“We have to stop laughing and start working now”. Why big organisations struggle with innovation
“You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.”
Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm
Companies, organisations, and the public sector all face increasingly complex worlds to navigate, and to innovate or being innovative has for a long time been heralded as an essential part of the solution for tackling this. I’ve been working with innovation almost my whole career, and I am struck by how hard this is to enable in large organisations, especially given that there is no shortage of ambition, nor of theories about how to facilitate for innovation to happen. Seen through the eyes of someone who has been both practicing as well as leading creativity and innovation initiatives this is to a large extent due to one incredibly apparent blind spot that almost all organisations I’ve worked for or with display:
The lack of understanding of how ideas emerge.
Big organisations are to some people just boring and slow creativity killers, but to me they are more than anything else fascinating micro universes containing a huge amount of experience, ambition, and willingness to change — that unfortunately isn’t always addressed properly. The initial reason I joined a global company almost twenty years ago was a really interesting position as a design researcher, but it didn’t take long before I started to discover the unique environments of this organisational world in itself that have fascinated me ever since. Rather than being a consultant coming in from the outside, I and my colleagues found the challenge of interacting closely with the outside world while at the same time trying to influence the big organisation’s DNA from the inside hugely interesting as well as creatively stimulating. Being trained designers, urbanists, game developers, etc, made it natural for us to develop and pursue a strategic design lab in order to contribute to the company we worked for, something that not only led to really interesting projects and results, but also to insights into how creativity and innovation work in large and often complex organisations.
About innovation
This text discusses innovation in its broadest definition and on a relatively high level of abstraction, but the principles and considerations brought up apply to all kinds of innovation — such as sustaining, incremental, adjacent, breakthrough, radical innovation etc — even if they of course have to be tailored in accordance with the specific contexts they are to address. In other words, how to address a matter of, for example‚ organisational trust will most likely differ depending on whether one is trying to improve something already being done, or if the scope is to come up with a completely new solution all together.
Innovation, or being innovative, is somewhat of an eternally hot topic for businesses, organisations, and the public domain, and investigating the abyss of innovation definitions is without a question a venture for those with great amounts of spare time and a well developed management lingo tolerance. This is a domain that can be dissected into extremely fine parts, but it can actually be described on a more principal level as well. In short, when reading up on various ways of describing innovation it is quite clear that many definitions include the process of coming up with novel ideas (for new solutions or to change existing ones) and then find ways to implement them or bring them to some sort of market. Scott D. Anthony describes this quite well:
“Innovation is a process that combines discovering an opportunity, blueprinting an idea to seize that opportunity, and implementing that idea to achieve results. Remember — no impact, no innovation.”
Scott D. Anthony: Innovation Is a Discipline, Not a Cliché (Harward Business Review)
This sounds pretty straightforward: First you generate ideas that address a problem or an opportunity, and then you develop these into solutions before you introduce them to the ones you invented them for, with the ambition for the receivers to adopt/buy what you’ve come up with. Who you target with your efforts can of course differ depending on the context in which you are innovating, so you might address organisations, citizens, customers/markets, to name but a few examples.
However, as almost everyone knows this is not as simple as it it sounds, especially not in organisations with already established existing operations and offerings. Most organisations struggle with this — large ones particularly badly — something that the vast amount of innovation management theory bears witness to. There is definitely no shortage of management, creativity, or business “insights” regarding innovation, yet companies still fumble the ball when it comes to facilitate for truly novel ideas to emerge and to identify and address new and emerging problems and opportunities. It is painfully clear that despite the abundance of innovation management initiatives and organisational functions out there with, on paper at least, fantastic models, processes, and measurable results, they very seldom generate any real distinguishable or repeatable innovation outcome. Many claim to have a formula for innovation that works, but it does seem to be something fishy with the emperor’s new clothes… If there really was a magic formula for innovation, shouldn’t it be super well known by now?
This is of course a bit generalising and perhaps even somewhat unfair to the work that actually leads to great new and successful solutions that undeniably are being created by some, but based on almost two decades of insights into many organisations’ work with innovation it’s extremely clear that the the struggle for most organisations is real. The return of all good intentions and efforts is, despite what we read in social media and hear at conferences, slow and most of the time not very impressive at all.
The problem: Everyone looks at “going to market” while ignoring how ideas are to emerge
Let’s take a look at the definition of innovation again: “/…/ discovering an opportunity, blueprinting an idea to seize that opportunity, and implementing that idea to achieve results.”
From this definition one could argue that innovation as a whole is built upon two distinct and rather different parts:
- “discovering an opportunity, blueprinting an idea to seize that opportunity”
- “implementing that idea to achieve results”
You could refer to these two activities or phases as Ideation (”the formation of ideas or concepts”) and Realisation (”the making or being made real of something imagined, planned”).
