Minds Limit (And Extend) Innovation

All innovation is dependent on the limitations of the human mind. We are unable to change and improve that which we cannot perceive and understand. As Canadian scholar Alexander Manu noted, “An individual’s or organization’s inability to recognize the meaning and potential of signals—be they in emerging technologies or emergent behavior—comes from the limits of their rational boundaries.” Our minds consistently retreat to the known and familiar.

One fascinating example was provided by Schoemaker & Day. The early morning hours of December 7, 1941 had been exceptionally busy for the captain of the destroyer USS Ward. Just hours earlier the ship had detected an enemy submarine moving toward Pearl Harbor. Releasing its depth charges, the crew of the Ward had sunk the submarine. While sailing toward Pearl Harbor, the captain could hear muffled explosions coming from the mainland. Turning to his lieutenant commander, the captain said, "I guess they are blasting the new road from Pearl Harbor to Honolulu." Even though his ship had engaged a foreign submarine only hours before, the captain made sense of the exploding sounds by reverting to his peacetime mind-set and completely failed to perceive the hostilities that lay just ahead.

How do we expand our sensemaking abilities? Education, experience, interaction with others, intentionally trying on new ideas, and developing multiple perspectives all help. Another important way is to ask God to “open the eyes of our heart.” In Ephesians 1:17-18 (NKJV) we read the prayerful admonition, “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints…” There can be no clearer vision than that given by God.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Keywords

Innovation, sensemaking, leadership, institutional learning, perception

References

Holy Bible, New King James Version (1982). Nashville: Thomas Holman Publishers.
Manu, A. (2007). The Imagination challenge. Berkeley: New Riders.
Prange, G. (1982). At dawn we slept. New York: Penguin Books.
Schoemaker, P. & Day, G. (Spring 2009). How to make sense of weak signals. MIT Sloan Management Review, 50(3), 81-89.

Innovating Christianity(?!)

Organizations, including churches, corporations, and universities, continually face the challenge of new and unsettling ideas. The preservation of longstanding corporate values, ideals, and principles is the sine qua non as new ideas are considered. Personal and group alignment with the “main thing” helps guarantee organizational perseverance, and the organization doesn’t want to fall prey to every new idea. As we learned in Ephesians 4, the faithful are enjoined “that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting…”

And yet, without fresh ideas and innovation, an organization quickly stagnates and dies. IDEO CEO Tom Kelley noted that leadership plays an important role in ushering new ideas into the organization: “You are not just in charge of today’s operations. You are responsible for making sure there is a tomorrow. You must constantly juggle the balls necessary to make new projects happen, to replace a just-finished innovation with a fresh exploration of another opportunity.”

This begs some important questions. Are there definable differences between new and untried ideas, doctrine, and dogma? How do we separate what is cultural baggage from essential biblical truth? When are orthodoxy, tradition, and best practices essential foundations, and when do they become unnecessary weighty impediments? What is the connection between personal and organizational revelation? In the crucible of idea consideration, can the process of discernment be speeded up or improved? What roles do leaders play in organizational acceptance of new information, and what roles do employees play in vetting new ideas prior to the leader’s acceptance of them? These important questions lie at the nexus of change management, the life of ideas, values transmission, and ideals preservation. These are dark woods that many fear and consciously avoid. It is an area that we must nonetheless choose to explore with an open mind and committed heart.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Keywords

Innovation, values, corporate history, doctrine, dogma, leadership

References

Kelley, T. (2005). The Ten Faces of Innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Hazy Memories of Innovation

It was Henry Ford who asserted, "History is more or less bunk” to a newspaperman from the Chicago Tribune in 1916. Ford was urging people to live in the present and not to be hobbled by tradition or orthodoxy. Mr. Ford also unintentionally focused on another issue: our historical record of innovation is accidently hazy at best, and intentionally distorted at worst. In brief, the guys who “won,” e.g. created the most successful innovation, were often those who helped write the revisionist history of their innovation efforts. As Scott Berkun noted, “Just because dominant designs developed before we were born, or in fields so far from our own that we’re ignorant of their struggles, doesn’t mean their arrival was predictable, orderly, or even in our best interest. Yet, the dominant designs, the victors of any innovative pursuit, are the ones that get most of history’s positive attention.” Looking in the rear-view mirror can distort historical reality: “Much of the literature of the history of technology is colored by post hoc kinds of explanations—that is, explanations that account for the emergence of a technology based on the final effects that the technology has” (Friedel, 2007). James Utterback similarly discussed historical distortion: “The emergence of a dominant design is not necessarily predetermined, but is the result of the interplay between technical and market choices at any one time.” That history doesn’t have to be too lengthy to be blurred. As Steve Wozniak, inventor of the personal computer for Apple said, “That’s what’s been bothering me—the fact that no one has gotten the story straight about how I built the first computers at Apple and how I designed them, and what happened afterward.” The lesson to be learned is that, to be of value, tales of innovation should come from primary sources, be consistent with other verifiable historical records, and always be considered with a measure of doubt. As my grandmother used to say, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see.”

