A Christmas Innovation Carol
This time last year, harried, I was madly adding Victorian urchin garb to my Christmas shopping list. My daughter’s stage school in London (England) was rehearsing A Christmas Carol. The child cast as Tiny Tim had gone AWOL after Baby #2 had arrived and her parents had (understandably) decided that the school’s draughty corridors were no place for a newborn. Looking beyond the irony of a newborn interfering with a nativity play… I was happy that my then 9-year-old was drafted in, to play Tiny Tim. While not the youngest of the troupe, she was by far the tiniest.
Stage mother pride aside, watching children 9–13 stage this play started me thinking….
Dickens’ story is understandably a classic. It’s one I’ve revisited, in one form or another, for each of the 40-something Christmases I’ve celebrated. With my daughter in his shoes, I found I was paying special attention to Tiny Tim’s role in the miser Scrooge’s conversion.
And so it was, last Christmas Eve, I sat facing a gas fire in Barcelona, with my daughter hundreds of miles away with her other family, and wrote this parable based on A Christmas Carol. It was published in Innovation Excellence on Christmas Eve (God bless the 6-hour time difference).
This year, my daughter celebrates with my husband and me. A family Christmas! Since storytelling beats holiday shopping any day, I’ve rewritten my parable.
Happy holidays, readers. Please share this far and wide.
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Seeing my girl play Tiny Tim, it strikes me that A Christmas Carol is a parable for the plight of innovation within organizations. Innovation does not always begin with money. But all too often, it ends abruptly because of it.
Money, money, money
Money is on our mind from the very first moment, in Dickens’ tale. We meet Scrooge when he is hard at work, as he always is: “on Christmas Eve — old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house,” the narrator recounts.
We know money in hand is very much Scrooge’s prime concern. When the ghost of his late business partner Jacob Marley visits Scrooge on Christmas Eve, we with Scrooge learn:
‘It is required of every man,’ the Ghost returned, ‘that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world — oh, woe is me! — and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness! […] My spirit never walked beyond our counting-house — mark me! — in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me!’
I’m struck by the parallel between Marley and Scrooge’s preoccupation with lucre and the financial culture defining commercial success in simply financial terms. We take it as a given, but it is — in fact — both a construct by society, and a choice by individuals.
Financial culture
In a recent talk at the RSA in London, Harvard Business School’s Professor Clayton Christensen made the point about the rise of the financial culture. And he laid responsibility for this with his generation of executives and business studies academics, whose innovations and procedures gave financial culture the tools needed to make it dominant.
Christensen said (according to my notes):
Spreadsheets made numbers the substance of management. If you watch managers at work, you’d think they ship numbers. The only virtue of numbers is they provide a common language. But it’s a terrible language when you work with anything of substance.
Christensen makes the point in the context of innovation. The financial culture that has come to dominate — even define — business creates an agenda for innovation. The financial-drive agenda directs energies to what Christensen calls efficiency innovations.
Efficiency innovations have the advantage of returning more of capital’s investment. They do not, necessarily, lead to stable commercial operations because inherent in efficient innovations is job reduction — and this leads to a profitable business at odds with sustainable communities. Nor do efficiency innovations necessarily improve the day-to-day lives of people, for greater good is achieved by empowering innovations (which transform complicated, rare goods for the few into simpler, more easily available goods for the many) or sustainable innovations (which replace old goods for new, often higher performing or less damaging goods).
Because of his preoccupation with money, Scrooge seems a man imbued in the financial culture. One can easily imagined him endorsing only efficiency innovations, and saying “Humbug” to better or more accessible products.
But the characteristic “Humbug” response is transformed, through the long night of visitations Ebenezer Scrooge endures. And all of us who care about anything of substance — including life-improving innovations — should sit up and take note: for here is a journey which many a humbug might do well to make.
Awakening to the needs of others
We know A Christmas Carol tells the story of Scrooge’s conversion from humbug to human. Let’s walk through his fitful night of Yuletide visitors.
First comes Christmas Past, to show the miser how high the price truly was of his adoration of mere money. It cost him his betrothed.
Then comes Christmas Present, a jolly soul.
As Christmas Eve wears on, this spirit begins to age so much that even the miser Scrooge notices.
As the clock strikes midnight, so that Christmas Eve cedes to 25 December, the spirit reveals to Scrooge two waifs cowering beneath his splendid robes: The narrator tells us:
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing.
The spirit of Christmas Present tells Scrooge: these children are Ignorance and Want. And to the miser, they spell Doom.
Now ignorance takes many forms. But one most relevant to innovation is that ignorance of changing times and tides. That was the ignorance that doomed Kodak, who held within its archives the first digital camera (invented first in 1975, and then shelved) and enough scientific knowledge about collagens to revolutionize skincare — a business opportunity Kodak failed to notice, while Fuji was busy seeing the adjacencies and acquiring cosmetics firms.
