Improve this One Behavior to Encourage Innovation
We All Get to Choose: Do We
Encourage Originality or Conformity?
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s
funny…’” said Isaac Asimov,
capturing the importance of maintaining an open mind and following our
curiosity. Indeed, many of our most critical developments have come not through
incremental steps along a planned development but by questioning our basic
assumptions and seeing what lessons come out of it. As Carl Sagan put it,
“We are rarely smart enough to set about on purpose making the
discoveries that will drive our economy and safeguard our lives. Often, we lack
the fundamental research. Instead, we pursue a broad range of investigations of
Nature, and applications we never dreamed of emerge. Not always, of course. But
often enough.”
Yet too often we close ourselves off to these
discoveries. We avoid investing in the unknown and the risk of unexpected
results, preferring to follow familiar and proven paths.
As we push for assured results — and punish delayed
gratification — we trade the ability to chance major breakthroughs for
the predictable slog of guaranteed incrementalization. And we get behavior
that’s derivative, not innovative.
A model that we drastically need to change. Or
live with the results.
The Downside of
Punishing Risk
In 1975, Senator William Proxmire, a fiscally
conscious Democrat from Wisconsin, awarded the first Golden
Fleece Award to the National
Science Foundation for spending $84,000 on a study on love. Proxmire would
continue to award his golden fleeces to those projects he considered to be the“most
outrageous examples of federal waste.”
Throughout his 13 years bestowing the award, some
of the 168 recipients included studies to compare the aggressiveness of fish
and rats after drinking tequila and gin, a study by the Department of Defense
to determine if people in the military should carry umbrellas in the rain, and
a Department of Justice study to better understand why prisoners want to escape
from jail.
It’s easy to get on board with fiscal
accountability. No one wants to have their tax money wasted. And Proxmire, who
was inducted into the Taxpayers Hall of Fame for his efforts to curtail
government spending — yes, apparently there is a Taxpayers Hall of Fame — did succeed in driving
greater fiscal scrutiny and restraint.
But it’d be shortsighted to ignore the downside of
the Golden Fleece awards. We’re not very good at predicting which projects will
be a success versus those that will go nowhere. Yet the potential to be
publicly criticized for a failure tells people that they better know the value
of their research before they even begin to conduct it.
With that potential threat, who wouldn’t hesitate
before pushing in a risky new groundbreaking direction and consider the safer,
incremental approach instead?
Uncertainty or
Certainty? Unknown or Known?
“Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never
count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other
words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly
requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can
bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the
task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of
genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.” — Albert O. Hirschman
In the summer of 1928 a Scottish biologist, known
among his friends for being disorderly, was researching bacteria cultures when
he failed to clean up his lab before leaving for vacation. When he came back,
he found that a number of the petri dishes had grown moldy. Before throwing
them out, he discovered the mold in one dish had destroyed the bacteria culture
growing there.
It’s easy to see how this research of watching
fungus grow on bread and cheese would have been well-suited for a Golden Fleece
Award and the associated public criticism. Yet while the timing predated an
award from Proxmire, Alexander Fleming’s work was enough to win one from the
Nobel Committee.
The mold Fleming found was penicillum, a fungus
that grows on bread. It would lead to the development of penicillin, and save
the lives of millions of people. After receiving the Nobel Prize for his
efforts, Fleming remarked, “One sometimes finds what one is not looking
for.”
Fleming’s discovery isn’t unique. Many of our
scientific advancements have come from unexpected directions. And many of our
greatest findings generated out of ideas that brought heavy initial skepticism.
A Polish woman wanting to sift through tons of
African ore, looking for small particles that she believes will glow in the
dark. A German scientist who never graduated from high school is looking for
invisible magic rays that can show us our skeletons. And an Englishman wants to
better understand why fruit falls to the ground.
Yet Marie Curie’s work in discovering radium and
polonium yielded great strides in cancer therapy. Roentgen’s efforts to
discover x-rays have revolutionized medical diagnosis. And Newton developed
laws that drove advances in everything from the Industrial Revolution to space
flight.
Many discoveries and developments that not only
impact our lives, but characterize the world today, were developed when people
were given the opportunity to explore fundamental questions and the freedom to
follow their curiosity.
They often didn’t know where their research would
take them. They couldn’t have offered guaranteed results or promises of
success. And this very aspect was often the key to their success. As Stuart
Firestein put it in his book on ignorance,
“Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding
pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to
screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.”
And our ability to make similar contributions — in our companies and
our lives — relies on whether we choose to encourage these behaviors
or stifle them.
How Does Your Company
Manage Uncertainty?
“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” — John Cleese
When an experiment doesn’t work out at your
company, how do people react?
It’s not just a question for labs and research
facilities. We all perform experiments every day.
Developed a new product feature and tested it with
your customer? That’s an experiment. Implemented a new process initiative or
improvement? That’s an experiment. Challenged the existing way of doing
business by creating something new and maybe better? Yet another experiment.
While we may not be performing these experiments
in a controlled lab, every time we take action to test preconceived beliefs,
it’s an experiment. And the results often tell us whether we’ve created an
environment that encourages innovation or conformity.
So when one of these experiments fail, how does
your company respond?
Do people shut down? Close ranks? Ask whose fault
it is?
Or do they come together? Try to understand the
cause? And see what they can learn for next time?
If the typical reaction is the former, it’s no
different than awarding your own version of the Golden Fleece Awards. If we
vilify ideas and initiatives that aren’t immediately successful — or don’t quickly
deliver a profitable result — people will quickly stop pursuing the more ambitious ideas. As Ed Catmull described the impact of this behavior,
“In fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or
unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe
that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not
innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the
opposite will happen.”
The trailblazing physicist David Bohm described
similar concerns in his 1968 essay On Creativity. In it he described the
main barrier to committing to the new,
“One thing that prevents us from thus giving primary emphasis to the
perception of what is new and different is that we are afraid to make mistakes…
If one will not try anything until he is assured that he will not make a mistake
in whatever he does, he will never be able to learn anything new at all. And
this is more or less the state in which most people are. Such a fear of making
a mistake is added to one’s habits of mechanical perception in terms of
preconceived ideas and learning only for specific utilitarian purposes. All of
these combine to make a person who cannot perceive what is new and who is
therefore mediocre rather than original.”
Choose Your Response.
“Life would be dull
indeed without experimenters and courageous breakers-with-tradition,” wrote Marie Bullock as she rose to defend the great E.E. Cummings after detractors
attacked her Academy of American Poets for awarding him their annual
fellowship.
The prescribed innovation never happens. The sure
experiment isn’t really an experiment. And there’s no invention that doesn’t
bring some level of risk. With each step towards the new, towards innovation and
scientific advancement — we risk failure. How we choose to handle that failure — and the example we
choose to set for future behaviors — will determine whether
people push forward towards new and greater advancements or whether they elect
to merely repeat what’s been done before.
As our obsession with productivity grows and the
demand for near-term results hits a fever pitch, our patience for asking
complex questions and delving into the unknown is under constant attack.
As celebrated creative icon Charles Eames warned,
“Recent years have shown a growing preoccupation with the circumstances
surrounding the creative act and a search for the ingredients that promote
creativity. This preoccupation in itself suggests that we are in a special kind
of trouble — and indeed we are.”
We are indeed. But it’s not something that we
don’t know how to turn around. The next time an experiment doesn’t work out,
decide whether giving out your own version of the Golden Fleece Awards is worth
it. And recognize what it’s costing you in the long-run.
Jake
Wilder
https://medium.com/@jswilder16/improve-this-one-behavior-to-encourage-innovation-654e041256c5
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