Tolerance, Talent and Technology — Instruments of Innovative Organizations
Although I have some concerns about the underlying assumptions in Richard Florida’s work, he has been a significant influence on thinking about the creative economy and on how we see the world. Community is a concept that has seen surges and retreats in popular Western culture and all of us struggle, to some degree, with the freedom and release of self expression and the comfort and warmth of community. Florida offers us a vision of community compatible with our best and worst creative urges. A system of development that accepts our showy self-love with a wink and a nod can’t help but be irresistible. He posits a credible narrative that sometimes leans to the optimistic but offers a path out of a persistent sense of separation.
The driving force behind any effective economic strategy is talented people. We live a more mobile age than ever before. People, especially top creative talent, move around a lot. A community’s ability to attract and retain top talent is the defining issue of the creative age.
- Richard Florida
Florida could as easily be describing organizations as urban centres and his insistence that communities require tolerance, talent and technology to be successful is attractive and coincidentally aligns with how I see our work.
At it’s most basic, organizations need good ideas (talent), the ability to communicate and refine them (technology) and the wisdom to not refuse them out of hand (tolerance). We love the quote from Rudyard Kipling (that is often shortened on one end or the other to support a particular worldview) when offered in it’s entirety.
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack
We take this quote to heart in all our engagements. Developing talent (say through leader development) is only effective if the energy generated has a space within the organization to be released. Truly effective personal development programs generate significant dissonance and we expect temporary increases in turnover rate for our participants in our development programs. This could mean finding a new pack to run with. Blackberry saw reduced engagement and employee departures beyond the current set of layoffs as evidenced in a Star article at the time.
The firm’s post-layoffs workforce of 17,000 is a sclerotic bureaucracy where a relatively small number of high-achievers are loaded down with 15 projects each while empty suits abound. “Getting decisions on minor issues takes weeks, on major decisions months,” another of the anonymous RIM employees writes.
Also, tolerance is only meaningful if the talent exists to improve on the situation and the technology is in place to let others know that the failure occurred. Mitsubishi in Japan was systematically covering up defects and came to be involved in what many consider the largest corporate scandal in Japanese recent history. The first failure could have offered an opportunity for restitution and improvement. The first few defects were publicized in 2000, but again in 2004 Mitsubishi was required to admit to cover ups and unreported defects. A few senior people tolerated the errors and the assurances of their reports but the larger talent pool wasn’t properly leveraged to prevent recurrence nor was technology employed to inform the full organization of the scope of the situation.
Finally, tools must exist that connect the individual to others to enable collective action. Tolerance of new ideas and enormous talent are wasted if the tools don’t exist to allow for effective coordination. There is no shortage of corporate failures attributed to functional silos that could never learn to cooperate. Nokia underwent a period of critical self-examination about how it has come to it’s current state that is neither a product of its talent nor a paucity of good ideas in its many areas of research and exploration.
Work, at it’s best, provides us a discipline to master, a larger purpose to which we can surrender and the tools to effectively coordinate our talents for the greater good. Failure in any of these areas inhibit growth and the potential of organizations to adapt and innovate. Richard Florida offers a compelling vision of creative cities, and more recently, the dark underbelly of the new reality, and we see organizations following a similar pattern, with the need to coordinate instruments of tolerance, talent and technology to ensure sustained success.
