Innovation As Usual
Following up on my last blog post about the Innovator’s dilemma, this time I would like to share a few thoughts on another interesting book: “Innovation as usual” by Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg (2013).
What is innovation? It’s the “creative choice”, the simple fact of deviating from the easy path: the norm. It is “creating results by doing new things” (p. 187). It is action, creating results. A means to an end, without impact, there’s no innovation.
Both people and businesses can benefit from innovation and this book is about helping people be creative within an organisation. How? Through innovation architects: leaders who are not innovators themselves, rather innovation-enablers allowing anyone to be innovators in their day-to-day work. Innovation should not be an exceptional behaviour, rather a daily pattern anyone should follow. Hence the title of the book which is the topic of this blog post: Innovation As Usual.
This is revolutionary, as too many organisations push innovation through ‘innovation islands’. Small, dedicated teams which succeed in implementing innovative ideas, but too often fail in communicating and driving innovation to their wider audience: the organisation as a whole.
Helping people become natural innovators is a matter of shaping the environment they work in. People’s behaviour is the outcome of personalities within the environment, and research proves that it is easier to act on the latter variable than on the former one! As the authors say: “the only way to systematically change behaviour is, logically, by way of changing the systems” (p. 9).
Easier said than done, innovation architects shape behaviour “indirectly”, shaping the environment through “systems, routines, habits and processes”. All these should be integrated with the wider company ecosystem so that current processes and systems could embrace innovation as seamlessly as possible.
The authors propose 6 steps which are summarised in Figure 1 below.
We are now quickly going to look at each step in detail.
Focus
Simply put “focus beats freedom” (p. 14). To be successful, any innovation should be aligned with the objectives of the business. The ideas should be directed so that people could be creative within the limits of the wider goals. The innovation strategy should then be aligned with the wider organisation’s one. Many companies nowadays (42% in 2013 and the number is growing) make this strategy explicit.
If objectives and constraints (time horizon, stakeholders, technologies, level of acceptable risk, etc.) are clear to anyone, choices are limited to innovative ideas that will maximise the business goals, ultimately benefitting anyone involved.
Connect
Innovation works better when multiple ideas and perspectives are combined. This is called recombinant innovation and it is better achieved when the knowledge from different roles and departments are mixed together.
For instance, marketing people and engineers have, quite often, different perspectives, but the real breakthrough may come within the space between them, the intersection. This is another reason why ‘innovation islands’ is not always very effective: the wider knowledge must be combined and the only way to do so is to connect people from different disciplines and viewpoints.
Interns, rotations, brainstorming, trend spotting sessions... are all ways to help connect people internally. But clients have an important part to play too! Quite possibly, an innovative idea may come simply by listening to one client’s problem.
Tweak
Despite the fact that many ideas look perfect in theory, the vast majority will not work in practice. It is then paramount that they are properly tested and the best way to do so is through quick, rapid prototyping. The goal is to get quick feedback to improve the solution, test again, iteratively, until its potential value has been proven.
People may think naively that many great ideas are perfect from the start. This oversimplified view is shown in Figure 2 below.
The reality is much more complex than that, and many tweaks are needed after the eureka moment. A more accurate representation of the process is shown below in Figure 3.
As the authors put it, “innovations […] are not found; they are developed” (p. 85). This implies iteratively reframing the problem and testing the solution until it is successful enough. Framing the problem is key: a perfect solution to the wrong problem is still a wrong solution. But when the right problem is found and correctly analysed, the proposed solution must be properly tested in an environment as closely as possible to the production environment. That is, “make physical prototypes, not PowerPoints, the centre of the discussion in the meetings” (p. 109).
Select
Once the idea has been evaluated internally by the innovation team, a decision must be made about moving the idea further: taking it into production, investing in it, implementing at scale, etc. This is where a decision committee with different skills and goals may be established. Decision criteria should be made explicit and reviewed on a regular basis.
Stealthstorm
Stealthstorm is about politics: convincing the organisation forces about the value of creating an innovative environment. To achieve this goal, potential brokers and senior sponsors must be identified as soon as possible. Their advice could be invaluable and, if ideas are properly “sold” to them, they will help drive them further.
Persistence
“As important as what innovators do is the fact that they keep doing it” (p. 154). In Thomas Edison’s words: “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”.
Motivation is key: the innovation architecture works if people have become naturally innovative. That is if they keep searching for innovation over and over again.
Leaders can leverage motivation in two ways.
- Intrinsically: they pave the way for people to actually choose the creative path for a number of reasons. Because they enjoy it, because it aligns with their own interest, for social recognition, etc. Autonomy also helps, but it is not about goals or objectives (see under Focus), rather about the means (micromanagement proved to work poorly with innovation).
- Extrinsically: rewards, bonuses, promotions and so on. Despite there is no general agreement about the need for external motivation, the authors put it this way: “innovation is hard work […]. Intrinsic motivation is for getting things started. External motivation […] for getting things finished” (p. 166)
Conclusion
Innovation is not easy. Different points of view from the many stakeholders, sometimes conflicting, make things even more complicated. Miller and Wedell-Wedellsborg provide a few insights in their book about driving innovation from a small team to the organisation as a whole, in a way that anyone in an organisation acts innovatively, every day, in a natural way.
Will this work in practice?
Sounds like a good topic for another blog post…
About The Author
Filippo Sassi is an IT Consultant here at Version 1.
