Making innovation a constant daily task for everyone in finding time and space to become involved in, is certainly a real problem for many organizations.
Innovation does not sit comfortably alongside efficiency or effectiveness as it requires a much looser structure. It constantly ‘flies’ in direct conflict too much for many within organizations to create resistance and adoption.
Innovation is looking to increase variability, nearly everything else in the organization is the exact opposite. How do we address this resistance and make innovation part of the daily working routines?
Where can we start?
We have to open up our thinking to a number of “possible paths” to allow it to flow. I believe innovation should not be highly structured; it should be more loosely structured to allow the possibility.
For a start individuals and organizations needs to explore multiple ways to learn and find the right pathway for innovative learning as they progress.
This needs a more ‘dynamic social fabric’ to allow it to flow, it needs organizational encouragement. It needs mutual adaption and mutual adjustment. The understanding of the absorptive capacity framework I’ve outlined before helps structure this.
Three simple rules have great intent.
Possible a starting point is through three simple rules I came across, but presently I can’t find the reference source on this regretfully. These seem to me to have a powerful intent:
- Mapping organizational and project innovation processes in the context of shared responsibility for innovation relies on the rule of taking full responsibility that allows all “to see” the space of innovation that exists.
- Generalizing organizational and project knowledge in the context where knowledge is a central task relies on the rule of supporting routines for getting to that space and for keeping it open for all to share and explore.
- -This helps people be collectively conscious of what they know and how they now, build up and have expertise in are all dynamic routine activities to become competent experts.
- – It also fosters respect for knowing and learning from what others know and contributes to a growing improved skillset far more geared towards understanding higher-level conceptual frameworks
- Spiralling across cycles of adaptation in a context of constantly looking for new opportunities relies on the rule of constantly searching for new opportunities that create an organization in which people are used to innovation that becomes second nature– “the chaos is that we are constantly innovating”. Also, the rule provides people with the vital resources of having ways to deal with inevitable surprises of innovation.
We need to find ways to combine general knowledge for wide awareness of available options, and specialized knowledge for assessing the systemic impact of specific options.
We need to move towards the development of “T-Shaped skills” being available constantly, to apply to different problems. Choice can stay fluid and it gradually ‘firms up’ to allow greater exploration and evaluation, as we ‘master’ knowledge and progressively experiment.
The ability to innovate is in the people, it is not in procedures. Our pressing need is to structure innovation activity into everyday work, to make it dynamic in capability and become the new routine work.
I feel these three simple rules just seem to make such good sense as a starting point for making innovation part of every person’s working day. Do you?
