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 Their traditional reporting model was fast becoming outdated and their ancient practices were holding them back in the new and immediate world of reporting online.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.

Searching for social media, high-end man...

Searching for social media, high-end management people is a tough job. Something has to give when asking for applicants.Something like this frustrates and confuses me to no end:

This appointment requires you to have: • Marketing or Communications related qualifications • at least five years’ work experience in project management • an effective social network profile • a good understanding of WEB2.0 applications for business purposes and an understanding of the international media world and its many challenges.

I don't think I know a single person with "AT LEAST five years' work experience in project management" and "a good understanding of WEB2.0" and "an effective social network profile". Are you joking?You might be able to find a project manager with 5+ years of experience who has no clue how to spell "WEB2.0" (if anyone's using that terminology any more), or you might find a candidate with a social network profile, a great understanding of social media, convergence and innovation with a 2 years of experience.Finding a combination of the three is one helluva task.This frustrates me because there are many young, talented individuals who could jump at this job with open arms and do it effectively who would not be able to apply (or would be dissuaded from even applying) because of the experience. Or a very experienced, gung-ho candidate who needs a prod in to social media who is intimidated by the application standards who you lose out on.I think that the job description of "Innovation Project Manager" is enough to entice people of a certain caliber that you can then filter yourself in the interviews. Don't knock out the applicants before you even see them.

Innovation is such an exception thing to...

Innovation is such an exception thing to strive for. And I think that I am incredibly fortunate to land up in the market that I am in. Mobile is an innovative space.Let me not get caught up in my own head and clearly lay out what I intend to say:It's simple idea but on that only recently dawned on me. I am fortunate to be in an innovate environment. Imagine if I was still a print writer? I'd be doing the same thing over and over and over, every day. I'd call my contacts, I'd gather information and construct a story from the information, I'd conduct an interview and write the story which would be edited, sub-edited and cut-up by the mechanisms in place. My byline would appear in the paper and the sun would set and rise again to repeat the cycle. Sure the focus of the story changes but more often than not it's the same mechanisms.Let's look at an accountant, yes there are challenges in every client that an account might audit, but on the whole there is very little innovation in their market. Pascal might come out with an update, a law might be tweaked here and there and if an account is lucky they land an extremely strange client who they enjoy auditing, but the premise is the same, the actions are the same, the results are the same. NOTHING is new from year to year in the way that they do things.Very similar situations apply to Lawyers, many GPs (which is a pet hate of mine), Judges and many other careers, career choices, markets and industries. There is very little that drives innovation.Then you move in to the mobile industry and the market is booming, filled with innovation and change, constantly. That appeals to me.Now don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that other jobs or industries aren't appealing and don't have their own, relative levels of what some might term innovation. But where I am right now things change on a daily basis. My job spec today could be completely different tomorrow and in every likelihood will be entirely different next year when my current projects launch.This motivates me and this keeps me interested in what I am doing. I hate being stagnant and I hate reaching a point where maintenance of a job is more common than innovation, creation and envelope pushing.

Your idea, My idea, why's everyone so paranoid?

I read Tyler's post the other day and thought nothing of it. Then I noticed that Sessa and de Waal had blogged about it as well as others.I have a bit of a different approach to this concept than many of the bloggers have already taken. I say tough shit. I say what makes you think I want YOUR idea? I say, what makes you think that I didn't think of it first and that's why I got it out quicker? I say, I must be better, stronger, faster, smarter than you if you had the idea and lost out. That's what I say.Mike commented on Tyler's post asking him to name names and brand the ones that stole. Let me tell you that does no good. Mike is right though, the ones that "stole" ideas will meet their fate. The world is made round to go round and comes round fast.But I must reiterate, what makes you think that anyone wants to steal your ideas?My point? Your ideas are not original. Nothing that you or I can come up with will be a truly original thought. Those thoughts are all long gone. Show me an idea and I can show you another who has thought it. Give me an invention and I'll show you one just like it. Nothing is yours.My rebuttle question is this: Where did YOU get your idea from? Who are YOU ripping off? How self-righteous of us all to think that we thought the ideas and that others want to steal them? Who do we think we are?What a load of rubbish. I have not claimed to have an original idea. I am a man who implements not necessarily innovates. I cannot claim that at the 'ripe' old age of a whopping 23 that I have come up with anything great, wondrous or truly innovative or original. If you think you are that great, prove it. Don't complain that someone ripped off your idea.I bet that Alexander Bell wasn't the first to create the telephone and Henry Ford wasn't the first to create the motorcar. They were simply the first to release their inventions and receive the accolades. This is the way of the world, this has always been the way of the world. Simple.

TechAttack #5 - Fleck, not Flock, Fleck

I have just picked up this interesting little social site that allows you to make notes and bullets on any website. So now, through Fleck you can not only consume information, but you can give it back. Simply leave a note, share it, blog it and let people know what you think of the site you are visiting.Currently Fleck is not supported on IE, the makers suggest Firefox and are in the process of developing an IE version soon.I am still in the process of familiarising myself with this tool but I think it sounds interesting. A little bar at the bottom of your screen pops up with various options available including bullet, note, share, blog and others. Below is a screen shot.

The other joy of this little tool is that there is no need to sign-up or register. You can do so if you wish, but it isn't necessary. I have a registration addiction so I tend to register with every site that I stumble across.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

UPDATE: TechAttack #3 - coComment

coComment is fantastic. If you read TechAttack3 you will get the gist of the story surrounding coComment. Now I've had a bit of time making use of this initiative and I am extremely impressed.coComment takes a bit of getting used to and understanding but let's be honest, if I can do it, anyone can. It's a hop, skip and a jump away from registering to getting in the full swing of the process involved in tracking your comments.I not only spend alot of time reading blogs that I like and commenting on them, but following up on those comments and conversations. It is extremely time consuming to try and cover them all in one fell swoop and remember where I've been, who said what and when. So now I simply have coComment do it for me. The program can be downloaded (If you are using Flock or FireFox) and simply attaches itself to your blogger/wordpress comment box and asks if you would like to track the conversation. This is where it gets a little bit slow, once you tick the box and say you do want to track the conversation, you need to enter the blog title, url, post and post link then write your post and sign in as per usual. The comment is then sent straight to your coComment inbox where you can thereafter view and track comments on the conversation.It's simple, it's easy and that's the way I like these sort of applications to be. Easy enough for me to use and explain in 2 days and one post. Done and dusted.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.