Developed by David Owens at Vanderbilt University and customized for the cultural sector with National Arts Strategies, this course is designed to help arts and culture leaders create an environment where new ideas are constantly created, shared, evaluated and the best ones are successfully put to work. One of the toughest challenges for any leader is getting traction for new ideas. Winning support can be a struggle. As a result, powerful new ideas often get stuck. This is especially true in the cultural sector. People involved in arts and culture often have little time and even less money for experimentation and risks. This course will help those in the performing arts, museums, zoos, libraries and other cultural organizations build environments where new management and program ideas flourish. Leading Innovation in Arts & Culture will teach you how to make an "innovation strategy" a fundamental component of your organization's overall strategy. In this seminar you will learn to: - Analyze constraints on innovation in your organization, foresee obstacles and opportunities, and develop a shared vision - Develop a process to manage the demands of multiple stakeholders, shifting priorities and the uncertainty inherent in new initiatives - Create a culture for innovation and risk-taking that generates new perspectives and challenges existing practice - Create a strong customer focus within your organization that anticipates customer needs National Arts Strategies worked with David Owens to customize this course for those working in the cultural sector. They based their work on David Owens’ Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations course. This highly interactive 8-week course will engage you in a series of class discussions and exercises.
L4-Part 3 - Strategy Constraints
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From the course by Vanderbilt University
Leading Innovation in Arts and Culture
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From the lesson
Organizational Constraints
This week's topic is Organizational Innovation Constraints. We are interested in understanding how organizations function in ways that can facilitate or constrain innovation in terms of their Strategy, Structure, or their Resources. This perspective is grounded in the idea that to develop and execute an innovative idea, you are going to need some form of organization, and the choices you make in terms of its functioning are consequential to its ability to innovate.
Meet the Instructors
David A. Owens, PhD, PEProfessor
Practice of Management and Innovation
Jim RosenbergIndependent Consultant and Senior Advisor at NAS
[music] We're going to start with the question of strategy.
Strategy is about intent, strategy is about what an organization wants to do,
where it's trying to go, and partly, how it tries to get there.
And so, I want to bring you back to an example we looked at which was the General
Motors EV-1, car the code name The Impact. And so, through some various things and
the story I told was that the compact became, the impact became the compact.
In fact, all the cars were crushed. I want to ask why.
Was this because someone didn't have a good idea?
Because we talked about the individual level about perception, intellection and
expression. Doesn't really seem to explain it very
well. Was it because of the group process?
Maybe there was a group of people who you know, how was a, how would a group have
been the, the cause of this, the cause of this thing to be pulled back and junked
the way it was? Now, there are some other things.
I've read with you all and we all discussed on the forms some of these other
questions. Was it a liability issue?
Maybe there's some problem with the car and they were afraid to have them out
there because people might crash or because they were unsafe.
Maybe there's no market for it. Maybe they saw it was only a thousand of
them, so why keep them out there if no one else is going to buy them?
Maybe there was some secret technology they didn't want other people to have.
Infrastructure, maybe a lack of infrastructure.
Certainly, there was at the time, the early 90s, difficult to find a place to
charge an electric car. Maybe it was a conspiracy.
Maybe the people got together and said, oh, let's, let's crash that, let's make
that thing not work. Was it too ugly?
I mean, that's a possibility as well. Well, one thing I want to offer is that
possibly from a strategy perspective, we think about the strategy of an
organization, the intent, we might actually be able to get some insight into
what happened with the electric car. So, the problem is sometimes in some
organizations, what we'll find is our ideas don't fit the strategy of the
organization. And, in fact, if they don't fit, what the
organization probably should do, this is from, remember, this is from business
perspective, what the organization should do is kill the idea.
The idea should not happen because if we have a strategy, that is we're trying to
achieve alignment, we're trying to achieve strategic fit, and your idea does not fit
that, we should not do your idea. Because your idea, if, if our alignment
takes us here and your idea is an idea that goes there, we should not do that.
