Does your innovation process need more chaos?
I recently read “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” by Jason Schreier. It’s a wild read about the video game industry with a lot of great, instructive anecdotes about the crucible-like nature of innovation. One of the chapters in the book focuses on noted game studio Bioware and its franchise series Dragon Age. It’s a chaotic story of trying to piece together narrative, gameplay and technology under extreme duress. Nothing seems to work and it’s only through a long and painful activity called “crunch time” that the game ships and becomes a commercial success.
Game studios create some of the most innovative works imaginable, but the process is usually a messy, high risk undertaking. It’s common for a game’s direction to painfully change many times during development. Schreier ends the book suggesting that this high stakes game of “innovation chicken” may be the only way to make great games. It’s a romantic notion, but the truth is more nuanced. The best game studios aren’t off the rails. They’re pushing the boundaries of how much creative pressure they can leverage. All in the interest of increasing the chance of producing a truly innovative game.
Reflecting on this balancing act reminded me of a Skype call with my brother years ago. He worked at Bioware on Dragon Age, and they were heading into crunch time on the first game in the series. We compared notes about the intense projects we were both working on. Like most young designers, I went straight to complaining about the process I had to work within. It was rigid, structured, and I believed it limited our team’s ability to innovate.
My brother laughed and levelled with me. He’d gladly take my structured process over the chaos he had to work under. His days consisted of a random mix of ad hoc meetings, hallway battles with foam swords, and intense production design. His team at Bioware did amazing work, but often at the expense of their mental and physical health. I envied his chaos, and he wanted my structure. We were stuck at opposite sides of the spectrum, trying to get our best ideas out.
A recent trend in the innovation space is the use of ideation management software. A recent Harvard Business Review article reports that tools like Spigit are turning innovation into a science. Some interesting findings came out of the research behind the article. Combing through data from over 3.5 million employees, the authors key in on a core metric for effective innovation pipelines:
The key variable that we identified across all the companies in our analysis is the ideation rate, which we define as the number of ideas approved by management divided by the total number of active users in the system. Higher ideation rates are correlated with growth and net income, most likely because companies with an innovation culture not only generate better ideas, but are organized and managed to act on them.
The finding here is that systematized idea generation at scale produces strong, measurable results. What’s interesting is that on the surface, this idea of Tayloristic innovation management is completely different from how game studios like Bioware and Valve operate. In fact, Valve boasts profit per employee numbers that can best Google and Apple. Both approaches have merit. They just use very different strategies to ensure that they produce high levels of novel, creative ideas.
Organizations that lean towards chaotic approaches to innovation often run fast and loose. Inefficiency is an acceptable risk, and they crank up the heat and pressure to drive the emergence of unique ideas and opportunities. Looking for random flashes of insight from a team steeped in context, they optimize their process to produce emergent novelty. It’s messy but it works. It’s also an extreme, and way outside the comfort zone for most organizations. Emulate them at your own risk.
The truth is that great innovation can be a mix of both chaos and structure. It’s not a binary choice, but a set of tradeoffs. Your organization doesn’t need to emulate the creative destruction of startups or video game studios, but it doesn’t hurt to leave a little chaos in the mix. You just might see something novel emerge…
