Always Being Amber

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“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Last week I had the great privilege to work with an executive team working in the public sector. The job at hand was to help them define the latest iteration in their future strategy planning. As is so often the case these days, the public sector is under increasing levels of scrutiny from politicians and members of the public alike. More often than not, that scrutiny takes the form of league tables and other forms of (usually crude) scoring system. For this team, the scoring system was built around the use of a traffic-light indicator system. The team was measured on around 40 different attributes of performance, each being scored in terms of either a green (‘everything is okay’), amber (‘there are things you need to be paying attention to’) or red (‘there are critical problems you need to be fixing now’).

For the most part, looking at the 40 traffic light images on their scorecard, the world looked pretty green. Green with the odd shade of amber thrown in.

“No matter how well we seem to do,” the Chief Executive said to me, “ we always seem to end up with at least a couple of amber lights.”

“Is it our job to fix them?” I asked, feeling a tad naïve as the words came out of my mouth.

She shook her head, “we’ll always be amber,”

“Really?”

She nodded, “the goalposts keep moving.”

“Isn’t that a little unfair?” I quizzed.

“On one level, i imagine it is,” she said, smiling, “on another if we’re always amber, it’s a great way to keep everyone on their toes. Green lights mean people rest on their laurels. They stop innovating.”

The thought stayed with me for a couple of days after the workshop. I learned that some of the biggest public sector scandals of recent years had happened in organisations that had been given all green lights just a few months earlier.

It made me think of Andy Grove at Intel and ‘Only The Paranoid Survive’. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was the same thing. Amber lights keep people thinking about doing better. They also – per the Kurt Vonnegut quote – make for what I think is a powerful metaphor for the innovation process:

Amber in a set of traffic lights is all about the transient no-man’s land transition between two stable, opposing states, a point where no-one is quite sure what they should be doing. It is the unknown space between two s-curves. It may just be the colour of innovation.

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