Innovation is not for everyone

I used to work at a big financial news publication. This was one of my first (and only) corporate jobs. I had a journalism degree behind me and was deeply embedded in the Web 2.0 movement. Wordpress had just begun to boom and “citizen journalism” was fast becoming a mainstream reporting practice. Blogs were exploding and the narrative was shifting from journalists covering the news to citizens creating their own publications and putting out their own news.

Said another way: The company I worked for was in trouble and they didn’t know it yet. Their traditional reporting model was fast becoming outdated and their ancient practices were holding them back in the new and immediate world of reporting online.

As a recent hire in the new media department of this publication, I was placed in a cubicle next to the existing website editor. She was a lovely lady in her 50s. It was 2006 so her job was relatively new. Each day she and I would transcribe pieces of content from the main magazine (a weekly publication) to the website. It was a static website without comments, without sharing (because social sharing wasn’t really a thing, hell, Twiitter hadn’t even launched yet) and without any real-time functionality.

This lady, let’s call her Jane, could not see the wood from the trees. Jane was too deeply engaged in a job that she had been doing for too many years to be able to stop, look up and see the changes coming her way. She was grinding on deadlines each day and each week, repetitively completing tasks assigned to her. She was being rewarded by the senior editors for doing a good job, a job that she was trained to do, a job that she knew how to do and a job she had been doing for many years.

Unfortunately, working in the online space meant that her job was evolving faster than she was.

Her salary and bonuses were not dependent on her ability to adapt to the world around her. She was given a task and was rewarded for doing that task effectively. She was not incentivised to creatively problem solve, to be curious or to experiment.

This was a problem that she did not create and thus a solution she could not find, let alone implement.

She was in a position to innovate but was not capable of introducing anything new to create opportunities, grow and evolve the online reporting tools and platform that she had efficiently operated over the past few years.

CURIOSITY

There is research that shows that most people lose a sense of curiosity after just 12 months of doing the job they were hired to do. 12 months is not a long time.

What happens is that people are taught to do their work and generally they are smart enough to understand how to do the job efficiently, effectively and well enough that they are rewarded for completing the tasks every day. They become more efficient every day and are incentivised accordingly.

These are the dedicated, hard-working and dedicated members of a team who keep a business running. These are the very important cogs in a machine that must keep moving to create income and survive. Every business needs these people.

But these are not the innovators.

You cannot ask someone who has been doing a job in a very specific way and who has been rewarded and incentivised in a very specific way to all of a sudden stop doing their work and create an innovative outcome. It is very unlikely that this person is able to read the label from the inside of their own bottle. They are trapped in the bottle and very few are able to climb their way out of the slimy glass walls, out the spout of the bottle and crawl down the side to walk far enough away to read the label and figure out how to change the ingredients.

If you are leading a team right now and expect your hardest working and most trusted long term employees to solve big, hairy, audacious problems then you are in for some trouble. These people can definitely assist in explaining how things currently work but will not be able to introduce completely new business models, revenue lines or ways of working.

Curiosity is the god particle of innovation.

Asking someone who has been doing the same work for five years to all of a sudden discover their curiosity for different ways to do their job is not an easy task. It’s like asking a squirrel to put down its acorn and find a different kind of food. Possible, but very unlikely.

Diversity

One way to spark curiosity is to find a diverse group of highly talented people and assign them the task of thinking about the biggest problems in your organisation.

Let’s go back to Jane and her online media job. I was placed in Jane’s department but given absolutely no power, no ability to experiment, no resources and no internal support. We had the chance to create something innovative, to launch a blog network that allowed our journalists to post frequently, update their articles and engage with our readers but the senior editors could not be moved from their legacy thinking.

We should have hired a diverse group of people who had skills in software development, citizen journalism, new media and front-end website development. We should have been given a small monthly budget to launch new and interesting projects and test out what worked and what did not. We should have been allowed to freely fail and learn from our experiments.

Jane should have been allowed to carry on doing her work as before and maintaining the business in the state that it was until the small skunkworks team had learned verifiable lessons to implement on the main website.

INNOVATION IS NOT AN ACTION

Innovation is an outcome.

Innovative outcomes are achieved when diverse and highly skilled people are given budget, freedom and time to experiment. These people must be allowed to be curious, inefficient, and to build, test, learn and fail while iterating and building more robust solutions.

There is no straight line to creating innovative outcomes and allowing people the freedom to be curious is scary and not always the most efficient way to build the future but without a doubt, this is the most effective way if your organisation is committed to continually creating innovative outcomes over a prolonged period of time.