Truths About Innovation Cultures

Recently I read a great article by Gary P Pisano professor of Business Administration and Senior associate dean at Harvard Business School titled the 'The Hard Truth About Innovation Cultures".  I really liked the article and summarize here what I learned.

The myth out there in the industry is for successful innovation to happen the organization should provide a culture where failures at experiments are encouraged and not frowned upon and hence innovative cultures are misunderstood. Gary propounds a tolerance for failure requires a high

intolerance for incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline and competent staff who are chosen meticulously to ride the bus along with you. Hence mediocre technical skills, bad work habits, busyness or busy bee activities and poor management cannot foster a culture of running tight experiments within budgets. Google is known to have an employee-friendly culture but is also the hardest place to get into. Gary states Google can encourage risk-taking and failure because it can be confident that most Google employees are very competent. For me, this translates to senior leadership articulate what is a productive and unproductive failure along with getting the right people/talent on the innovation strategic journey you are embarking upon.

Second point Gary states is the willingness to experiment should be a highly disciplined affair. Though the team may be comfortable to ambiguity and uncertainty it has a clear time frame, budget, constraints defined upfront. Thought initial explorations are unconstrained the ideas are narrowed down as the focus and belief become clear towards experimentation. He gives the example of Flagship Pioneering a Cambridge, Massachusetts company who models this applying lean approaches and encouraging their teams to narrow framing after initial explorations and defining clear criteria, timeframes and budgets. I like how he states disciplined experimentation is a balancing act. As a leader, you want to encourage people with moonshot unrealistic ideas and give them time to formulate their hypotheses. Killing the idea too soon can and funding it without a timeframe can both be detrimental for the experiment, team and the organization.

Third truth Gary posits is the teams that are good at innovation psychologically sage and brutally candid. The idea here is each member feels safe to criticize other people's idea while knowing well they have the thick skins to receive criticisms as well. Even if the criticism is sharp people are encouraged to defend their proposals with data and logic. The challenge for leaders here is to not to have incredibly nice organizations or incredibly divisional approach where team members may begin to hate each other. Providing alternate solutions along with criticism is one of the hallmarks of respect as described by Ed Catmull in 'Creativity Inc'.  General Dwight Eisenhower before D-day operations invited top officers for input and criticizing his plans...he said "I consider it the duty of anyone who sees a flaw in this plan to not to hesitate to say so. I have no sympathy for anyone, whatever his station, who will not brook criticism. We are here to get the best possible results."  Eisenhower was demanding criticism.

Fourth truth Gary outlines in the article is the need for collaboration but with individual accountability.  Team members have a sense of collective responsibility when others seek help in the journey but do not enable laziness. An accountability culture allows individuals to make decisions and own consequences. Ed Catmull is stated as an example again who describes in his book Creativity Inc., Pixar allows the selected director of a movie which feedback to take and which one to ignore and is then held accountable for the contents and the movie-making process. Accountability and collaboration can become complementary when accountability drives collaboration where clarity of decision-making rights at each individual level and team level are clear.

Finally, innovation cultures have flatter organizational structures with strong leadership. Here lack of hierarchical structure does not mean lack of leadership, paradoxically flatter organizations have higher failure as clear strategies priorities and directions are not outlaid by leaders. This also means flatter organizational structures requires at the individual level develop strong leadership capacities. Amazon and Google are very flat organizations but their employees at all levels enjoy a high degree of autonomy to pursue innovative ideas but there is also a high degree of accountability and directional outcomes at high levels specified.

Final thoughts:

• Valuable learning can only occur by sharing, transparency, and failures where learning is demanded. 
• Innovation as a free-for-all will see discipline and unnecessary constraint on their creativity. The people who will not thrive will have harder decisions to make. 
• Innovation cultures are systems of interdependent behaviors they cannot be implemented in a piecemeal fashion.
• Disciplined experimentation will cost less and yield more useful information. Tolerance for failed experiments becomes prudence rather than shortsighted accidental adventures. 
• Tolerance for failure can encourage slack thinking and excuse making but too much intolerance for incompetence can create fear of risk-taking and stifling of innovation. The latter will eventually lead to irrelevance. 

Thoughts,

Dr. Sam Kurien