Conformity, Innovation & the Organisation

During the last twenty-odd years, I have worked for some of the most interesting organisations in the world, trying to bring about innovation.

I have often thought about the challenges that this presents - and wondered if I should write a book about it. It seems a popular topic these days; Ray Wang talks about the importance of Digital Artisans, for example - and the big four consultancies routinely produce reports extolling the importance of innovation in times of change.

But I find I’m often disappointed by books about innovation. They say ‘INNOVATION IS KEY TO YOUR FUTURE’ but don’t seem to understand the dynamics that hold innovation in check. They often take a great many pages to say very little. So I thought I’d write a slightly longer post and save us both the trouble.

People

Those of us working to innovate within organisations will often express frustration at colleagues who are not. To us, they sometimes seem narrow-minded and short-sighted. ‘Jobs-worths’. And to them we seem reckless and self-centred. 'Mavericks'. This has become so noticeable that now I can generally tell if a person is of this type when we first shake hands. These are not people who are interested in the ‘why’, they are there to follow - and enforce - the rules. They are the cops, we are the robbers.

It is easy to get frustrated with those who do not see the value of innovation. My friend @euan has plenty to say on this, though he generally experiences it from the outside, rather than from within. I would like to explain why I think this dynamic exists and what we can do about it.

The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg described 6 stages of moral development. These were loosely based on Piaget’s developmental stages, and the set out how a child transitions from simply avoiding punishment to obedience, to abstract ethical principles. But there are two problems with his model: it implies that we progress through all the stages, and that the later stages are superior.

In fact many people are, as adults, at Kohlberg’s stage 4 ('Authority and social-order maintaining orientation’). In all probability this is a function of parenting - i.e. they had strict parents who set clear rules and expected them to be followed. The kind of parents who said ‘because I say so!’ or ‘because that is the rule!’, rather than encouraging them to experiment and question.

Organisations are disproportionately comprised of people of this type. And this makes perfect sense: until fairly recently organisational structure was predominantly characterised by hierarchy. The organisation adopted a parental stance in relation to its employees. Hierarchy and obedience are ways that organisations remain stable through periods of change; much as a solid remains solid though its rigid bonds.

So organisations implicitly seek out people who will fit well in this parent-child structure. Obedient individuals who will accept and enforce rules unquestioningly, and who look up or down - but not across. They are often extroverts (since introverts are more likely to wonder about the ‘why’) - which means they write characteristically stern emails but are often quite chatty in person. They are people who become very anxious about deadlines and procedure. They like to hold meetings and achieve consensus.

It is easy to sound dismissive of the importance of these things - that is not my intention. I would like to point out again that such characteristics and people have kept large organisations together through times of change, ensuring their survival for decades and protecting colleagues from risk. At some level these are people who understand that innovation (and by this I mean true innovation, not the ‘INNOVATION’ that makes its way into corporate jargon and marketing materials) represents a threat. After all, whilst HR may attract authoritarian personalities - we are the more likely home of autistic and sociopathic types.

And so these types of conversations characterise the interface between innovators and their organisation: crossed conversations where one party talks about the ‘why’ and the other about 'the rules'.

So why do organisations need innovators at all? After all, they are a nuisance. 

Organisations

An organisation is like a boulder in a stream. This really is a pretty good metaphor for thinking about the challenges faced by organisations seeking to persist over time. In times when turbulence is low, then rigidity is a good strategy. But there comes a point when the turbulence reaches a point that it will lift the entire rock and fling it down the stream. Under those circumstances, it is the weeds that are more likely to survive - precisely because they are more flexible.

It’s become a truism to talk about the softening and flattening of large organisations. In fact, this should be called ‘melting’. As things ‘heat up’ around the organisation, it makes sense to soften at the edges and this brings about a flattening of the hierarchy. Some are just like big blocks of ice melting slowly. It seems likely that successful organisations will become fluid, if not vapid - able to pivot rapidly to take advantage of new market opportunities, able to rapidly resize to fit requirements. 

But of course this degrades two traditionally central characteristics of organisations: the rigid hierarchy (and with it the parent-child contract) and the sets of rules which maintain its persistent shape. A fluid or a gas requires looser bonds.

The resulting organisation comprises a much smaller core of ‘principles’ (rather than policies) and a much thicker skin of innovation and autonomous behaviour. You can actually see this in operation already. Quite without prompting employees are shifting to using their own technology (and consequently creating their own rules) for getting work done. Even in the Oil&Gas industry upwards of 71% of people in operational roles are using their own mobile device for work. Of course they are sharing information with third parties, of course they are using Gmail and Evernote.

As the system of policies and controls which held many organisations together breaks down, they seem not to understand that in a fluid state it it only their narrative - their mission or meaning - that can act as an organising principle for activity (something which I tried to set out here).

