Creative People Must Be Stopped (11 page)

A. Before generating divergent ideas, a group needs to share an understanding of the project (a convergent step). Unfortunately, Josephine's board wasn't clear about what it considered as “large” or what it defined as “diverse.” Often organizations don't provide a well-developed brief to help them start, so team project leaders will have to insist on creating and vetting one. Make sure everyone understands the goal. Then take the time to create a process map that shows the required phases, the timeline for those phases, and the expected outcomes for each phase.

B. In the idea generation phase, participants may not be sure of how narrow or wide to set the scope. Each person must decide if his or her ideas should diverge wildly from those of others as a way to enlarge the search space, or if he or she should explore nearby with more closely related ideas in an effort to be more thorough in the search. Without explicit guidance, group members can only do what comes naturally. Some will go wild and radical with revolutionary ideas; others will stay in an adaptation mode, seeking evolutionary ideas with implementation in mind. Of course you need both kinds of exploration to be truly effective; but when we are not aware that both are happening at once, the result is debilitating frustration. Recall how Sonya from marketing, who sees idea generation as a way of life, begins to accuse Mark from the business office of lacking imagination. In turn, Mark dismisses Sonya's ideas as fantasies. Being clear on the desired and allowable behaviors for each phase of the work is critical.

C. Turning the corner from generating ideas to assessing constraints requires the group to have sufficiently explored the space of possible solutions and to shift toward seeking agreement on which of the ideas are most worth pursuing. Josephine thinks it may be time to switch phases, but is not completely sure that the group has spent enough time or that it has a good set of possibilities. This creates a vacuum wherein Sonya tries to delay the transition and continue divergent brainstorming, while practical-minded Mark pushes even harder toward implementation. This should not be surprising, considering the lack of a schedule or a clear goal.

If you have created a process map, revisit it at every meeting, plotting the team's progress and reminding everyone of the kind of thinking and action needed in the current phase. This may generate process conflict in the short term, but agreement about the process is paramount.

D. Assessing ideas is a very different behavior from generating them. Once again, the group needs an explicit understanding of the behaviors required in a new phase of the process. It is sure to lead to relationship conflict if you keep generating ideas and I keep critiquing them, both of us sure the other is being stubborn or mean. At ShowArts, with Josephine out on a phone call amid general confusion about the process, Barry's proposal for them to vote does restore some small amount of meaning and order: voting means making decisions, and making decisions means we're making progress. Unfortunately, what was needed at that moment was not a solution for “moving on” but a reminder of what phase the group was in and what its purpose was.

E. Committing to a direction is always hard, but it is even harder when you believe a different direction to be better or when you are not even sure, anymore, of the direction. Not fully convinced that the group has found a good solution, Josephine nonetheless goes along with its vote, possibly believing that reversing its decision will undermine harmony and commitment in the team. Even so, Sonya, disagreeing with the choice, checks out and never fully rejoins the team. The commitment being asked for at this stage is substantial; people are being asked to step forward into an uncertain future they may not understand or believe, possibly putting their social status and careers at risk. This must be acknowledged. Beyond a trustworthy process and a meaningful schedule, people like Sonya need to understand why the group is going the direction it is and why that's the best way for it to go.

F. The design phase requires that we have a good understanding of the goal so that we can make informed choices about the inevitable trade-offs that will have to be made in this stage. It also requires that we test and iterate possible solutions. Team Think Big seems to have bypassed this phase altogether, instead rushing into implementation by purchasing a mailing list.

Groups have a natural desire to get past the confusing early stages and move into the more stable production phase. This is where a well-planned schedule, with appropriate amounts of time allotted to each phase, can help a group resist the urge to converge prematurely (or, for that matter, languish too long in a particular phase). A better approach is to feed the desire for concrete action by starting small experiments to test your ideas to see what will work. Doing a small pilot project of recording and emailing, for example, might have shown the team that the real constraints for ShowArts were going to be legal.

