How Do You Do Innovation?

 

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As an IT executive, I constantly get asked questions about innovation, whether it be from board members, members of our executive team, leaders from other organizations, etc. In fact, back when I was looking for my next role 18-24 months ago, this came up a lot in interviews. What I thought was interesting was the perception that some have, especially outside of the IT space, about how innovation occurs. It seems that there is the misperception that most “innovative” IT departments have teams of individuals just working on innovative solutions or to borrow a term from defense contracting -skunkworks. Many are surprised and usually enlightened when I discuss my approach to innovation. To me, innovation isn’t something that you come into the office and work on as just another task in your day where you require yourself to try to be innovative. I see that as counter productive and a waste of time. Innovation to me is solving a problem in a new or novel way. Now, you will notice that I didn’t mention technology there. Innovation doesn’t necessarily require technology. In fact, numerous times I have worked with department leaders to create an innovative solution to a problem that didn’t require me to add any additional technology to the equation, just a different perspective on how to think through the problem and redesign the workflow. Too often, we think of innovation as some mad scientist creation that happens in the bowels of our IT departments waiting to be sprung on the organization. While some innovation might come about that way, the innovation that I think most of us are driving toward is innovation that solves a problem and not innovation that is looking for a problem to be solved.

So, when I am asked how I encourage innovation across my team, I typically walk through my approach to innovation as a leader with them which usually consists of the following:

I start with developing a mindset toward innovation in my team through coaching and expectation setting.

·         First off, whenever I conduct team meetings, large or small, I always have someone present a problem that they are working on. This is typically voluntary, and my teams have learned to trust each other and me enough to know that this is a safe learning experience and one that they may derive great benefit from.

o   We walk through the problem statement, any steps that have been documented as part of the current process, and then what my team member has done or at least their thought process around how they are going to approach the problem.

o   I usually go first by asking some questions, which is typically where I encourage the innovative process because it lets my team know how I would approach or try to bring innovation to the problem.

o   Now, I know that my answer isn’t always or probably not even usually the right answer, so this is where I invite the rest of the team to chime in and ask their questions and begin to provide their suggestions.

o   What the presenter walks away from the meeting with is usually a pretty decently fleshed out plan for how they might solve this problem, and it is typically much more innovative than if only one or a couple of us had come with it.

·         So, this is the second thing to keep in mind about innovation: it quite often requires more than one brain and one set of eyes to really work. While encouraging innovation I also encourage collaboration, and I think the two go hand in hand. And this collaboration doesn’t just stop with the IT team but should also include the person/department that raised the problem in the first place and any potential stakeholders.

·         The third thing to keep in mind about innovation is there are no heroes in innovation. Everyone that participates in the process is part of whatever innovative solution that has come up. No one should be keeping score or trying to get credit for something innovative. Once that happens, innovation is now stifled by individual glorification. Let’s look at an example of how this might play out in both a positive and negative way:

 

Take my earlier statement about how often times when I get involved in helping solve a problem, that solution is often not a technical solution. So, let’s assume for a minute that I have a purchasing department that is swamped and another department that they serve that is frustrated because purchasing is way behind on their orders. Let’s also assume that many of those orders are pretty small amounts, say less than $50, and are typically ordered from one or two vendors. Through me asking questions to try to facilitate brainstorming a solution, the two departments agree that for purchases under $100, the department can place the orders themselves as the control provided by the purchasing department in this case probably costs more than the items being purchased. The purchasing manager can review a report at the end of the month for those items purchased by the department to make sure that they pass a reasonableness test and everyone is happy. In this case, I didn’t create a solution, I facilitated a discussion that led to an innovative solution. Now, if I were looking to get credit for a solution, I might have suggested creating a digitized process that has a digital requisition that gets routed for approval and where everyone could see the status. This solution uses technology and may speed up the process somewhat, but it doesn’t really solve the true problem, the bottleneck in purchasing, especially during busy periods.

I guess in conclusion, what I am really trying to say is that innovation is much less a process or a function than it is an approach to problem solving. True innovation takes a problem and comes up with a way to solve that problem and hopefully makes some process much faster or easier. Innovation is all around us, you just need to learn to recognize it. So, keep this in mind the next time you press a technology leader on innovation and make sure that your perspective is set accordingly. Unless that person is the head of a research and development department, the answer that you should expect or hope to get is some version of innovation is part of the problem-solving process. Understanding that problems don’t always mean something is broken, but just that they are usually something that can be made better in some way. With this expectation and perspective, you will be ready to sit down with your technology staff and discuss the problems that you are facing and work with them to create an innovative solution.