Can it be done differently?

There is no such thing as an innovative culture. There are only cultures where people do innovative things. Innovative cultures are those created by innovative behaviours, such as seeking unpredictable answers and relentlessly asking “Can this be done differently?”

Innovation is hardly a new management idea. Many people think of innovation as a grandiose project with a grandiose outcome: a major breakthrough, a brand-new Apple gadget, a cure for cancer… But innovation is something that can be fostered. A culture of innovation is one where new ideas are easily generated and where ‘looking for innovation’ is part of the behavioural fabric of the organisation.

Reams of paper have been dedicated to innovation and I don’t want to explore the theme in depth here! I am interested in disruptive ideas and there are two involving innovation. The first one is structural and I have dealt with it in the section on Structures. In a nutshell, teams are not terribly good for innovation because they tend to constitute a rather predictable environment.

My preferred way of describing how you can get innovation is ‘look for unpredictable answers’. The predictable answers may refine things or solve problems, but they can hardly generate new ideas. Teams are full of predictable answers. If you work closely with John, Mary and Peter (even in a remote or virtual team, as that is still ‘close’), chances are that you can ‘predict’ their views on things. Even if the three of them were outstanding individuals with ‘lots of ideas’, there would still only be three predictable sets of answers, no matter how rich they were.

Loose networks are great for innovation because you don’t know the individuals well. And when you shout, “Houston, I have a problem!” or simply, “Does anybody know how to get to X?”, you are literally entering uncharted territory full of possibilities.

A simple consequence of all this is that you should involve diverse people in your discussions, reviews, etc. The more people with similar ideas you have, the less innovation will come up.

A second angle of innovation is behavioural. It has to do with systematically asking “Can this be done differently?” Better? Cheaper? This is a discipline that can be implemented now at zero cost. Imagine that a team has just solved a crisis. Things have gone well, anxiety is down and there is satisfaction in the air. People have handled things brilliantly and efficiently. Everybody congratulates everybody. But the question is could that crisis have been solved differently? Have we solved it in the same way we solve all crises? Are we becoming proficient in solving crises? Are we perhaps creating a (scary) Best Practice here? If the answer is yes, then chances are you are not in a terribly innovative environment.

In other words, innovation as a behaviour has to do with questioning and challenging the status quo of things, seeking different angles and possibilities. Asking the question “Can it be/could it have been done differently?”, is a simple and disruptive yet powerful behaviour.

A necessary corollary of asking the question and feeling a bit uncomfortable with the answers is that it will force you to experiment with alternative ideas and perhaps to explore some unconventional avenues.

In my experience, the discipline of asking the question spreads very fast virally in situations such as:

• Review forums, approval bodies or committees (before the approval is granted).
• Crisis management (as above).
• Planning process.
• Post-activity reviews or ‘post mortem’.

But the key to ‘reinforcing innovation’ is to be ruthless in deciding which behaviours to reinforce. Following the example above, if a job is well done, but it is not done in an innovative way, you should not reward it, if innovation is what you want to reward! You can’t have it both ways.

Even if you irritate everybody, ask relentlessly, “Can it be done /could it have been done differently?”

Ask how this is done in X (as far away from you as possible; not the team next door or your close competitor).

If you want innovation, don’t reward a job well done that doesn’t include innovation.

If you want to reward jobs well done, do so, but you will also be rewarding non-innovative things

If you want to reward both, (1) you are close to the norm and (2) you are close to not rewarding anything effectively (Tip: Choice).

Watch out for Nicholas Negroponte’s warning: “incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”

Copyright © - Leandro Herrero - 2008