Adult Innovation
A while back when I was preparing an innovation workshop for a client, the client wanted to send out an email to their division inviting people to take part. When they sent me the email to review, the main thing I did was to strike the word “fun” from the description and then sent them my feedback. When I received round two of the text, the word “fun” had made its way back in. It was time for a chat.
“This workshop is going to be great,” I assured them. “We can describe it in various ways, but we should not promise ‘fun’ as one of the deliverables.”
“You mean it’s not going to be fun?” one of the clients replied. “I think it sounds like fun!”
“It might be fun,” I answered them. “But words like rewarding, challenging or stimulating are more accurate since we don’t know that people will think it’s fun. Isn’t that enough?”
The clients reluctantly removed the word fun. In the end, the workshop was challenging, stimulating and rewarding. Some people thought it was fun. Almost everyone enjoyed taking part. But it illuminated a weakness in the whole innovation process.
Are we so insecure that innovation will actually make a difference that we need to pitch it as entertainment? Disney promises fun; Apple does not, even though both are innovative companies. It also points to the weakness in our approach to building cultures of innovation in that we don’t want to promise hard work, we want to promise fun.
Much of this is due to what others have called the “infantilization” of dealing with challenges. We tend to now treat citizens, co-workers and other adults as children when we deem things to be complex or difficult. For the Swedish government during the Covid-19 pandemic, their main strategy was to reduce “worry” among the public — many critics challenged that they prioritized it over actual public safety. It smacked of a patriarchal “Don’t worry the children” attitude that even pervades workplaces.
Netflix legendary HR head Patty McCord often uses the phrase “only adults in the room” when she describes the necessary conditions for greatness and change.
Stanford Professor Bob Sutton describes it best:
“The best teams engage in constructive conflict. At Pixar, Brad Bird, the director of the Incredibles, and John Walker, the producer of the Incredibles, argued endlessly about everything. But in their words, they worked in loving conflict every day.”
To me, that description sounds rewarding, challenging, stimulating, and fun! Learning to grow or do something better can be fun, but it might also feel really frustrating. Isn’t the learning the point, not the fun? Shouldn’t changing the way you work so you can produce better results and have more honest and trusting relationships with your co-workers be reward enough without promising entertainment?
If companies offering change and innovation training or workshops promise fun they are in essence infantilizing their clients, assuming that they are not mature enough to do the hard work without the promise of candy or ice cream. I mean, there is a lot of money to be made in acting that way but it doesn’t necessarily deliver change.
Let’s start treating each other like adults, adults who are willing to roll up our sleeves and get down to the hard work of innovation, sustainability and change. Along the way it might be the most fun thing you’ve ever done, but it will only feel that way if you don’t start there.
