Innovation Judges
I think I could write variations of this article every week. You will all recognize it:
Your organization starts a new initiative aimed at innovation|customer focus |blue sky |future business model | (fill in your description). The goal is to tap into the knowledge and creativity of the experienced internal staff for them to help develop the next great leap forward. The organization invests time, and sometimes money, to help staff get up to speed with new processes and methods and gives them (a little) time to come up with something new.
And then (drum roll please!) the employees present the findings, ideas and initiatives to senior leaders and management with the hope and expectation that the organization will prioritize and choose the best thinking and move forward with it in a concrete and consequential manner.
In reality, this last step rarely happens. Instead, employees and staff feel like game-show contestants facing skeptical and celebrity judges.
I see this a lot.
The “judges” express delight at the energy, focus and learning of the staff. The ideas, however, usually get one of the following rulings:
- We tried something vaguely like that a few years ago but it didn’t work.
- This sounds like a very big idea and so we’ll never be able to pull it off.
- This sounds like a very small idea and it probably isn’t worth doing.
- We can’t possibly do something this different while we continue to do our usual work.
- We’re not convinced.
In other words, “yes, but…”
I run into this and similar challenges leadership has with design and innovation initiatives. Just like the staff needs training on new creative and customer focused processes, leadership and management needs help and training on how to lead them. It can be something as simple as training leadership on how to give constructive creative feedback. Most managers don’t do this well because they’ve experienced it so rarely. That is a fairly easy fix but one that needs practice.
The help and support leadership needs to nurture new initiatives and to allow them to flourish takes more time and effort. Most of the reactions I cited above have little to do with “facts” but instead revolve around different types of emotions and fears, such as:
- I’m afraid of failing, like last time, especially since I don’t even know why we failed.
- I don’t really understand this idea, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it.
- I was expecting something big and flashy, and this isn’t it.
- I’m not comfortable with change, when it comes right down to it, especially if it impacts my domain and position.
- My risk aversion is greater than my fear of the future.
Asking leadership to invest in their own development can feel risky in and of itself! Many see this as an implicit recognition that leadership doesn’t have all of the skills to…gulp…lead effectively. It’s the hackneyed slippery slope — but this time of organizational management where the thinking goes — “If they don’t think I can lead this, they will doubt I can lead anything!” On the other hand, there is great power in leading by example. When leaders show they are willing to learn something new, it can empower staff to do the same.
One of the challenges with change and innovation initiatives is that we haven’t laid the groundwork for what happens next — that is, what is the process and structure for enabling some of these initiatives to get off the ground into new or pilot or embedded initiatives. Does a budget or planning process exist for taking these to the next logical phase? Has leadership done any scenario or future planning? Does the leadership group have a process for evaluating and prioritizing the results beyond mostly emotional reactions?
Too often leadership has decided that the problem or challenge with change lies at the bottom or middle of an organization. They will invest in trying to get their staff to change. Investing in changing themselves and their own processes is too often lacking. But providing them the support and understanding, of themselves and their own processes, is a good investment and one with higher ROI than not investing in themselves.
What we need is a parallel investment in behavior change both at the operational AND the leadership levels. Besides risking wasted time and money in a type of innovation theater, the bigger risk is employee cynicism — really, how many times to do you want celebrity judges to diss you? That experiences will negatively impact future change initiatives and trust in current organizational leaders.
