Don't Accidentally Rebuild a Legacy System While Trying to Innovate

Innovation has a branding problem.

In meeting rooms and board decks, it’s celebrated as the badge of progress. New platforms, fresh tools, smarter systems, but all wrapped in sleek interfaces and buzzwords that signal transformation. Look closer, and much of what passes for greenfield innovation is little more than replication of something old, just made to run faster.

Yesterday’s processes rebuilt in today’s technology, carrying forward the same inefficiencies and blind spots, only faster and with better polish.

This is the trap Delver Tom Bellinson warns against in his Greenfield Thinking series presentation, titled: "How to Not Build a New Version of the Old Thing: Why the Design Process Has Never Been More Important." True innovation doesn’t mean dragging the past into the future. It means asking better questions about what should exist in the first place. And that begins with design. Not design as aesthetics or branding, but design as the discipline of deciding what to build before a single line of code is written.

The Danger of Rebuilding the Old in the New

Why do so many organizations end up creating a new versions of the old thing? The reasons are deceptively simple:

1. Speed over clarity. The pressure to move fast leads teams to start building before they’ve defined the outcomes that matter. The result: modernized replicas of outdated processes.

2. Competitor envy. Leaders benchmark against what others are doing and treat imitation as strategy. That thinking ensures you’ll always be one step behind.

3. Tradition disguised as best practice. The phrase “this is how it’s always been done” gets repackaged as “industry standard.” In reality, best practices are often just averages dressed up in authority.

4. Fear of the blank page. Starting fresh is uncomfortable. Teams cling to familiar structures even when those structures no longer serve.

The cost of this pattern is immense. Instead of freeing teams to work smarter, investments lock in yesterday’s logic with tomorrow’s dollars. Instead of transformation, organizations get efficiency theater.

The Case for Design as a Leadership Discipline

The antidote is design. Not the surface-level design of colors and fonts, but the deeper discipline of choosing what to build and why. In an era of accelerating technology, the most critical leadership skill is not execution but discernment. The tools available are nearly limitless. The constraint is clarity about value.

Good design begins with intent. It forces leaders to ask:

• What outcomes do we want?

• What work do we want people to be doing?

• What value are we creating that did not exist before?

This approach shifts the question from “How do we automate what we’ve always done?” to “What should we be doing in the first place?” The organizations that master this distinction are the ones that leap forward, while others spend millions reinventing the wheel.

Start with Value, Not with Features for True Greenfield Innovation

Every successful reinvention starts with value. Too often, teams gather requirements by interviewing users about current workflows. That process guarantees the answers will be framed in terms of what already exists. A claims processor describes the steps in their legacy system. A customer service rep details how they respond to tickets. Build a new system around these workflows, and you’ve simply codified yesterday’s pain points.

Instead, the design process must begin with outcomes. What should the claims processor be spending their time on if the system were working perfectly? What kind of customer experience are we aiming to create, independent of the current tools? Those questions uncover the value worth building toward.

When value drives the design, technology becomes an enabler rather than a constraint. Features matter less than whether the system delivers the outcomes people actually need.

How to Stop Caring What Others Are Doing

One of the hardest disciplines in innovation is ignoring competitors. Every leadership team wants to know how they measure up. Every board member asks for comparisons. But building based on what others are doing is a recipe for mediocrity.

Competitors do not have your culture, your people, or your customers. Copying their approach means adopting someone else’s constraints. Worse, it signals that your goal is not leadership but parity.

The boldest organizations resist this trap. They acknowledge the competitive landscape, then set it aside. The real question is not “What are others doing?” but “What do we want to be true that is not true yet?” That is the essence of design thinking applied to strategy.

When you stop caring about comparison, you create space for reinvention. You move from chasing benchmarks to setting them.

The Myth of Best Practices

Few phrases stall innovation faster than “best practice.” It sounds safe. It sounds proven. But what it usually means is “what most people do.” Best practices are averages. They are the codified comfort zone of an industry.

The problem is that averages rarely create breakthroughs. They prevent failure, but they do not enable transformation. If your ambition is to be slightly more efficient than average, best practices will get you there. If your ambition is to redefine the game, they will hold you back.

Design-led organizations know when to borrow from convention and when to discard it. They treat best practices as input, not instruction. They ask: does this approach serve our unique value? If not, they leave it behind without apology.

Creating Space for Reinvention

Design requires space to think, to challenge assumptions, to sit with uncertainty. Yet organizations are wired for speed. Agile methodologies, sprints, and deadlines all prioritize output. The risk is that in the rush to produce, teams skip the harder work of deciding what is worth producing.

Creating space for reinvention means carving out intentional time for reflection. It means involving people who understand the frontline realities, not just executives with strategy decks. It means being willing to sketch, debate, and discard ideas before they calcify into roadmaps.

The most innovative solutions often look deceptively simple. That simplicity is the result of a disciplined design process that stripped away everything unnecessary. Without space, that discipline cannot happen.

A Practical Framework for Leaders

How do you put this into action? Here are three guiding principles you'll learn more about in Tom Bellinson's presentation:

1. Identify the work you want to be doing. Do not start by documenting existing tasks. Ask what work creates value for your members, your customers, or your teams. Build for that.

2. Align design decisions with outcomes, not tradition. Every feature, every workflow, every tool should serve a clearly defined outcome. If it exists only because “that’s how we’ve always done it,” question it.

3. Stop benchmarking and start imagining. Competitors and best practices may provide inspiration, but they should never set the ceiling. Your advantage lies in building what only you can.

This framework shifts design from being a technical exercise to being a leadership discipline. It forces clarity about value and courage about choices.

Stories from the Field

Consider a financial services firm that invested millions in a new digital claims system. They dutifully gathered requirements from every department and rebuilt the existing workflow in modern software. The result: a faster, shinier version of the same frustrating process. Employees were still bogged down, customers still complained, and the promised efficiency gains never materialized.

Contrast that with a healthcare startup that approached design differently. Instead of asking how to digitize existing forms, they asked what outcomes patients actually needed. The answer wasn’t “faster paperwork.” It was “more time with doctors.” By redesigning intake around value rather than tradition, they cut administrative time in half and improved patient satisfaction dramatically.

The difference wasn’t technology. Both projects had access to similar tools. The difference was design.

Why This Moment Demands Design

The explosion of AI, automation, and digital platforms makes design more urgent than ever. Tools are powerful and increasingly accessible. The temptation to adopt them quickly is enormous. But speed without clarity is a liability.

If organizations simply pour old processes into new technologies, they risk baking inefficiency into the future. Worse, they risk alienating the very people these systems are meant to serve.

Design is the safeguard. It slows you down at the beginning so you can move faster later. It ensures that when you implement, you’re building for value, not just velocity.

From Replication to Reinvention

Innovation isn’t about building new versions of the old. It’s about resisting the pull of replication and daring to design for what could be.

This requires leaders who are willing to tune out the noise of competition, to see best practices for what they are, and to give their teams space to imagine. It requires a discipline of starting with value, not tradition.

The organizations that embrace this discipline will be the ones remembered not for working faster, but for working smarter. They will leave behind not just efficiency, but true reinvention.

Join Delve Collective during our limited series titled "Greenfield Thinking: Knowledge for Navigating the Future," where Delver Tom Bellinson, will be presenting more on this topic in his presentation, "How to Not Build a New Version of the Old Thing: Why the Design Process Has Never Been More Important." This Delve limited series runs October 14th through 23rd, 2025.