Innovation and Creative Tension

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Innovation and Creative Tension

Written by Dena Hurst, Ph.D.

Innovation is no longer the exclusive realm of Research and Development
teams or eccentric scientists in university laboratories. It is not Newton sitting
under an apple tree or Descartes locked in his study on a cold night or a teenage
Steve Jobs hunched over a computer in his garage. Innovation is not the result of
activity in isolation.
Innovation is applied creativity, captured potentiality. Innovation is the key
to long-term sustainability for any organization, for standing still is no longer an
option. Thus, innovation must be a shared responsibility—shared by employees,
customers, clients, and vendors.
On the flip side, innovation for its own sake is wasteful and ineffective;
uncontrolled innovation is chaotic and disruptive; innovation not balanced with
vision is destructive. Innovation is a powerful force, and one that must be
handled with love and discipline. How do we do this?
First, you must be clear about your organization’s purpose, core values,
goals and desired future reality—in short, your organization’s vision. The vision
defines the parameters of innovation. If you manufacture bottle caps, you might
come up with brilliant ideas to improve the process of cap production or make
caps that seal more tightly. You might even come up with a new bottle design to
complement your caps. But you do not want to put energy into creating stronger
shoelaces.
Second, be clear about your expectations around innovation. Is innovation
a priority in your organization? Are employees allowed time to think and create?
Are they encouraged to openly share ideas with one another and with
management? Do they understand what they can innovate? All of these points
are critical.
Employees must believe that innovation is your priority. This must be
repeated to them as if it were a mantra. Structures (processes and procedures,
rules, etc.) should be put in place that provide viable outlets for creativity and
idea sharing. Employees should be given an allotted amount of creative time; a
suggestion box could be established; the process for submitting ideas for review
by management should be clearly understood, and so forth.
Further, innovation requires collaboration, multiple ideas, multiple voices,
and multiple perspectives. This approach helps with all of the stages of
innovation: review, selection, quality control, scenario planning, implementation,
and marketing. Part of your organization’s structure should be assembling
creative teams, cross-functional and cross-disciplinary, to carry out and monitor
the innovations that are approved.
Employees should be permitted to seek the personal practical knowledge
they need to connect to the source of their creativity. Perhaps they can be taught
problem-solving methods, or encouraged to read or attend classes, to reach out
to customers or vendors and ask questions.

Innovation should not be limited to the product or service you offer, the
“content” so to speak. It should extend to processes, the “how” of doing business,
and to relationships, with whom we do business. There is no limit.
Third, embracing failure is essential. You cannot operate a work culture in
which nothing less than perfection is accepted. If people cannot fail without fear,
then they will not take risks to be creative. Quality ideas will be stifled, and
employees will either become complacent in their work or leave. I once worked
with a manager in setting up performance standards for his operation. When I
explained that the first step was to monitor current performance to see what the
data indicated (number of errors in a particular process, in this instance), his
response was that there was no need to track current performance. Mistakes
were being made, so it obviously was not good enough. He expected 100%
error-free work. His thinking is reflective of much of our traditional leadership
theory, but it is not realistic. It is not so much that we avoid failure, but that we
handle it with grace and learn from it.
A corollary to this point is embracing the unpredictable pace, and
seemingly erratic trail, of innovation. Progress is not linear, meaning it does not
continue steadily at the same pace until it reaches fulfillment. It actually increases
exponentially; once attention and energy are put towards an innovative path,
success often comes much quicker than planned.
And fourth, look outside your organizations and notice trends among your
competitors and peers, learn about innovations in other industries, even in other
countries. Have a forward thinking perspective will help you as you help move
your organization towards its desired future reality.
Fostering innovation can seem overwhelming to both leaders and
employees; it does bring about a certain amount of uncertainty. But without that
creative push, without focusing on the gap between where we are and where we
want to be—or who we are and who we want to be—there will be no urge to shift
from current reality. This state is what we at JLC call creative tension.

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