Leading Innovation
This week, I had the privilege of attending a hand-on workshop about leading innovation. It was a packed 3-day schedule and I learned a lot both from the material and from the exercises.
My motivation for attending was a message that I’ve heard from the teams I work with. The engineers on the team regularly communicate that we are not very innovative. This is feedback comes despite the reality that these teams have submitted multiple patent applications! I had two hypotheses as to why we receive this message and I wanted to understand better what is the reasons the engineers report that our teams are not innovative. Is it that we are not very innovative or that we perceive we are not innovative (or some combination).
A little team context helps here. These teams are responsible for foundational security capabilities - we are one of the teams that most engineers have heard of. These teams normally move slowly because mistakes have very large blast radius. I often tell people that “our teams only make big mistakes.” By moving slowly, it can feel that we are not very innovative because we only make a few changes each year. From that perspective, it sure seems that we are not innovating a lot. However, these few change are often very high impact. From that perspective, it sure seems that the things we do are innovative.
I think it is important to address the feedback, irrespective of whether the low degree of innovation is fact or perception. I’d like to share here two key ideas from the workshop.
What is Innovation
The first part of the workshop focused on defining innovation. This part was helpful because it directly addresses a core question I had. Is the feedback about lacking innovation a question of fact or perception?
We talked about a few frameworks for describing innovations. I think one of them was particularly relevant for my objective: things and methods.
| Things | ||
|---|---|---|
| Methods | old/old | old/new |
| new/old | new/new invent | |
The claim being made is that innovation does not necessarily imply invention. Invention, using new methods to do new things, is only one form of innovation. Re-purposing, using old methods to new new things, is also innovative. Indeed, enough small incremental improvements, old methods to do old things, over time can also be innovative.
This leads me to believe that we can help teams understand where we are being innovative by recognizing and rewarding forms of innovation beyond invention.
Environments for Innovation
The second part of the workshop focused on creating an environment that generates innovation. This part reinforced some ideas that I already had - namely that environments can both foster and kill innovation.
The essential idea is that a psychological safe environment is a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient to foster innovation. The actions of leaders have an important effect on creating the right environment.
Many of us have probably observed “predatory questions”. Predatory questions are those designed to elicit a particular pre-determined outcome that the leader has decided is the right answer. This is much like how lawyers attempt trap witnesses to achieve a particular pre-determined outcome.
These lines of questions destroy trust because the effort is not to seek truth. Those using such questions destroy the safety of the environment and kill the possibility of innovation.
A strategy I’ve taken with teams I work with is to hold a regularly time where the team members can present any idea. I commit myself, and remind others at the start of the session, that the purpose of the session is to encourage innovation. We hold a low bar for bringing the idea and we will focus our group effort on discovering truths together. An idea from the workshop that I’ll take back to this meeting is “what has to be true for me to say yes to the idea.”