By Shane Rodgers
The word innovation is one of the most overused in the English language. Even though it has been in the language for a very long time, sometimes it is treated like something we only discovered in the past 10 years.
Innovation is no longer just a long word that describes doing things better. It has become a whole industry complete with sticky notes, white boards, brainstorming sessions, deep dives, online sharing gizmos and shark tanks.
Companies are constantly told they need to innovate. Governments unrelentingly write cheques to facilitate this, boards ask their CEOs what they are doing about it and the bookstores are awash with publications explaining how to do it.
In many different organisations, I’ve seen many different approaches to the innovation imperative:
- Innovation “systems” through which staff submit ideas so they can be assessed
- Massive innovation “programs” in which staff spend hours attending workshops and populating sticky notes so innovation is seen to be democratised and inclusive
- Committees of bright thinkers who drive or collect ideas and create business plans
- Leadership programs with “projects” designed to give companies ready-made, ready-to-implement initiatives to improve efficiency or profitability
- Deep dives designed to produce great ideas and products in a few days
- Shark tanks where people with ideas stand nervously in front of people who control money seeking investment in their ideas
- Suggestion boxes that allow ideas to be submitted anonymously to management
- Staff prizes for people who come up with the best ideas.
In my experience, most of these innovation approaches have some value and are better than having no pro-active way to give oxygen to fresh ideas.
Having said that, many also give a poor return on investment and often become so bureaucratic that they can be idea killers rather than nurturing genuine, positive change.
All the innovation “systems” I have seen in operation ended up spending many man hours assessing staff ideas and rejecting nearly all of them.
The ones that simply fed ideas to the existing management also tended to mostly fail because managers are busy and, unless the idea is so good that it demands immediate and urgent attention, the new idea did not make their short list. Staff often talk about ideas “dying on the vine”.
The other problem is that few companies genuinely invest money in developing new ideas unless they have been proven elsewhere, there is a burning platform of need or business is going so well that there is cash to burn for trialing some stuff.
Often the projects that come out of leadership courses are very good but, in the companies I have worked for who did these programs, my best guess is that about one in 50 projects ever saw the light of day in the real world.
In fact, these leadership course projects tend to be more valuable when they are used to value-add something a company is already committed to doing, rather than promoting genuine, clean-piece-of-paper innovative thinking.
Sticky notes as a basis for innovation are hopefully a passing fad. It is quick and looks inclusive but seldom does much thought go into them and often the wrong people are in the room (hierarchy-based rather than based on the generation of fresh thinking).
There are some clear obstacles to innovation in most companies:
Busy people are expected to do it as part of their day job. As a result, it is seldom a priority.
Companies typically claim to have three-to-five-year plans but mostly they have one-year plans and that is not enough time to plan and implement real innovation.
New programs are often driven by outside consultants but very typically not enough is subsequently invested in the implementation and immersion. As a result, new things are built outside the company but get rejected by the culture when attempts are made to implement them.
It is a bit like creating a new organ for a body in a laboratory and then inserting it into the body. There is every chance that the body will reject it.
For me, innovation does not work when it is a systemised “program”. It only works when it is a corporate mindset, and the organisation seeks out people with an unrelenting dissatisfaction with the status quo.
There is a real danger in believing that you need to create a corporate structure around mindsets. You don’t. You just need to create the ecosystem where ideas thrive and give leaders permission to try things, even things that might not always work.
People in the organisation need to believe that innovation is doable, and incubation is properly resourced. Otherwise you run the risk of wearing out your best people and eventually burning out your company. There is a fine line between a company being crippled by change and energised by it.
Shane Rodgers is the author of Worknado – Reimagining the way you work to live.
