As tech leaders, we’re destined to always be in some sort of limbo when it comes to adopting new technologies and combating the hype cycle. You might as well learn how to manage this battle well. You cannot over-hype; that’s like consuming heaps of empty calories. Similarly, avoiding all novelty entirely will lead to innovation starvation. Find your center.

Indicators of Misalignment

If you’re not sure, here are some signs you’re not balancing things all that well:

• Doing performative, hyped-up “innovation.” That’s tech for tech’s sake. Implementing whatever is currently all the rage on LinkedIn, so you can post about it as well, without thinking about the actual use.
• When most of your innovative stunts, like results of hackathons, are tossed aside quickly. Nothing actually has any long-term results.
• Some (or all) of your teams never make the time to try something new. All effort is directed 100% at doing things the “tried and tested” way.
• Even when you’re trying new things, you only sign off on those things that are virtually guaranteed to work. That’s not really innovating, but implementing best practices for the first time.
  

Balance, Again

The short answer to managing this is, of course, balance. But you knew that already. The thing that I see helping people is realizing that we can achieve this balance across multiple planes.

For example, there’s time balance. That’s about making the time to innovate, but in a managed and measured way. Hackathons are a poor way of doing that. A better way is with intermissions (you can grab for free the innovation chapter from The Tech Executive Operating System, which covers innovation at the bottom of this article). Committing to regularly spend time on innovation is a great solution to hype-proof you. You’re less likely to get sucked into something that’s currently cool. It goes on your backlog, and if it’s still interesting in a month when you get to it, it’s more likely to be worth your time.

There’s also a people balance. Allowing everyone to play with many things all at once can introduce too much confusion into the organization. Assigning specific experiments to particular teams and letting them go through learning the ropes before expanding the approach can really accelerate time-to-value in these experiments.

One last aspect is project balance. Rather than allowing specific teams or particular people to do something in a new way, we “color” an entire project. That makes the innovation more end-to-end, in a way that reduces the odds of the experiment staying too artificial. Contrast it with the single engineer who tries a certain tool and never sees areas of concern like collaboration.

Snap out of the hype loop and do things that actually matter.