Innovation time illusion
How much time should your organization spend on innovation, change, or improvement efforts? Of all the challenges around innovation, time is, in my experience, the one that gets the most air-time. And here we run into big questions like: is the goal the journey or the result or both? Learning organizations will say the journey is the goal and that one can measure results in various ways. Most traditional organizations will say that the actual result of the time is the goal since it is the easiest thing to measure. In either case, each organization is trying to assess how much time to invest in its employees.
I work with clients to help them integrate innovation and design into their work flow. The time challenge comes up again and again. Over the years, we’ve tinkered around with different approaches ranging from full-on immersion (“Too much time!” says everyone) to a shorter more time-constrained effort. Even in this slimmed-down version time comes up again and again as a piece of resistance.
The shorter version — focusing on specific parts of the design and innovation process — asks the team to spend 20 hours spread over six to seven weeks in short assignments — small bursts — with clear but limited constraints and outcomes. When team members or their managers start to complain about how much time this is taking, I ask them these simple questions:
“How much of your time, per week, do you spend in meetings?”
The answer is invariable 40–50% of their time, i.e., 16–20 hours per week.
“OK,” I ask, “what are the results of those meetings?”
The answer is usually “Not much.”
“So,” I conclude “If you compare both the learnings and outcomes of the 20 innovation hours over these 6–7 weeks with 96–140 hours of meetings you attend during that same time, which do you think delivers more value, or efficiency, or results, time wise?”
You know what the answer is, as do they. The problem, as they see it, is that those 16–20 hours of meetings per week are highly prioritized and sometimes required. But no one seems to have done or asked for the same cost-benefit analysis that managers seem to need to evaluate innovation. This is the time illusion: that 3 hours per week on innovation is somehow more wasteful than 16 hours per week in meetings. Three is greater than sixteen.
Without a doubt, more than a few of these meetings are important or even critical. Even though many people experience frustration with the amount and content of meetings, the meeting culture is so ingrained in the status quo that it is hard to challenge.
I’m all for doing analysis and cost assessments of innovation initiatives. But if we do them, we should be clear that each effort delivers a variety of “results.” And that we need to put this analysis into a context of analyzing the alternatives — what or whose time are we taking and what is the cost analysis of them shifting their times away from saying meetings to learning and doing and creating?
If one complains that innovation takes “too much time” the response should be “compared with what?” Otherwise, we run the risk of making seemingly rational choices based on illusions and pre-conceived notions.
