Real innovation is exhausting. Changing how a group of people of any size perceives and organizes itself is just plain hard. It’s like General Robert E. Lee said of war:
It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it. (Fredericksburg, 1862)
Of course, that’s the problem. We have grown so fond of “innovation” that we have succumbed to innosanity. Like a ten-year-old backyard warrior posing as the conquering general, we pretend to be great innovators.
We launch toothless innovation programs to public fanfare. We improve our products and call it breakthrough innovation. We hold innovation award ceremonies and hand the top prize to the guy who reorganized the stock room (true story).
So what’s the harm? Why not let the stockroom improver think he’s an innovator? Why not let a cool invention get a marketing bump by calling it an innovation? Is the CEO that expects every employee to focus on innovation all the time really hurting anything?
Yes, it hurts. It trivializes the importance of knowing how to paradigm-shift and confuses this crucial capability with other equally important but importantly different activities. It lulls our organizations into a false sense of being innovative that leads to paralysis and disbelief when real innovators destroy our entrenched business models. Unlike the child playing war, when we play at innovation we are playing with live ammo, with lives and livelihoods.
Like warriors, innovators provide a crucial service but must also be managed carefully. History shows what happens when you let an army run amok during peacetime. Using the wrong approach to managing innovators at the wrong times can have disastrous results – ok, sure, usually without the bloodshed.
The next series of posts will explore how to maintain and manage your innovation forces through the business cycle the way countries maintain their military in peacetime, wartime, and stages in between.
Catch the next installment of the Innovation Wars saga, War and Peace.