Canberra Innovation Network’s Growth Manager, Craig Davis discusses his thoughts about the Power of Consistency.

 

As entrepreneurs and innovators, we usually work on changing and improving things rather than keeping them the same. So why am I writing about consistency?

Well, let’s think about our innovation goals. We believe successful innovation is when people adopt something new in ways that benefit them. If you agree with that, you can see that a big job for innovation leaders is finding ways to get more people to engage with their innovation. We’re used to thinking about ways to improve our products and understand our customer’s needs better as the cornerstone of this.

But when we find something that people want and adopt, then the task becomes engaging more of those people. This is where consistency comes in.

Let me use our monthly networking event, First Wednesday Connect (FWC), as an example. On 1 July 2015, we ran this event for the first time – our goal was to see if this would be a good format for the innovation community to connect.

Inspired by an event in New Zealand, we thought having an event at the same time every month would make it easier for people to remember and attend. This is why we chose 5:00pm on the first Wednesday of the month.

As you can see from the photo below the event was well attended – a great start.

But if our goal were to engage 10,000 people, we would have fallen short. So, we enlisted the power of consistency—every month (other than each January) since the first event we have organised and promoted FWC.

We’re obsessed about regularly running a great, well-attended event. The numbers have added up, with an average of 100 new people registering each month.

So now, 9 years later, we track 19,017 registrations and 10,235 individual registrations. This is the power of consistently repeating a great activity to build our impact over time.

How can consistency help your innovative project? This is something to consider because it varies from project to project. If you can make X sales this month, will repeating that for the rest of the year add up to a good year? If each month is a bit more than the previous, would that be better?

Consistency helps us set big goals. At CBRIN, we want to multiply our impact by ten. It sounds impossible until we realise that we help more projects every day, and the power of compound growth is enormous when we are consistent over several years. In a future blog post, I’ll talk about a bigger vision we can create together over the next 10 years.

We know the proverb that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step – but after we start that journey, we need to consistently keep taking steps so that we travel a long way over time. Where will we be after another 100 of these events?

Help us celebrate our clever, connected and creative innovation community and be welcomed at our 100^th First Wednesday Connect on 3 July 2024.