Organizations large and small, in their quest for productivity, effectiveness and bottom-line results, are killing innovation, and in so doing, killing their chance for effectiveness and success in the long-term.
Larger bureaucracies, both public and private sector, are crying out in pain at the lack of budgets, and pleading for more money to deliver basic services. Yet, whatever they receive is never enough. These organizations have become risk-averse, and have built bureaucracies and death by policy manuals. There is no tolerance for risk, no tolerance for failure, and thus no tolerance for true innovation.
Ironically, many smaller organizations, while free of bureaucracies, enforce similar restrictions. One of the common characteristics of an entrepreneur is that (s)he likes to keep his/her hands in every part of the business – it’s their passion for the business that establishes their initial success. However, as they grow, they need to learn to let go and allow members of their team to own pieces of their ‘baby’. That means that some solutions and innovations may not be what the entrepreneur would have done, and that can be too much for him/her. The restrictions they lock down can be as stifling as any bureaucracy or policy manual.
At its core, the common thread for both types of organizations is holding on to what’s familiar. Many people call this the ‘comfort zone’, but it’s not always comfortable, so we call it the ‘familiar zone’. It’s what we know, and one of the greatest barriers to innovation is the need to hold on to what’s familiar – we want to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done.
We hear of all the difficulties health care institutions and schools are having delivering their services. Generally, these bureaucratic monoliths seek money to continue working the way they have always delivered them. The problem is, most of the processes that they are trying to perpetuate are riddled with inefficiencies and outdated policies trying to deal with concerns that no longer exist. Nobody has the courage to wipe the slate clean, throw out the way it’s ‘always been done’ in order to create a way that truly works today.
Army budget being slashed by 40-60% in people and budgets, the support side of many military bases had to start bidding for their jobs against private sector firms in order to keep their jobs (with half the resources they had before). In base after base, they went back to ground zero and reinvented the way they did business to actually deliver better services than before the cuts and be cost-competitive with private-sector firms. What they had to do was let go of all of the old ways of thinking and doing business. The cuts and the threat of no jobs if they weren’t competitive provided all the motivation they needed.
Unfortunately, it can take extreme measure such as that to move these types of bureaucracies to change. Today’s way of business drives short-term, immediate results in the familiar zone. It doesn’t allow for failures or experimentation or new vistas, and so kills innovation.
This is nothing new. As I understand it, the computer mouse and today’s all-too-familiar windows-type computer interface were developed by Xerox’s R&D teams. However, the organization didn’t see or support their potential, so they were cast out and adopted by Apple, and organization that lived and breathed innovation.
Outside of challenging the familiar zone, there are three huge barriers to innovation created by traditional organizations: no tolerance for failure; no tolerance for dreaming; and no tolerance for incubating ideas.
fail and succeed
The only thing that you are guaranteed if you innovate more is more failures. If you’re not failing, then you’re simply not trying anything new – you’re living solidly in the familiar zone. Not every innovation succeeds. In fact, it is only through the preceding failures that the ultimate innovation is born.
Edison failed 10,000 times before he invented the first incandescent light bulb, but to him, those weren’t failures. Each one taught him something new that led him to the next experiment, and the next and the next, until he succeeded. It’s not failure – it’s feedback. Those who don’t have the courage to fail never succeed.
be silly
Modern society seems to have no patience for impracticality, silliness, or flights of fancy. Everything has to be practical and workable and able to deliver results – now. Unfortunately, if you use ideas that make sense and that are practical right away, all you’re doing is more and more of the same old, same old familiar zone. Nothing will produce significantly greater results.
To truly innovate, you need to step away from the practical and get into the impractical and impossible and even the silly. I’ve never been a part of any real innovation that was born out of practicality. And the fact is, if you don’t somebody else will. Change isn’t a choice any more – your only choice is whether you create the changes that wreak havoc with your competitors, or they will do it to you. That’s your only choice.
Look at all of the latest breakthroughs in technology and service. Not long ago, most of those would have seemed impossible or ridiculous, and now they’re everyday (remember Bill Gates infamous comment that nobody would need more than 64k?).
Simply put, we get practical too fast. In my experience, investing a short amount of time (and it never takes long) to get totally impractical and silly always generates returns far beyond what you would have gained by staying practical. The second article in this series will present some tools for this type of divergent thinking.
to innovate – take a break
One of the keys to effective innovation is incubation – leaving an idea or problem be for a short time and focusing on something else – either some other work or relaxation. Yet what happens when we see someone just sitting back daydreaming? They’re goofing off and inefficient.
Our unconscious minds need time on their own to work through problems and find solutions we wouldn’t have discovered logically or linearly. A simple example of this is when we can’t think of someone’s name. We can drive ourselves silly with no results, and then we get on with our lives. Then we wake up at 3 in the morning with that person’s name. That’s our unconscious working for us – it just needs to be left alone while it does so! The Stress Buster! in this issue deals with a similar approach for beating stress – one used by Winston Churchill himself.
Bottom line: To succeed and move forward in life today, we need to innovate. If we hadn’t as a species, we’d still be running around with stone knives and bearskins. It’s part of our nature. It’s who we are. We’re seeing the results of not innovating all around us – organizations, large and small, that have been around for years and years are disappearing off the map. The asteroid has landed, and the dinosaurs are passing on.
The good news? We can all learn to innovate. First step: Invest the time to get impractical and try out new things that may seem silly. Then get practical and make it workable.
Cheers,
Rajat