On the Importance of Excluding (Some) Innovation

So, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’d like for your organization, or an organization that you work with, to be more innovative. You’re not alone. In fact, here’s a fun test you can do. Ask a number of people in said organization (ask 10, 20, 50, 100, heck, ask 5000 people (and send me the dataset)) whether they think innovation is important and something that the organization should be doing. Restrict the answers to yes or no. Without knowing anything about the people you’re asking or the organization in question, I’m willing to bet good money that something scarily close to 100% will answer yes — although there will always be people who either don’t understand the question or give you misleading answers on purpose.

This, the near-complete agreement on the issue might seem like proof that innovation is really important and something that the organization needs to work hard at. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Quite the opposite. Sure, innovation, properly defined, is important, but the agreement that people have about it isn’t proof of anything except that people will pay a specific kind of lip service to the issue. Succinctly put, the modern individual has been trained by his/her surrounding culture to say that innovation is important, and to do so without really thinking about it. Innovation is assumed to be good in itself and always already, and so we swear by it more or less on autopilot.

But real innovation work is something altogether different from saying you like innovation. In fact, the general and thoughtless statements about how important innovation is can blind us to innovation as it actually happens, and create organizational cultures where the talk of innovation becomes a hindrance to innovating.

This as innovating needs not only to stand for something, it needs to mean something. And this meaning does not come from mere statements about how great it all is, but needs to take into account that meaning is created partly by seeing something as a good thing, but also by delineating what this good thing is — in effect by excluding some aspects of it. In fact, I would contend that many an organization would benefit from a frank discussion when it comes to the assumed goals of their efforts, an discussion that would contain at least the following steps:

It is self-evident that an organization that hasn’t been able to define what innovation means for them will not be able to have a meaningful debate about innovation, but will instead be caught up in vague and ultimately directionless chatter about it instead. This is something I’ve found most people agree with.

However, this also means you have to be able to exclude that which you do not want to see as innovation. This is far more difficult, as it will inevitably mean that you exclude something that someone in the organization would want to include. Many people therefore shy away from excluding perspectives, even when this directly affects their organization’s capacity to engage with innovation. Rather than annoying someone, and out of fear of “missing out”, organizations will implicitly adopt an anything goes-approach, and thus dilute the entire defining exercise.

You will also, in addition to defining what innovation is, need to exemplify this. Just saying “we should focus on innovations that add to the bottom-line” is meaningless unless you can point to a reasonable example of the same — preferably one that isn’t completely out of your organizations league (telling your team of five that they should innovate like GE is not only meaningless, it’s insulting). But this isn’t enough. You also need to be able to exemplify what innovation is not, for you. Show what kinds of things you don’t want to go for. Highlight magnificent examples that you don’t want to replicate. Granted, this is far more difficult that just making a wishlist of great innovations, but it is a great way of imbuing the term innovation with meaning and a context.

In the end, it all comes down to something very simple. Statements and claims that everyone agree with are rarely very meaningful. In order to do meaningful work we need to take a far more difficult step, namely talk about those things some will disagree about. When it comes to innovation, this will involve saying “no” to things, and being prepared to accept the bad with the good. Innovating like you mean it means asking the question not everybody will answer with a “yes, of course” and being prepared to pay the price for excluding certain perspectives. Which, in the end, is much more difficult than wishing upon an innovation star.