Innovation is something that many companies seek, but not many actually have a firm grasp of how to achieve it. In this I note the distinction between any words spoken by leaders and the actions and behaviours that you see being carried out. That is, it’s one thing to claim to want or create innovation in a company, whereas it’s another thing entirely to actively enable and encourage it.
Firstly, I might just get to the meaning of innovation – the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a new idea, method, or device : NOVELTY”. In this sense it’s often a new view / use of something that might already exist in some form. Thus, it’s somewhat more incremental than to invent something which is defined as “to produce (something, such as a useful device or process) for the first time through the use of the imagination or of ingenious thinking and experiment”. Thus the bar for innovation is somewhat lower than that required for invention, but it can still be hard to achieve if you don’t have the right environment to enable it.
Innovation is key for a 21st century business because the environment is moving so fast with technology and advancements that those companies that don’t include it will oftentimes not survive. At the very least they will find themselves responding to the market / competitors rather than leading the way. Essentially, if you’re not innovating and improving, you’re going backwards.
Time
Let’s consider the first key ingredient required to enable innovation – time. It always astounds me that teams and organisations involved in knowledge work often have filled their capacity to it’s limit and even in some cases over it’s limit. Even if you don’t want to enable innovation, this is a fairly bad practice because you have no contingency for the unknown that inevitably crops up, plus it reduces and inhibits flow. One of the key aspects of knowledge work is that it involves humans that think and collaborate to create solutions to problems. These problems are often not simple – because if they were, you would automate the solving of this problem to unlock the unique talents of people for higher order problems. Therefore, in order to create quality knowledge work outcomes you need to create the time and space for people to think and collaborate.
This is a key aspect in the Kanban method and how we distinguish this from the Kanban that’s used in manufacturing. Whereas manufacturing is concerned with the physical world, knowledge work that we use the Kanban method for is inherently intangible, invisible and requires at the very least some thought, but also the higher value, and oftentimes more complex, work requires collaboration. Creating the space for “thinking slow” (as per Daniel Kahneman’s book), rather than just reacting, is an essential part of enabling innovation. I’ve often found that when working on difficult problems, that the answer comes to me when my mind is “slow” and relaxed, rather than continually occupied with activities. If you want your people to innovate, you will need to create time for them to be able to think, consider and attempt these things.
Firstly, creating some slack in the system is a good way to start this. If people are so “busy being busy” with their day job, they simply won’t get time to innovate. Thus instead of filling your capacity to 100%, only take on enough work to keep you 80% utilised. With this additional time, often teams, provided they have the right leadership in place, will look to improve how they work. Commonly, the people in these teams / groups already know the problems and might have an idea how to fix it, but they’re so busy that they never have time to get around to it. This can be difficult to justify at first, but usually getting a 20% improvement in speed or quality through the slack time doesn’t take very long – indeed when starting with groups involve in knowledge work I often see a 5-10% flow efficiency anyways, so the bar is fairly low.
Another way of doing this is being explicit and creating a different work item type / class of service for the innovation work. Key to this is allocating a capacity of the group to doing this kind of work (eg 20%). It then becomes visible and you can examine different innovation options to make a more informed decision on which ones might have the right kind of payoff curve before trying it.
Collaboration
Whilst not always essential, oftentimes collaboration is a key element as I described above. New ideas can often flow through discussion, debate and critical thinking. Indeed, conflict can be an element that goes with this – provided that it’s low grade (eg a difference of opinions) and not highly emotionally charged. Key to this is the interplay between different perspectives and points of view – often the best products or services are not just great from one perspective, they have multiple elements that make them desirable – this can be not just from the utility, but also from how they are sold, serviced and supported throughout their lifecycle.
The key is having the right kinds of collaboration at different points in the flow. If you’re collaborating in the same way, you’ll often produce the same product / service. Therefore, you will need to look at different perspectives, at different points in time to be able to enable innovation. To an extent the collaboration needs to have some innovation to it in order for the final product / solution to be innovative. For example, it’s often useful to engage those who are supporting customers with the product early in the process so they can tell you the problems that customers are experiencing. It’s not unusual for innovative solutions to emerge from a better understanding of key problems.
Sometimes, organisations get so large that you get collaboration silos where people often don’t interact with large portions of the business. Whilst this can make sense from a certain perspective because you can get lost in large orgs, when you’re looking for innovation, it can often come from when you make new connections and collaborate in different ways. Organisations need to be conscious of this and look to make new connections that weren’t previously there. Activities like Social Network Stimulation are one way of doing this. As this is inherently the realm of complexity, there are no guaranteed results from this. However, if you continually shape and steer the network through the creation of new connections, oftentimes unexpected and highly valuable innovations can result.
Safe to fail
When creating innovations, you need to enable it in a way that is “safe to fail”. That is, you don’t necessarily want to be “betting the company” on one new innovation. An alternative way of thinking about this is in relation to risk – you don’t want to expose the organisation to an abundance of risk for innovation. There are several aspects to consider when setting things up to be “safe to fail”.
Firstly, consider the size of the innovation – usually a small incremental improvement is inherently less risky than larger time and resource consuming efforts. Thus, setting up an environment that can do sustained small incremental improvements and innovations will reduce the risk exposure to the organisation, plus it will give you compounding benefits through early delivery of small innovations. In a sense, this is related to the Time element mentioned earlier – creating space for small continual improvements is less risky.
