Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Innovation and the City
I’m looking for a connection.
Let’s say that the city of Groverton has 100,000 residents and produces X number of innovations per year. Down the road, the city of Pecaville has 1,000,000 residents. Since Pecaville has ten times more residents than Groverton, it should produce 10X innovations per year, correct?
Actually, no. Other things being equal, Pecaville should produce far more than 10X innovations. In predicting innovation capacity, it’s not the number of people (or nodes) that counts, it’s the number of connections. The million residents of Pecaville have more than ten times the connection opportunities of the residents of sleepy little Groverton. Therefore, they should produce much more than ten times the number of innovations.
In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson makes the point that connections are the fundamental unit of innovation. The more connections you can make, the more likely you are to create good ideas. Scale doesn’t matter — more connections are better at a very small scale or a very large scale. This is where cities come in. In terms of innovation, larger cities have multiple advantage over smaller cities, including:
- There are more “spare parts” lying around — Johnson points out that most new ideas are created by combining — or connecting — existing ideas. Existing ideas are “spare parts” that an enterprising “mechanic” can assemble in new ways. (In an earlier post, I referred to this as mashup thinking. Click here.) Cities have more of everything, including more spare parts to fool around with.
- More information spillover — I know a lot about information science. If I keep it to myself, it doesn’t do a lot of good. If I share it with, say some sociologists, we might just come up with something useful. My information spills over to them and vice versa. In Johnson’s terms, the information I share becomes spare parts that the sociologists can plug into their framework. The question is: how likely am I to meet up with a bunch of sociologists? It’s much more likely in a big city than a small town.
- Not only are there more connections, the connections are more varied — if I mainly talk to people who are like me, the chances of something innovative happening are fairly low. It’s when I talk across boundaries — to people who aren’t like me — that interesting ideas begin to emerge. It may happen when I bump into a random sect of sociologists. But if it doesn’t happen then, well… maybe it will happen when I encounter an enclave of entomologists. Or maybe I’ll bump into a bevy of brewers who need to know about information science. In a big city, I’m likely to interact with many more disciplines, opinions, experts, and enthusiasts than I am in a small town.
Does this work in real life? Johnson provides some very interesting anecdotes. More recently, last Friday’s New York Times had an article (click here) on manufacturing and innovation. The article argues that more innovation happens when designers are close to the manufacturing floor. Why? Because of information spillover. Researchers claim that offshore manufacturing reduces our ability to innovate precisely because it reduces information spillover. Connectivity seems to work on the manufacturing floor as much as it does in big cities. Scale doesn’t matter. Bottom line: if you want to be more innovative, get connected.
Three Myths of Change Management
My attention span is less than 12 minutes.
A majority of change management efforts in organizations fail. Indeed, the failure rate may be as high as 70%. As we’ve discussed before (click here), strategy and culture are intertwined. Before you change your strategy, you’ll probably need to change your culture. But, if the failure rate is 70%, is it even worth trying? Not if you believe in myths.
According to Bain & Company, there are three great myths that inhibit the success of change management efforts. Let’s look at each of these today. (For the complete article, click here).
Myth #1: As long as the effect on people is minimized, change will succeed. To change successfully, we all know that the whole organization needs to coalesce around a common vision. That’s easy to say but hard to do. If you’re being disrupted, you may not want to align around somebody else’s vision. So smart change managers identify those employees that are likely to be most disrupted and invite them to co-create the vision. This often takes the form of workshops “that help the leadership team paint a clear picture of what the change will look like when it’s finished.”
Myth #2: So much about change is irrational and hard to predict. Bain & Company has developed a list of 30 specific risks that can disrupt change. The list is not surprising; in fact, it’s very predictable. You can organize the risks into five major categories: 1) Balance ambition; 2) Mobilize leaders; 3) Change behaviors; 4) Shape execution; 5) Extend success. The 30 risk factors occur in “predictable patterns” and only a handful will be disruptive at any given time. By studying the predictable patterns and applying them to your organization, you can create heat maps that help you focus your attention on the right spots at any stage of the change process.