G. This is a critical point for inviting supportive but straight-talking outsiders to give hard feedback about the problem, the proposed solution, and other contextual issues that may affect them. Of course, a team should be doing this all along, but at this juncture getting feedback is essential. Often we don't seek outside scrutiny for fear of criticism or because of a fear that others might uncover a showstopper flaw or a deadly mistake in our approach. But of course this only sets us up for a bigger setback or failure later on during implementation, after we've begun to sink not just time but also money into our approach.

H. As they refine their ideas into a final approach, team members must again be convergent. As before, it is critical that they understand (and agree) about the phase they are in and their current goals. Groups will tend to be short on time at this point due to poor scheduling or lack of time resources and will try to rush into the implementation stage to get it done. However, they must accept that they may need to iterate between designing and refining to overcome obstacles that may appear—or, god forbid, that they may even have to abandon their approach.

I. The implementation phase is when you transition from exploring, critiquing, and refining to going head-first down the luge toward your ultimate goal. Some naturally divergent thinkers like Sonya will want to abandon the project at this point if they feel that it lacks excitement or impact, and some naturally convergent thinkers like Mark may bail because they sense too many unresolved issues and are afraid the solution is not going to work. Two ways to keep the momentum going are (1) to pull in fresh people who can add energy and expertise and (2) to ensure that the project has sufficient resources.

Putting the Framework to Work: Group Constraints

To aid you in assessing the constraints at this level, use the following diagnostic survey. It is intended to help you assess the extent to which the constraints described in this chapter may be unintentional hindrances to innovation in your organization.

Using the Results

Note the total number of statements that you rated as “Highly Descriptive.” If you have rated more than six of them this way, then working on group constraints will be a productive effort. Now that you have identified the specific constraints, you can take action. You may wish to turn back and reread the description of the problem and of the specific strategies for addressing that constraint. You may also find that strategies are obvious given the symptom you have identified. For detailed instructions on working with your assessment results, use the steps outlined in Appendix A, Using the Assessment Results, to determine whether group constraints are a significant impediment for you in your organization and to develop strategies for overcoming them.

Later, after completing assessments for the other chapters, you will be able to compare constraints and see if one of the other levels poses a greater challenge for you overall than do these group constraints. Of course you need to recognize that fixing these issues in a group is going to be far more difficult than fixing them in yourself, especially if you haven't yet convinced others in the group of the value of the change.

Summary

Groups can be powerful agents of innovation. When members provide multiple perspectives, alternative problem-solving approaches, and production capability together, they can achieve things no individual can achieve on his or her own. To use groups to their highest potential for innovation doesn't require much, except a safe environment, a desire to innovate, an environment for collaboration, and a simple process. The following chart offers a recap of the constraints discussed in this chapter, along with some strategies for overcoming or living with them.

Chapter Reflection: Group Constraints

It can be helpful to reflect on your insights about group-level constraints and the process of diagnosing them in your group. You may wish to consider these questions:

• What evidence is there for the existence of the constraints you named?
  
• How important are these group factors compared to the individual, organizational, industry, societal, and technological constraints you identified?
  
• What constraints may have been overlooked because of your group process?
  
• Would other members of the group agree that there is a need to fix these constraints?
  

CHAPTER 4

Why You'll Never Be a Prophet in Your Hometown

Organizational Innovation Constraints

Figure 4.1

Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, was founded in 1971 as an R&D center for the Stamford, Connecticut–based firm. Worried that new competitors from Japan would soon be entering the copier market as early photocopy patents expired, and concerned at what the “paperless office” of the future might entail for Xerox, the company created PARC with a mission of innovating for the future. As Larry Tesler, a researcher there recalls it, “The management said go create the new world” (Cringely, 1996, part 3).

From all reports, it was a very innovative place. John Warnock, a researcher at PARC and, after a stint at Apple Computer, a cofounder of Adobe Systems, said, “The atmosphere was electric—there was total intellectual freedom. There was no conventional wisdom; almost every idea was up for challenge and got challenged regularly” (Cringely, 1996, part 3). According to Adele Goldberg, manager of the System Concepts Laboratory, this was a kind of nirvana for researchers. They “came there to work on 5-year programs that were their dreams” (Cringely). They also had immense funding; Charles Thacker, one of the scientists there, said, “We felt comfortable in profligately wasting hardware to simulate the future” (Abate, 2004).