Consider innovations as experiments – they may or may not work. Plus they may need some adaptation to make it work, you might not necessarily have it right the first time. Thus applying some forethought to it will help you set it up in a way that is inherently safer to fail, rather than just blazing into it.
Similar to when considering probes in the complex domain, when setting up safe to fail experiments, there might be 3 outcomes:
- Positive – in this case you should consider steps to solidify / amplify the change you’re setting up
- Negative – in this case you should have steps ready to rollback the change and return to a previously known state
- Inconclusive – in this case you might then consider different parameters to the experiment / innovation to see if something else will work. Alternatively, you might want to drop this line of inquiry and consider something else.
Thus, prior to going down the innovation path, it’s worth spending some time considering roll forward / backwards actions prior to starting the experiment / probe as a way to mitigate any risks and ensure a more positive outcome.
Capability
There also needs to be an inherent capability in the organisation to enable innovation. Some areas might be struggling to keep up with the pace of change in the market and haven’t keep the skills of their people honed through training and learning. This might limit the kinds of ideas that comes up and the depth of impact they can have. Thus it’s important that you grow the right kind of capability over time.
One of the quick fixes for a lack of capability in the organisation is to inject it in the short term through consultant / contract staff. Those that have come from areas of the industry that have been innovating and improving in their organisations can often help get some improvements kick started. It’s important that whilst they are there, that you not only get them to help with the innovation, but that they also mentor / train staff in how they found their way to those results and how the others can repeat these kinds of things once they go.
The slower but longer term solution to a lack of capability problem is to ensure that you’re growing your own people in this way. For example, do any of your KPIs / personal development plans include innovation? Indeed, in some of the more leading technology companies they actually espouse this as a company value and ensure that it’s injected at every level as an expectation of staff members. Once this is in place, it makes it inherently safer for staff to conduct themselves in this way and it makes the conversations simpler when trying to setup time and space for innovation to occur.
More than that, the actual day to day of growing a capability is really important. This can include various techniques such as:
- Formal training classes – ensuring staff have access to the latest techniques and methods is an important way to inject new capability into the team and bring innovation to the fore in a lasting way
- Mentoring – Continually building capability through mentoring. This can help deepen expertise in certain areas or alternative can build a breadth of capabilities.
- Pairing – something that started with “pair programming” but can be applied across a variety of knowledge work is the concept of pairing. Instead of reviewing things after they’ve been produced, you pair two people together to produce it from the outset. During the activity of pairing, people share techniques and information building capability. You can split pairs regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, to make sure that the knowledge and experience grows across the team / group.
- Conference attendance – keeping an eye open for conferences where team members can learn from a variety of knowledgable practitioners from around the country or indeed the world, will ensure that you inject new ideas and techniques that will enable future innovation
Thus, there are a number of ways that you can inject learning into the process to enable deeper capability and innovation. This should really be a part of “the cost of doing business” in modern knowledge work as the progressions in technique and technology are constantly evolving.
Process / Policy rules
Oftentimes, organisational policies and rules can get in the way of innovation. Sometimes, the effects are so dramatic that I’ve seen some organisations where it’s almost impossible to innovate within – at least to an extent that is deeply impactful. Essentially, in those organisations they often get so large and bureaucratic that they have to “buy” innovation by acquiring products and companies rather than building it themselves.
Where processes are overly onerous, it can detract from innovation. Sometimes it just gets too hard to innovate because you need to jump through all sorts of hoops to enable it, oftentimes it’s easier just to maintain the status quo.
Examples of policy areas that can inhibit innovation:
- Legal / risk approvals – having an inherently risk adverse business might mean that many things have to go through review from the legal and / or risk department prior to being released to customers.
- Procurement – “It’s simple, all you have to do is follow this 47 step process to enable a new vendor”. This is something that I’ve heard in a number of organisations. If you want to use new tools that enhance your process, having an overly burdensome procurement process will hinder innovation.
- Expense systems – I’ve seen this work really well and really poorly in organisations. In the best organisations, we were just told to expense the smaller things as we needed it quickly (plus the process for doing expenses was simple). In more complex organisations, this process can be bloated and take way too much time considering the expenses that are involved.
- Technology / Security reviews – oftentimes this is also associated with procurement. Sometimes this is reasonably simple with well explained policies and rules and in other cases things can get swallowed into the review process. As things start to bottleneck up in this part of the organisation, approvals become increasingly slow and cumbersome to the point where people will not bother if its too difficult. This can be another way to stifle innovation.
Essentially, all of the above items might make perfect logical sense and help an organisation manage their risk exposure. However, by being overly conservative and slow with these processes also means that you stifle innovation. This is an inherent risk to the organisation as you’ll start to go backwards as your competitors move forward. Thus, you’ll need to take a more overall risk management approach to ensure that these are balanced with the fundamental business needs and survivability of the organisation.
Conclusion
Enabling innovation is not as simple as it might seem – certainly saying or calling for innovation does not make it so. Creating the time and environment to enable innovation is key and requires some thought and system / process changes. There are also a variety of other considerations to ensure that this is set up for the longer term. Perhaps innovation is not key to your business and you don’t need to worry about it. Good luck – I hope that is the case because if you’re wrong you might just be creating a slow and painful death for your organisation in today’s market.