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We’ve developed a strange relationship with innovation. We treat it like some mythical creature that only appears during lightning strikes of genius, preferably in a garage somewhere in California. The story goes: brilliant founder has eureka moment, disrupts industry, changes world. Roll credits.
This narrative has done more damage to actual progress than we’d like to admit. While everyone stares at the horizon waiting for the next revolutionary breakthrough, the door hinge keeps squeaking, the checkout process still takes seven clicks too many, and nobody can figure out how to schedule a meeting without fourteen email threads.
The obsession with moonshots has made us blind to the ground beneath our feet.
The Lottery Mindset
Chasing the next big thing is essentially playing the innovation lottery. You’re betting everything on one unlikely outcome while ignoring the guaranteed returns sitting in plain sight. Companies spend millions trying to invent revolutionary products while their existing customers struggle with basic features that barely work. Entrepreneurs pitch investors on ideas that will “change everything” while their current operations bleed inefficiency from a thousand small cuts.
The math here is worse than it appears. Revolutionary innovations are rare by definition. If they were common, they wouldn’t be revolutionary. Yet we’ve structured entire systems around the assumption that this is where value comes from. Venture capital funds need moonshots because their model requires a few massive wins to offset many losses. That makes sense for them. It makes no sense for everyone else to adopt the same thinking.
Most businesses don’t need a moonshot. They need to make their product work the way customers expect it to work. Most innovations don’t need to change the world. They need to make Tuesday afternoon slightly less frustrating.
The Compound Returns of Mundane Improvements
Here’s what actually builds exceptional organizations: fixing one small thing, then another, then another, until you’ve created something that works noticeably better than the competition. Not because of any single brilliant insight, but because you’ve eliminated a hundred minor sources of friction that everyone else considered too boring to address.
Think about Toyota’s production system. Nothing about it was revolutionary when they developed it. They just decided that problems were worth solving immediately rather than living with them. Workers could stop the entire production line if they spotted a defect. The insight wasn’t groundbreaking. The discipline to actually do it, continuously, was what mattered.
Or consider how Google became the dominant search engine. Yes, the PageRank algorithm was clever. But what really separated them was an obsessive focus on speed and simplicity. Every millisecond of load time mattered. Every unnecessary element on the page was a problem to solve. While competitors added more features and clutter, Google kept asking what they could remove. They won by being reliable and fast, not by inventing something nobody had imagined before.
The returns compound in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Fix the login process and customer service calls drop by 15%. Improve the onboarding flow and retention jumps. Speed up the checkout and conversion rates climb. None of these feel like innovation in the sexy sense. But stack enough of them and you’ve built something competitors can’t easily copy, not because it’s complicated, but because it requires sustained attention to detail that most organizations can’t maintain.
Why We Avoid the Small Stuff
There’s a reason we’d rather dream about revolution than fix what’s broken. Small problems are tedious. They require confronting boring realities about how things actually work. They demand ongoing attention rather than one heroic effort. There’s no story to tell at dinner parties about how you reduced customer complaints by 8% through better error messages.
The psychological appeal of big ideas is immense. They let us imagine we’re smarter than the incremental work suggests. They promise escape from the grinding reality of implementation. Why spend three months improving your existing product when you could spend three months imagining a product that makes the current one obsolete?
This is the same impulse that makes people prefer planning to doing. Planning feels like progress without requiring you to face what’s actually hard about execution. Chasing moonshots feels like innovation without requiring you to solve the specific, often annoying problems your customers actually have.
Organizations amplify this tendency. Nobody gets promoted for making things 3% better. People get promoted for launching new initiatives, entering new markets, leading transformation projects. The incentive structure explicitly rewards big swings over steady improvement. So rational actors within these systems naturally focus on what gets rewarded, even when it’s not what creates value.
The Hidden Leverage in Boring Problems
Some of the highest leverage work in any system is fixing things that seem too small to matter. This sounds counterintuitive. Small problems often indicate systemic issues. The annoying thing that everyone complains about but nobody fixes usually reveals something deeper about how the organization functions.
That confusing error message isn’t just a bad error message. It’s a symptom of developers and users never talking to each other. That slow approval process isn’t just bureaucracy. It’s a sign that nobody trusts anyone else to make decisions. The tool that requires a workaround isn’t just poorly designed. It reflects a broken feedback loop between the people who build things and the people who use them.