The problem is that an overwhelming amount of innovation initiatives place a vast amount of their efforts on the realisation phase, the one in which an idea is transformed into an offer for receivers of some kind, such as customers in a market, an organisation and it’s people, citizens and civil society (in the case of public sector innovation), and so on. It is like there is an invincible force that pushes them away from the ideation phase and pulls them towards the realisation phase. It is as if complex organisations have magnetic poles for innovation that underlies the way the organisations unconsciously orient themselves when trying to think differently or new.
The bias towards the realisation phase is in many ways really easy to understand. This phase is about analysis, planning, executing, measuring, and so on. It usually has a clear start and end point in time, and the expectations and how to assess wether things are going well or not are most often clearly stated. In other words, this phase resembles much of the existing work and the processes that organisations already use in most of their everyday operations, even if the context of innovation provides a bit of a different canvas to draw upon. This creates a sense of familiarity, and perhaps more important, of being able to manage risk. Risk management is a strong behavioural influencer for many organisations in general, and in particular when it comes to innovation, which by its nature is about approaching new and sometimes unknown domains and solutions. The fact that the realisation phase has a kind of Milton Friedman logic to it (to make money, not to be wasteful, to succeed) — which in a time of new public management galore is more or less a law of nature to many — focusing on the work before the realisation phase almost goes against the perceived natural order of things.
This organisational bias is sometimes explained by referring to an organisation’s underlying values, which often relate to an organisation’s competencies and culture, which are discussed later in this text. For many organisations this manifests itself through a lack of fundamental tools, processes, or languages for anything that doesn’t support their everyday business operations. Organisations with existing operations often have policies and procedures in place to secure efficient and reliable processes and deliverables — in many cases by eliminating risks — something that makes the first, often uncertain and explorative, part of the innovation process very difficult to deal with. Being able to address innovation with a clear and concise process and approach is therefore often quite attractive, something that further increases the bias towards the realisation phase.
It has to be pointed out that the realisation phase is not a problem as such. To develop ideas into “sellable” or relevant solutions that fit someone else’s needs and ambitions is essential for any innovation be successful, let’s be honest about that. The problem however, is that no matter how good you are at this part, you still depend on the ideas that are to be transformed into solutions — and you have to be able to ensure that you continuously over time get new ideas to evolve into solutions. No matter how excellent your processes, approaches, frameworks, or “machines for innovation” are, they do depend on the ideas entering them. Bad ideas can of course be “helped” (”Hey, let’s pivot!”) in the realisation phase, and sometimes new ideas and solutions emerge from this, but this is a spectacularly slow and blunt approach that steers the process towards whatever offer and solution that might have any market fit whatsoever. These solutions are rarely grounded in the organisation from which they stem, leading to a rather disparate kind of innovation culture over time.
So ideas, and the quality of them, matters — and this is where most organisations struggle really badly.
Where do ideas come from?
To be fair, quite a few organisations actually do understand the need for coming up with ideas to be transferred to the realisation phase, but a very common problem is their understanding of how ideas emerge, and how to approach this — the ideation phase in other words. Many organisations and innovation initiatives seem to assume that ideas exist regardless of what anyone does, and that people in the organisation automatically will share them if they only get the chance. How these ideas emerge is of little concern in this mindset, the ideas seem to just be there, ready and waiting to be “harvested” and developed.
Some organisations go a bit further, arranging hackathons, holding workshops, or providing challenges along certain topics or domains in order to facilitate for ideas to emerge. Initiatives like these are not bad as such, but they are often presented in a kind of organisational vacuum in the sense that they are almost isolated instances of creativity that aren’t a natural part of the organisation’s or it’s employees’ everyday work or operations. Many of us have been invited to 55 minute brainstorm meetings (allow five minutes to get to the next meeting) during which people without any preparation nor mandate are expected to come up with “radical” ideas along some predefined themes — the creativity equivalence to Amazon’s dystopian “ZenBooths” (or “AmaZen Kiosk”). One can of course argue that these activities are better than nothing, but that level of bar setting is also a big part of the problem, given that they are more like taking pain killers rather than to try to fix the underlying injury. These activities and initiatives are a step in the right direction, but they’re not even remotely enough to begin addressing an organisation’s full creative potential. If you really want to get better at generating novel ideas of quality, it takes more than that.
