How can HR facilitate innovation?

I listened to an interesting podcast recently from the CYA Report team - "How HR is Killing Innovation with Hitendra Patel" Sure the title is a bit sensationalist, I personally don't think HR is killing innovation but poor HR certainly can.

Hitendra Patel is Managing Director for IXL Centre, an innovation consulting firm among other interesting positions such as Professor of growth and innovation at Hult International Business School.

There are a few thoughts and quotes from Hitendra that I'll draw out and discuss. It sounded like Hitendra was calling in via phone rather than in studio which made it difficult to catch each word however i'll do my best to capture Hitendra's statements when quoting him (apologies if this isn't a direct word-for-word).

Organisations tend to have people who fall into two categories; employees who diverge in their thoughts and employees who converge in their thoughts.

Staff who diverge tend to bring new ideas from outside the organisation into a discussion and are quite comfortable (and even enjoy), conversations taking creative twists and turns as ideas are explored. This could be sparked from an article they read, a new website they discovered or a fresh experience they had over the weekend.

Staff who converge tend to enjoy structure and focus. This can be formulating lists, plans and clearly executable action items on next steps. You might see them frustrated with meetings that lose focus or take too long and may actively cut them short to bring things back on track.

"We need the person who diverges, because those sort of people look beyond the boundaries of the organisatoin for dots, new dots, new ideas and eventually you'll need more dots than the dots that exist in your company but you'll eventually have to connect the dots. 

The person who converges doesn't like that space as much and will compress it but the person who converges is necessary because sometimes we do have to shut up and move forward and this can bring discipline to the process. Put those two people in the same room and we will have a fight but we have to teach each other how we will work with each other to collaborate." - Hitendra Patel

It's about building an organisational culture that allows both traits to co-exist and add value to the organisation in their own way; the people who create the dots and the people who connect them. Hitendra rightly points out we have a habit of hiring people just like ourselves and so it's important to make a conscious effort to consider if the organisation has a healthy balance to stimulate innovation (and make it stick!).

Innovation is about an experimentation cycle and iteration cycle

Experimentation cycle

This cycle is where an individual innovates and tries multiple different approaches. Think of a scientist or engineer who might not know exactly where the answer lies and so will test several options at the same time to see where they lead. This will inevitably lead to failures but that's the point of the experimentation cycle.

Hitendra talks about how many organisations stifle innovation by punishing failure, rather than seeing it as part of the experimentation (i.e. learning) process.

Iteration cycle

This is when a wining idea or process is found and resources are then spent on a continuous improvement initiative. This is a standard process within organisations as they look to streamline processes, refine procedures etc. However an iteration cycle without an experimentation cycle can open the risk of people barking up the wrong tree to begin with.

"When we look at most other functional jobs within companies, sales marketing, operations - we only give people one chance to do their work. We don't design in multiple cycles of experimentation and when you don't do that your staff are only going to take low risk and only do things that are 'right' or what you have done yesterday because you have not designed in opportunities for learning." - Hitendra Patel

Overly prescriptive position descriptions stifle innovation

This was an interesting point because in my experience position descriptions tend to have a surprisingly small impact on actual work performed. All too often I have encountered PD's covered in proverbial cobwebs reflecting a time and place sometimes years back. I'll assume then that here Hitendra is more so referring to an organisational culture that builds strictly defined position limits.

People need room to move, grow and change. To look beyond their day job and ask 'What's next?' 'What if?'. As mentioned above, if employees always do tomorrow exactly what they did yesterday they're not going to innovate. There's a useful metaphor mentioned in the interview where Hitendra talks about basketball players - given their experience they don't have to expend all their mental energy dribbling the ball (representing their day job). They instead focus on who they will pass the ball to, where they will play the court, the next decision they will need to make - future focused.

Games for innovation

Recently ABC Radio National Future tense had a fascinating interview with Dr Robert Dew. Robert is a games facilitator who specialises in innovation and Future Tense asked Robert a few questions about his thoughts on facilitating innovaiton.

In this particular game, participants act within a make-believe scenario. The participants are broken into four groups each playing a part of a HR department. The game itself runs for about two hours.

Here is an extract from the interview however the whole transcript and audio can be found from the ABC Radio National Website (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2009/2769322.htm). It is certainly worth a look at and is particularly relevant in the current climate where there can be little room for failed innovation investment attempts.

Robert Dew: Adults are different to children when they learn in that they have a basis of experience that they need to connect to, so what they're learning needs to be relevant. They come in with some transferable competency, and so they undertake meaning making in a very different way. In the area of innovation, it's really challenging to get people to give up linear thinking if you don't activate the child within, so to speak. So playing a game gives the ability to make a model of the world, and it also gives a way of activating people's sort of play-like sense, and that means that they're better at making connections.

In this particular game, what we want to show is how industry dynamics work, and so because we set up technically what's called a multi-round, multi-player, prisoner's dilemma, with incomplete information. We can predict very clearly what the emergent behaviours will be, and everyone goes, 'Ah, that's what happens', so it's really kind of that learning by experience concept.

Antony Funnell: And what are you hoping that they will take away from this, in terms of innovation?

Robert Dew: So I'm hoping that people understand that just because I'm faced with a contradiction, in this case a contradiction between the problem of competing and collaborating. I want to do both of those things, and I can't. I either compete or collaborate, I can't do both. With linear thinking what you do is you end up with some kind of compromise, where I compete a bit, then I collaborate a bit, and I'm not doing either very well.

To innovate you need to get to a higher ground, which is that I'm going to compete and collaborate at the same time, and so the game shows them how that's systematically constructible. So that's really what I'm trying to achieve.

Robert also interestingly spoke of evolutionary theory and how he was particularly inspired by Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker. I confess I haven't read The Blind Watchmaker, however I have read his 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene and completely understand where Robert is coming from. (See http://richarddawkins.net/RDbooks for more information if you're interested.)

Essentially evolution is an answer for a non-linear, problem-solving algorithm where you need to essentially evaluate strategies on incomplete information in a dynamic world. Robert sees a clear connection with the strict biological problem and the problem of innovation in business today.

Robert also speaks of the power of games in an unfreezing process. Especially in adult learning where you easily have a room full of people each with decades of experience. I find games excellent for these reason also however that topic may be for another blog post.