Innovation - who needs people?

The chances are that you do! Innovation is viewed as a “soft” science, hard to measure and hard to define. Other business functions such as purchasing, finance and manufacturing are easier to define and seem much more established and “concrete”. Purchasing, finance and manufacturing are accepted business functions with hierarchies and responsibilities. When we talk about innovation, however, the measurements, metrics and operations are less obvious. Few firms have an “innovation department” and even less have metrics around innovation or systems and processes to support innovation.

That’s why people are so important in an innovation initiative. Much of the work of innovation is at the “fuzzy front end” where there may not be as many clear cut milestones or metrics, and traditional transactional systems can’t provide much value. It is this ambiguity that is handled so well by people. In business as in life , the important things boil down to people.

I ask you to go to the cinema to watch a film and you say “who’s in it?” If you are browsing in a bookshop you will read the jacket notes to see who has recommended it and what the critics say about it. If you join a new company, project or team, you will ask “who is the boss, what are they like?” and “who else is working on this?” A venture capitalist’s main concern is the management team—who will be making this venture (and my money) work? The focus is always on people.

Innovation is an outgrowth of the people and the culture of the firm. If people are encouraged to innovate and compensated and motivated appropriately, the culture and processes will follow. If they are not motivated or compensated to be innovative, no amount of systems or processes will drive an innovation initiative. The people are the key to the success of innovation.

Why focus on people? Success in any endeavor is based on having the right people doing the right things the right way at the right time. If you want to implement a successful innovation initiative, you need the right people in place to succeed. People are going to implement the processes and systems to make things work. You need to identify those people. Additionally, different people bring different skill sets and viewpoints to any project, so exposing ideas and innovations to a broad team within your firm can improve the chances of success with new ideas. Finally, a few people who truly believe in an idea can overcome many barriers and management hurdles.

Just as Meredith Belbin defined his Team Roles, so there are a number of people that you need to make your innovation initiative work. The second part of this article – Innovation, the people you need describes the characteristics of these people.

Busting the myths surrounding business creativity

Myth #1 Creativity Comes From Creative Types

The fact is, nearly all the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some creative work. Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells. Intrinsic motivation -- people who are turned on by their work often work creatively -- is especially critical.

Myth #2 Money Is a Creativity Motivator

Research shows that people put far more value on a work environment where creativity is supported, valued, and recognised. People want the opportunity to deeply engage in their work and make real progress. It is therefore critical for managers to match people to projects not only on the basis of their experience but also in terms of where their interests lie. People are most creative when they care about their work and they are being stretched.

Myth #3 Time Pressure Fuels Creativity

People are least creative when they are racing the clock. Actually, you may find that there are 'after effects' -- when people are working under great pressure, their creativity is likely to go down not only on that day but the following day or two days also. Time pressure stifles creativity because people can't deeply engage with the problem. Creativity requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up.

Myth #4 Fear Forces Breakthroughs

A US research project coded 12,000 diary entries for the degree of fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, joy, and love that people were experiencing on a given day. They found that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. The entries showed that people are happiest when they come up with a creative idea, but they're more likely to have a breakthrough if they were happy the day before. When people are excited about their work, there's a better chance that they'll make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day's happiness often predicts the next day's creativity!

Myth #5 Competition Beats Collaboration

Creativity takes a hit when people in a work group compete instead of collaborate. The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that's destructive because nobody in an organisation has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

Myth #6 A Streamlined Organisation Is a Creative Organisation

Creativity suffers greatly during a downsizing or restructuring. But it's often worse than many of us realise. A 6,000-person division of a global electronics company experienced a 25% downsizing, which lasted a painful 18 months. Every single one of the stimuli of creativity in the work environment was significantly reduced. Anticipation of the downsizing was worse than the downsizing itself -- people's fear of the unknown led them to basically disengage from the work. More troubling was the fact that five months after the downsizing, creativity was still significantly reduced.

Making use of the oddballs

Many organisations have an oddball character who sits in the corner of the office and does things in their own unique way. These people may very well be the cleverest and most valuable people in the company. You of course would dispute that wouldn’t you?

So how does your organisation work? Of course, you are the star and the place simply could not function without you. In your inner circle are a few highly driven and well motivated individuals who carry the whole business along. Some of your colleagues do an ok job, some are plainly not motivated and a waste of space and then there are the oddballs, the nutters who dress differently, crochet incessantly and go on caravanning holidays. What do they do apart from create endless piles of paper and tap on their calculators all day?

Just because these people use methods different from yours, it does not mean they are wrong. There ways of solving problems could be more effective than yours. What if they actually were doing a better job than you?

Jerry Sternin, former dean of Harvard Business School has labelled these people as positive deviants (PDs) and the process by which their activities are brought from the fringes of a group into the mainstream is termed positive deviance.

Sternin, has many case studies and examples of these types but his principle is that PDs should be used to change the behaviour of their peers so that improved practices are taken on and owned by the wider group, by a proves he calls ‘making the group the guru’. This is more effective than simply calling in outside experts and blindly following their instructions.

The beauty of this method is that it works in social as well as business environments. To see of you have a positive deviant in your office that can help you solve a particular problem, use Sternin’s 4 Ds:

1. Define the problem that you wish to solve.e.g. salesmen are not selling enough widgets


2. Determine if there are any deviants who exhibit the required behaviour e.g salesmen who are outselling their peers


3. Discover what uncommon practices or strategies these people use to succeed e.g. less sales visits but explaining the marvels of widgets to customers


4. Design an intervention that would enable others in the group to grasp the positive deviant behaviour e.g. allow salesmen to shadow deviants or get deviants to demonstrate their methods

Note this is not dissimilar to spreading best practice, the one huge difference is that positive deviance is not imposed from outside.

Slow Innovation

Around fifteen years ago, the Italian journalist Carlo Petrini was strolling past a new MacDonald's franchise in the centre of Rome and launched a major eating revolution. He paused and said: If this is fast food, why not have slow food? There have been other ‘slow’ movements such as ‘slow education’. In the business world there is huge pressure to deliver results ‘fast’, but do the changes we make, the consultants we employ, and the money we spend create a lasting difference to our businesses? We seem to make a constant stream of satisficing decisions that just get us by, until the next crisis that is.

In much the same way as the other ‘slow’ movements, I began thinking about ‘slow innovation’. Innovation has become a buzzword, if we just come up with some good ideas and do some market research then we are bound to get some new products into the market and ensure the future success of our organisation – right? Not necessarily.

What we have created, with our knee jerk reactions, is the fast business, driven by objectives that have not been thought through. What seems to matter is the outcome, not the process. In our quest to achieve a short term goal we have neglected the systems that should be put in place to properly manage ideas, to ‘un manage’ our employees, to create the right culture, ensure that our money is spent wisely and create a long term programme that will avoid a constant stream of (expensive) knee jerk interventions. As with fast food, these events are not pleasurable for our shareholders or staff. We will suffer from obesity (consultant overload), additives (things we do not need), hypertension (change fatigue) and of course an empty wallet. This is Taylor’s scientific management applied in the wrong context.

The route to slow innovation means savouring the flavours of diversity and learning, blending ideas and know how and ultimately becoming self sufficient. In our fast consumer society we can throw away what we grow tired of or find not to our taste. We cannot throw away our businesses and start again. Slow Innovation, the sustainable way, is surely a better way to create the business of the future.