The Growth Engine Co.

Bryan Mattimore

Innovation Leadership Shaper

Bryan Mattimore is the author of eight creativity and business innovation process books and leads executive education workshops on AI-enabled ideation and innovation processes for TCU and Caltech. His newest book is, “Trump’s Playbook, His 50 Brand and Influence Strategies and How to Use Them Ethically.”

For the past two decades, CIOs have helped lead one transformation after another - digitization, cloud computing, data analytics, cybersecurity, automation and now artificial intelligence. Each wave has helped organizations operate faster, smarter and more efficiently.

But I believe the next challenge may be fundamentally different. It won't simply be about using technology to do what organizations already do better. It will be about using technology - combined with human curiosity - to discover opportunities organizations don't yet know to look for.

Call it the Discovery Organization.

AI can already analyze enormous datasets, identify patterns, summarize research, simulate possibilities and generate hundreds of ideas in seconds. As these capabilities become widely available, however, access to AI itself becomes less differentiating. If every competitor has increasingly powerful AI, where does the next competitive advantage come from? One answer may be discovery.

From Answers to Different Questions

Science-fiction writer William Gibson famously observed, "The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed." The challenge is learning to notice where it has already arrived.

Most organizations are remarkably good at answering questions they already know how to ask. How can we reduce costs? How can we increase customer retention? What new features do customers want? How can AI improve productivity?

Discovery begins by questioning the frame itself. What are we completely missing? What assumption about our business might no longer be true? What are we seeing that we can't yet explain?

Building a Discovery Organization

A Discovery Organization doesn't replace data, strategy, market research, R&D or innovation. It expands the organization's field of vision.

Consider replacing the traditional employee suggestion box with a Question Box. Instead of asking employees for polished ideas, ask them to contribute questions, anomalies, contradictions, unusual customer behaviors and changes they're noticing outside the business.

The value isn't simply in collecting more information. It's in tapping the observational power of hundreds or thousands of employees who encounter customers, technologies, competitors, cultures and markets from very different vantage points. Most contributions may lead nowhere. One might change the entire company.

Another simple mechanism is what I call the Whiteboard Technique. Put a whiteboard in a heavily traveled area - or create a virtual one - and write one provocative question across the top: What customer behavior have you noticed recently that doesn't make sense? Or: What is happening outside our industry that could unexpectedly change it?

Let employees respond, challenge one another, make connections and add questions of their own.

  Discovery begins by questioning the frame itself.  

Change the question regularly. The purpose isn't necessarily to generate ideas. It's to expand what the organization notices.

Experiment Before You Debate

Discovery Organizations also run lots of small experiments. Companies frequently spend weeks debating whether an unconventional possibility will work when a simple experiment could begin providing an answer in days. AI can make those experiments faster and less expensive by helping create prototypes, identify test audiences, generate alternative scenarios and analyze results.

The operating principle is simple: When uncertainty is high and the cost of testing is low, experiment. A successful experiment doesn't necessarily produce a new product. Sometimes its most valuable outcome is simply learning something the organization didn't know yesterday.

Who Owns Discovery?

This raises an interesting question. Marketing Research studies customers and markets. R&D explores technologies and develops products. Chief Innovation Officers help turn ideas into commercial opportunities. But who is responsible for asking: What are we not looking at? I believe organizations may eventually create a new role to do precisely that: the Chief Discovery Officer.

Whether that particular title catches on is less important than the organizational responsibility it represents. Someone needs to own discovery - not as an occasional innovation exercise, but as a continuing discipline.

CIOs are particularly well positioned to help establish that discipline. They increasingly sit at the intersection of technology, data, operations, customers and organizational change - and now oversee technologies capable of accelerating exploration itself.

For years, CIOs have helped their organizations digitize the present. Today, they're helping them AI-enable the present. Their next opportunity may be considerably more interesting: Help the organization discover the future. Because the future rarely shouts. It often whispers.