Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration (IQO)
Originally published as a Desk of Brad on October 5, 2018
“System in all things is the soul of business. To deliberate maturely & execute promptly is the way to conduct it to advantage. With me, it has always been a maxim, rather to let my designs appear from my works, than by my expressions.”
— George Washington
Every business has a way of doing things. Most of the time, that way is accidental, the accumulated habits of people who were never given a better option. IQO is the deliberate alternative: a system for building a company that knows what it does, knows whether it’s working, and can repeat it at scale.
It has three parts. Together, they form a covenant, a promise to clients, to employees, and to the business itself, that what we deliver will be intentional, measurable, and consistent.
Innovation: The Search for the Best Way
Innovation is often confused with creativity. Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt drew the distinction: “Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.” Innovation isn’t ideation. It’s action.
Innovation is the heart of every exceptional business.
And the most important place to aim it is not at your product, but at the way your business operates. How you interact with clients matters more than what you deliver. By recognizing that it is not just the work itself that demands innovation, but also how that work is presented, scoped, and fulfilled, we aim our innovative energies at the way business does business.
For innovation to be meaningful, it has to take the client’s point of view. Every engagement begins with a promise, a covenant between you and the client about what’s possible and how you’ll get there together. Innovation is the discipline of constantly asking whether you’re keeping that promise in the best possible way, or whether friction, complexity, and habit have gotten in the way. If a process doesn’t make things easier for the client, it’s not innovation. It’s complication.
Innovation is the mechanism through which a business identifies itself in the mind of its customers and establishes its individuality. It is the result of a scientifically generated and quantifiably verified profile of your clients’ perceived needs and unconscious expectations.
The discipline is asking, every day, “What is the best way to do this?” Knowing you’ll probably never find the definitive answer, but that by asking, you’ll always find a better one than you have now.
Innovation is the “Best Way” skill. It produces energy in every company where it’s nurtured, fed, and stimulated. That energy feeds everyone the company touches: employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. In an innovative company, everyone grows.
Innovation is the signature of a bold, imaginative brand.
Quantification: The Truth Is in the Numbers
Lord Kelvin put it plainly in 1883: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. When you cannot, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”
What was true for physics is true for business. If you can’t measure it, you can’t predict it. If you can’t predict it, you can’t improve it. Quantification is how we hold ourselves and our business accountable.
Quantification is how a business learns to see itself clearly.
Most companies default to qualitative analysis. They trust their instincts. They tell stories about what’s working. But stories aren’t data, and instinct doesn’t scale. Few companies thoroughly quantify their operations, even the ones that believe in measurement.
Making the commitment to quantify everything about how you do business will profoundly change both your results and your culture. It means tracking the things that matter:
• What was the measurable business impact of our work?
• How many positive client interactions do we have each day?
• Are our capabilities aligned with our pipeline?
Eventually, you think of your entire business in terms of numbers. You can read the company’s health the way a doctor reads vitals. Not guessing but knowing. Because without numbers you can’t possibly know where you are, let alone where you’re going. And when you do know, you can act with confidence instead of hope.
Quantification turns intuition into intelligence.
Orchestration: Consistency in Execution
W. Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality management, said it simply: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
You’ve innovated a process. You’ve quantified its impact. Now orchestration ensures your clients get a consistent result, every time. Orchestration is the elimination of discretion at the operating level: replacing individual judgment with a reliable system so that the promise you made to the client is the promise they actually experience.
Orchestration is the discipline that turns a good idea into a reliable business.
Without it, nothing can be planned and nothing anticipated, by you or your client. If everyone in the company is doing things by their own preference rather than following a shared system, they aren’t creating order. They’re creating chaos. Discretion, however well-intentioned, is the enemy of progress, standardization, and quality.
A process that hasn’t been orchestrated can’t be consistent. A process that isn’t consistent can’t be depended on. And a process that can’t be depended on isn’t a business model. It’s a collection of talented people making it up as they go.
A business model is simply your unique way of doing business. IQO is the system that makes that way repeatable. It provides the vehicle for predictability, for ensuring that the covenant you made at the start of every engagement is honored at every step. Because unless clients experience what they were promised, every single time, they will go someplace else to get it.
Orchestration is the glue that holds a company to its customers’ perceptions. It is the certainty that is absent from every other human experience, the order and logic behind the human craving for reason. It is as simple as doing what you say you’re going to do, saying what you mean, and meaning what you say.
Orchestration is what makes a promise keepable.
The Cycle Never Stops
Once you’ve innovated, quantified, and orchestrated something, you’re not done. The world will collide with whatever you’ve built and sooner or later destroy it. IQO is not a one-time project. It’s a permanent operating discipline. You innovate, measure, systematize, and then you do it again.
When you think of Orchestration absent Innovation and Quantification, you’re describing an action stripped of its purpose, its meaning, its vitality. The three only work together.
Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration are the backbone of every extraordinary business. I want ours to be extraordinary.
The People Who Keep the Covenant
IQO is a system. But systems don’t build themselves, and they don’t run on autopilot. They run on people who understand the covenant, the promise made to every client at the start of every engagement, and who take personal ownership of keeping it.
That’s what transforms work from a habit into a craft. When you commit to IQO, you stop thinking about tasks and start thinking about the promise behind them. Am I innovating the best way to deliver on this commitment? Am I measuring whether it’s working? Am I making it repeatable so the next client gets the same result?
The people who ask those questions, who hold themselves to that standard, are the ones who build extraordinary businesses.
Our mission is to make millions of people a little happier every day. That’s not a slogan. It’s what happens when smart people commit to keeping the covenant, every day, in every interaction.
Let’s go be great.