Creative People Must Be Stopped (13 page)

Use Fluid Structures

To reduce the constraints introduced by rigid hierarchical forms, you may need to restructure parts of your organization to optimize information gathering and processing rather than operational efficiency. Innovation requires multiple paths of information flow and the ability to stop the process to absorb and evaluate data that don't seem to make sense. It also requires that insights and initiatives be able to come from anywhere in the hierarchy. These are all inefficiencies from a process-flow, variance reduction perspective.

If bureaucratic structures help promote routine, ad hoc structures that arise in the moment and that have fluid and changing memberships can be great at supporting innovation. Take consulting teams as an example. Consulting firms are not organized in neat multilevel hierarchies. Rather, they form teams on an as-needed basis, pulling people in as more are needed and sending them out when their role is fulfilled. The team is built around a project and organized around the process the team uses to complete the project. Movie production works the same way. With a core group running the show, people with unique information and special skills are pulled in and sent out as needed. While engaged in the project, they direct their behavior according to their place in the process and not where they might fit in the hierarchy.

Mix It Up

You can improve information flow in your organization by allowing (or even forcing) people to meet and work across functional boundaries. Considering that at the beginning of a project, you are not usually aware of which piece of information might need to come from or go to which part of the organization, err on the side of allowing as much access to information as possible. Many R&D and consulting organizations have company-wide weekly gatherings during which teams share information about their projects, their progress, and their process, in case someone in another part of the organization knows something the team needs to know. Although these weekly gatherings are usually informal (on Monday mornings over bagels at IDEO), some companies hold more formal seminars where teams are able to share more specific information and get input into their projects. It was at this kind of seminar at 3M that Spence Silver presented his progress in a way that stimulated Art Fry's thinking about a solution. Rather than merely giving permission to attend these meetings, overcome organizational constraints by requiring some consistent level of participation or attendance.

Stay Aligned

Innovation efforts, especially radical innovation efforts, are likely to create confusion and misalignment. For this reason, keeping everyone aligned requires conscious effort. If multiple parts of your organization are working on complex problems related to a particular initiative, take the time to get them into the same room to discuss how the pieces fit together. You can use the chart of innovation process phases discussed in Chapter Three (
Figure 3.3
) to help groups locate where they think they are in their own project and at what points of convergence it makes sense to bring the teams together.

Innovate Outside the Lab

Structure in large organizations is based on the division of labor, separating people into functions. Unfortunately, that means innovation is separated off as well. In structure and in mind-set, many organizations enforce the idea that innovation is done in the lab by the scientists or engineers, and everyone should stick to his or her work. But as a manager, you know this is not the way it should be. Shouldn't the payroll clerk also be encouraged or required to innovate? There are as many ways to add value in the administration of a business as there are in the products it creates. Dell Computer's business model innovation that built the company had little to do with changing the performance of the computers themselves. Rather, the innovation was to hold no inventory of computers and to get paid by the consumer for the computer long before paying the contract manufacturer who builds and ships it.

By outsourcing innovation only to certain parts of the organization, you create frustration among the innovators in other parts of the organization who have useful ideas to share, but who can be ignored and derailed by those around them who prefer things as they are by simply saying,
Stop innovating; that's R&D's job
. But in today's competitive world, improved product performance is necessary but not nearly sufficient to keep an organization at the top of its industry.

Cultivate Dissent

In normal bureaucratic functioning, “skipping levels of authority” is considered improper, and there are often informal norms against this. In 1986, NASA learned a difficult lesson about how this norm impeded information processing. After the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded seventy-three seconds into flight, killing all seven crew members on board, the Rogers Commission was formed to investigate the circumstances surrounding the accident. After a lengthy investigation, the commission found that NASA's culture and decision-making processes had contributed to the accident. There was a previously known flaw in the booster O-ring, and when engineers warned of the danger it represented on the eve of the launch, their arguments and supporting data never made it past their supervisors for consideration. Had the dissenting opinions been allowed, the report suggested, the accident might have been averted. By 2008, it seems, things hadn't changed very much at all. A group of summer interns made a video parody, titled “Barriers to Innovation and Inclusion,” about their internship experiences at the Johnson Space Flight Center. The plot centers on a young woman engineer trying to get her ideas for an innovative design listened to within the NASA bureaucracy; it shows all too clearly the barriers she faced as middle managers tried to stay in their comfort zones, continually reminded her that it was not in her job description to do design, and worked hard to prevent the young engineer from annoying their superiors.

When I was first shown the video, I was a bit shocked that the interns had actually made it and then aired it publically; it seemed they were very definitely burning bridges to future employment at NASA. But the last scene in the video suggests why they had acted as they did. The same young engineer, now a Google employee, is shown having a discussion with her new manager and finding exactly the opposite treatment: open discussion, respect for her ideas, and true excitement about them. The last line is a zinger: the engineer's manager says, “Maybe we can sell this idea to NASA!” I guess that with the option of working at a place like Google, these bright young engineers find the bureaucracy of NASA makes it a place where they don't care to work.