Ideas can’t be found — they emerge
Let’s look at what it means to come up with new ideas from a more organisational point of view. Within an organisation, fostering the opportunity for people with different competencies and “hunches”, as Steven Johnsson calls them in his RSA talk “Where do good ideas come from”, to meet and engage is a hugely important key factor. This means that people within the organisation should meet more often, perhaps in settings that aren’t designed to yield an explicit outcome (like normal work meetings or workshops) but that are to foster another type of interaction in which different perspectives and competencies can cross pollinate each other. The ideas, Johnsson argues, emerge at the intersections between hunches, when two good but perhaps separate thoughts collide and generate something novel and unique.
An interesting aspect of Johnson’s argument is that good ideas often take a lot longer to form, mature, and emerge than one might think — they might require years to evolve, not months or quarters. This is a challenge for many organisations and companies that operate with yearly plans or tight time constrained initiatives, many times due to a culture of “speed of execution” or similar, that might work well for other domains but not at all for creativity and ideation.
Large organisations actually have a huge advantage when it comes to having a lot of hunches, much thanks to their sheer number of people and disciplines in them. Large organisations usually also have the luxury of being able to work with longer time perspectives, even if they don’t always utilise this opportunity. This is a great potential, but the challenge is how to get these hunches to meet and engage with each other, and to do this over longer periods of time. What would all of this look like? What would we need to do to enable this? What decisions would be needed, based on what premises and expectations? The answers to these questions aren’t given and they will vary depending on the organisation in question, but hopefully this text will provide some guidance.
A very common way of depicting how ideas emerge is a flashing lightbulb that appears above someone’s head, almost like a strike of lightning. To some extent this is a rather true description of an idea appearing, but there are quite a few prerequisites for this to happen that aren’t that easily depicted and that are essential for the light bulb to emerge and start shining.
Some years back the team that I worked in looked into the field of Internet of Things, an area that was interesting for the telecom industry in which we worked at the time. We investigated the domain from an outside in perspective, meaning that we interviewed and observed people and companies outside of our own organisation as a way to understand drivers and barriers for this new area, but also as a way to identify possible paths forward for new products and services for the company we worked for.
These research and insights activities carried on for a while and eventually we started to ideate around a range of topics of interest. One topic that we had identified was that people had a really hard time to understand how things and services that never had been interconnected before, could now be connected, and how they would be able to interact and see the benefits (and potential worries) with this. People simply had no mental model of how this would all fit together and be used. As a team we wrestled hard with this, utilising a wide range of methods and techniques to push us forward, but to no avail — we felt a bit stuck.
Then, on a late Sunday afternoon, one of our colleagues took a walk with his wife. As they were talking about his wife’s current Master thesis project about social networks, my colleague started to think about our challenge at work. The hypothesis that he formed in an instant was as unexpected as it was brilliant: If people can manage really complex relationships and connections in social networks, couldn’t we think about our relationships to the products and services we use in similar ways? What if we would borrow mental models and interaction patterns from the ways that we make sense of and structure our interpersonal social relations as a way to facilitate for the understanding and interaction with the Internet of Things?
He brought these thoughts to work the following day, and the result turned out to be SWoT, “The Social Web of Things”, a concept for making interconnected things and services understandable and useful, that at the time was truly groundbreaking.
This might come across as just another of one of these Heureka moment stories that in hindsight make the inventor look like a sole genius. However, in all projects throughout my career, ideas have never been the sole creation of one person. To the contrary, ideas are almost always the result of circumstances that can be arranged, supported, and nourished — just like in the case with the Social Web of Things concept. In that project, our team worked according to a methodology and in an environment that were specifically designed to be beneficial for creativity to flourish and ideas to emerge.
Joakim’s lightbulb moment was for sure his, but it came as a result of an intentional process aimed at generating novel ideas that we worked on collectively. We trusted the process and even if we couldn’t tell exactly when an idea would emerge, or that all ideas that emerged would be good (they never are!), we were confident that ideas would present themselves in the space in between the concrete activities or process steps.
In his book “A Technique for Producing Ideas”, James Webb Young writes about what he refers to as the “Mental Digestive Process” during which your brain goes over all the information, knowledge, insights, experiences etc relating to the task that you are trying to address. It is a phase that includes a great deal of mental effort in search for synthesis and ways forward, but that most often leads to a state of despair when no clear insights are to be seen. Webb argues that at this point you are ready for the next step:
“In this third stage you make absolutely no effort of a direct nature. You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can. It is important to realise that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.
/…/
You remember how Sherlock Holmes used to stop right in the middle of a case and drag Watson off to a concert? That was a very irritating procedure to the practical and literal-minded Watson. But Conan Doyle was a creator and knew the creative processes. So when you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.
/…/
Out of nowhere the idea will appear. It will come to you when you are least expecting it — while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. It may waken you in the middle of the night.”
This is a fundamental insight, and one that modern day organisations find really hard to incorporate into their ways of working: For ideas to happen, at one point you have to actively do nothing. To do something else, something that doesn’t seem productive even, is the way forward. To many this is truly an oxymoron, but for the ideation phase it is crucial.
