Beyond Heroes: Navigating the Soap Bubble Maze of Organisational Innovation
Organisations, particularly large organisations, fight hard to stay the same. They fight to stay the same because they are made up of teams that are invested in today's work more than tomorrow's.
In 1948, Luther Gulick, reflecting on the administrative lessons of World War II, offered an insight into the extent to which individuals can triumph over an organisational system:
Good men seldom survive bad organisation.
The following (somewhat random and incomplete) thoughts came from thinking about how we seem to talk about organisational innovation and then reflecting on Mr Gulick’s observation.
Our innovation focus is often on idolising the role of the individual. There is one story that comes to us in two forms.
The visionary leader (hero) accurately forecasts the future, sees what no other can see, and wrestles a reluctant organisation (that fights them all the way) to an innovative outcome. The lone worker (entrepreneur) at the coalface has a unique insight but must battle the sceptical management to accept their idea.
These stories of everyday organisational heroism may be true. Still, the organisational dimensions of innovation should be considered in our haste to place the wise leader or entrepreneurial worker on a pedestal.
In many organisations, I suspect an intense desire for ‘more innovation’ or ‘a culture of innovation’, but little progress is made on addressing ‘innovation’ as a practical business strategy. This approach is similar to Alice’s dilemma:
It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged. The only difficulty was, she had not the smallest idea how to set about it.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
An organisational approach to innovation might consider leaders and managers needing to work within the current organisational system and with readily available resources. Our conversations about innovation take away these constraints (other than as barriers to overcome by our hero innovator). Unfortunately, most leaders and managers (no matter how senior or special) are not in positions where wholesale innovative change is possible or achievable.
Our leaders and managers, as is sometimes portrayed, are inside the control room with their hands on the big organisational levers. More often, they are in a room filled with soap bubbles, where they blow madly to get the bubbles to go (mostly) in the same direction. Organisational leadership is always uncertain, delicate and frustrating.
Organisations, particularly large organisations, fight hard to stay the same. They fight to stay the same because they are made up of teams that are invested in today's work more than tomorrow's. They are bound into systems that deliver value and are not within their gift alone to change. They fight to stay the same because every day, individuals bring to work with them a bag of commitment, which is at their discretion alone to provide. To bring about change, each individual must be convinced to invest their commitment to achieving that uncertain, collective and innovative outcome. So, ultimately, the weight of an organisation always tends toward stability. These are real constraints on the ability of organisations to implement innovative ideas that need to be understood and worked with rather than assumed away.
What follows are half-formed, high-level and somewhat esoteric thoughts on the problem of organisational innovation. They are shaped by the need to think about innovation at the level of the organisation rather than the individual. They accept the messiness and uncertainty of innovation in organisations that are, by necessity, tightly bound and structured. These thoughts are based on the idea that organisational innovation only gets interesting when you think about your organisation as soap bubbles.
We might consider four ways of thinking about innovation and reform:
Our approach should provide a sense of scale. It should appreciate how innovation drives simultaneous reform at different levels across the organisation. Innovation is never isolated. This is central to understanding the importance of innovation and negative reactions to new ideas and practices.
Our approach must account for how innovation produces a different effect and, therefore, a different organisational response at each layer. The history of product and service innovation is that successful innovation changes organisational relationships alter business models, and challenges existing practices. These changes are not confined to a particular organisational level but spark concurrent and interdependent change at every level. The speed and breadth of the change can differ across the organisation.
Our approach should identify the role of the organisation's leaders in maintaining the integrity of today’s organisation to meet today’s needs while also making decisions about the path of innovation and change to meet tomorrow’s needs. Leaders are constantly engaged in delivering policy, products and services; consequently, the stability and integrity of today’s organisation are as important as finding the ‘game-breaking’ innovation that might lead to improved performance. Balancing the constant tension between stability and change is a dilemma for all leaders. A problem that is often overlooked in discussions of innovation.
Our approach should guide our understanding of the value of innovation. We need to look beyond input measures alone. Input measures are easy to see. They look like ‘hard’ measures, and we can spend considerable time refining them without recognising that we are focused on one part of the equation. We need to understand relationships and interactions and how these contribute to converting an idea into practice with an effect. We need an understanding of value beyond what we can see and touch. For example, the evolution of innovation introduced primarily to improve efficiency may have widespread and unintended effects. The ability to track an innovation's diffusion, evolution and impact is central to understanding its value. It is central to organisational learning.