Innovation

So how can innovation take place within large organisations?

Let me start by saying that generally it cannot. Despite the many people extolling the virtue of organisational innovation, the very nature of conventional organisations makes them toxic to genuine innovation. The story is familiar: a large corporation, inexplicably unable to foster its own innovation takes over a flourishing small enterprise  - and promptly kills it. Disgruntled former employees cite the rapid deterioration in their working culture.

The advice I hear most often, is that such organisations should create experimental ‘hands off’ spaces in which innovation can operate - in essence, that they should acknowledge their inherently toxic effect on innovation and resist any attempt at integration. But this has not been my experience of how things work in practice; instead innovation arises in small pockets within the organisation and must fight to survive.

The analogy I would like to use here is that of a virus and the human immune system: our immune system is set up to detect and eliminate viruses, which represent a threat to our existence. But it is also true that humans are 90% microbial - and that we probably owe our core nature to viruses (mitochondria for example).

In order to succeed, intra-organisational innovation needs to borrow the tactics of the virus:

• camouflage: areas of innovation need to learn to borrow the language and objectives of the organisation in order to survive. They must present themselves as strategically aligned, addressing the current business challenges. Why can they not simply be strategically aligned if their ultimate goal is the survival of the organisation? Whilst an organisation may express innovation as an ambition, this will be articulated in sets of hierarchical objectives whose net effect is to maintain the status quo. For these reasons innovation must be seen to address current challenges - and actually address them where possible - whilst simultaneously seeding a new means of function (one which is not yet expressed as policy). An example of this might be the introduction of workflow apps which address immediate cost pressures, but covertly usher in new ways of operating.
• invisibility: camouflage is a means of achieving invisibility, but many other factors are at play. As with the virus, small size can greatly help. Invisibility means avoidance of antibodies, which in organisational terms means avoiding the attention of committees and governance, which are the organisational correlate of human white blood cells. Since committees are often comprised of the organisational core, they will naturally be quick to quash innovation.
• spread rapidly: successful viruses spread rapidly whilst avoiding detection. For innovation to succeed it is important to operate similarly; by the time that it is detected, it should already be so pervasive that it is better to incorporate the change than to combat it. Note that this is a strategy with diminishing returns; the organisational immune system - like the human one - learns, and will quickly learn to pay closer attention to parts of the organisation that have brought about significant change whilst avoiding governance. Having said that, where innovation has shown a real benefit to the organisation, the organisation may begin to tolerate it in increasingly high doses.
• mutate: fluidity is the essence of future organisations - the ability to quickly identify opportunities and re-organise in ways which take advantage of these. An innovation team must have agility as well as invisibility, by rapidly changing direction, it is able to stay ahead of the slow-moving organisational core.
• infectiousness: it is actually very easy to get rid of innovators. In fact, this is the norm. The core of the organisation will prioritise short-term success over long-term viability. Apple ejected Steve Jobs, unceremoniously. What is much harder to expunge is an idea. If an idea can spread - an infectious idea - then this can be almost impossible to wipe out. There are many ways in which innovation teams can create infectious ideas - indeed if it is not infectious it is often not innovation. Such approaches span user-experience, aesthetics and memes. Apple's approach was not ultimately hierarchical; its success was due to the fact that everybody was infected with the idea of good design.
• difference: Einstein is quoted as saying that ‘madness is doing the same things and expecting different results’; innovation stems from difference. For us points of difference have included user-centered design (an infectious idea caught from Apple) and the notion of Affective Context. Collectively these are elaborated as an operating model in our Learning Design Toolkit.

I may not have taken the approach you expected in describing the method of bringing about innovation within organisations, it is not a ‘conciliatory’ approach. It is uncompromising.

What I would like to say, then, is that in my experience - whilst this is the way to achieve innovation - innovation itself is not all that matters. For those people who are not innovators - who do not constantly ask ‘why’ - it is unlikely that they will ever change. Nevertheless to take them on that journey, even a very little way, can be important. Innovation disrupts the lives of people who are not themselves innovators. And to innovate for the sake of innovation - without a care for those affected, is a kind of inhumanity. Innovators risk making the 'Jurassic Park error': 'you were so preoccupied with what you could do, you didn't stop to think if you should.'

For innovators to partner successfully with regulators there is invariably an element of compromise - which is more often than not fatal to innovation itself. For there to be any partnership at all requires extensive relationship-building: time spent listening and understanding, in order that sufficient trust be established for small experiments to be carried out and a sense of shared endeavour built. It is a slow and risky path to innovation, and will feel like taking a small child on a difficult journey. But, as I say, sometimes that’s precisely the right thing to do.