They set exceptionally high performance standards for their people. They recruit the best talent they can. Exploring risky ideas that ultimately fail is fine, but mediocre technical skills, sloppy thinking, bad work habits, and poor management are not.
Steve Jobs was notorious for firing anyone he deemed not up to the task. At Amazon, employees are ranked on a forced curve, and the bottom part of the distribution is culled. It, too, has a rigorous performance management system that moves people into new roles if they are not excelling in their existing ones.
At Pixar, movie directors who cannot get projects on track are replaced. It sounds obvious that companies should set high quality standards for their employees, but unfortunately all too many organizations fall short in this regard. Consider a pharmaceutical company I recently worked with. The truth is that a tolerance for failure requires having extremely competent people.
Attempts to create novel technological or business models are fraught with uncertainty. But failure can also result from poorly thought-out designs, flawed analyses, lack of transparency, and bad management. Google can encourage risk taking and failure because it can be confident that most Google employees are very competent. Creating a culture that simultaneously values learning through failure and outstanding performance is difficult in organizations with a history of neither.
A good start is for senior leadership to articulate clearly the difference between productive and unproductive failures: Productive failures yield valuable information relative to their cost.
A failure should be celebrated only if it results in learning. A simple prototype that fails to perform as expected because of a previously unknown technical issue is a failure worth celebrating if that new knowledge can be applied to future designs. Building a culture of competence requires clearly articulating expected standards of performance.
If such standards are not well understood, difficult personnel decisions can seem capricious or, worse, be misconstrued as punishment for a failure. Senior leaders and managers throughout the organization should communicate expectations clearly and regularly. Hiring standards may need to be raised, even if that temporarily slows the growth of the company.
Consider how digitization has impacted the value of different skills in many industries. In some cases, people can be retrained to develop new competences. Maintaining a healthy balance between tolerating productive failures and rooting out incompetence is not easy. A New York Times article about Amazon illustrates the difficulty. One reason striking a balance is so hard is that the causes of failure are not always clear. And in the event of bad technical or business judgments, what are the appropriate consequences?
Everyone makes mistakes, but at what point does forgiveness slide into permissiveness? And at what point does setting high performance standards devolve into being cruel or failing to treat employees—regardless of their performance—with respect and dignity? Organizations that embrace experimentation are comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. They do not pretend to know all the answers up front or to be able to analyze their way to insight.
They experiment to learn rather than to produce an immediately marketable product or service. A willingness to experiment, though, does not mean working like some third-rate abstract painter who randomly throws paint at a canvas. Without discipline, almost anything can be justified as an experiment. Discipline-oriented cultures select experiments carefully on the basis of their potential learning value, and they design them rigorously to yield as much information as possible relative to the costs.
They establish clear criteria at the outset for deciding whether to move forward with, modify, or kill an idea. And they face the facts generated by experiments. This may mean admitting that an initial hypothesis was wrong and that a project that once seemed promising must be killed or significantly redirected. Being more disciplined about killing losing projects makes it less risky to try new things. A good example of a culture that combines a willingness to experiment with strict discipline is Flagship Pioneering, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company whose business model is creating new ventures based on pioneering science.
Flagship generally does not solicit business plans from independent entrepreneurs but instead uses internal teams of scientists to discover new-venture opportunities. Explorations are initially unconstrained. All ideas—however seemingly unreasonable or far-fetched—are entertained. A willingness to experiment does not mean randomly throwing paint at a canvas. But experimentation at Flagship differs in fundamental ways from what I often see at other companies.
First, Flagship does not run experiments to validate initial ideas. Such a lean approach to testing not only enables the firm to cycle through more ideas more quickly; it also makes it psychologically easier to walk away from projects that are going nowhere. It forces teams to focus narrowly on the most critical technical uncertainties and gives them faster feedback.
The philosophy is to learn what you have gotten wrong early and then move quickly in more-promising directions. Third, experimental data at Flagship is sacred.
If an experiment yields negative data about a hypothesis, teams are expected to either kill or reformulate their ideas accordingly. At Flagship, ignoring experimental data is unacceptable. They gain no financial benefit from sticking with a loser program.
In fact, just the opposite is true. Continuing to pursue a failed program means forgoing the opportunity to join a winning one.
Again, compare this model with what is common in many companies: Having your program canceled is terrible news for you personally. It could mean loss of status or perhaps even your job. Keeping your program alive is good for your career. At Flagship, starting a successful venture, not keeping your program alive, is good for your career.
Disclosure: I serve on the board of a Flagship company, but the information in this example comes from a Harvard Business School case I researched and coauthored. Disciplined experimentation is a balancing act. These four major aspects of innovation management set the foundation for successful and sustainable performance. Innovation is centralized in the majority of large organizations, and although there are a lot of positive aspects to it, it's not necessarily always the best option for all.
Meanwhile, the rest of the company toils away in the surrounding towers, working in cubicles with five-pound, year-old laptops. This type of centre devolves into innovation as spectacle instead of innovation as strategy.
All business units and people should work towards a common goal regardless of the employee role. A good way to ensure that the strategy is at the core is by aligning the KPIs, and compensation structure to the overall strategic innovation objectives. To be able to fully benefit from innovation, the whole system needs to be integrated to the actual ways of working. Building a repeatable approach to creating innovation in your organization requires some work and almost always involves some trial and error — no matter how good you were.
With a systematic approach and focusing on the right things, you too can create a scalable machine for driving sustained innovation performance, no matter your current level. This post is a part of our Innovation Management blog-series. In this series, we dive deep into the different areas of innovation management and cover the aspects we think are the most important to understand about innovation. You can read the rest of the articles in our series covering innovation management by clicking on the button below.
With the recent economic turmoil, we've seen many struggle, and want to do our part in helping to build back better. We need innovations now more than ever, so we made Viima's Basic plan free for an unlimited number of users.
All rights reserved. Why Is Innovation So Hard? Innovation Innovation Management. So, how are people supposed to figure innovation out?
Table of contents Companies aren't used to managing different types of innovations Innovator's Dilemma Finding a balance between different types of innovations Common obstacles to innovation Critical capabilities are missing Cultural challenges Lack of leadership support Organizational structures and processes Integrating innovation to the core Putting it in practice - Innovation Master Class.
Related posts. Innovation requires looking at what already works, identifying an unmet or unrecognised need and applying creative resources to design a solution. Innovation can turn this into your invisible advantage. In an innovative culture, employees know that their ideas are valued and believe that it is safe to express and act on those ideas and to learn from failure.
Real dollars, real action, needs to be thrown at altering an approach to doing business. Attention needs to be placed in all these areas if innovation is to become a key value of an organisation. Consider the assets you have at your disposal within the workplace. Would removing those cubicle partitions make communication easier? Do teams need a unified communication app such as Slack?
This is about matching the right people to the right challenge and ensuring they are well resourced. Leverage new routines to promote innovation, recognise successes, capture learnings from failures, and create formal and informal opportunities for people to collaborate. Also, realise that the best in your industry may not always be the best for the job. There are situations when an unrelated industry, or employing consultants will bring fresh insights where internal staff may not be able to see the forest for the trees.
Does your infrastructure allow for cross-department problem solving, or is work siloed in different departments? For executives seeking to excel in addressing these challenges, innovation is attractive as it offers the potential for their organization to continually adapt to demands and improve performance beyond what is attainable through their day-to-day business.
However, achieving that is often elusive and many innovation initiatives fail to deliver on the desired outcomes due to challenges including understanding, culture, and approach. Innovation is not well understood. A successful program needs to establish what innovation is and why. Culture is a major barrier to harnessing innovation.
0コメント