Innovation and control

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Innovation and control

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Editor's note: How does a library foster innovation while maintaining enough control to keep things running? It's an inherent conflict, one that can be healthy but requires thought and attention. More than a decade ago, one AUL at an ARL library recognized the problem and put it this way: "We were so busy looking at the sky that we were forgetting to check the books out." More often, perhaps, libraries are accused of focusing too much on checking the books out and failing to look at the sky.

Steven Bell discusses innovation and control in posts from Designing better libraries, excerpted and adapted for use here.

Organizational tension between innovation and control

Originally appeared in somewhat different form as an October 24, 2007 post at Designing better libraries.

There is an inherent dualism within most organizations between the desire for innovative workers and the desire to control those same workers. After all, if everyone is off being innovative who’s going to be getting the work done? This seems to be a problem in the library world. I am reminded of a rant by David Lee King in which he claims that attendees at his presentations almost unanimously agreed that if they tried to implement innovative Web 2.0 technologies in their libraries they’d hit a brick wall with their supervisors and library directors. Is it that some library directors are simply resistant to change or do they fear that their organization will suffer if workers spend a few hours here and there experimenting with new technology--the result of which could be an innovative service enhancement?

This problem is by no means unique to libraries. It’s a challenge for all types of organizations, and it’s a conundrum that must be addressed by the organizational leadership. The problem and potential solutions are explored in a new book by Gary Hamel titled The Future of Management. I recently read an excerpt in Fortune Magazine. Though the book received just a fair review over at BusinessWeek, I think the excerpt offers some stimulating ideas, and I’ll want to see more of what it has to say about innovation. For example, Hamel writes:

When talking to senior executives about the need to encourage innovation, I often get the sense they’d like their employees to loosen up a bit, to think more radically and be more experimental, but they’re worried this might distract them from a laserlike focus on efficiency and execution... I’ve heard this concern expressed in a variety of ways: “Yeah, we want people to innovate, but we have to stay focused.” “Innovation’s well and good, but at the end of the day, we have to deliver.” “If everybody’s off innovating, who’s going to mind the store?” These sentiments reveal a persistent management orthodoxy: If you allow people the freedom to innovate, discipline will take a beating.

In other words, having more of one means less of the other. So what advice does Hamel have for organizations that would like to have their cake and eat it too? Hamel’s approach is to provide examples of companies that, in his words, have learned to “double dip” and have both innovation and worker discipline in the same setting (not just a separate innovation or design lab). His examples are Whole Foods Market, W.L. Gore and Google. One problem that most library managers might have with these examples is that they use some fairly radical organizational structures. This can include the use of small teams with with the power to make key decisions, highly flat structures where there are no titles and no supervisors, half-days off for “dabble time,” financial rewards for innovation and a host of other practices that may be difficult to implement in traditional library hierarchies. In fact, this is a problem that the BusinessWeek reviewer had with the book. How many organizations can structure themselves like these three companies? Even Hamel acknowledges that there have to be mechanisms to “keep things in check.”

So while it’s unlikely library organizations are suddenly going to re-structure themselves to resemble Google, there are some libraries that have organized workers into teams, others that are allowing for more experimentation time and others yet may be trying techniques that allow workers a bit more freedom and a little less control. If you know of some good examples or you are making progress in this area at your library, please share your insights.

Unfortunately, there were no comments between October 24, 2007 and April 8, 2008--but you can leave yours on the Talk page!

Innovation, not information overload, may be what 2008 is all about

Originally posted in somewhat different form on January 9, 2008 in Designing better libraries.

Information overload isn’t just for librarians anymore. As long as I’ve been in this profession, and especially in the past few years, having more information than I can possibly cope with is the name of the game. Now everyone else is catching onto the challenges of capturing the most important information, applying it for decision making and storing it for future use. While some may think that the new year will be all about dealing with information overload, I think we’ll be focusing more of our attention and energy on stimulating our own innovation. Here are some signs.

Boxing in creativity

Even the New York Times is providing insight into if not outright advice on how to improve individual and organizational innovation. In a recent article the Times observed that “As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.” This exact point was made in my post about Thinkertoys (and see below)--that our expertise can blind us to possible solutions and innovative ideas because we are unable to see things from different perspectives.

Creating the innovation culture

I recently discovered two excellent pieces about innovation. If you are looking for ideas on how to create an innovation culture in your organization, begin your reading with an Innovation Labs white paper titled Creating the Innovation Culture: Geniuses, Champions, and Leaders. According to author Langdon Morris, an innovation culture is one in which innovation happens and does so consistently over time. He says organizations with innovation cultures have individuals who fill three essential roles:

  1. The creative genius whose insights develop into ideas and then into value-adding innovations.
  2. The innovation champion who supports innovation by helping creative people to overcome the obstacles that otherwise hamper innovation.
  3. The innovation leader who defines the organization’s expectations and policies so they favor innovation.

After discussing each of these three roles in greater depth, and supporting it with examples from the business world, Morris explains (via his Innovation Culture Table) that most business practices exist to maintain stability and standardization while extending the status quo. Does that sound like a library for which you’ve worked? If an organization is able to start its innovation culture by bringing together these three roles, then it should begin to remove the obstacles that inhibit the growth of the innovation culture.

