Innovative Express
"Improving effectiveness by making the complex simple and making the simple work!"
May 2007
In this issue:
I hope this newsletter finds you well. Last month, I attended the World Innovation Forum conference in Newport Beach, California. I heard some great speakers such as Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School Professor renowned for his research on disruptive innovation), Ray Kurzweil (one of the most provocative thinkers on technology's future impact), and Vinton Cerf ("Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google). And I heard some not-so-good ones too. In one of the future newsletters I will include a short summary of the ones I liked and explain why I didn't care for the others.
There is an old adage in consulting that if you are not insulting, you are not consulting. Of course, you don't have to be rude about it, but you do have to question the status quo and help make implicit assumptions explicit. In the May, 2007 issue of Leadership Excellence, Editor Ken Shelton pays a tribute to Tom Peters (for being a gunslinger who dares to name names) and Warren Bennis (for being a Supreme Botherer). He goes on to say that "I've selected articles for this issue using one criterion: Would Tom like them?"
Well, I am proud to say that my article "Fostering Innovation: Doing Right By Doing Wrong!" was selected alongside those by Tom Peters, Marshall Goldsmith, and David Maister among others. If you want to see the whole issue, please let me know. This newsletter provides a summary of my article, which urges leaders to drive out fear and learn from mistakes—sometimes even make deliberate ones!
Inspired to agree, disagree, or otherwise comment? Have an interesting story to share? I hope that you will let me know your thoughts.
Abhay Padgaonkar
President, Innovative Solutions Consulting, LLC
Coloring Inside The Lines
Last summer, I attended an improvisation workshop for 8-10 year olds at a piano camp. The clinician was teaching children that the only rule was that there were no rules! The children were asked to play in a given rhythm ("ostinato"), but the notes, the order, and even the octave didn't matter. They could "just make it up."
I observed with amazement as a look of horror came on the faces of many of these talented youngsters. Some even looked at their parents for approval to play without any rules. Others simply froze. After encouragement and assurance by the teacher, however, they made some beautiful music together on the fly. Picasso once said that "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once they grow up." I think that is precisely the dilemma most companies have when it comes to innovation.
As children, we are told to "do the right thing" and always color inside the lines. At a fairly early age, it becomes imprinted in our brains that mistakes have to be avoided like the plague. We are made to feel embarrassed, apologetic, ashamed, and even guilty when we "screw up." Other than an occasional rebellious act or two, most of us learn the rules quickly. The result? We learn to fear failure.
Doing Right By Doing Wrong?
And then we grow up! With experience, we discover what Charles F. Kettering found out a long time ago: "You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere."
Mistakes are an important part of learning and innovation-some will say the only way. It is impossible to tell when a system is working well as to why it is doing so. Fred Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, says, "Its success rests on a long chain of subtle interactions, and it's not easy to determine which links in the chain are most important."
A Comedy of Errors
According to Dr. Atul Gawande, the author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, "When things go wrong, it is usually because a series of failures conspires to produce a disaster." For example, an independent panel investigated the massive, fatal truck bomb strike on the U.N. headquarters in Iraq in August, 2003. The report largely blamed the U.N. for mismanagement of security breaches. The factors responsible were lack of clear leadership, deliberate defiance of regulations and recommendations, turf battles, dysfunctional systems, and bureaucratic procedures. Sound familiar?
As organizations become more successful, they increase in scope and size. Along the way, they also become more bureaucratic and internally focused. They become intolerant of mistakes and incapable of learning from them. Yet, they aspire to retain the spirit of innovation that made them successful in the first place.
Organizations have a typical response when there is a failure: denial, deflection, blame-game, fault-finding mission, search for the scapegoats, and punishment of the innocent. This automatic response emanates from the fact that we are trained to fear failure. Paul C. Nutt, who has studied hundreds of decisions, makes a strong case in his book Why Decisions Fail as to why debacles must be studied. He says that "Debacles highlight blunders. They offer insights into how a decision can go wrong, why it went wrong, and what changes in decision-making practices could improve the chances of success." He directly traces the failures to the actions of decision makers.
