There are generally two kinds of innovation. The first is the kind that comes from the top (i.e. your company’s visionary founder, a term which may or may not need air quotes at your workplace, guides the organization to produce something that has never been produced before. Or takes something that has been produced before and puts a clock in it). That’s top-down innovation: a small group of folk in control of the company does all the innovation. A future article will focus on how to generate innovate ideas in this group.
Alternatively, we have grassroots innovation, which is where the folks who are actually doing the tactical work still find time to innovate. The important distinction here is that the people at the top are paid to innovate. The folks at the bottom do it for free. So how can you encourage this?
Cross-functional teams
What is a cross-functional team? It is a group of people with different skillsets working together. An easy example is the C-suite of a company: The CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO, CFO, …etc. There’s a big difference between someone with financial skills and someone with technology skills, but they have regular meetings and align on company goals. Another example might be your standard Scrum team at a technology organization. You have front-end developers, back-end developers, UX Designers, DevOps engineers, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners.
So now that we know what a cross-functional team is, how do they encourage innovation? Well, in several ways:
- T-shaped people: Cross-functional teams create people who have great depth of expertise in one area, but also shallow depth in a LOT of areas. If a financial person works closely with a technical person, that technical person will begin to understand the importance of good financial management. The innovation comes in when that technical person asks financial questions that any good financial person might have ordinarily dismissed. Maybe the answer seems obvious in the financial field, but when they are forced to explain it to a layperson they might realize how silly it is. Alternatively, a technical person might bring obvious insights from their own field to finance where they might be considered novel. Wired Magazine published an article recently about how we came realize that COVID was airborne. I don’t want to summarize it here, but it is a fascinating read and I encourage you to go there and then come back. The conclusion is that it was only when an air-pollution expert worked with infectious disease experts that we realized that COVID could remain airborne for much longer than we thought.
- Retaining Organizational Knowledge: Some companies are too small to have several front-end developers on staff–maybe they just have one–and what happens when that person leaves? What if they leave abruptly due to an unforeseen circumstance or accident? That knowledge goes out the door. By placing folk into a cross-functional team, some of that knowledge will be retained by others even if they don’t share a discipline. A front-end developer, for instance, will work on tasks with UX designers and back-end developers, and if that front-end developer leaves, the UX Designer and back-end developer will probably know enough about their work to be able to help onboard their replacement. Less onboarding time means more time to innovate.
I’ve used the example of executive groups and scrum teams above, but working groups and steercos also cross-functional. Look for ways that you can encourage that in your company.
Feedback Loops
I once worked at a company with a brilliant CEO. He’d started the company in his home office and grown it into South Africa’s largest web-hosting provider through a combination of sheer innovation and hard work. Unfortunately, the company was so dominant that it had stagnated a bit and become a “country club” organization, which is to say a company where everyone drives a nice car and parties together but not much gets done.
When I arrived, we tried to change that:
- We founded the UX discipline, with a mission to connect with our customers.
- We added a banner on our log-on screen asking customers if they wanted to join an “early-adopters” group who would get access to our app when it was in beta and who would be invited to participate in ideation ceremonies.
- We began interviewing the Contact Centre, which was a group of 80 or so helpdesk folk on what problems their customers were facing and including them in an innovation group.
Almost immediately, things began to change. For instance, the engineering group, who had done most of the innovation until then, had wanted to undertake a project to speed up how fast one of our products loaded for resellers (folk who added value to our product for a markup). Apparently, customers had to wait 15 minutes, which horrified them. I asked one of our Product Owners to interview a few of them and none of them complained about the wait time. They simply started up the product and made themselves coffee. On the other hand, if one of their larger customers didn’t pay their bill on time, they couldn’t pay US on time, and we shut off service for ALL of their customers, not just the delinquent one. That was a much more urgent problem for them.
With this insight in hand, we re-focussed the company on a more sophisticated billing system and saw gains in customer satisfaction very quickly.
Create Innovation Champions
At Teck Resources, we wanted to make sure that Security was a priority for the company. The standard way to do this was to hire a bunch of security folk and put them onto each team, but I’d had the unfortunate experience of being hacked at a previous company, and we’d dramatically increased our security footprint there in a clever manner that we wanted to try here at Teck.
We asked each team to supply us with Security champions. These champions could be from any discipline–all they needed was to have an interest in Security. We ended up with a good mix of folk, everyone from UX Designers to Architects. These folks would meet biweekly in a “guild” that would examine new topics in security and then these champions would bring that knowledge back to their teams.
Effectively, we created a cross-functional team that was focussed on a new skillset. When one of them learned something new, they were able to bring it to the guild meeting and other champions cross-pollinated it back to their own teams.
While no organization is perfect security-wise, we’ve seen huge gains in the quality of the code and in the culture of security within the orgnisation.
Innovate on Methods to Innovate
What companies should be aiming for is a mix of both kinds of innovation. Generally, we call this “top-down/bottom-up innovation”, and this is how companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are able to continue innovating after they’ve become so large that top-down innovation alone isn’t enough to sustain them.
Often leaders at large companies talk about creating a “start-up atmosphere”. In large part, this kind of innovation is what they mean.
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