The interesting thing is that this understanding of how ideas emerge, and they can not be hunted for, is described in all kinds of domains. A thought provoking example is presented by Computer Science Professor Kenneth Stanley in his talk “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”. Stanley talks about his work on artificial intelligence and machine learning and how he and his colleagues came to the conclusion that we can potentially achieve more by following a non-objective yet still principled path, after throwing off the shackles of objectives, metrics, and mandated outcomes. According to Stanley, objectives can even be an obstacle for creativity and innovation. In his talk he describes their work on a machine learning enabled AI solution for generating images, and their struggle when trying to reverse engineer the different decisions that led initial non descriptive computer generated images to become understandable and meaningful images to people. It eventually turned out that they simply couldn’t, something that they analysed carefully and that in turn lead Stanley and his team to conclude:
“You can only find things by not looking for them”
A special plea for play
“Seriously though, this is so fun, but now we have to stop laughing, get serious and start working…”
The above was said by a colleague from another unit than ours during a workshop and brainstorm that was a part of a research project aimed at identifying and defining use cases for a technology that the company we worked for was investigating. The work that day had been great, including a morning with sharing and analysing the research that all team members had done individually during a couple of weeks and that we went through in a joint session. This was intentional since looking at a topic from a common starting point and then through a variety of competence “lenses” usually led to a lot of cross pollinating of thoughts and insights very quickly (facilitating for “hunches” to meet!). In the afternoon the workshop continued with a brainstorm session in which we bounced impressions, questions, half baked ideas, and so on, with each other, often by extrapolating things to the extreme as a way to pressure test our thinking and hypothesises. Needless to say this approach can lead to quite extreme conversations — for example, I once came up with an idea for a slingshot commute solution as an extreme way of utilising big data for travel (think weather, trajectories, etc) something that at the time was just a way for us to shed light on some things that were interested in but that we didn’t see as a feasible solution — but that’s ok since it’s simply a way to quickly explore and test early thoughts and ideas. However, perhaps the biggest benefit by doing this is that it stimulates a kind and open minded kind of engagement among the participants in which new ideas and takes on things are treated with curiosity rather than scrutiny, something that fuels a very constructive atmosphere that supports novel thinking. The interesting thing this particular day was our colleague’s reaction to this, that the laughter and bouncing of ideas to him was not work at all, when it to us was perhaps the ultimate sign of progress.
For my team, as for many within the traditional “creative” domains, to do nothing, or to engage the unconscious, is key for creativity and ideation. John Cleese argues in the “Design Better” podcast that anything really new comes from the unconscious and the only way to get in touch with the unconscious is you are in a playful mode — not in a driven, purpose, and result oriented mode.
Cleese suggests that in order to nourish creativity we need to create a space in which we are not interrupted, and in which we should play with ideas that we have in order to evaluate and develop them.
Former IDEO CEO Tim Brown talks about something similar in his TED Talk from 2008 in which he makes the case of playfulness at work, something that for IDEO — one of the world’s most recognised creative and innovative companies — is essential:
“So we have the finger blasters. Other people have dinosaurs, you know. Why do we have them? Well, as I said, we have them because we think maybe playfulness is important. But why is it important? We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them.”
In the light of what has been described in this section, it is easy to understand why the ideation phase is so hard for organisations to manage, especially large ones. To facilitate for hunches to meet over time is in itself quite an undertaking, and then also to NOT look for ideas for them to emerge? Sometimes fuelled by having fun?! The challenge is real and quite understandable. Nevertheless, if organisations don’t address this, the ideas that they so much need will remain elusive.
How can we help ideas to emerge?
Dealing with your organisation’s creative abilities is a bit like working with human fitness. Say that you want to be able to run a marathon. The way to become able to do so is not by going from never moving at all to a 30 min walk every two weeks and be happy with that. Sure, it is a start, but in order to become such an accomplished runner that you can endure a 42 km marathon, you have to utilise a variety of different routines and exercises in order to progress. For example, improving your cardio is one thing, but you also have to strengthen your muscles and joints, not to mention your mental capabilities, your energy intake, and so on. Over time this leads to change, your fitness will begin to improve, and your abilities as a runner as well. However, this is not a one-off change journey that will create ever lasting capabilities. Any athlete (or non-athlete for that matter) knows that if you want to retain your abilities you have to continue and evolve your training, as your muscles as well as your brain need continuous “service” to maintain their ability to continue to deliver what you want from them.
