Thanks to some three decades of teaching in highly participatory environments and managing a site like this one, over the years I have been able to observe the many ways that people’s attitudes shape innovation environments.
Needless to say, the idea that the world is divide between optimists who see the glass as half-full and pessimists who see it as half empty is simplistic. People do not always respond to the same stimuli, nor do they always act in the same way: sometimes we tend toward optimism, and other times toward pessimism. We may intuitively think that pessimists tend to slow projects down by tirelessly highlighting unsolvable problems, which might lead us to think that we should keep pessimists away from projects with potential and instead fill them with optimists. Except that this would lead us to pursue hopeless projects. As George Bernard Shaw is often credited as saying: “Optimists and pessimists both contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist the parachute.”
Nevertheless, the attitudes of the people who make up an environment shape its capacity for innovation. An environment brimming with negativity will likely kill innovation, just as one filled with pathological optimists can lead to irrational risk taking. Wikipedia, a project I have followed for many years, and monitored the attitudes toward it by different groups, which is why I loved this 2015 article by Chris Dixon on the subject, “It’s hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment…” As a teacher and author, I have lived through the times when children were told not to use or cite Wikipedia on the basis that it wasn’t necessarily edited by experts and so could not be trusted. Today, Wikipedia is, without any doubt, the best and most complete encyclopedia ever created in the history of mankind — and yet, you still find doomsters (who will probably write in the thread below), who discredit it or point out its possible errors, even though the days when stupid journalists intentionally vandalized it so they could say it was wrong are long gone.
The problem with pessimists is that they are usually incapable of imagining how a project that today seems impossible will not be seen as so in the future. Indeed, the first editions of Wikipedia, before its community of editors was consolidated and before some of its procedures were regulated, even if only minimally, did suggest problems. But in response, the optimists at Wikipedia didn’t just say “never mind, just keep going, things will sort themselves out,” and rather, “depending on the development of the community, it is reasonable to think that the problem of vandalism will be minimized.”
Optimists, on the other hand, often have trouble understanding the magnitude of the forces around them. I highly recommend this article, “Ivory poaching has led to evolution of tuskless elephants, study finds”, which shows how predation pressure from poaching has led to the selection of a highly negative genetically encoded attribute, modifying the long-term characteristics of a species. Evolution and natural selection can teach us a lot about innovation, but we must always keep in mind that, in biology, the force that determines mutations is none other than chance, whereas in the case of human societies, we have other weapons and tools, such as culture. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) never had the opportunity to meet James Watson (born in 1926) or Francis Crick (1916–2004), and he never imagined that the mechanism of natural selection could depend solely on mutations at the molecular level that occurred completely by chance and that were simply selected if they represented some kind of advantage in a given environment. The thicker beak of seed-eating finches in certain Galapagos islands? A fluke, a mutation that allowed some animals to be more successful at feeding, to reproduce more efficiently, and to pass that mutation on to their offspring.
But in human societies, and when we talk about innovation processes, the fundamental force is not chance — although it may play a role, and not an unimportant one on many occasions — but another, from the field of sociology, which I have been studying for a long time, since I used the best known and most cited paper on the subject in my dissertation on the evolution of newspapers on the internet: isomorphism. Defined as the tendency of human organizations to become progressively more similar to their normative environment, it’s the reason why, in its three varieties of normative, coercive or mimetic; for example, all banks look the same, as do universities, or why all automotive companies tend to have structures, channels and mentalities cut from the same cloth.
Obviously, not all isomorphism is bad: sometimes, there is only one logical way of doing things, and whoever does not adopt that procedure, in a given technological scenario, simply cannot aspire to be competitive. Or certain types of isomorphism are constituted as norms, laws, standards, etc. that must be complied with, whether to guarantee certain levels of quality, safety or responsibility (and even these are sometimes put to the test by some innovators). But beyond these limits, a company should be constantly exploring new ways of doing things, new possibilities offered by the development of the technological scenario, or new possibilities derived from other possibilities, translated from other environments, adapted from other industries, or simply, nuances and variations more or less occurring in the activity. Innovation in efficiency, maintenance and transformation depend on the right mix of these ingredients.
And it is in this process of constant ideation that the construction of an innovative culture, capable of allowing ideas to be expressed and take shape without encountering fierce resistance or unbridled negativity, plays a fundamental role. Properly managing the profiles that interact in the innovation process, ensuring a balance between those who only see unsolvable problems and complications, and those who bet on everything new even though there is no evidence that it can really contribute anything. The duality between fear and fascination. Getting people in the right place to ensure a successful transition from ideation to execution. A company that aspires to develop an innovative culture must ensure that people who are typically reactive to change, especially those who are pessimistic, hypercritical or fundamentally negative, do not constrict the flow of new ideas and possibilities, while guarding against overly optimistic environments that are willing to waste resources on ideas that are absurd or lacking in potential.
All of this, moreover, varies depending on issues such as the type of industry and hierarchical level. A particularly conservative manager in a well-established industry with no surprises, located at a high hierarchical level or in a specific functional area is likely to stifle any possibility of innovation, and also to miss, and cause his company to miss, any possibility of disruption that may arise around him or in other companies. In a very dynamic industry, subject to strong evolution and fast movements, it is quite possible that this situation simply cannot happen.
Does your people management department understand the implications of this type of attitude, do you as a manager, or do you simply place people in positions without taking into account such potentially important factors? Is your company sufficiently clear about the importance of maintaining, nurturing and consolidating a culture of innovation?
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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