Innovation is motherhood in the corporate world. You have a problem? Innovate! Falling sales? You need innovation! Losing market share? Innovation will fix that. Are your people less than dedicated to good old Corporate You? Don’t hesitate – Innovate!
There is, in fact, a minor industry in innovation these days. It’s become a black box, a blank space on the map marked “Here there be simple answers to all your problems.” But while it is true that innovation is necessary, desirable, and can solve problems, there are two major problems with innovation itself: first, that it’s not a magic spell that will make your problems go “POOF!”; and second, most organizations really, really don’t want to innovate, no matter what they say to the contrary. In fact, many of the most vocal proponents of innovation are, I suspect, the biggest fakers. Let’s look at these issues, starting with the magic box idea.
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese book of divination, which is kind of like a computational fortune teller. It is also the repository of a great deal of folk wisdom, and one of my favorite hexagrams (or fortune cookie sayings, if you prefer) is that “Even the greatest hunter finds no game in an empty field.” I take this to mean that if a problem has no possible solutions, you can’t solve it no matter how creative you are. And, of course, this immediately invites the comment that if a problem hasn’t been solved, it’s only because no one has been creative enough. Logically, this is a tautology, like saying you can make water run up hill through prayer. How hard do you have to pray? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course.
Moreover, true innovation is hard work, and much of it involves real thinking. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing, and isn’t, but someone once said that most people will go to any lengths necessary to avoid having to truly think. Innovation takes serious skull sweat, and most people are out of practice in thinking new thoughts. What’s more, our society and culture have spent decades teaching us that only artists can be creative. Indeed, creativity is often thought of as a “soft” skill, suitable only for soft pursuits rather than hard-headed business. When you’re taught for decades that you’re not supposed to be creative, you tend to think that you’re unable to be creative. It’s not true, but it means having to fight against the culture you were raised in.
Next, there’s the frankly bigger issue of aversion to true innovation. Companies (and not-for-profits, too) pledge allegiance to innovation because they know it’s a good thing, and they’re supposed to. But innovation requires you to do two things that most organizations don’t want to do: do things they’re not good at, and be willing to fail. If you’re only willing to do things you’re already good at, then the chances are you’re just rehashing something you’ve done before, which is, by definition, not innovation. And organizations most especially don’t like the idea of failure. Failure is the ultimate sin in the corporate world. It goes you fired, demoted, passed over, or passed up. Yet the possibility of failure is the price you pay for doing something new. If there’s no risk of failure, then you’re only re-playing your greatest hits, and you won’t have any new ones.
Naturally you don’t want to fail, and you should do everything, within reason, to avoid failure. And your first attempts at something new should be small and containable, so that if they don’t work, you haven’t lost too much. And, most important of all, you need to work hard to learn from your failures, and take them as opportunities to improve your skills and extend your abilities. And you need to look for ways of turning your small failures into bigger successes, not by doubling down, but by taking what you’ve learned and leveraging it into something better.
Innovation truly is important. It’s not a panacea, able to cure all ills, but it is a critical tool in any organization’s arsenal. And the techniques of innovation can be incredibly helpful, providing structured ways of looking at the world from a different perspective, inspiring new thoughts and new ideas, and providing ways of developing those thoughts and ideas into practical, working realities. But no one should approach innovation under the delusion that it is quick and easy, and that all you have to do is rush into the marketplace with the latest book on innovation open to page 37. It doesn’t work that way, and folks who do this are just fooling themselves, and wasting time and resources doing so.
© Copyright, Richard Worzel, May 2009.
