Innovate! Disrupt! The future of your business depends on it!” To me, that ubiquitous advice has always seemed as doable as, “Jump that tall building in one bound!” What a relief, then, to hear someone widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy say, “Stop trying to innovate.” Kristina Halvorson included this message in Jamaica Phone Number List her speech to Content Marketing World. Instead of aiming for innovation, here's what Kristina advises marketers to do: Improve what you are already doing with your content. Then Jamaica Phone Number List upgrade it again. This is where your competitive advantage lies. This is where your success lies.Listen. Improve. Repeat.Now there's something a deadly marketer can do.How do you decide what improvements to make to the
Content? And how do you track your progress as you make one improvement after another? The rest of this article explores these two questions.Look for 'adjacent improvement opportunities'Kristina's message is not new. Product designers and manufacturers have followed the principles of continuous improvement (commonly referred to as continual improvement) for decades. The idea is that innovation does not come from seeking breakthroughs, Jamaica Phone Number List but from achieving one incremental change after another.Expressing this idea memorably during a talk at the Delight Conference for User Experience Designers in 2014, Forrester Research Vice President James McQuivey said: Don't try to build the future. Build an adjacent possibility. Create what people need. Let the future find you.Don't try to build the future. . .Build the next thing people need, says . Click to tweet Adjacent possibilities.
Simply put, James sees innovation as an evolutionary process. In fact, in a Harvard Business Review article, he points out that the man who coined the term was an evolutionary biologist.In the same article, James gives business strategists this Jamaica Phone Number List advice: Direct your team to obsess over the adjacent possibilities of today, not the distant improbabilities of tomorrow… You will have no way of anticipating all the adjacent possibilities that will need to be combined (over the long term) to predict with specify what products you will sell or how Jamaica Phone Number List you will sell them as far. It's not for lack of intelligence on your part. This is because most of those adjacent possibilities that you will ultimately depend on have not yet emerged from the combination of other adjacencies that they will ultimately depend on.In his introduction to a recent This Old Marketing podcast, discussing the difficulty of making long-term