When you fix these small, visible problems, you often have to fix the larger, invisible systems that created them. This is why organizations that excel at execution tend to excel across the board. It’s not that they’re better at strategy or vision. They’ve built systems that surface and solve problems quickly, which means they improve faster than everyone else.
Consider the medical field. The biggest improvements in patient outcomes often come from boring interventions like checklists and hand washing protocols, not from breakthrough treatments. A surgeon using a checklist before surgery prevents more deaths than most new surgical techniques. But checklists aren’t exciting. They don’t get published in prestigious journals or win awards. They just save lives consistently.
The Practice of Incremental Excellence
Shifting from moonshot thinking to incremental improvement requires different habits. It means creating systems that surface small problems before they become big ones. It means giving people permission and incentives to fix annoying things. It means measuring progress in ways that value reliability and consistency, not just novelty.
Start by making a list of everything that’s embarrassing about your current product, service, or operation. Not the big strategic gaps. The small things that make you wince when customers encounter them. The workarounds everyone knows. The features that technically work but nobody actually uses because they’re confusing. The processes that take twice as long as they should.
Now pick one and fix it. Not eventually. This week. The specific item matters less than the practice of actually addressing these issues rather than deferring them indefinitely. What you’ll likely discover is that fixing it wasn’t as hard as everyone assumed. It just required someone to decide it was worth doing.
Create feedback mechanisms that bring you into contact with these small frustrations regularly. Use your own product the way customers use it. Watch people struggle with your interface. Sit with customer service and listen to complaints. Most organizations insulate leaders from these daily irritations, which guarantees they’ll never get fixed. The people who could authorize resources to fix them never feel the pain, and the people who feel the pain can’t authorize the resources.
When Big Swings Make Sense
This isn’t an argument against ever pursuing ambitious goals or breakthrough innovations. Sometimes you do need a fundamentally different approach. Sometimes incremental improvement means perfecting something that shouldn’t exist. Sometimes the market changes so dramatically that your carefully optimized system becomes obsolete.
The key is knowing the difference. Most of the time, in most situations, the high leverage move is fixing what’s broken rather than building something new. But not always. The trick is being honest about which situation you’re in rather than defaulting to whichever option is more psychologically appealing.
Big bets make sense when you have genuine insight into a new possibility that others are missing. They make sense when the current approach has fundamental limitations that can’t be fixed incrementally. They make sense when the market is shifting in ways that will strand your current excellence.
They don’t make sense just because they’re more exciting. They don’t make sense because you’re bored with incremental work. They don’t make sense because everyone else is talking about disruption and you feel left out. And they definitely don’t make sense when you haven’t yet proven you can execute the basics reliably.
The Advantage Nobody Can Copy
Organizations that focus on fixing small things consistently often end up being more innovative in meaningful ways than organizations chasing innovation directly. They innovate because they’ve built systems that encourage experimentation, surface problems quickly, and can respond to what they learn. The innovation emerges from the process rather than being the goal.
Amazon didn’t become Amazon by having one brilliant idea. They became Amazon by building an organization that could launch, test, and improve things rapidly. The innovation engine was the boring work of creating systems, processes, and culture that enabled continuous improvement. The specific innovations were outputs of that system.
This is the advantage that’s hardest for competitors to copy. Anyone can copy a feature or product. Many companies can raise money to fund moonshot projects. But very few can build organizations that reliably execute and improve the basics. It requires patience, discipline, and a willingness to value work that doesn’t generate exciting stories.
The next time you’re in a meeting where someone pitches the next big thing, ask a different question. Not whether the idea is exciting or transformative. Ask what small problems you’re currently ignoring. Ask what percentage of your customers encounter basic frustrations that you could fix. Ask whether you’ve actually gotten good at doing what you claim to do before expanding into new territory.
Innovation doesn’t require waiting for lightning to strike. It requires the humility to acknowledge that most of what you do could be done better, and the discipline to actually improve it. The revolution everyone is looking for probably won’t come from a sudden breakthrough. It will come from someone who decided that the squeaky door hinge was worth fixing, and then fixed a thousand other small things just like it.
The next big thing might be learning to value the small stuff.