As for want? Want speaks to the suffering caused by deprivation. Like ignorance, deprivation takes many forms. To appreciate which deprivations matter, it’s high time we move beyond Maslow’s hierarchy. For a more relevant list of human essentials, please consider the work by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and others in developing the Capabilities Approach as a basis for a human-centred approach to social justice and economic development. The Capabilities Approach “takes each individual as end, asking not just about the total or average well-being but about the opportunities available to each person” (Nussbaum 2011, pg. 18). This framework helps us recognize deprivation and suffering when individuals or groups are denied freedoms in ten key areas:
- Life
- Bodily health
- Bodily integrity
- Senses, imagination and thought
- Emotions
- Practical reason
- Affiliation — in two senses, to life with and towards others, and having the social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation
- Other species
- Play, or
- Control over one’s environment, both political and material, in the sense of holding property and working. (See Nussbaum 2011 pp. 33–34)
These facets of human life determine what is useful to any given set of people at any given time — be it a product, a service, an opportunity, or so forth. Since innovation is novelty that’s useful and implemented, innovation practice has the opportunity to address pains and gains in any of these facets….and, in so doing, make a real difference to people’s lives.
Business-as-usual in great companies makes the connection between innovation and our humanity loud and clear. But too few companies are great.
And too many companies use the business-as-usual as the reason to drive conformity and compliance from workers and customers. People who are sensing the reality, applying their practical reason and seeking to adapt could well find they are ostracized. Imagination is endangered. CEOs may say they want creativity but middle managers have all the power they need to strangle it when it appears.
A Christmas Carol shows us what happens when they do.
Using power to protect the vulnerable
The last of the Christmas visitors to come to Ebenezer Scrooge is the spirit of Christmas Future. The spirit has no face, and does not speak. But his message reads loud and clear. Without transformation, Scrooge’s life is nothing to remember. There is no legacy. Again, in innovation, it’s hard not to think of Kodak.
But what of the change of heart Ebenezer Scrooge experiences after his long night of visitations? The change is to embrace life — and the meanings it gives beyond the merely financial.
Says Scrooge to his faithful employee Bob Cratchit, whom he visits at home on Christmas Day:
‘Now, I’ll tell you what, my friend,’ said Scrooge, ‘I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore,’ he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank again: ‘and therefore I am about to raise your salary!’ Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler.
He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it; holding him; and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat. “A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. ‘A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!’
This isn’t merely a move to engage a valuable employee. The promise preserved by Scrooge’s change of heart and his new-found commitment is a promise of guardianship over the most vulnerable character we meet, the one played (beautifully, says the proud stage mom) by my daughter: Tiny Tim.
In this reading of A Christmas Carol, who does Tiny Tim stand for?
Tiny Tim is a metaphor for all the early stage ideas too easily dismissed, overlooked and (in deed or through inaction) killed off by a senior leadership too obsessed (as was Scrooge himself) by business as usual.
Tiny Tim is novelty.
Tiny Tim is the kind of breakthrough thinking upon which our future, in a sense, depends. He is also the novelty that needs time and nurturing to grow into a contributing member of the company family.
When Tiny Tim says, “God bless us, every one” we can hear him as saying: cherish us, however fragile or fit we are, for together, we are your future.
Unlike Scrooge, we don’t have the benefit of a phantom from the future to show us what will come. We need our Tiny Tims, a great many of them, growing in readiness for whichever future may in fact arise.
Change is upon us
Outside the stories we’ve inherited, we don’t know what’s coming. But one thing is certain. Like Scrooge, we need to change our ways. The financial culture denies too much to humanity and rewards too few. Like Scrooge, it’s time we wake up, and change.
References
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol; The original manuscript. Illustrated by John Leech. Published Project Gutenberg. Release Date: October 30, 2009 [EBook #30368]. Accessed December 24, 2013.
Christensen, Clayton. “The Capitalist’s Dilemma.” Recorded Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Manufacture, London, UK. September 9, 2013. Available online: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/the-capitalists-dilemma
Nussbaum, Martha. 2011. Creating capabilities: The Human Development Approach. London: Belknap Press of Harvard University.
About the author
Kate Hammer is a joint founder of KILN, inventors of IdeaKeg, a tool that helps teams transform their internal innovation processes by asking better, bolder questions as the first step in truly creative idea generation work. Kate works as a commercial storyteller, teaches creativity and entrepreneurship, and writes creative nonfiction. In 2012, she created StoryFORMs to help others articulate their commercial & organisational stories. Kate offers workshops & 1:1 coaching.
(c) 2014 Kate Hammer. All rights reserved.