An individual’s or an organisation’s creative capacities and their ability to generate ideas work almost exactly like this. The random brainstorm opportunities and the occasional hackathons can be good activities as such, but they’re not in themselves the solution to the bigger problem of generating ideas over time. For that you need to fundamentally change how you view and engage with the ideation phase, and how to maintain your creative fitness over time, something that seems to be extremely difficult for most organisations to do.
Seen from an organisational point of view, increasing its ability to get new ideas is ultimately about creating and maintaining a healthy (for ideas) environment. If this is achieved, people within the organisation will continuously come up with ideas as part of their daily work, and ideas are allowed to naturally evolve to a point at which some of them can be developed further and perhaps enter the realisation phase of the innovation process. It’s like a greenhouse with different plants growing and evolving over time, at different speeds, and due their individual prerequisites. Creating this kind of environment is really really hard, to put it mildly, and this is where an overwhelming majority of large organisations go wrong, considering that this is not something you change with a one year “program” or “initiative” (often named Ignite, Move, North Star, X etc) with a series of activities that you measure with a FPS score. Instead, this is to a large degree all about organisational culture.
Culture be described or defined as the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular group of people, and to change these is a long term and quite profound endeavour (think of it as the fitness programme mentioned earlier). Workshops and brainstorms are all well and good, but here we’re talking about much more than that. This doesn’t mean that the whole organisation should be turned into a creative agency — that wouldn’t be possible nor desirable — but that processes and activities that spur new ways of thinking, identifying opportunities and problems, and new solutions for these, should be a natural part of the way it operates. As most readers know there is a plethora of theories about specific methods and processes for generating ideas and enabling creativity, but this text won’t go into these in detail. There are however some of fundamental aspects that are worth mentioning, since they map rather well with many years of observations from innovation activities in all kinds of organisations.
Challenge 1: People and hunches need to meet
The first question one needs to ask oneself is where people can meet and engage with each other, preferably physically but in times of remote working also digitally? In the analogue world, physical spaces such as workshops (like some kind of open lab spaces for people to build and develop things) can be really great “water holes” for people with ideas to gather around. If placed at locations close to where people anyway tend to go, like close to canteens/cafe’s, the exposure to the organisation is increased, as are the chances of people stopping by on their way to and from lunch or coffee — all in the spirit of increasing spontaneous meetings between people. It’s important that these physical spaces aren’t closed of behind access controlled doors though, make it more of an open shared space for as much as possible. If you want to go pro, place the company cafés inside of these creative areas, making the mix of people even more diverse while taking place in an environment that signals social engagement and dialogue.
To make things even more complicated, just creating opportunities for hunches to meet within the organisation itself probably means that the organisation would be missing out on valuable inflow of hunches from the outside world, such as its customers, partners, society as a whole, to name but a few examples. Hence some form of regular exchange with people and organisations outside of the organisation would be beneficial as well. This can be achieved in many ways (too many to bring up here), and include promoting people in the organisation to engage in external collaborations, external events, partnership engagements, etc, as much as possible. This also relates to the organisational culture in the way that in many organisations these kinds of external engagements are often by default driven by management, which is a “truth” that can be worth challenging. There will of course always be opportunities for management to participate in such collaborations, but what if the policy would be to assign subject matter experts instead of managers to collaboration workshops and meetings — that is, prioritising expertise over organisational rank? A lot of these cultural assumptions can — or should — be revised if one is serious about changing towards a more creative corporate culture.
Challenge 2: Organisational setup
Even though enabling people and hunches to meet is crucial, just having physical (or virtual) meeting places will not be sufficient. People within the organisation must also know that they have the time and mandate to engage, that this is something that is valued by the company, their organisations, their managers, and their co-workers. This is much harder to address than spending some money on work benches and 3D printers in the canteen, since this goes straight into an organisation’s operations, goals, measurements, ways of working, and so on. On a more fundamental level all of this comes down to the people involved, and how the organisation’s setup supports and steers them in matters like these.
For an employee there are numerous parameters that influence what is possible to do and act upon in regards to new ideas and innovation. Pursuing your idea sounds easy, but in reality this might for example mean having to ask your manager for permission first. This sounds pretty straightforward, but most people are aware of the circumstances in which they work, that they themselves, the teams that they belong to, their managers, etc, have goals and plans that most often are rather streamlined and that are measured frequently — many times because they are linked to performance evaluations that affect career paths and eventual financial rewards. In the light of this, to ask for time off for working on a new idea becomes quite sensitive. Bearing in mind all the issues just mentioned, the employee exposes him/herself to a scrutiny beyond the assessment of the idea itself in which the impact of not contribution to the organisation’s performance becomes quite daunting to think of, and that in many cases prevents people from suggesting the idea in the first place. The same reasoning can of course be applicable for many types of employees regardless of their role or position within the organisation. The point is that if the organisational setup doesn’t include this kind of flexibility, one can’t expect employees to pursue the development of hunches or ideas.