Innovation as a learning process

Though its scholarly approach (and length) makes for more challenging reading, the article “Innovation as a learning process: Embedding design thinking” is worthwhile for its attempt to better understand the innovation process by blending ideas about design and learning--two skills set that are of increasing importance to the work of librarians. The article was published in the fall 2007 issue of California Management Review.

This blending results in a model that explains the innovation process as a set of four stages:

  1. Observation (contexts)
  2. Frameworks (insights)
  3. Imperatives (ideas) and
  4. Solutions (experiences).

The authors, Sara Beckman and Michael Barry, focus more on the work of teams in this article. The learning styles intersect with design within the innovation team itself. The most effective teams include a leader with a concrete experience style, an artist with reflective observation style, a writer with abstract conceptualization style and a speaker with active experimentation style. These are somewhat foreign sounding learning styles and the authors don’t do much to explain them, but there are a few good case studies which help to clarify things a bit. This is the sort of article that will demand several readings.

Good innovators are good information managers=

Perhaps what one can take away from all these articles on innovation is that good innovators are good information managers. They have methods that make the best of information received, and they are good at identifying worthwhile resources, applying appropriate filters to channel the most appropriate information to themselves, then screening the incoming news to identify the most salient information, and ultimately disseminating that information to their colleagues or team members. So for all the talk about 2008 being the year of information overload, I’m going with 2008 as the year of innovation.

Finding your inner creativity

Originally appeared in somewhat different form as a December 19, 2007 post on Designing better libraries.

Some librarian bloggers complain about LIS education, with the number one complaint along the lines of “I didn’t learn anything.” My reaction is “Were you listening or thinking while you were doing all that reading, writing and fieldwork?” None of us recalls everything that happened in LIS school (or from our undergraduate days for that matter) but I have several memorable experiences that were indeed excellent learning events.

One came in my now ancient PL/I programming course. The instructor was awful, but trying my hand at computer programming languages taught me a great life lesson: to solve problems you must look at them from a completely different perspective and the more complex the problem the more perspectives one must think through. When my programs failed to run (and how I dreaded redoing those punch cards!) I realized the only way to attack my failure was to stop my linear thinking and turn the problem completely upside down. I had no idea then, but I was using a Thinkertoy technique to release my inner creativity

I had never heard of Thinkertoys until I came across an interview at IdeaConnection with the author of the book. Michael Michalko has put together an interesting collection of techniques for creative thinking, and collectively he refers to them as Thinkertoys, the title of his book on creative thinking.

While some of the suggestions will come off as platitudes (e.g., creative thinkers are positive thinkers), others are thought-provoking. For example, one of our greatest barriers to creativity is our own expertise. It leads us to use the same experiences and resources to approach problems in the same ways we have always used them. Sometimes that approach works fine, but mostly for simple decision-making scenarios. In other words ,it is critical to understand the context of the problem. If you attempt to resolve a problem with a complex context with techniques that work well in asimple context, you will likely fail (for more on this see an excellent article, “A leader’s framework for decision making” in the November 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review). Michalko says, “Learning how to look at problems in different ways with different perspectives, and learning how to generate a multiplicity of ideas is the key to solving any problem.”

Creativity and the opposable mind

What I found most interesting was the link between one of Michalko’s techniques for improving creativity to solve problems and Roger Martin’s new book, The Opposable Mind. Martin and Michalko both propose that in order to release creativity in problem solving one must be able to resolve “two opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts or images that exist simultaneously and that may even be beyond logic” (Michalko). This approach is what moves creative thinkers into the realm of seeing totally new perspectives on their existing problems in ways that free them from the biases of their routine approaches. We think there can’t possibly be another solution, that we’ve thought it all the way through. But when we explore options that are in complete opposition to our existing solutions, and then make the effort to resolve the two opposites a new solution is able to emerge. (In the HBR article the authors suggest that some decision-making situations are so utterly complex that one can only create an environment that allows solutions to emerge from the people affected by the problem. Master problem solvers and highly creative individuals have the knowledge and experience to both establish the right environment and avoid the urge to impose their own solution.)

I believe this is what I experienced in my PL/I course when I learned that, in order to get a non-thinking, highly logical computer to do what I wanted, I needed to stop reading the code commands in the book and instead attack my challenge from a completely different angle that had never before occurred to me. Unfortunately, that would usually happen only after many hours of frustration. But, like Edison I suppose, I was only exploring all the ideas that didn’t work before I found the one that did. Michalko has other good examples of this based on the methods of creative thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein.

Thinking outside the box?

Is what Michalko has to offer anything more than “thinking outside the box,” a platitude that suggests we need to move beyond our inner biases and mental limitations? He gives such basic advice as reading beyond the boundaries of one’s own profession (a key element of the keeping up philosophy I’ve been imparting for years) or seeking out experts from other fields for advice in solving problems. In seeking answers to these questions I will need to read the book and explore more of his creative thinking techniques. When I get to the end of it I will hope to be the monkey, not the kitten, when it comes to creative problem solving.

Monkeys? Kittens? Go read the interview.

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