Corporate innovation bods, acting normal “How was your day?”

Let me tell you about my day…

How many times do you get asked that? By friends, your partner, the waitress at your favourite bar. Man alive. I’d rather be asked to do some complex mathematics. I always hesitate. I am tempted to ask how long have you got. I know you don’t actually want to hear it, but I want to tell you all about it.

How was your day? My day was awesome.

You know what I do for a living?

I get to see people’s ideas take shape, I get to see businesses and tech before it’s market-ready, before they take the world by storm, when they are nothing but a bunch of dreamers with battered laptops. I get to see them at the dawn of success, at the start of life. I get to marvel, I get to learn, some times I get to help.

I get to work with people who long-thought that nothing can change in our organisations. I get to watch them sit up straighter, talk louder, get animated and push through. I get to watch them do the very things they told me can’t get done. Sometimes I even get to help.

I get to watch decisions get made, I get to see learning get done.

I get to see ideas take flight.

I get to start these conversations, keep them going, shield them while they are too young to withstand an avalanche, let them soar when they are ready.

My days are amazing.

How was your day? My day was terrible.

You know what I do for a living?

I push against closed doors and run into walls. All day, every day.

I get to defend other people’s dreams against cynics and often let both sides down. I get to beg for favours, time and access.

I get tripped up by a million random things. Policies nobody knew existed. Policies everyone knew existed and all agreed should change. But not now. Not yet.

I get to fight tooth and nail to bring someone to the table only to find that the people I bring them for have lost interest or, worse, never meant for me to bring these guys over. They didn’t think I would succeed.

I get a deployment signed off but access to the environment denied.

I get the use case signed off, but the data set not.

I bring the client but lose access to the resource because of business as usual (BAU) imperatives.

I get to fight so hard for the oxygen we breathe that any delay, mistake, miscalculation or detour on our part brings us back to first principles. Not “hey it’s all part of the journey” but the innovation function’s lack of robustness.

My days are an endless chain of unexpected small-scale man-made frustrations and show-downs with men of little faith.

How was your day? My day is not over.

You know what I do for a living?

I ask people to believe and try and work harder than their contract demands and put their head above the parapet.

And although I’ve left the office my head is still there.

I am still refreshing my email in the hope that the approval, the sign off, the user acceptance testing (UAT) report, the night owl dev will be coming through.

I am home, but I am still fuming about the information that was promised 11 days ago and is still nowhere to be seen and I am trying to figure out who I may know in the far away office who can go stand by that person’s desk until they give me what they promised me (thank you Matt for once doing just that, you legend). I am home but my head is full of noise, frustration and hope.

My days are long.

How was your day? My day is never how I think it will be.

You know what I do for a living?

I am paid to force an organisation to do things for the first time. They hired me to force them. They hired me to resist me.

So although we all know everything we do is new, we all try to pretend it will behave in familiar ways. When it doesn’t, we either have jubilation or despair.

I spend days squaring circles, trying to figure out what the hardest thing will be and getting it wrong. Every. Single. Time. Some times that’s a good thing. Some things turn out easier than expected. The corporates continue to surprise me. I prepare for every eventuality apart from the one that occurs.

How was your day? You ask, and I am dying to tell. But a little voice reasonably reminds me that most people don’t go to war, they don’t go to school, they don’t go to the races, they don’t go exploring and fighting and striving and dreaming and hoping and seething with silent rage and the opportunities missed, when they go to the office. Most people just go to work.

So they ask: how was your day and pause and I say yeah not bad, yours?

By Leda Glyptis

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

Leda is a lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem, inhabiting both start-ups and banks over the years. She is a roaming banker and all-weather geek.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on Twitter @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.