To promote more open ended and explorative ways of working is often quite complicated since it introduces other ways of thinking and working compared to what the organisation is used to. To some extent these mindsets might collide, and it is by no means an easy task to prioritise “away from” the core of what the organisation’s “main” or “core” focus is, but it can help to view the organisation’s creative abilities as a useful tool for addressing both current operations as well as being better prepared for the future. A more creative organisation will certainly be better at moving into the future, but it will also be better at identifying and acting on challenges and opportunities within its current assignment or business. In any case — and this can’t be emphasised enough — one cannot expect people and groups to generate more and better new ideas, while at the same time keeping the processes and ways of working fixed on the “business as usual” deliveries with their underlying processes, methods, priorities, and measurements — things will inevitably have to be altered a bit if one wants to get another type of outcome.
Challenge 3: Top level engagement essential
A CEO of a huge company once said to a colleague of mine:
“I know that the work of the 5% of you that are looking into the future is so extremely important for our company, but I find it incredibly difficult to balance how to address and talk about this considering how much we need the outcome of the other 95% for our current existence”.
His frustration is a good example of how hard this is. In many cases the top level management understand the importance of generating new ideas, but they often lack the ability to be handle these sometimes opposing approaches. To lead an organisation with a clear purpose, often envisioned as a well oiled delivery “machine”, implies a mindset, priorities, and communication that can be very difficult to combine with the more open and explorative approach to inventions and innovation, something that often contributes to organisations’ bias towards the more result oriented realisation phase at the expense of the explorative, and more “fuzzy” ideation phase. This is problematic, since no matter how decentralised and bottom up driven an organisation might be, hierarchies are real. Top level communication, strategies, priorities, etc do matter, and no organisation mindset or cultural change will come without the feeling that this is not only accepted by higher management, but also encouraged as a way of working an operating — preferably by management being a part of this way of working.
Large organisations are usually quite complex, and regardless of how agile or “flat” they want to be, hierarchies almost always exist. The monthly CEO letter to all employees is read carefully, investors days are analysed, and all employee meetings are often viewed as indicators of what is prioritised and valued within the organisation. One might have a super flexible and easy going direct manager that usually encourages exploration, but if the CEO says that “the last quarter was ok but now we must ensure that we’re doing the right things for the right reasons”, then the organisation immediately assumes some kind of sharpened focus on core business and performance. The direct manager can say whatever he/she wants, in reality people’s minds are consciously or unconsciously beginning to prioritise what they shall focus on, and in situations like the one just described people often become less explorative.
Over time this forms a part of the organisation’s culture and mindset, and even if the organisational leadership team sincerely believes in the need for new ideas and the organisation to be innovative, they have to start acting differently. They have to make room for multiple messages that are supported by concrete decisions and actions. If you want people to think more about new ideas and solutions you simply have to signal this. Sure, sharpen focus might be needed, but unless the building is on fire the next sentence should include something related to “pursue new ideas”. The goals and targets might still be core business focused, but maybe they shall also include that time must be spent on new ideas — perhaps even as a goal in itself? In other words: For an organisation to believe in and prioritise innovation and creativity, the domain should be not only be promoted, but also driven, by the organisation’s management. Simply put: If top level management believes that being innovative is of importance to the current and future existence of the organisation it must treat innovation and creativity accordingly.
Three things that organisations really must do
To work with innovation in large and often complex organisations is hugely interesting, but in many cases also very difficult. As mentioned earlier there is an ocean of initiatives and models for how to address this, and to go through them all would result in a rather different text than this. However, regardless of the model, initiative, or framework for innovation one might look at, there are some fundamental perspectives all large organisations really should think about. These can of course be described and explained much more extensively than here, so the reflections below are to be seen as starting points for further discussions.
Work on organisational trust
Go to great lengths to create a culture of trust. This is of course beneficial for an organisation in general, but it is absolutely essential for new ideas to emerge and for people to willingly share them with each other and with the company.
How to do this on a large scale is of course quite an undertaking that will have to be tailored depending on the organisation, but trying to establish a kind of psychological safety on an organisational level around the topic of innovation and creativity is without a doubt a good north star to navigate after. However, don’t underestimate this challenge — this is an endeavour that stretches from the very top of the organisation and its strategies to the nuts and bolts in the details of everyday life as an employee.
A colleague that I interviewed about innovation a few years back told me that she was about to enter an innovation competition at the company she worked for at the time. As she was preparing her submission she came to the legal section of the process. It was as usual quite lengthy and complex but something caught her eye: Every submitted idea was the company’s property as soon as the submission was completed, and would remain so even if the idea didn’t win or was otherwise being used. From an employee perspective this wasn’t all acceptable according to my colleague, and consequently she never entered the competition.
