The Trojan Horse

Most people hate to change - and will do anything they can to avoid it. Even when they claim they want a "change of pace", or complain that "not enough changes around here", in their heart of hearts, most don't want anything to really change.

Especially now. Despite the calls for innovation to combat the recession, most companies are doing anything but changing. Instead, they take the relatively easier route of laying off workers, closing lines of business, selling assets, and praying that the economy will change before they run out of money. Why avoid innovation? Because the unknown is even more frightening than layoffs.

Sometimes, the greatest mistake an innovator can make is to tell someone that they are innovating.

So - how do you persuade a company, a market, a community...yourself...to innovate when it is all so frightening?

Use a Trojan Horse.

In Virgil's The Aeneid, the Greek armies, after 10 years of trying to defeat the city of Troy, built a huge statue of a horse out of wood. The Trojans took the seemingly harmless but massive statue into their city. At night, soldiers from the Greek army snuck out of their hiding places inside the statue in order to take over the city.

Successful innovations often use a Trojan Horse approach. They present something new as if it were merely a slightly modified version of something old. The iPod is really just a digital version of a Walkman. A personal computer is really just a typewriter with a screen. A car is really just a horseless carriage. A television is really just a radio with pictures. Look at most successful innovations, and likely you will also find an analogue to an older technology that was used to get people comfortable with the idea.

At times, the Trojan Horse approach goes well beyond offering comfort. I can also cloak the true implications of an innovation - forcing us to change our lives without realizing it. No one buying a computer in 1990 was buying into the complete transformation of our work and personal lives that took place in the next 15 years. If companies knew that the Internet would force them to share more information than they had every shared before, would they have started creating Internet sites? If we knew then what we know now, I doubt many would have ever bought a computer - all that change is far to scary.

What are the Trojan Horses of today? What seemingly harmless idea, toy or tool has the potential to completely change our world?