Although having lots of smart individuals is no guarantee of creative output, this innovative group really did produce. At a time when computers were gargantuan things, housed in controlled-access air-conditioned rooms and owned by IBM or the Defense Department, they developed all the components of personal computers as we think of them today: a graphical user interface with windows, a point-and-click mouse, a cut-and-paste command for use while working on documents, a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) display, the computer network, and even the laser printer. Much of this was built on the back of another revolutionary idea from PARC, SmallTalk, an object-oriented programming language. Taken together and implemented in the form of the Alto computer, these inventions represented a significant list of treasures for the late 1970s (Dernbach, n.d.).

Despite having been charged with creating the future by headquarters (and having done so), the researchers at PARC could not seem to get sufficient traction for their ideas. James Turner (2008), in an interview for
O'Reilly
, said, “I actually worked for Xerox AI Systems in 1986 and it was kind of frustrating because they really had the mentality there that if you couldn't sell paper and toner for [them] they weren't interested.” Andy Herzberg, one of the original designers of the Macintosh, offered that “most of the best PARC people were really frustrated by the Xerox management” (Turner). Steve Jobs characterized management as “copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do” (Cringely, 1996, part 3). Apparently headquarters did not care for anything that did not work with a copier or that they could not conceive of working with one. Ignoring all the rest of the PARC treasures, they did seize on the value of the laser printer in moving paper and toner (“Adopting Orphans,” 1999).

This situation might well have turned out to be one of lamentable frustration on the part of the researchers, and not much else. Just as the Post-it almost did, the inventions might have died in the lab; everyone would have moved on to new pursuits. This would likely have been the case had it not been for a visit by Steve Jobs. PARC was an intellectually open place and had a continuous flow of visitors, but this visitor in particular was smitten by the Alto. Jobs reported that “within, you know, ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day” (Cringely, 1996, part 3). Jobs then resolved to align Apple's strategy with the graphical user interface he saw at PARC (Dernbach, n.d.). Days later, he arranged an intimate technical demo of the Alto with senior members of his Macintosh development team, over the loud objections of the Alto project manager. HQ executives overruled her, however. In exchange for the right to purchase $1,000,000 of pre-IPO Apple stock, they had agreed to allow the demo along with three days of access to the PARC facilities (Landley, 2000; Pang and Marinaccio, 2000).

There is a great deal of speculation about what the Apple team actually learned and whether it appropriated Xerox's intellectual property, especially considering that Apple's Lisa computer, the predecessor to the Macintosh, had already incorporated a number of the ideas. Bill Gates had his own thoughts on the matter. After being accused by Jobs of “ripping off” Apple in the development of Windows, Bill Gates is said to have replied, “Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it” (Hertzfeld, 1983).

The story of PARC's development of the Alto may seem to suggest that Jobs's visit made the difference between Xerox's failure to capitalize on its own innovations and Apple's success. Yet there is obviously much more to the story than that. Given that numerous “Leonardo da Vincis” were hard at work and that groups in Xerox were sharing and collaborating (they built more than two hundred Altos), it's clear that individual and group constraints were not the issue. And although we might like to find fault with the executives at HQ, they were focused exactly where they should have been: on protecting the business at hand. One technology they did pay careful attention to, the laser printer, turned into a $1 billion business for them, so clearly they were not asleep at the wheel. They knew there were problematic issues on the horizon, which is why they had founded this research organization in Silicon Valley.

So how do we explain this story of innovation? Although Apple may have come away with some ideas, we also know that the
idea
is the easy part; it's
implementation
that's the hard part. Why was Apple able to enjoy the fruits of PARC's efforts in a way that Xerox never was?

Do “Innovation” and “Organization” Belong in the Same Sentence?

The purpose of
organizing
is to get people into a configuration that allows them to achieve a predefined output, and to do so in an effective and repeatable way. Successful organizations are quite good at doing this. For example, Maxim (
www.maxim-ic.com/
), a manufacturer of integrated circuits, or chips, reports a failure rate for its products as 0.49 FITs. This means that the company expects a chip to fail only once in
two billion
hours of operation (once in 5.5 million years)! Xerox's copier business was so successful and its machines so ubiquitous that its name became a verb. Instead of photocopying something, you Xeroxed it.

