My brother had a pogo stick when we were kids. He got to be pretty good with the pogo stick, but I never could get the hang of it. With a goal of bouncing across of our driveway, I would only hop twice then sprawl all over the concrete.
In our neighborhood, there weren't many who were as good with the pogo stick as my brother. While my brother could skillfully bounce to the end of the block, I could only go that kind of distance on two feet.
Two Feet Better than One Stick
Technology companies caught onto this concept decades ago. When a well-known company knew they had a ground-breaking technology, they also knew that consumers might find unintended uses (and problems) for the product. So rather than having one Research and Development team, they put two smaller R & D teams in competition to build the new product.
One team would launch the first version of the product while the second team would take prototypes of the yet unreleased product into the field and observe customer usage, then design the second version of the product before the original was even out of the manufacturing process!
Rather than trying to vault a perfect product into existence (think pogo stick) with the customary single-team approach, the tech company wisely chose to use 'two feet' and brought innovations quickly to the market step-by-step (a much more stable way to go).
In essence, the technology company knew it would have competition in the space, so the company chose to compete with itself by having two teams that competed with each other.
Stepping into New Media
Today, radio stations have large and loyal audiences--and so do many other traditional media outlets. All of us understand that these audiences are attached to our brand of communication, but that attachment faces a future-threat with new media that can dilute the time spent listening of our stations.
Most traditional media outlets have tried pogo sticks (HD radio, static web sites) with a serial, one-at-a-time approach. A few innovative media outlets recognized that there's a strong likelihood that some of the ideas will engage the audience, but other ideas will be largely unused. These two-stepping producers are getting great traction with audiences by quickly trying things, then measuring if the intended outcome occurred.
Two-stepping (or running with two small competing teams to engage the audience) proves to be faster and less likely to waste large amounts of money in other industries. Now, it is time for those of us in the media business to create multiple small teams (maybe teams of only 2 or 3 people each) and attract our audiences to the new media opportunities we see--with a progression of steps.
