worked around, which is most of what our implementation work is really about.

The takeaway.

If your innovation is all incremental, look at where your team spends its time. Office time produces office ideas. The cure is cheap: leave the building once a month, watch something real, and come back with what if questions instead of status updates.

I have argued before that innovation should not grow up as the company scales, and that incrementalizing yourself to death is a real risk. Anthropology Day is the smallest practical version of both arguments. One Friday a month, out of the building.

How are you unlocking innovation?