Although organizations have many advantages over individuals and groups in achieving complex goals, this increased power comes with its own set of constraints. These constraints are not the result of malice or conscious efforts at sabotage on the part of change haters (though at times it may feel that way). Rather, they are inherent in the very act of organizing. For example, the organizational goal of reducing variance can be in direct conflict with the goal of innovation, which requires constantly questioning and changing the things we do.

This chapter focuses on three aspects of formal organizations that can seriously impede innovation:

• Strategy:
  the organization's mission and the employees' understanding of how they will achieve it
  
• Structure:
  the mechanism for coordination and control in the organization
  
• Resources:
  the assets an organization has control over that can be used to achieve the mission
  

Whether your role in an organization is one of managing others or of being a sole contributor, these constraints limit your ability to innovate. This chapter will help you understand how this happens and suggest ways of overcoming these constraints.

Strategy Constraints: Knowing the Intent

An organization's strategy is an articulation of its intentions and embodies a judgment about appropriate ways to achieve that intention. It is designed to tell you what to do and, at least in broad terms, how and when to do it. Business thinkers and executives alike will readily agree that a solid, well-articulated strategy makes decisions easier—you need simply align to it. Use it to make new product or service decisions, resource allocation decisions, operations decisions, and even decisions about which customers to serve or to ignore in the face of the actions of your competitors and of other agents in the environment. If you have a good strategy and if all your decisions are aligned with it, you should be on your way to achieving your goals. But several factors can complicate this simple picture.

Innovative Ideas Don't Fit the Organization's Strategy

One of the basic pitfalls for would-be innovators in an organization is a lack of “strategic fit” between their ideas and the organization's goals or plan for achieving them. This gap can lead to a failure of innovation—and significant frustration for the innovator—and for all the right reasons. If a proposal for change violates the what, how, and when of the organization's strategy, then it
should
be stopped because it is a waste of organizational resources.

It follows that employees' ability to respond to a call to innovate will suffer if they don't know or understand the organization's strategy. Why would they not know the strategy? Sometimes executives keep the strategy secret out of fear that it will be revealed to competitors. Sometimes the strategy is too complex to be easily shared. Sometimes employees do understand the basic strategy but not underlying risk factors, such as the organization's financial condition, or legal considerations, such as patents or liability. And sometimes, as in the PARC story, the strategy “go create the new world” is so ill defined that even the senior leadership may not recognize when employees are fulfilling it.

The Organization's Strategy Doesn't Reflect an Ever-Changing Reality

It can easily happen that even a well-thought-out strategy no longer makes sense because of changes in the environment—for instance, a new competitor moves into your market, your core product loses its patent protection, or changing technology threatens to take away your ecological niche (think of newspapers). In fact, this kind of gap between reality and even our best-laid plans is bound to exist because of the way we make strategy in organizations. We do the analysis to develop the strategy and communicate it at Time 1, but we don't finish enacting the strategy until Time 2. If there is a substantial interval between T1 and T2—many organizations use a five-year strategic plan—you will likely be facing a completely different world than the strategy was intended for. What is more, this change is accelerated as competitors in a market respond to one another's moves in a process called
coevolution
. You lower your product's prices, then your competitors do the same, then you respond again. Or you improve your valet parking, and they install luxury seating; the next move is yours.

Faced with these situations, people generally do the rational thing, which is to change their perspective to match the new reality. If everyone in an organization saw exactly the same changes in the environment, they could all change their behavior uniformly (and presumably update the strategic plan accordingly). But organizations typically group people by the kind of work they do, so employees necessarily see different parts of the environment that might call for different kinds of responses. The gaps between strategy and perceived reality—and therefore appropriate action—are likely to be many. This situation creates confusion and uncertainty that are exacerbated when there is significant divergence between the views. The employees at PARC, for example, could not understand why HQ would be so dense as not to see what they saw in Silicon Valley: the clearly emerging future of the personal computer.