INNOVATION SPECIAL .......Inspiration, Not Desperation, Drives Innovation

Inspiration, Not Desperation, Drives Innovation

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it is a cruel stepparent when it comes to creating real breakthroughs in the corporate world. Many corporations today realize they are in a precarious position because they have lost their edge. I sometimes see managers drive their employees to work “better, faster, stronger” by making things harder for them. They erroneously think that scarcity or difficulty will somehow be more effective carrots on the end of the innovation stick than positive approaches.
Studies show, however, that stress is not a good motivator. In his best-selling book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses evidence to this effect, and it all comes down to the primitive nature of the human brain. In short, there are two neural pathways that we tend to operate along. With one, we move from stress-related emotions like fear and anxiety to calmness. With the other, we move from a state of boredom and apathy to excitement and a sense of fun.
Research reveals that stress does not inspire creative, pathbreaking thought. Workers creep along the tried and true until they find safety. This is not the scenario you want to create for your team, as it simply won't bring out anything much in people except a desperate desire for relief. In contrast, if you’re working from a baseline of apathy or complacency, you're in luck. Here, you have the opportunity to get things moving along the neural pathway from boredom to engagement. And the best way to do that is through positive reinforcement.
    The beer company AbInBev is a classic “Six Sigma” organization in managerial parlance, meaning that it does what it does excellently. They have recognized, however, that they have become too comfortable, and that in today's fast-changing market environment, that's a dangerous thing.
    One tack they are taking in an effort to get managers to innovate is to cut rather than increase their advertising budgets, yet still demand the same, if not better, results. That is what I call innovation coming out of desperation. Given how humans are wired, it's only going to be effective among a small group of people who habitually tend to traverse the boredom to excitement pathway. These types naturally translate desperation into a challenge, and they tend to be younger. But for the majority of their marketing staff, it's not going to work.
    Take a look at the film Apollo 13. Their charter was “failure is not an option.” They simply had to bring the astronauts back to earth. If you watch the film, you'll see that this inspired a few people to rise to the occasion, but it created intense burnout. The number of people who quit NASA after that mission was one of the highest in history of the organization. Innovation through desperation is not sustainable.
    To their credit, AB InBev has also set up a shop in Silicon Valley called the Beer Garage. One big chunk of their expenditures is on mass media, like television. They are out in California to understand what's going on in the digital media landscape so that they can leverage it. That's what I call innovation coming out of inspiration. Here, they’re likely to be much more successful.
    A classic example of the power of inspiration in stimulating creativity can be found in TSYS Acquiring Solutions in Phoenix, which produces merchant payment systems. Their traditional business provided the technology to capture credit card swipes in airport terminals. They made good money on these trillions of transactions every day, but they knew that with new payment systems being developed and new regulations, they would have to innovate.
    To do this, they created a technology platform whereby people from anywhere in the organization could post ideas. Everyone in the organization was given TSYS “dollars,” which they could use to “invest” in ideas they thought were particularly good.
    A young and largely unknown employee in the organization posted an idea for a technology that would make it much easier for retail stores to dispense gift cards with varying dollar amounts onsite. Due to the popularity of the idea among employees, as evidenced by the “investments,” the fellow became something of a rock star walking around the company as people began to recognize and talk about him. He was assigned a senior mentor who became an advocate for his project, and the company actually ended up developing the technology, to its great benefit.
    TSYS’s story proves that stimulating innovation does not have to be a pain game. They democratized where new ideas can come from and also capitalized on one of the most powerful motivators I've seen: social recognition. By inspiring, rather than driving innovation, they created a win-win that has indeed been paying dividends.
Baba Shiv, Sanwa Bank, Limited, Professor of Management Science, Stanford Graduate School of Business CDET130614