Innovation

 

Firstly the mantra, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ drives quite a lot of new and innovative thinking.  I often marvel at the creative juices of prisoners of war and how they applied their wild imagination not only to escape from imprisonment but also the highly innovative techniques they adopted to maintain themselves and blend into communities once they had escaped.   The purpose and driving force behind their collective imagination and effort was to regain their freedom.   So when pressed into a corner the imagination of human beings seems almost limitless.  Secondly we witness considerable innovative activity when companies are facing disaster.  It is a similar situation only on a larger and this time commercial scale.  Ask anyone who has been involved in or led a turnaround of a business which was fast disappearing with the potential consequence of the total wipeout of an entire workforce and you will find that innovation was a key factor in the ultimate success.  They quickly challenged not only what they were doing but how they were doing absolutely everything and came up with ways to renew the entire proposition.  So gaining freedom in terms of the POWs was now transformed into survival strategy for many people.   Renewal achieved through a combination of will and innovative approaches to survival. 

 

Thirdly there is a forward looking driver of innovation.   Some companies traditionally survive on a continual renewal of their product base – such as the technology companies like Sony, Microsoft and Dell.  Their marketplace demands that new products are introduced on a regular basis in the knowledge that without this they will wither and die – they will simply be killed in the battle for survival.  So they not only have a culture of continual product innovation but a strategic need to be ahead of the curve in a highly competitive sector.  The pharmaceutical companies have a strategic need to introduce new drugs to market as the commoditizing and replication of their core products drives down margins to unacceptable levels thus squeezing profits and threatening progress.  So here are some examples of types of industries who thrive on innovation as a key to success.

 

One of the aspects of innovation that fascinates me is the culture piece.  The inner workings of an organisation and how it renews its processes or challenges the ways it does everything from the most complex process to the reordering of paper clips.   Quite a number of organisations do not consider this sort of challenge to be associated with innovation.  Yet any student of history of warfare will find wondrous examples of innovation by studying how General Bill Slim completely reworked some of the time honoured logistical models in order to survive in the hostile environment of Burma against a formidable and well-equipped foe.   His book, ‘Defeat into Victory’, is the story of innovation amongst many other things. 

 

Yet companies see innovation as a process.  One of the most amusing memories I have in many years of consulting is one of a huge global company addressing the fact that they felt they needed to be more innovative.  So the first thing they did was to establish an innovation committee and stacked it full of the most senior control freaks and naysayers known to commerce.  It was a spectacular failure in record time.  Intermittent skirmishes into the crazy world of innovation by people who have neither the interest in nor care for any form of innovation and then tasking them to stimulate the organisation to be more innovative is like trying to teach fish to walk.

 

You have to nurture an innovative culture otherwise it will fester and die.  Sadly most companies pay lip service to their culture and address it only when they realize that a cultural virus is getting in the way of progress.  The innovation plant will never grow in infertile cultural soil.  We have to remember that every company started with some form of innovation in the first place.  So what does that entail?  It means being able to attract and retain slightly crazy people who have a ‘can do’ attitude as a base position.   They just know that everything is up for grabs and they are driven to force change in everything they do.  They can see that anything and everything can be improved.   Most organisations, in the attempt to standardize things, have hard wired most processes with a set of rules and policies.  In order to change anything you have to completely rewire the house.   Clearly there have to be some rules otherwise there would be anarchy and chaos.  For these smart innovative people they recognize that and will impose rules upon themselves in order to regulate decisions, create priorities and apply for resources.  

 

There are many enablers of an innovation culture.  The internal design certainly has a huge impact upon how people interact, the ambient lighting, music, desking and other ergonomic factors have a huge impact upon how people feel and think.   We have an amazing collection of gym balls, beanbags, dentist chairs and armchairs.  It looks a complete mess but it is what people require to feel more comfortable and in turn more effective.  Most companies face some quite complex challenges and it seems quite sensible to make every effort to make the internal environment as conducive to thinking and generating ideas necessary to make the organisation more competitive in the future.  Sadly little thought goes into the interior design of office environments with a view to making them conducive to collaboration and intellectual stimulation.    We naturally gravitate towards a place which is conducive to work.  I am writing this article in a beautiful gazebo of a hotel in America.  I could so easily sit at my desk in my boring hotel room, but I have decided that sitting in the shade surrounded by the birds and beautiful flowers in relative peace will stimulate my thought processes.  Surely some imagination can be applied to make workplaces more imaginative and stimulating even if the building is old and tired.  It has to be more than carelessly positioned pot plants!   I did some consulting work with a company where the size of the pot plant was directly proportional to the seniority of the executive and they had a written policy to support this sort of nonsense.   Isn’t it amazing that so much management time can be applied to things that don’t matter?  The ‘pot plant strategy’ probably wasn’t going to inspire the workforce; quite the opposite.  In fact it was one of the first things that was pointed out to me even before I had started the assignment.   I then knew that this was going to be a tough one.

 

Without an innovative culture and a continuous resolve to improve and renew every business is heading for a downward spiral that could be terminal.  The smart, fast and highly charged innovative start-ups will kill you off - and much quicker than you think.  The ability to be complacent exists in every organisation.  We all want to stop for a while and smell the roses.  But that is the very time that the predator will strike – when you are asleep at the wheel.  If your culture is one of continuous maintenance rather than renewal, then you need to look again.  If you don’t believe me then walk around your office and ask people, ‘If you were now the Chief Executive what are the three things you would change instantly?’  I will guarantee you will not be hit by a wall of silence.  I will also guarantee you will not be advised to change the pot plants.  Try it.