In cases like the above it is quite easy to understand the issue. To submit something that you have thought of — perhaps even worked on a bit — to a competition and not even get to keep the idea if it doesn’t win is unfair to most people, even if it makes sense from a strict organisational legal perspective. However, in the case of innovation there are many more issues that might affect the level of trust.
One such issue is how well people with ideas within the organisation feel that they are understood in regards to what they want to achieve. A big mistake that innovation initiatives do is to spend way too little time on figuring out the motivation and driving forces behind the inventors within their organisation. It is often assumed that they are entrepreneurs that look for monetary rewards or the chance of becoming the CEO or CTO of their own (mother organisation backed) enterprises, and consequently this steers how the different initiatives are set up. To some inventors this might of course be the case, but in a majority of cases when looking at inventors within large organisations, there are a lot of other motivating factors at play.
For example, it is important to realise that most people seeking employment in large organisations do this because they are looking for something else than a start up or a small company context. If you are an entrepreneur with the ambition to create your own company, a big and complex organisation isn’t a logical starting point. Instead, many people are more into their expert domains, such as specific technologies or areas of special interest. To many, the driving force behind coming up with new ideas is therefore to create something, a solution or a product that doesn’t exist yet or that addresses a problem or opportunity in a unique and successful way. In many cases the reward is to make the idea into something real and to see if it actually works and makes a difference — not necessarily that it becomes a product or a commercial success that they get rich from.
To some this might sound a bit naive — surely everyone must realise that when working for a company or an organisation you do this within that commercial or organisational context. This is absolutely true, but to most inventors working within the ideation phase this is simply not the case, something that organisations with their realisation phase bias might find very hard to come to terms with.
Needless to say, creating a culture of trust and psychological safety is hard, and it will require challenging some established truths regarding how modern and efficient organisations work. This will take more than just some internal marketing or some standard HR processes to achieve, and will have to continue to evolve over time. Change and the effects of it will be different to what many organisations are used to, and will have to be followed up using both quantitative and qualitative methods. To many organisations this can be hard and painful, but perhaps there is some consolation in knowing that by pursuing this they will not only become better at their current and future operations, but their employees will be much happier — and innovative — as well.
Embrace and develop different ways of working
“But… are you guys going to do all the fun work?”
The above was said to my team by an engineering colleague during a startup meeting for a project. Different teams representing various competencies and expertise had been presenting what they intended to work on, and we had just detailed out how we were going to ensure that the project was run in a user/customer centric way by co-creating with users and the rest of the development team. His reaction disturbed us, but we could also understand him. He was working in a technical field that very seldom had interacted with users or design, so for him what we talked about was hard to understand. To him, our work sounded ambiguous and almost unproductive, especially compared to the discipline that he himself belonged to, with repositories to add things to, backlogs to maintain, and code to be written. Seen from that perspective, user journeys, qualitative analysis, and ideation sessions can appear to be quite undefined — especially since the starting point often is: “We don’t know yet, but we’ll find out!”
A lack of understanding for other domains and other ways of working is common in large organisations where subject matter domains can become almost isolated islands while at the same time also be very dominating in defining the overall organisation’s culture, ways of working etc. In technology companies it is very common to refer to the “core”, as in the technology that the company’s success has been built around historically. It is also common that an organisation’s overarching goals foster a kind of a process/method/ways of working mono culture in which everything shall be streamlined, automated, standardised, and measured in unified ways. To many this seems to be fair, but also correct in the sense that there is a structural logic to it. It’s a kind of an organisational bias that in many organisations is formed by from years of experience of how things have, and should, be done — often because that’s how they have ended up where they are.
“You don’t have to explain how you work. We are engineers, we know how to work”
The above was said to me by a manager to who’s unit I and my team just had been transferred and that I was presenting our unit to. We were a team of non engineers (OK, some of us had partial engineering degrees) and to us the key to our contribution to the company was the combination of our competencies and our ways of working — which weren’t the same as the way that the engineers worked, and that was our whole point: We complemented each other. His comment and standpoint was quite shocking to us and it took a great deal of arguing and convincing to be able to continue that very first presentation. Unfortunately we never really got to the point where he would see the value of having a variety of methods, approaches, and ways of working, something that negatively affected our ability to perform during our time within his unit.
