Your workplace culture is caging insights and you’re missing the opportunity to innovate (part two)
Insights are the lifeblood of design strategy. They are transformative and disruptive, forcing us to look at things differently and inspiring us to reach our goals in ways previously unimaginable. Why, then, are insights so often killed, and how can we prevent it?
I’ve spoken before about the value of insights, and about the many ‘people traps’ they can fall victim to throughout the course of a project. In this article, I will examine the ‘organisational traps’ that can kill an insight before it has a chance to work its magic.
Even if we’re able to overcome the people traps and arrive at an insight, organisational culture will often suppress it. Organisations have adopted a scientific culture that rewards delivery, not disruptive ideas. They encourage compliance to the status quo over reinvention, due to the misguided belief that this is the only way to maintain effective operations. This cultural backdrop results in insights getting trapped very quickly.
What follows is a look at three aspects of organisational culture that prevent insights working their magic.
Reward mechanisms create a risk-averse culture
Performance management and achievement recognition programmes typically reward employees for delivering against pre-determined and agreed goals. The concept of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic, Time-bound) objectives was first introduced in the early 1980s, and has been widely adopted by organisations across a range of industries. SMART objectives and their ilk force employees to be concrete about what successes they’re going to deliver, how, and by when.
These fixed objectives create the goal fixated culture I outlined in my earlier article, and signal to employees that it’s too risky for them to abandon agreed goals in favour of new goals created by disruptive, unpredictable insights. It’s understandable that people wouldn’t want to risk their careers on developing and acting on insights that change their agreed goals, particularly when they work in large, well-established organisations.
Employees who are able to consistently deliver against agreed goals are also more likely to be promoted. As they rise through the ranks and take on the management of others, they encourage their subordinates to mimic this delivery focused thinking and behaviour, using their position of seniority as evidence of the value of this approach.
A number of years ago I was involved in a workplace ethnography project for a multinational pharmaceutical company. We did ride-alongs with the sales reps, and observed marketing teams and strategic business transformation teams at work. Almost immediately, I was struck by the way in which reward mechanisms affected how employees viewed the value of different kinds of information.
This was most prevalent in the marketing team. Their goals were focused on successfully launching new products and building and maintaining the market share of existing products in line with a set of targets. Their SMART objectives associated with these targets were primarily focused on creating marketing content for the sales reps, which could be customised to individual healthcare professionals on tablet devices. The sales reps we shadowed explained why this tablet-based format wasn’t very effective with healthcare professionals: they typically had no more than 3-minutes with each doctor they met, and were often conducting their sales pitches in corridors, rather than in a formal setting. Opening the tablet and launching an app wasted valuable time and also wasn’t particularly practical in the ‘walking meetings’ sales reps had to engage in with healthcare professionals. The sales reps also knew that the digital format of the content they were being asked to present wasn’t especially memorable, and therefore preferred to leave printed literature with the doctors they met with to act as a visual prompt to find out more.
The sales team tried to share their observations with the marketing team. Unfortunately the marketing team’s SMART objectives were centred on producing content for the tablet devices, rather than encouraging them to work collaboratively with the sales team. As a result, they ignored the valuable information the sales reps were trying to share with them, and the opportunity to try a new approach was missed.
Compliance-centric culture stifles speculation
To create the conditions for predictability and error-free operations, organisations typically have cultures that are rooted in following pre-determined processes. A great deal of trust is placed in prescriptive procedures and checklists that ensure product and service quality is maintained or improved. There is undeniable value in these mechanisms of governance, particularly in situations where failure could be life-threatening (such as in an operating theatre or in the cockpit of a plane), however there is also a cultural downside when adopted in lower-risk environments. They signal to employees that following the steps and being compliant is valued above inquisitiveness, speculation and invention.
To give you an example, I’m often asked to help clients develop their design practice through collaborative projects. These clients tend to be fixated on adopting a process for design, and love to see models that describe different phases of activity. They are often overly concerned about following the process correctly, and can struggle to grasp that design isn’t so much about following a pre-defined process, but rather about approaching a project with an open and speculative mindset — in other words, being open to insights. When I coach clients on these types of projects, freeing them of the effects of their compliance-centric culture is usually my biggest challenge.
Scientifically grounded business culture suppresses insight and innovation
The development of process engineering that accompanied the industrial revolution gave birth to the idea that business management is a hard science. The belief central to this idea is that through the use of logic, hypotheses and rigorous data collection, any problem can be solved.
This scientifically inflected business culture constrains the kind of open inquiry that leads to insight. Instead, historical data is typically used to try and predict the future. Any anomalies that might hint at something new are viewed with suspicion and are often ignored because they don’t align with the beliefs of those interpreting the data.
The logical leanings of this business culture also influence the way organisations promote project success stories. There is a neat narrative to them that describes the goal that was set and the strategy that was formed and acted upon, concluding with the return on investment that was generated as a result. Even if an insight did manage to work its way into a project, the twists and turns that it will have inevitably produced are often deemed irrelevant and edited out of the success story. This lack of visible modelling of what insights do means that they aren’t actively encouraged and supported by the organisational culture.
This hard science based business culture isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it’s fantastic for optimising the systems and processes needed to operate effectively. Unfortunately, the dominance of this culture also suppresses the disruptive force of insights and innovation.
Overcoming traps created by organisational culture
It is impossible to purposefully design the culture of your organisation to be more open to insights, but it is possible to influence and shape the culture through your actions.
The values of an organisation aren’t embodied in the statements that are so often plastered to walls, but in the behaviours fostered and encouraged by managers. If you’re a manager, encourage your team to be speculative and playful in their thinking. Praise those individuals who exhibit this mindset. Invite reflection on the goals your team are trying to achieve, and be flexible about changing direction if the team sees a better goal emerging. Most deadlines for delivery are arbitrary, although they often feel imperative. Recognise this, and allow time to assess whether a new goal is worth pursuing — rather than racing to deliver something that’s aligned to a weaker goal.
Aim to create flexible frameworks for governing how people approach projects, rather than rigid processes. This will encourage employees to think creatively and be open to insights.
When you share success stories within your organisation, highlight the disruptive nature of insights. Avoid cherry picking only the high-points of the project that got you to the outcome; showcase the unpredictable journey you went on because of an insight, so that others can recognise their value.
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Read the next article in the series on how processes and systems cage insights.
Read the previous article in the series on how people trap insights.