Cultivating dissent, however, is not easy. People tend to want to be cooperative and to fit in. One organization, the American Foreign Service (AFS), cultivates it through a mechanism it calls the “dissent channel,” which is a communication channel for “expressing constructive dissent.” By giving it a formal name and advertising its purpose, the AFS gives employees a place to express their dissent with current approaches and to voice those alternative perspectives that they feel are being blocked and not heard. The message is clear that dissent is appropriate and will be heard. Create your own dissent channel like the AFS by setting up an email address where people send their reports of blockage; or even simpler, make a few minutes' time at the end of each meeting and call for an expression of dissent. A few anonymous remarks on Post-its can work wonders for getting people to say what you need to hear: what they
really
think. After all, it's better for higher-ups in your organization to hear ideas from frustrated innovators than to have those innovators find that the only person willing to listen is your competitor.

Resource Constraints: Capital and Capabilities

The third category of constraint that is inherent in organizations has to do with the resources that the organization uses to achieve its goals, what we might think of as the fuel that powers the actions. Many managers I talk to believe that the tightest constraint on innovation is insufficient time or money. However, there are a number of other resources worth considering in this light. In addition to the many forms of capital—economic, political, social, and so on—organizational resources include the employees, their skills, the value chains, and the processes and systems that enable the work.

Getting Capital Where It's Needed, When It's Needed

A common idea about innovation is that it is expensive and that the expense is paid in money. We think of start-ups, for example, as becoming viable only after the infusion of (lots of) venture capital. However, even a cursory conversation with a venture capitalist or private equity fund manager will indicate that there are lots of things that innovative early-stage companies need, but that cash is usually not the most difficult to get nor the most important. Rather, experienced leadership, technical know-how, market power, and political and social capital in the form of powerful networks are often what will make or break a start-up. These resources are just as important in established organizations that are embarking on new ventures. Unfortunately, they can be difficult to acquire, store, and distribute throughout an organization in the service of innovation. In large measure, the focus that organizations place on money causes managers to lose focus on the value and power of these other types of essential resources.

At the same time, money (assuming money is to be had) can be accessed and distributed quite easily—so easily that organizations erect any number of controls and barriers to prevent it from being distributed and used in uncontrolled or illegitimate ways. Budgets, of course, are a primary way of controlling the flow. They enable the management team to allocate financial resources in ways they believe will best allow the organization to achieve its short- and long-term goals. A key word here is “will”: budgets are always about the future. That budgets are created in advance does not pose a serious problem for supporting the routine functioning of an organization. However, when it comes to innovation, the world stubbornly refuses to behave the way we plan for it to behave. Budgets that require
all
allocations to be specified and approved in advance do not allow for the eventualities of an innovation process. Of course, R&D budgets are intended to account for and control “unplanned” expenditures. But what if your group isn't on the R&D gravy train? Then you'll probably have to account for every penny up front, which will likely entail being starved of the resources you need to support a meaningful innovation effort.

Having the Right People for the Job

It's hard to overstate the importance of marshaling “people” resources in support of innovation. People bring the knowledge, imagination, and skills that are the essential fuel of the innovation engine. But that doesn't mean that it's always easy to get the kinds of people we need or to motivate them to apply their talents to the problems the organization deems important.

In the spirit of efficiency (and in deference to inertia), organizations tend to recruit in conventional ways and in the same places that they have always looked for labor (and brains) in the past. Yet the people an organization needs to innovate may be very different from the ones it knows how to recruit and screen. Consider General Motors, for example. As long as GM was making conventional combustion-engine cars, it was fairly straightforward to find combustion engineers and even to help create new ones through such means as donations to university programs. But what happens when the company decides it's time to build an electric car? Suddenly it needs to find electrical engineers and battery experts to work in a field that is just emerging. To some degree, the company's routines for finding engineers are going to have to be reinvented. Similar issues arise any time an organization is branching out in a distinctly new direction. If we're lucky, we may choose well and end up with individuals who have just the skills and knowledge we need, but even then we may not be happy with them (or they with us) because of the different value systems they are likely to bring into the organization.

Complex and Well-Defended Value Chains

Another, oft-overlooked constraint on innovation is the existing value chain. The value chain is simply the set of linked steps involved in taking raw inputs and converting them into a more highly valued product. The value creation may occur with a product, as in manufacturing, or as a service. A proposed innovation will ideally take into account the organization's value chain and, in fact, strategically improve some part of that chain to create even more value. For example, Porter Walker, a company that distributes tools and safety equipment to manufacturing firms and utilities, creates value by getting its client organizations the equipment and supplies they need, when they need it. When the heads of the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, take a nuclear power plant off-line for planned maintenance, the last thing they want to do is sit around waiting for needed tools and supplies. Porter Walker realizes this and focuses relentlessly on improving its ability to get the right stuff to the right place, which includes loading trucks more quickly and accurately, planning more optimal routes, and understanding and acquiring those supplies most likely to be needed. Innovations focused on the critical parts of the value chain are much more valuable than, for example, optimizing the spaces in the lot for employee parking.

To change a process may require changing what several people in the chain do, and how they do it. A simple change in the way you load a truck to make it quicker to unload, for instance, requires the involvement of not only the driver but also the warehouse workers, the stock picker, and the salesperson who is checking the order. And if your new way of loading requires additional space, you may have to involve the forklift drivers too, as the space you need is the same space they currently use for turning around in the tight warehouse. Changing processes may also require new equipment, rearranging old equipment, and entirely new sets of understanding about how to fix the inevitable problems that arise when implementing a new system.