The Great Backlog clearance. Building stuff people used to need.

We are in the midst of the Great Backlog Clearance. Innovating backwards.

Granted - there is some smart, future-creating innovation being driven in pockets, but the majority of commercial activity right now has defaulted to a realisation that all that stuff we had been happy adding to backlogs, feeling in the rush of pre-Covid BAU that it could wait, we now realise is an urgent must have.

We've been generating quite a long-list for several years. Now a lot of organisations are hurtling head-long through their to-dos in a game of digital catch-up.

Hence the market demand for people who can make the stuff on that to-do list. Coders, engineers. Nuts and bolts folk. Of course, as the backlog becomes the product to ship, you then need folk to sell it. Hence the current demand for people to sell stuff you've made.

So - people who make the stuff you are in a dash to catch up with. People to sell stuff when you make it.

When you are clearing the backlog, what you don't need is people to tell you what needs to be made. There's so much to do, already, right?

Hence the lack of demand in the insight-to-innovate space.

While this may feel like the appropriate response to difficult economic circumstances, it is, instead, a short-cut to mid-term decline. Dealing with the backlog is dealing with past demand, generated in the context of a different (pre-Covid) world. One which is changed for a minimum of three years and perhaps forever.

You are building responses based on invalid insight. You are innovating backwards. You are building things people used to want. That may feel like you are getting stuff done, but it is not serving the new needs of the new contexts. It is supply to an out-moded demand.

The Responsive Organisation is seeking to build better from change. It is not looking at what it should have done in the old context. It is seeking to understand the new contexts, imagining the experience of its customers in the new, next and possible contexts of the now and next system we are feeling are way through. And it is moving fast to serve those new needs.

It is asking itself, what needs to be made now?

It is enabling the mindset, ways of working, collaborations and commercial approaches, and access to technology, to deliver best-fit solutions for the new and next nows.

So if you are busying yourself building out your pre-Covid backlog - stop. 

Reassess your backlog; revalidate the insight; start from live understanding of need in new contexts, to press the go button on your insight-to-innovate investment. Start responding to now and next.

Lift you head up, look around. You're not in Kansas anymore.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash