Unicorn Projects
Keys to Innovation Part 6
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic continues our Keys to Innovation series and discusses the very common problem that everyone thinks their problems are unique like a unicorn. It’s a persistent failure mode for innovation, project execution, and process optimization. Thankfully there’s a common set of tools that we can apply to solve these ‘unique’ problems. It’s a fun mind twist so let’s dive in!
“No, you don’t understand. This is a unique situation.”
It really doesn’t matter where I’ve worked or what projects I’m on; I can guarantee someone will utter this, ironically, un-unique phrase about the circumstances of why their product, processes, or people are struggling to perform. It really came to light when I worked at a start-up where I was regularly told, “I’m sure we’re a lot different than you’re used to at those big companies.” My reply was always, “No, not at all.” They were shockingly similar, including the fact that they thought they were unique. Unique projects are like unicorns; they don’t exist.
The thing is, this claim of uniqueness is also typically the cause of why these teams are struggling. They believed they were different and so, failed to use the successful processes from other teams. As a case study, let’s look at a process many of us have never considered before in the petrochemical industry.
Petrochemical Process Controls
Fellow aspiring polymaths
, Laszlo Kardos, Peter Rier, and I have been collaborating for a couple of years around the ideas of Systems Thinking. These guys are experts in complex process controls on critical infrastructure projects focused on the petrochemical world. This was a completely new area for me, as I came from aerospace.They focus on what’s called Turnarounds in refinery management. For background, a refinery is a continuous flow system and requires shutting down the entire system to make repairs, upgrade equipment, perform maintenance, etc. Every second they aren’t refining, they aren’t making money and you can’t flow the system faster to make up lost time. Distilling this down, Turnarounds require incredibly complex project management where minutes of delay are measured in tens of thousands of dollars.
Every refinery on the planet has to go through these turnarounds from time to time, yet the most common refrain my friends hear from clients is: “This Turnaround is unique because ____...” Then they watch as the Turnaround teams ignore the best practices, run into one common problem after another, and finally blow out their budgets and schedules, like over 70% of all the other turnarounds. They believed they were unique, ignored the expert advice my friends offered, refused to use the best practices that exist to ensure success, and failed. Just like everyone else.
This behavior creates a reinforcing feedback loop because if they failed, they had to be unique because no one wants to admit that they failed because of common problems that have well-known solutions. And that’s the crux of the problem. They did fail because of common problems and there are well-known solutions. Frustratingly, this behavior is common and it’s also the foundation of Functional Stupidity.
If they failed, they had to be unique because no one wants to admit that they failed because of common problems that have well-known solutions.
Unique Unicorns
When we first started collaborating, Chris, Laszlo, and Pete were interested in the idea of systems thinking but still struggled to understand how to apply lessons learned from outside the petrochemical industry. As we continued to work together they soon couldn’t stop seeing the commonalities. Petrochemical isn’t unique but it does have higher complexity and less margin for mistakes than most projects. This means, more than others, it needs the common best practices for process controls.
This uncovered a counterintuitive insight in that a person who finds those common problems and uses the best practices to manage their complex systems will make the Turnaround look ‘easy.’ An annoying behavior I’ve experienced myself is where a person who turns their project into a dumpster fire often gets viewed as working a ‘tough’ problem and gets rewarded. Conversely, those who masterfully manage a similar project using best practices are viewed as having an easier problem.
What emerges is that when you reward firefighting, you invite arson. Petroleum companies continue to reward the firefighting leadership and wonder why their Turnarounds never work out as planned. That’s because their leaders are still successful while their execution is unsuccessful.
When you reward firefighting, you invite arson.
It’s a tough paradigm to break because there’s a huge incentive to have a unique project. This incentive often far outweighs the benefit of world-class execution because we all love the idea of being unique, struggling through challenges, and emerging as the hero, even if it results in failure just like everyone else. Thankfully, once we reject the siren call of being unique, we can unlock a ton of capabilities.
Taking Action
There’s just one major action to take to help solve this problem: Start looking for what your project has in common with others. It’s too easy to find or, more commonly, justify differences. It’s a lot harder to slow down and really look for what’s common.
Thankfully, we have the powerful tool of Systems Thinking that we’ve explored in detail before and further distilled into Yes, And… So! as a starting point for analysis. It’s stepping back from the problem so we can begin seeing the outlines of a solution and specifically looking for commonalities between other systems and problems in other domains and disciplines.
A great example from the world of software is a process called Development Operations or DevOps. This popular method has exploded in recent years, but it’s not new or unique. DevOps, as wonderfully detailed in the book The Phoenix Project, is simply the application of Lean Six Sigma. Yep, the same core principles that we apply to manufacturing can be applied to software. That’s because Lean Six Sigma is about eliminating waste and variation and helping the product to flow smoothly.
The Lean Principles also apply to supply chains, program management, and refinery Turnarounds. At the root, we find a common need for efficient processes that are aligned and executed with discipline to enable success. Even better, there is no shortage of best practices and lessons learned that can be applied for quick success and unlocking value.
For another example, I’m currently assisting the US Space Force in detangling and integrating highly specialized cloud architectures. There are a lot of different drivers and a lot of different perspectives, but I’m able to dive in and help them understand the problem, pin down a plethora of buzzwords, and uncover what they need. How? Because it’s not about cloud architectures. It’s about enterprise architecture and the flow of data. Guess what data flows like? If you answered “Everything else,” you’d be right. My success is applying Lean Six Sigma to identify value and make it flow.
Even better, when we finally find the small area that actually is unique, we also find the area where innovation can occur. Let’s think about this for a minute. It’s easy to think we’ve found something innovative if we think of everything as unique. Just look at all of the start-ups out there desperately trying to solve a problem along with dozens of others when there are already dozens of solutions. Instead, once we distill down what’s common, we can find the areas that need something new, something uncommon, and something truly innovative.
Summary
Unique projects are like unicorns; they’re a myth. Once we uncover how it’s not unique we can stand on the shoulders of giants and see how others have solved similar problems. I can speak from experience that this key to innovation can be applied everywhere. In all domains and disciplines, and across all technologies. In fact, it’s almost the master key of our keys to innovation and one of the first that I recommend applying.
The belief that your problem is unique leads to common failures, whereas finding the common threads and executing standard processes leads to uniquely high performance. Let me state that again: what is unique is when teams sit down and work to find what’s common, align themselves to best practices, and then watch as their performance exceeds expectations.
What's your best story of a Unicorn Project? I'd love to hear your examples.
Check out the other Keys to Innovation here
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
- All-around great daily essays
- Fantastic introduction to Stoic Philosophy
- Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
- Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
- Integrating AI into education
- Computer Science for Everyone
Good read, fun fact: reading this from my home in the Netherlands, Woudenberg.
Even in the sciences we deal with this all the time. "My research is unique because" and then they fail to follow basic science principles and can't figure out why no-one can reproduce their study.