Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

Chapter 8. Have You Had an Innovation Lobotomy?: ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY BLOCKAGES

The Key Dangers

• Making your numbers is the most important thing.

• Career opportunities seem limited.

• Failure is a career-limiting event.

• Management doesn't want ideas from employees; they've got enough already.

• We're doing really well; we just need to execute on the business that's there.

Overview

There is a tension between the need for operational excellence and protecting against (or preemptively creating) disruptive innovation. As organizations grow, they may not want to jeopardize their success and they may become risk averse in their investment decisions, or a culture may emerge where failure is not accepted. Because incremental innovation is usually something people want, and disruptive innovation is often something people don't want (at least inside the organization), this can hamper an organization's ability to pursue disruptive innovations. Incremental innovation often comes from implementation, while disruptive innovation often comes from imagination. We will examine the roles that different kinds of innovation play in organization success and look at how to remove the organizational psychology blockages necessary to pursue incremental and disruptive innovation at the same time.

What Are You Afraid Of?

Most people are afraid to fail. And this fear holds people back, both from imagining truly breakthrough solutions and from taking the kinds of risks that lead to disruptive and innovative outcomes. ...