Innovation not equal Ideas

I have worked in a few large companies over the past few decades. Every so often they each would go on an innovations kick. Every time they would trot out the same old tired pony. The suggestion box.

The first few times in each company that I worked, I would get a bit excited that maybe something would happen with the suggestions. But after many years and a number of innovation initiatives, I guess, I have become a bit skeptical. After all how can I expect the company to do anything I put in the suggestion box when they have effectively ignored most everything I have proposed in my day to day work. I have hundreds of ideas every day, but rarely have the bandwidth to action only a few a year.

I got to the point where if I had an idea, I would jot it down and file it in my filing cabinet. Then, usually 3 to 5 years later, when everyone was in a panic and willing to try almost anything, I would go to my file and pull out an idea that would help solve the problem. Often the idea had been proposed and rejected earlier.

I never used all the ideas in my filing cabinet, but enough were useful to make it worth while to keep putting ideas into it. But it did illustrate that simply more ideas is not innovation. There were a lot of ideas in my filing cabinet, but simply sitting there caused no innovation.

My interpretation of an organization that every time it wants to innovate, the major thrust is to call for ideas is that the organization is simply insane. One of my favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results." So I think that it is organizational insanity that causes this belief that this action of thrashing and rehashing is the same as making effective progress. If an organization cannot make use of the ideas that naturally occur in day to day work, how can it have the bandwidth to handle opening the flood gates by calling for ideas.

One problem, I have seen in some companies, is that the call for innovation is filtered through the requirement that the idea be fully formed, with little or no risk and is a home run of at least a value of 100 million before the company would consider any investment. There are a few companies willing to invest in small or partially formed ideas, 3m a few decades ago and Google recently. But it is a rare attitude.

Let's take a closer look at why so many companies cannot take advantage of the day to day ideas for improvement. 20 years ago a good friend of mine, Jeff Rosenberg, made the observation while we were going through another reorganization to implement the management theory of the day that "organizations do what they do because of the structure of the organization." Recently, I heard Brian Robertson, the founder of Holacracy, say that "organizations are perfectly organized to produce the results that they do." Given the current top down command and control organizational structure, with the decisions made towards the top and actions separated from the decisions and performed at the bottom, we have an organization that perfectly suppresses ideas from the bottom and separates the hands on learning and experience at the bottom from the decision makers at the top. This structure tends to calcify the organization, forcing it to do the same things over and over. To simply say "lets have all your ideas" without addressing this calcification perfectly meets Einstein's definition of insanity.

To be fair, working with in the conventional business framework, the suggestion box seems to be the only (easiest) way to break through these layers of calcification. But it rarely shows any significant results as it does not address the fundamental problem with the distribution of power.

Some of the organizational work at Toyota moved some of the decision making down to the line workers with a great increase in quality and production because some of the innovative ideas of the line workers was not lost through the filters of going up then back down through a fully calcified organization. Agile software development expanded some of these principles into the line level programmers, also with a substantial increase in quality and productivity. Holacracy is the leading edge of this wave, formalizing the ideas of distribution of power and dynamic organizational self modification for any type of organization. Holacracy is now formalized into a constitution that can be legally adopted by an organization.

Of course, full adoption of Holacracy would give the greatest benefit to any organization able to make the transition. However if that is not currently possible, a deep study of Holacracy and understanding its principle can help inform better decisions when there is an opportunity to decide between options when adjusting or working within a traditional organization. I do the latter almost every day.