Squelching Innovation
By Clark Quinn
Look, innovation sounds good, but…do we really want it? Innovation means change, and we’re comfortable. If things get shaken up, we could be under threat? We could have to adapt or succumb! Far better to be safe. So, how do we squelch innovation?
We can look for inspiration to the dimensions of a learning organization as documented by Garvin, Edmondson, & Gino (HBR 2008). In it, they talked about four dimensions that make a supportive environment. Obviously, we want to interfere with those! The four components are valuing diversity, being open to new ideas, time for reflection, and psychological safety. We need to have interventions to constrain each.
Obviously, we can ensure there’s no time for reflection by the invocation of the time-honored “hey, we don’t have time for that, we have deadlines!” There’s a natural resistance to reflection we can tap into.
Similarly, a “that’s not how we do it here” is an effective barrier to new ideas. Invoking consistency suggests that there’s a reason it’s done this way, and that other ways have been evaluated. (Even if it’s not true.)
Valuing diversity is a little bit tougher, but really all we need do is take it down a notch and just ‘tolerate’ diversity. The point is to not actually value diversity, such as seeking to ensure we’re exploring wild ideas which come from different ways of looking at the world.
Finally, a ‘Miranda Organization’ mentality – where anything you say can and will be held against you – is a pretty good technique for constraining ideas. People won’t contribute their most innovative ideas if they’re afraid they’ll be pilloried for them.
Accompanying the supportive environment are concrete practices. For one, there’s the possibility of training folks the various known skills around innovation. For instance, brainstorming, and personal knowledge management. It’s imperative that those skills aren’t considered germane, and individuals and groups are left to their own devices for how to be effective in learning. Fortunately, most folk psychology has much wrong.
Another opportunity is to avoid experimentation. Jennifer Mueller points out that one of the barriers to innovation in organizations is a mismatch between their desire for new ideas and their resistance to risk. As a form of learning, innovation inherently requires experimentation, and experiments that never fail inherently can’t be innovative. An effective barrier to new ideas, then, is to happily pretend that experimentation is welcome, but ensure that only successful experiments are tolerated. There can be no tolerance for anything but success.
The final element they tout is leadership. If leadership, for instance, were practicing things like learning out loud (or, as Jane Bozarth has it, ‘showing your work’) might encourage employees to believe it’s an important practice. The only safe thing to do is to pay lip service to innovation, but not actually have any management or executives actually practice it.
These steps will help keep innovation from happening. We see many of these same barriers in organizations that actually would like to foster innovation, so we know these elements work. Unless you actually do want innovation, and then, well, maybe, you need to do the reverse?
Bozarth, J. (2014). Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To’s of Working Out Loud. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.
Garvin, D. A., Edmondson, A. C, & Gino, F. (2008). Is Yours a Learning Organization? Harvard Business Review. March, 2008.
Mueller, J. (2017). Creative Change: Why We Resist It…How We Can Embrace It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.