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, historical record, innovation history, technological change

References

Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Cambridge: O’Reilly.
Friedel, R. (2007). A culture of improvement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Utterback, J. (1996). Mastering the dynamics of innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Wozniak, S. (2006). iWoz: Computer geek to cult icon. New York: Norton & Company.

Emergent Innovation

To meet the increasing pressure for innovative ideas, companies often impose new and foreign innovation techniques on company employees. Conversely, emergent innovation is a new paradigm that seeks out, recognizes, and helps promote useful innovation methodologies already successfully being used in the organization by “invisible innovators.” For more details, please read Emergent Innovation: A New Strategic Paradigm in the latest Regent University Journal of Strategic Leadership.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, emergent innovation, Christian innovation, leadership, innovation theory

Reality & American Auto Companies

The fundamental problem afflicting the American auto companies is that, for decades, they have intentionally cocooned themselves inside a bubble of unreality. As a long-term subcontractor of the Big 3 auto companies, I found it stunning to see how far away from the real world of economics and competition they were, and how strongly they fought to remain in their comfortable fantasy world. As Bossidy and Charan noted, “Though businesspeople like to think of themselves as realists, the fact is that wishful thinking, denial, and other forms of avoiding reality are deeply embedded in most corporate cultures. But what’s been tolerated in the past can’t be tolerated in this new environment. The price for failing to confront reality is simply too high.” Bankruptcy and sale to foreign interests is indeed a high price. Dance icon Twyla Tharp similarly noted the danger of avoiding reality: “Denial becomes a liability when you see that something is not working and you refuse to deal with it. You tell yourself ‘I’ll fix it later,’ or you convince yourself that you can get away with it, that your audience won’t notice the weak spots. This is bad denial. You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.”

Honesty begins with corporate executives. As former CEO Max DePree said, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” Bossidy and Charan noted that this is not always an easy task: “To confront reality is to recognize the world as it is, not as you wish it to be, and have the courage to do what must be done, not what you’d like to do.” Kouzes and Posner have studied the importance of leader honesty to subordinates: “Honesty has been selected more often than any other leadership characteristic; overall, it emerges as the single most important ingredient in the leader-constituent relationship…It’s clear that if people anywhere are to willingly follow someone—whether it be into battle or into the boardroom, the front office or the front lines—they first want to assure themselves that a person is worthy of their trust.” Christians are intimately aware of the importance of honesty and reality, and they join with the Psalmist, “What you're after is truth from the inside out. Enter me, then; conceive a new, true life.” How profoundly sad that the auto executives did not share the same desire.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Automobile manufacturing, Big 3, honesty, reality, values

References

Bossidy, L. & Charan, R. (2004). Confronting reality. New York: Crown Business.
DePree, M. (1989). Leadership is an art. New York: Dell.
Kouzes, J. & Posner, B. (2002). The leadership challenge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Tharp, T. (2003). The creative habit. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Why “Christian” Innovation?

As noted in an earlier post, Christians do not “own” innovation, and many faith traditions have ably informed the process of innovation through the centuries. Christians do possess a unique perspective on the Source of imagination and creativity. To learn more, please read Christian Innovation: Descending into the Abyss of Light in the most recent edition of the Regent Global Business Review.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, Christian innovation, faith, leadership, innovation theory

Working Conditions & Innovation Success

Media reports indicate that elegant facilities are important to innovation success in this modern age. Many companies hire a “starchitect” to design their plush surroundings, and then regularly lead customer tours through the facilities to remind them of how advanced the company is. As Becker and Steele asserted, “Just as a Ferrari performs much better on a well-paved road than on a sandy beach, a high-performance team or organization requires a high-performance workplace.”

Hang on! A thorough historical study of innovation generally refutes this concept. As Bennis and Biederman noted, “The tendency of great things to be accomplished in dreadful places should give architects and decorators pause. There is something about the controlled chaos of a garage, the joyless interior of a Quonset hut, that seems to spur the imagination. Perhaps the charmlessness of these places forces the people who work in them to turn inward, where problem solving takes place. Certainly these environments offer few distractions, including comfort. For reasons still to be discovered, creative collaboration seems to be negatively correlated with the plushness of the office or the majesty of the view. Awful places have come to be seen as almost a requisite for a Great Group.” Silicon Valley icon Guy Kawasaki echoed their thoughts: “A lousy building and lousy furniture are necessary because suffering is good for revolutionaries. It builds cohesiveness; it creates a sense of urgency; and it focuses the team on what’s most important: shipping! If you are ever recruited by a team that claims to be revolutionary and see beautiful, matched Herman Miller furniture, run, do not walk, from the interview. On the other hand, if you see a lousy building, lousy furniture, but fantastically creative workspaces, then sign up immediately.”

The apostle Paul, certainly no stranger to difficult conditions, was nonetheless incredibly innovative. Paul clearly explained his reasons in his letter to the Philippians: “I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content: I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, Christian innovation, facilities, workplaces, human resources

References

Becker, F. & Steele, F. (1995). Workplace by design. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bennis, W. & Biederman, P. (1997). Organizing genius. New York: Addison-Wesley.
Kawasaki, G. (1999). Rules for revolutionaries. New York: HarperCollins.