Creative People Must Be Stopped (28 page)

Start Small

I know of several people who have recently been promoted into a role with the word
innovation
in the title, but who are still not sure where they fit within the organizational structure and who are not clear on what being held “accountable for innovation” will actually mean.

This leads me to the blanket bit of advice to start small. Even if you are the director of global innovation for a multinational company, starting small will have a number of significant benefits for the long-term health of the innovation strategy in your organization (and probably your career). First off, starting small allows you to use a smaller budget, which, given most traditional organizational constraints around funding, can help move you out of the crosshairs of those parts of your organization that are really focused on controlling uncertainty and for whom your innovation projects are likely to represent an unacceptable or frivolous risk.

Among other advantages, starting small helps you manage risk. Starting with small initiatives, you can use them to develop and debug a consistent and workable process first, before using it to attack larger problems that have higher resource needs and that will, therefore, undergo much higher levels of scrutiny. Although you will understand that failure (or rather, disconfirmed hypotheses) is par for the innovation course, others in your organization may not. Especially if they are powerful others, you want to make sure you have some level of familiarity with successfully accomplishing innovation projects in a local and controlled organizational context before you start the big expensive and critical projects.

One organization I know well wanted to “reduce its carbon footprint in a big way” and was toying with ideas like moving the administration buildings off the municipal electric grid. It ended up being better served by starting with a small incremental project—namely, putting solar lighting on the path to the parking lot. Not only did the innovators in the organization learn what might work technically, but they also learned that the position of the newly appointed “director of innovation” in the organizational hierarchy gave him insufficient power to get the project implemented without continual intervention by the CEO. Without the trial run, they never would have learned that managers in Administration and those in Facilities have very different ideas of what constitutes a good innovation and of who gets to make decisions about it.

Build a Portfolio

Another advantage of starting small is that it supports the creation of an innovation portfolio. Your portfolio should consist of a variety of projects in various stages of development, which is to say that it will contain not only multiple projects with different goals but also multiple approaches aimed at achieving the same goal. In this way you can also use the portfolio approach to test the components of a larger initiative.

For example, a children's museum seeking ways to increase attendance by its traditional noncustomers, namely older teens, developed a portfolio of approaches—based on hypotheses about new content, different hours, additional services, alternative advertising channels, and siblings—to address the issue. As the innovation team performed experiments to assess the value of each approach in terms of the ease of implementation versus the efficacy of that particular approach, it honed in on the most effective approaches in the portfolio. Even though some approaches were going to require more time and resources than the team had immediately available (for investment in an untested idea), it could still get started. This allowed it to benefit from small gains and to collect the information that would allow the team to assess the wisdom of the risky and gigantic all-or-nothing project it was also considering.

Use Portfolio Maps

A
portfolio map
is a visual tool used to analyze relationships across innovation projects. You can use the maps in
Figures 8.4
and
8.5
to conduct a vigorous discussion in your organization of your emerging innovation portfolio.

Figure 8.4
Portfolio Map 1: Returns Profile

Source:
Developed with James Rosenberg of National Arts Strategies.

Figure 8.5
Portfolio Map 2: Risk Profile

Source:
Developed with James Rosenberg of National Arts Strategies.

Portfolio Map 1 allows you to map out the return profile for your portfolio by comparing the potential return, or overall value, of a concept to the amount of time it will take for you to realize that value. The vertical axis indicates the amount of the returns that you expect, ranging from low returns at the bottom to high returns at the top. The horizontal axis indicates the length of time from your current point in time that it will require for the project to generate the full return. The left side represents short, quick implementation and fast returns; the right side represents a longer wait for the full value of the concept to be realized. For each proposed innovation concept, indicate the level of return and the time horizon by placing its name in the appropriate location along the axes. Consider where your three or four most important current initiatives fit on your map too. Does your organization's portfolio lack strategic projects—that is, those with long terms and high returns? Or are you missing an opportunity for short-term tactical gains?

Portfolio Map 2 allows you to map your portfolio by comparing the risk involved with the level of investment that will be required. In this map, the vertical axis indicates the level of resources that will have to be invested in order to realize the value of a concept, ranging from a low level of investment at the bottom to higher levels at the top. The horizontal axis indicates the amount of risk the concept presents to your investment should it not succeed. The left side represents low-risk concepts with little likelihood of failing; the right side represents high-risk concepts with important questions left unanswered and significant levels of uncertainty. For each of your proposed concepts, indicate the level of risk and of investment by placing its name in the appropriate location along the axes. Consider where your three or four most important current initiatives fit on your map too. Are you a diehard frugivore, interested in low-hanging fruit, or a compulsive gambler looking for the massive payout? In either case, you should aim for a portfolio that balances returns, risks, your short- and long-term desires, and your resource constraints both within and across your innovation initiatives.

