Is Innovation Management an Oxymoron?
For the past few years I’ve felt buffeted by two encouraging and yet conflicting trends: on the one hand we’ve seen a rise in the attraction and acceptance of innovation as a necessary driver in the success of organizations; and on the other hand we’ve seen an attempt to standardize and systematize a process (innovation) that is often complex, chaotic and where failure is built in.
Often there seems to be a vast gulf between people who actually develop innovative solutions and people who want to manage this process.
We typically describe the process of innovation as an iterative process of divergent and convergent phases. Innovation typically arises from joining two previously known ideas into a completely new idea. It is where a diverse group of thinkers of doers can come together to challenge, engage and support each other.
We typically describe the role of managers as planning, organizing, and directing the completion of specific projects for an organization while ensuring these projects are on time, on budget, and within scope. Their goals are to reduce costs and maximize company efficiencies. They also evaluate the performance of employees who carry out a particular set of tasks.
When you put these together, you get something that seeks to embrace chaos, speculations and improvisation combined with someone who seeks predictability, efficiency, and de-risking.
We can talk about this on a conceptual level forever but I find that when I meet people with the title Innovation Manager I often find people who have a really hard time practicing a lot of the characteristics of innovators — rather than opening up to push themselves, they are afraid of looking silly or even wrong. It’s not that they only have let a lot of their creative muscles atrophy; they often seem suspicious of their own muscles.
One of the problems I see is how we define the word or role “manager.” Right now might describe the rise of Innovation Management as a reaction from traditional Project Management and Managers to stay relevant in a quickly changing world and to maintain the positions they’ve worked hard to achieve in our corporate industrial complex. Remember that the golden age of efficiency and Six Sigma is a recent phenomenon, starting in the 1970s, and while it still delivers efficiency, we can’t describe it as a process geared to creating innovation.
As I try to think of a good metaphor for what an Innovation Manager should be, I find myself coming back to the role of a manager of a baseball team (sorry internationals!). Baseball is a beautifully slow game of nothing happening until everything happens all of a sudden. It is a weird mix of individuals of various talents competing individually together. It has star players (usually) starring and role players supporting until they too suddenly take a star turn.
The manager’s most obvious tasks are to pick out starters, make substitutions, and argue with the umpires. But mostly the manager has to 1) make sure the players have practiced the fundamentals 2) cultivate individual relationships with the players so that they see that the manager is invested in them and believes in them so they can play their best and 3) create a culture of winning and support to maximize the group as a whole.
Typically great managers have had mediocre playing careers — they are not the stars but the failures, ones who have played and deeply understand the game. Their lack of stardom has allowed them to observe both players and managers to gain an innate understanding of what works and what doesn’t. But they know and feel the game in their bones but can’t rely on their star status to get players to follow them.
And right now we’re seeing a pushback in baseball against the quants — the smart Ivy Leaguers running teams with no feel for the game. Moneyball, it turned out, started sucking the life out of the game.
I think this is the optimal description of an Innovation Manager — it’s someone who has done innovation and understands what it takes to make something great, unique and valuable. This baptism by fire might be the distinguishing characteristic of a great innovation manager because it means that the manager will not only expend a lot of energy on creating that winning culture, they will also spend internal political capital to support and protect individual members of their team to give them the space to experiment, fail and succeed.
Lately I’ve seen a lot of articles where authors keep saying that designers and innovators need to learn more about business in order for leadership to take them seriously. I think the opposite is true: managers and leaders need to experience the messy, complex, chaotic and exhilarating culture of innovation in order to lead and manage it and so that innovators will trust them and deliver great work.
Right now, I think we are too far apart. Innovation doesn’t need more predictability and efficiency; it needs more space, more play, more unpredictability and future thinking. An Innovation Manager who feels uncomfortable in this space will not succeed in delivering innovation to their organization.
We need to keep pushing everyone out of his or her comfort zones if we are going to successfully shift from a management driven economy to an innovation driven economy.
