Imagine spending years creating something that changes your career. Or even the direction of your company.
People love it. Critics praise it. Customers can’t get enough of it. Your confidence spikes because you’ve finally found the formula.
The process becomes crystal clear. Everyone knows that “this is how we do it.”
Then you launch the next version.
You don’t expect it to totally replicate your previous success. I mean, that’s a high bar. But you certainly don’t expect it to disappear almost without a trace!
Lizzo didn’t, that’s for sure.
In 2022 her album debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, selling over 39,000 copies in the first week. Earlier this month she released her latest album and sold a meager 2,649 copies. To be honest, there probably isn’t a single, neat explanation for what happened.
But what interested me wasn’t the music. It was the pattern.
BEcause I’ve watched the exactly same thing happen inside companies that had nothing to do with entertainment.
Success is a terrible teacher
The biggest risk to innovation isn’t failure, it’s success.
Failure forces us to ask questions. We experiment because we have to. We look for better ways because what we do now doesn’t work. We stay curious because curiosity is our best chance of finding an answer.
Success changes that whole equation.
Once something works, we naturally want to repeat it. We document the process. We build systems around it. We train people to follow it. And before long, the experiment becomes the standard operating procedure.
It just makes perfect sense. Until the world changes.
The invisible expiration date
Every successful idea has an expiration date. The problem is that there’s no box for somebody to stamp it on.
Markets evolve. Customer change what they expect. Competitors learn from what worked for you and take their own slant on it. Technology creates possibilities that didn’t exist when you first succeeded.
Yet many organizations continue asking the same question: How do we do that again?
I get it, it’s an understandable question. But it points everybody backward instead of forward.
innovation starts to stall the minute we spend more energy protecting yesterday than creating tomorrow.
The comfort trap
One of the most dangerous moments in any organization is when everyone says and accepts, “This is how we do things around here.”
Those seven words sound like stability. But they’re actually a warning sign.
I’ve worked with companies that could explain every detail of the product that made them successful. They could describe every campaign, every process, and every decision that led to their biggest win.
What they couldn’t do was explain what’s changed since.
They were still optimizing a strategy that had been built for conditions that just didn’t exist any more.
They weren’t standing still because they lacked smart people. They were standing still because their previous success had convinced them they already had the answers
Curiosity changes the conversation
The most innovative leaders I’ve met don’t spend a lot of time asking how to repeat their biggest success. Nope. They ask questions that make everybody a little uncomfortable.
👉 If we were starting this business today, would we build it the same way?
👉 Which assumptions are we treating like facts?
👉 What are our customers asking for now that they weren’t asking for two years ago?
👉 If our biggest competitor started from scratch tomorrow, what would they do differently?
Nobody walks away from these questions with concrete answers. But they create something a lot more important than certainty.
They loosen our grip on assumptions that have quietly outlived their usefulness.
Innovation isn’t repetition
It’s easy to mistake consistency for innovation. But they’re not the same thing.
Consistency helps you execute well. Innovation helps you stay relevant.
The organizations that thrive decade after decade aren’t the ones that keep perfecting the same formula. They’re the ones that have the courage to question it before someone else does. They understand that every breakthrough has a shelf life and playbooks get outdated.
That’s why the headlines about Lizzo stayed with me. Not because this album sold fewer copies. But because it reminded me how easy it is to believe that yesterday’s formula will carry us into tomorrow.
The most innovative companies don’t cling to what made them successful. They stay curious enough to ask, “What needs to change before success starts becoming our biggest liability?”
Because the biggest risk to innovation isn’t that your last big idea fails. It’s that it works so well you stop looking for the next one.
