Being Innovators... or not

Fellow DIT’ers,

This is long, so if you’re not interested in what innovation really means and what it really takes, I suggest you pass on this email or, if you are interested, read it offline at your leisure. Comments welcome; your innovative ideas are even more welcome!

I’ve heard it said around the office… we (DIT) should be innovators; departments should be looking to us for solutions; we follow more than we lead; departments are creating innovative solutions and we’re not…

Cindy Rohlf may have said it best a couple of years back at the mass “Leon” meeting at the Main St library when she told the IT department, “I don’t look to Engineering for innovation (in IT). I look to you.”

First off, I trust we all agree that we do, indeed, offer innovative solutions on a daily basis. Yet many outside of a small circle of techs may never know about it or be able to fully appreciate it. By the same token, I think we’d agree that we can do better in this area.

Do we even know what innovation is? If so, are we too busy to innovate? If not, how do we become innovators? Do we sit back and wait for a problem and then attempt to offer an innovative solution? Or is it possible to practice innovation and become better at it over time? What do others do?

There is an excellent Information Week article, titled Innovation Atrophy: How Companies Fight It that explores innovation and issues surrounding it.

Article: What is Innovation Atrophy? “A condition where risk taking and daring become so neglected… that IT pros forget how to take a chance on a big, potentially brilliant idea.” (Innovation Atrophy, p. 24)

Employee: Hey, I don’t have time to do that! I’m busy with scheduling, maintenance, project management, programming, and a ton of other things. I don’t have time to “take a chance on a big, potentially brilliant idea”. I’ve got real work to do and zero time to dream!

Man, if we don’t have time to dream about how to make this City better and deliver better services faster and partner with departments for their success, we’re in BIG trouble. If you’re hung up on “dream” word, think of it another way… it’s visioning; taking risks; setting goals for the future; prioritizing our work to those goals, becoming vested emotionally in the success of others, and making a real difference in others we serve.

In fact, the idea of taking “a chance on a big, potentially brilliant idea” is central to the HPO philosophy that the City adopted. Anybody ever heard of a BHAG? Everybody who has attended Leadership Meetings (and maybe HPO training) has heard of it. A BHAG is a Big, Hairy Audacious Goal:

A true BHAG is clear and compelling, serves as unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.
—Collins and Porras, 1996

What do others do?
Some companies have “innovation teams” staffed with real people whose mission it is to evaluate emerging technologies, dramatically improve business services, solve particularly troublesome problems or just move a company forward in new ways.

The article addresses 4 Steps to Spark Innovation (p. 26-27):

1. Encourage innovation



2. Collaborate with partners outside of IT (checkout their ref to newsletters as a way to highlight innovation)



3. Pick the best ideas to move forward on



4. Discard the word “fail” and replace it with an attitude to “test and learn”

The article emphasizes the need to know your customers (p. 26). Without knowing how they do things and why they do what they do, innovation may become the equivalent of a high school science project… technology for technology’s sake. If we don’t meet with your partners and become vested in their success, how we even hope to be innovators? And who are our partners? If we have a defined list, maybe we’re limiting ourselves artificially and not thinking big enough.

Learning to fail (the anti-thesis of innovation)
The article stresses the need to know our “appetite for failure” (p. 29). Are we really willing to fail? One only need look at our meetings and how new ideas are received by others to gauge our appetite for failure. When new ideas are presented, do people start shooting them down? Or do we play off each other and attempt to make those ideas better? What happens to us when things don’t work as we expected? Do we gather and learn or start pointing fingers and look for a bus to throw someone under? Your gut is already telling you what our “appetite for failure” is. How do we change that?

If we are reluctant to innovate, it might be due to a lack confidence or because we have become risk-adverse. Going back a year or two ago in an email I sent out…

Another trait of great leadership is the tendency to take risks, but before we go there…

Some schools of thought see failure as a learned response. That is, we learn to fail by associating a certain set of emotions with the concept of failure. And then we do everything we can to avoid those “bad feelings” that we associate with failure – anger/disgust with oneself; a feeling of inferiority; aloneness; lack of confidence; awkwardness. To avoid of those “bad feelings”, we can become risk adverse and sometimes miss out on opportunities that could propel us and others to greater heights.

Thanks,
Greg