A reason for our manager’s reaction and reasoning could be what Daniel Kahneman writes about in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. In it he argues that there are two systems that are in conflict within the human mind, something that in this article is used as a description of how organisations work as well. System 1 is automatic and impulsive, and is built upon our learnings from the past, what we have experienced and what we “know” has yielded results — such as focusing on core offerings, certain competencies, ways of working, principles and processes, etc. It’s a system that reduces the need to think too much before acting in a certain way. System 2 on the other hand is reflective, analytical, and considerate. It’s younger in evolutionary terms, and is better suited for more complex problems and situations. The problem according to Kahneman is that sometimes the human brain thinks that a problem or a situation is simpler than it actually is, making System 1 think that it can handle it, and we end up making mistakes. This is a rather good analogy to what seems to happen when we’re talking about innovation in large organisations. The organisation’s System 1 seems to kick in, not realising that the situation is different and more complex than what it realises, and what the organisation ends up with is a solution that is skewed towards methods, processes, and ways of working that most often miss the needs of the ideation phase.
Regardless of the reasons behind this organisational behaviour, there is a strong need for multiple ways of working and operating for innovation to happen and flourish. To actively work with this and to develop the organisation’s understanding and use of a variety of approaches and methodologies is essential for any organisation that aspires to be creative and innovative over time.
Acknowledge and utilise diverse competencies
Many organisations actually do read up on some of the things that are needed to create an idea generating environment, yet they still struggle with doing what is needed. Talking the talk works pretty well, but once the walking is to happen, things start to fall apart. One of the most complicated reasons for this is that organisations often don’t put enough focus on what competencies they need in order to identify necessary changes and to implement them. Rather than considering what competencies would be needed for improving the organisation’s creative capabilities and put these in charge for this — or hire adequate competencies if needed — the default reaction in many organisations is often to scramble together people that are available and give them new assignments, which is a bit like giving a bunch of horses new names and then expect them to run faster.
Another common approach is to assign innovation assignments to young and/or new employees — since youths are always coming up with new stuff, right? This does not only display a rather embarrassing shallow understanding of innovation — as if innovation is nothing about experience or deeper understanding — and it is also a rather sad and demeaning attitude to the established organisation itself. In a way it is a a bit like saying: “The ones that have worked here for a while are too old and stale and unwilling/unable to change or think different that it is better to ask the interns instead”. Nothing could be more wrong. Large organisations are filled of people with experience and ideas on how to do things differently, there is absolutely no shortage of that. Sure, to bring in new and young perspectives is definitely valuable, but don’t think that one group without the other would work — the combination is essential.
However, the problem isn’t really about young/old or new/experienced, but more of the actual competencies involved. Young people can be as conservative or unimaginative as anyone who has worked within the organisation for thirty years, and vice versa. In fact, what you should be looking for is people with the right competencies and experience within your organisation, something that you have to vet quite carefully and against a firm understanding of what you are looking for. Most of the time however, this is not what happens. Innovation initiatives are instead often introduced as something that requires a mindset of structure, grit, and performance — good qualities to have in the realisation phase, though not that useful in the ideation phase — so once again the organisational unconscious bias phenomenon kicks in and people that can deliver on those aspects are put in charge.
This is the key problem, because if the ideation phase is to be properly addressed, competencies that can deal with organisational culture, innovation, and creativity will be needed, and they are often not the same as the ones that are really good at transforming ideas into deliverable solutions. For the ideation phase to work you need teams and individuals that have done actual innovation before, that have formal education or experience from relevant fields of expertise, and that have experience from setting up and nurturing creative environments categorised by high levels of trust and psychological safety, to list a few examples.
In other words: Organisations that are interested in becoming more innovative must incorporate truly diverse competencies, even if this means hiring competencies outside of what the organisation considers to be it’s core focus. For many organisations this can mean hiring ethnographers, sociologists, anthropologists, designers, to name but a few examples — an undertaking that can be extremely challenging if you are a technology company or a governmental agency based upon more “traditional” domains such as engineering, business, and law, etc. In such settings, introducing disciplines from the humanities, social science, and others, can be challenging — but what are the alternatives?
Conclusion
It is often said that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results — an expression that has crossed my mind many times during my years working with creativity and innovation. In terms of when large organisations are going to learn how to properly work with innovation, perhaps it will be the day when they — to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald — develop the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and retain the ability to function.
To anyone interested in getting there faster: We are a lot of people out here that are keen to help out, but terms and conditions (as in trust, ways of working, and competence) do apply.
Please note
This article is written based on my personal experiences of working with innovation within, and in partnership with, many large organisations for almost two decades. As a part of these roles and assignments I have also studied a vast number of initiatives, frameworks, processes etc relating to creativity and innovation, from all kinds of domains and disciplines. The views, conclusions, and proposals outlined in this article shall not be seen as a critique of any individuals or organisations that I have worked with, but as an aggregated body of reflections on a more systemic level relating to the characteristics that large organisations often display.