Don't Fear the Reaper!

In an R&D organization I once studied, the research director went to great lengths to ensure that projects in the lab would not continue past the point where they no longer made sense. In his opinion, project managers were a sly and crafty bunch, and what's more, anyone with the word
project
in her job title would not stand idly by and watch her project be canceled, no matter how compelling the reason. He may have also recognized the tendency of people with an emotional investment in a project to prefer to work on in ignorant bliss than to test the most difficult showstopper constraint.

His solution was ingenious. He decreed that membership on any project team was completely voluntary, and that every quarter, all lab employees from junior interns to senior researchers should assign or reassign themselves only to projects that they believed in and that had the highest probability of success. This way projects weren't killed; they simply evaporated as lab employees bailed from loser projects and piled into the good ones that had a significant chance of success.

Although this approach may seem extreme, managers in most organizations are extreme, but in the other direction. They fear playing the role of grim reaper or angel of mercy whose job it is to put the ailing project down. Even when a project is burning precious time and money with no obvious chance of success, there is no appetite to cancel it. If the project manager is well liked and the project relatively benign, the resources being consumed may be considered a small cost to pay in comparison to the pain of the conflict that would be required to put the project out of its misery.

One way I've seen organizations get past this problem is not to use the word
project
when referring to innovation initiatives. Such initiatives can be referred to with terms that describe exactly what they are—namely,
concept development, idea exploration, feasibility studies
, or even
experimentation
. These terms have a built-in sundown clause, meaning that the expiration date is built into the language. That way, initiatives that are working and showing promise can be consciously evaluated for continued investment. Again, starting small with investments in a number of projects of varying risk will go far in getting your innovation strategy under way.

Your Innovation Structure

An innovation structure is one that makes it easy to recognize the opportunities and challenges you face and that lets you move the people, resources, and ideas into the best arrangement for addressing them.

Support Your Innovators

When organizing innovation, a first tendency is to form an innovation group and put it in charge of
all things innovation
. The problem with this approach is the same problem that plagued the R&D megalabs like the mythic Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and continues to haunt so many university science and engineering labs. The result is an innovation playhouse where lots of ideas and insights are generated, but few of the ideas take root because everyone in a position to help move ideas out of the lab for commercialization is too busy doing his real job to allow himself to be bothered by the crazies in the innovation center. After all, their goofy ideas have nothing to do with what our organization really does or what our society values.

A step in the right direction, however, would be to put a group in charge of
supporting
all things innovation in your organization. This group will have the obligation to help the people who are doing the work to innovate in that work. This assistance may not need to be much more than helping remove constraints, providing motivation and encouragement, and proving to the innovators that the organization is actually serious about supporting their efforts. This kind of arrangement can also provide people with advocates to help them find the places in the structure where they can go to pitch their propositions for positive change.

Reward Both Success and Failure

An innovative organization is also one that rewards the behaviors associated with innovation and not just the positive outcomes. So what does that mean? It means that paying people for simply generating ideas (the easy part), instead of paying them for implementing innovations (the long, hard follow-through) is not the way to go. It also means, in the advice from Robert Sutton (2007) that you may remember from Chapter Three: “reward failure and success equally, but punish inaction” (p. 103), being sure to make the time to let people learn from their successes and intelligent mistakes. Though it may be difficult to solve in your organizational context, another problem arises when organizations don't share the rewards that come as a direct result of a person's hard work and genuine efforts, regardless of which stage of the innovation process he or she contributed to. This will generate deep dissatisfaction among those you most want to encourage to generate and contribute their insightful, hard-earned, invariably controversial, and definitely valuable ideas. These people, who have proven they can take an idea from start to finish and create value, are hardly the ones you want to alienate in your organization.

Ultimately, the most powerful reward may also be the least expensive: simply to let creative people do creative work. You do this by removing barriers and reducing senseless constraints. Consider the comments of Erik Demaine, a professor of computational geometry at MIT, who at the age of twenty when he received his PhD was the youngest professor ever hired there. When asked about leaving elementary school before eventually talking his way into college at age sixteen, he replied, “The main thing I learned was how much time is wasted in school. When you take away lunch, recess and other breaks, the nine-to-three day reduces to about one hour of real instruction. Home schooling is much more efficient” (Nadis, 2003, p. 40). His efficiency in getting the rote, unimaginative learning out of the way is what left him plenty of time for his more imaginative, curiosity-driven pursuits.