Myth #3: All you need is good leadership and day-to-day management. Once you start a major change process, you put immense stress on your organization. Weird things start to happen. For instance, people in normal business situations may have an attention span of an hour or so. In stressed out organizations, attention spans shrink to about 12 minutes. People may retain only 20% of the information they receive. Stressed employees will tune you out altogether if they think you’re not credible or that you don’t care about them. They’ll decide in roughly 30 seconds whether you’re trustworthy or not. Even the best orators find it difficult to establish trustworthiness in 30 seconds. That’s why it’s so important to deliver high-stress information via sponsors that the audience already trusts. Normal communication doesn’t work in a high stress situation. You need to simplify your message and deliver it through trusted channels. (For more on trusted channels and message cascades, click here).
Change Management: The Sponsorship Cascade
We’re cascading the message to you.
Remember the ice cream theory of communication? (Click here). It’s a cascade of information flowing step-by-step to the target you want to influence. Say that you want to influence the trade press. You know that reporters will want to know what analysts think, so you brief analysts before you talk to reporters. Analysts will want to now what customers think, so you brief customers before analysts. And so on.
The ice cream theory also works with internal communications — especially when big changes are afoot. When an organization needs to launch big changes, it often puts the CEO on a video broadcast to all employees. Everybody hears it at the same time. What’s wrong with that? Well, frankly … nobody trusts the CEO. It’s not that the CEO is a bad person; it’s just that most employees don’t know him or her. Without a personal relationship, it’s hard to know whom to trust. It’s like sending a press release to a reporter without first preparing the rest of the ice cream cone. The reporter needs further confirmation. So do your employees.
Bain & Company develops this concept in two parts: 1) the sponsorship spine; 2) the communication cascade. The sponsorship spine is very similar to the ice cream cone. Ask yourself two questions: Who are we trying to influence? Whom do they trust? Let’s say you’re trying to influence Department Z. Whom do they trust? Well … it’s Mary, a long-term employee who is widely respected for her experience and wisdom. Mary may or may not be Department Z’s manager. Then ask another question: whom does Mary trust? Let’s say it’s Inga. Then, whom does Inga trust? Let’s say it’s Grover. Keep asking the whom-do-they-trust question until you’ve reached the executive suites. You’ve now established the sponsorship spine.
Once you’ve identified the spine, you can start the cascade. The key ideas are to start from the top, speak to people who know you and trust you, speak to them personally in face-to-face settings, and always invite feedback (and listen carefully to it). If you need to make adjustments based on the feedback, then do so. Then ask the people you’ve spoken with to cascade the message down one level. Repeat the process throughout the organization. Ultimately, everybody in the organization hears the message personally from someone they trust.
And what about the CEO? He or she can still play a role. My advice is that the CEO should speak after the cascade is complete. The CEO confirms and reinforces the message, but doesn’t introduce it. People hear the message from a trusted source and then have it verified by someone in authority. That reinforces the sponsor’s trustworthiness and speaks to both our emotional and our logical sides. That, in turn, helps the message sink in and prepares us for action.
You can find the full article from Bain & Company by clicking here.
Creatively Creating Creativity
I alternate between fantasy and reality.
I recently wrote that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book, Creativity: Flow and The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, identified ten different pairs of opposing traits that occur commonly in creative personalities. We looked at three pairs in that post (click here). Let’s look at three more today.
Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other. Csikszentmihalyi notes that Albert Einstein believed that both art and science “are two of the greatest forms of escape from reality that humans have devised.” To create new truths — to change the paradigm in Thomas Kuhn‘s phrase — one needs a great imagination, bordering on fantasy. At the same time, the creative person realizes that the fantasy could actually be true. The imagination extends well beyond reality but, sooner or later, reality catches up. Csikszentmihalyi also notes how artists respond to Rorschach tests. Creative artists tend to respond with more original and more detailed stories than “normal” people. But the artists rareley give “bizarre” answers as normal people sometimes do. Csikszentmihalyi concludes, “Normal people are rarely original, but they are sometimes bizarre. Creative people, it seems, are original without being bizarre. The novelty they see is rooted in reality.” Thus, it seems that it’s good to study reality so you can connect it to your imagination. Imagination disconnected from reality is simply bizarre.
Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion. Being truly creative requires a lot of time alone. You need solitary time to master your domain, to learn how to play the piano, or to write your magnum opus. Yet many of Csikszentmihalyi’s creative people said it was equally important to interact with other people and just kick ideas around. As Freeman Dyson puts it, “Science is a very gregarious business. It is essentially the difference between having this door open and having it shut.”
Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time. Highly creative people understand that they “stand on the shoulders of giants” — they first mastered their domain and then they extended it. Csikszentmihalyi points out that they also understand the role of luck in their discoveries and that they’re more focused on future work, making past work seem less boast worthy. At the same time, creative individuals realize that they have indeed created new forms and structures that genuinely make them proud. Csikszentmihalyi sees this duality as the contrast between competition and cooperation. To change your field (or to change the world), you need to be aggressive. “Yet at the same time, [creative individuals] are often willing to subordinate their own personal comfort and advancement to the success of whatever project they are working on.”
Click here for Csikszentmihalyi’s book. By the way, his surname is pronounced Six-Cent-Mihaly.
How To Undermine Your Employees
What’s the best way to motivate employees? According to Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, it’s progress. In a recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly, Amabile and Kramer write that a sense of progress on meaningful objectives is fundamental to motivation. If your employees feel they’re doing something meaningful and making progress on it, they’re motivated. If they feel they’re doing something that’s not meaningful — or don’t understand why it’s meaningful — then motivation wanes. If they don’t sense that they’re making progress, motivation dies.
Amabile and Kramer go on to say that executives often commit four errors that undermine employee motivation. Here they are:
Mediocrity signals — your mission statement may include soaring language with emotionally appealing overtones. However, what you say to your employees day-to-day may say the opposite. Amabile and Kramer give the example of a company that claimed to be dedicated to innovation driven by autonomous teams. It’s quite possible that they believed their own rhetoric. In their day-to-day activities, however, they emphasized cost savings and undermined team autonomy by dictating cost reduction measures. Ultimately, employees came to perceive the rhetoric as hypocritical and lost their enthusiasm. Moral: what you say should be consistent with what you do.
Strategic attention deficit disorder — I once worked for a CEO who travelled a lot. After every trip, he’d come back with a new idea derived from an airline magazine article. We all braced for a YAGI — yet another great idea. Actually, some of them probably were great ideas. But there were too many of them. We were just getting started on one when another one superseded it. Amabile and Kramer give the example of a company led by a CEO with a short attention span and a “…desire to embrace the latest management trends. … If you blinked, you could miss the next strategic shift.” Moral: consistency over time is not boring, it’s motivational.
Corporate Keystone Kops — the Keystone Kops were famous for being uncoordinated. They literally couldn’t get out of each other’s way. Amabile and Kramer say the same phenomenon occurs far too often in the corporate world. Their examples include complex matrix organizations that make it difficult to know who’s in charge of what and a failure to hold departments and individuals accountable for meeting their commitments. If one team meets its commitments and another team doesn’t, the lack of coordination can spoil it for everybody. Moral: Keep it simple and keep it coordinated.
Misbegotten big hairy audacious goals — management gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras suggest that organizations should develop BHAGS — visionary goals that stir the emotions. The most cited example is probably John Kennedy’s challenge to NASA to put a man on the moon. It’s a great example but hard to emulate. Amabile and Kramer write that corporate BHAGs are often “… grandiose and [contain] little relevance or meaning to the people in the trenches. They can be so extreme as to seem unattainable and so vague as to seem empty. The result is a meaning vacuum. Cynicism rises and drive plummets.” The authors cite a chemical company whose BHAG was that all projects had to yield $100 million in annual revenue within five years of launch. “This goal did not infuse the work with meaning, because it had little to do with the day-to-day activities of people in the organization. … worst of all, it did not connect with anything the employees valued. Most of them wanted to provide something of value to their customers; an aggressive revenue target told them only about the value to the organization, not to the customer.” Moral: BHAGs are OK but make them meaningful to the people you’re trying to motivate. Keep them focused on customers and simple enough that the “people in the trenches” can get a sense of progress.
You can find Amabile and Kramer’s article, “How leaders kill meaning at work” by clicking here. You can also find their book, The Progress Prinicple, by clicking here.
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