Learning from Lapses
Rather than playing the blame-game, leaders need to encourage honesty and openness. Dr. Atul Gawande says that "Getting open and honest reporting is crucial. The Federal Aviation Administration has a formalized system for analyzing and reporting dangerous aviation incidents, and its enormous success in improving airline safety rests on two cornerstones. Pilots who report an incident within ten days have automatic immunity from punishment, and the reports go to a neutral, outside agency, NASA, which has no interest in using the information against individual pilots."
That is exactly why Deming's advice was to drive out fear: "Many employees are afraid to ask questions or take a position, even when they do not understand what the job is or what is right or wrong. People will continue to do things the wrong way, or not do them at all. The economic loss from fear is appalling. It is necessary for better quality and productivity that people feel secure."
Simply beating the front-line people on the head does not eliminate the root causes of failures. Leaders have a responsibility to look in the mirror to see how the decisions they make may introduce latent errors upstream that later set the organization up for failure downstream. They need to overcome the inherent resistance, especially among senior management, to hold themselves up for scrutiny.
Making Deliberate Mistakes
While executives "know" what needs to happen for innovation to occur—flexibility, decisiveness, and risk- taking—"doing" it is a whole another proposition.
Paul J.H. Schoemaker and Robert E. Gunther in their article "The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes" (Harvard Business Review, June 2006) point out the reason: "Although organizations need to make mistakes in order to improve, they go to great lengths to avoid anything resembling an error. That's because most companies are designed for optimum performance rather than learning, and mistakes are seen as defects that need to be minimized." This mode of thinking goes to the core of an organization's culture. A memo from the corner office is unlikely to change that overnight.
A culture of innovation nurtures fearlessness. In this regard, as FDR once said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Leaders need to drive out fear, accepting that experimentation will inevitably lead to errors and that's the price you pay for learning. Rules and regulations may enable a smooth and efficient day-to-day operation, but they can become constraints and obstacles that can easily choke off innovation.
To encourage innovation, leaders must identify and root out innovation-busters in their culture. They have to set an example by challenging "common wisdom." It's up to them to set the tone by rewarding those who are willing to challenge long-held, rigid assumptions—both written and unwritten—in a constructive and systematic way.
Schoemaker and Gunther go even further and extol the virtues of making deliberate mistakes: "Many managers recognize the value of experimentation, but they usually design experiments to confirm their initial assumptions." Instead the authors advocate making "mistakes" knowingly. They also lay out a process on how to decide between smart mistakes and dumb ones by 1) identifying assumptions, 2) selecting assumptions for testing, 3) ranking the assumptions, 4) executing the mistake, and 5) learning from the process.
Learning From Lapses
When innovation is high on their agendas, leaders have to be the instigators of the movement toward learning by making deliberate mistakes. If they do, the story about Thomas J. Watson, Jr. at IBM refusing to fire a midlevel executive for a multi-million dollar mistake saying that "he had just spent millions of dollars educating him" will be a commonplace occurrence in corporate America rather than folklore that it has become.
Innovation begins with creating a culture that encourages making deliberate mistakes and learning from them—deliberate or otherwise. As Bill Gates said, "It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure." But that means unlearning what we were first taught as children and then learning to do right by doing wrong!
The Bottom Line: "Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment." Have you exercised "bad judgment" lately?
Personally Speaking...
At the World Innovation Forum, all attendees were offered a Windows mobility device, courtesy of Microsoft, running on HP’s iPAQ. These gadgets would allow attendees to check agendas, vote in live surveys, make phone calls, send questions to the speakers, and surf the web. I thought this was a great idea until I tried to check out a device on the first day. After several tries, my iPAQ refused to finish the initial download process. So I went and got another one. This time, I had registration issues because the first was still showing checked out. So I had to go get help again.
The third time was a charm, but the device was very slow, the user interface clumsy, and the overall experience nothing to write home about! I found it ironic that they would give out these clunkers at the innovation conference to showcase their technological superiority. Worse yet, nobody bothered to ask how the users' experience was!
The Bottom Line: Somebody forgot to tell them not to "squat with their spurs on."
Disclaimer: "This written advice is absolutely intended to be used, and if used under expert supervision is known to improve organizational and individual effectiveness substantially."
© Abhay Padgaonkar 2007. All Rights Reserved.