Killing Innovation - A Manager’s Guide
I wrote a short article the other day about innovation and someone took umbrage at one of my lines that the public sector (as the traditional hierarchical bureaucracy) has 1001 ways to kill a good idea and that we need to move towards a model that has 1001 ways to advance a good idea. Innovation can often be really difficult for managers who are under time and budget constraints to get the job done rather than look to do things differently.
I came across this blog post which describes 5 questions that can be raised by a manager to kill innovation. The beauty of responding with a question is that it makes the innovator have to justify their innovation to you through logical reasoning based on your own assumptions - a phantasmagorically circular way of killing innovation slowly but surely.
I think we are now up to counting 1035 ways to kill innovation (although we cheated because we started at 1001)!!
February 21, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I thought your 1001 way to kill innovation in the public sector was a conservative estimate. We talk the talk, but rarely walk the walk in this area. We want to be challenged and openly say so, but when the challenge comes we don’t want THAT challenge.
Innovation involves change and that change involves pain. We know intuitively (some of us anyway) that innovation is the way forward, but we have no stomach for the associated pain.
So in the interim at least we’ll still keep taking about innovation ….
February 23, 2008 at 8:03 am
Luke
I agree with Frank - the public sector is so completely risk averse they are almost incapable of making a decicson, let alone being innovative. I truly suspect most innvation (if and when it rarely occurs) happens ‘under the radar’. I could list one hand hand (perhaps even 2 fingers 8-)) the managers I have worked for who had even one creative bone in their bodies.
How do we change this? I don’t know that we can. The public sector has always worked on the minus accounting side - i.e. if you do 9 out of 10 things well you sit at minus 1, not + 9. Noone is going to stick their neck out in this environment.
Frank is right - we just keep talking about it 8-(
April 3, 2008 at 2:43 pm
It is so true, it has made me depressed, I am going home straight away. I’m an Innovation Manager. It is the bean counters that always ask these questions that nobody can answer, they use their imagination as a contraceptives.