Xerox PARC famously invented the mouse, the graphical user interface, and the printer — then watched Steve Jobs walk off with all of it. The usual lesson: silly management didn't recognise what they had. The actual lesson is more useful ... and more uncomfortable for innovator types. Sit in your beanbag so you can't storm off.

In this one, we use Xerox PARC as a case study in what happens when an uncertainty bubble has a membrane that's too thick and too long-lived. Then we tell the story of a client engagement where we built one that had the right kind of membrane. What does it take to run the scary process of innovation under the radar, while keeping stakeholders just comfortable enough not to kill it?

• Why the PARC director's real mistake wasn't being too far ahead, it was the trade fair
• "Duringmath": why the groundwork has to happen during the bubble, not after
• Nemawashi, information radiators, and the meetings before the meeting
• The MAYA principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable — and what happens when you violate it catastrophically
• How a challenge month became an uncertainty bubble that nobody could see was improvised and revised daily
• The barbell strategy for uncertainty: work the certain end and the wildly uncertain end; leave the middle for later
• Why successful projects end up nothing like the plan — and why that's the point
• Pretotyping: build nothing if possible, cobble something together if necessary, build the real thing last

This one's for anyone who's tried to run an experiment inside a company that wasn't ready for it, or tried and failed to innovate by following official processes, or wondered why the brilliant innovator always seems to end up persona non grata.

References

• Alberto Savoia, author of The Right It and coiner of "pretotyping"
• Uncertainty Bubbles, concept by Crown & Reach
• MAYA principle — Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, by Raymond Loewy.
• Nemawashi – the Japanese principle of preparing the ground; pre-meeting meetings
• Duringmath – our new coinage from this episode :)
• 4U framework: Unpack, Undergo, Unfold the Uncertainty, by Crown & Reach
• Barbell strategy, referenced in this episode, should be attributed to Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Deliberate strategy vs emergent strategy (attributed to "a Japanese CFO" quoted to by JP Castlin

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