Alright, we need to stay aligned. And if you have ideas that go in this
direction, they're good ideas for us, if you have ideas that go in this direction,
well, at best they're irrelevant and possibly, they're harmful.
And so, this question of why wouldn't org, employees of organizations sort of go in
that direction? Well, they would, right?
If, if you work for your organization, you want your organization to succeed.
And so, why would you not push in the same direction as the strategy of the
organization? One problem is, sometimes we don't know
the strategy. You know, why wouldn't we know the
strategy? Do you know the strategy of your
organization? This is a question I ask people often and
they sort of nod at first, they say, okay, well, tell me.
Then, it's much more difficult to tell. And why don't we tell people the strategy?
Well, one reason can be because we don't have a strategy.
And, in fact, we think we have a strategy and we work on it, but actually there's no
strategy there. And if there is a strategy, it's not
communicated to us. Another reason, we might not tell people
the strategy or why they might not know the strategy is that the strategy may be
secret. You know, oh, we have the strategy, but
it's a secret strategy. You know, we don't trust our employees
because if, if we told them and they might tell our competitors what our strategy is.
Well, guess what? They're not going to be able to innovate
for you. They're going to be pushing off in the
wrong direction if they don't understand that our strategy is to go in this way.
And we'll talk about overcoming these, these constraints, but think about it as
lack of trust. Another problem is our strategy may be
complicated. You may work in an organization, where you
say, let's show me the strategy documents and it's like a big row of, of big binders
on some shelf somewhere, you know, collecting dust because the thing is so
big, it's so complicated, it's difficult to understand.
And so, normal employees don't understand what it is.
How does that thing, you know, developed up there, relate to me at my job?
They have no idea. And so, when they're going to do
innovation, they have to say, well, I'm not sure which way to go.
So, they're just going to go the way that's comfortable for them.
Not the way that's necessarily aligned with where the organization is trying to
go. Organization maybe unrealistic,
unbelievable, yeah, we're going to take over the world.
People say, yeah, right, we have no money, we have no employees, we have no market,
we have no, and, and so, when things become unbelievable in that way, it's,
it's just as good that you don't have a strategy because people will treat it as
if it doesn't exist. And so, these are reasons why people might
not know the strategy. Another problem that we have is we have a
strategy and it changes, but no one notices that it changes.
So, in fact, that we may say, here's the way we're going to go off.
We're going to go do this thing. And somehow, something changes in the
world that doesn't meet our strategy anymore.
You know, the world changes around us. Our competition doesn't behave as the way
we predicted. Alright?
So, sometimes our competition, we think they're going to go this way, then they go
that way. And our strategy has to change.
Our strategy may no longer be valid for what has happened before.
But we don't update our strategy often enough to be able to address these needs.
We have problems where a strategy may require all the resources that we have.
That we don't have extra resource to do innovation with because our strategy
requires to be a lockstep to make sure the thing is that we do all work.
And so, why risk something if our strategy requires us to, in order to stay alive as
an organization, to do something when we take these experiments that might take us
a different way? And so, the strategy may be to not put
organizational resources at risk. And so, this is going to be a problem
where we say, well, we you know, even small experiments in organizations may be
pushed down, may be declined, maybe not followed up on because of the risk that
they create for organizational resources. Also, innovation may be viewed as not
strategic. You know, maybe our organization is really
about being efficient. And so, anything that is about efficiency
is not about innovation. Because first, innovation is about
learning. Right?
There's going to be some wasted time, some time that we spend in the early part of
the learning curve where we're not actually productive, we're not exploiting,
we're not producing, we're not doing all of that stuff efficiently.
And so, in organization where efficiency is the top value, the most important
value, then in fact, ideas, innovations that push towards, I mean, that ultimately
lean towards efficiency may, at first, not be approved because they have to go
through a stage if inefficiency before they can become more efficient.
You also may have this thing, the, the idea where your organization is a fast
follower model. It may be that your organization's
strategy is to not be efficient. I means, it's not to be the lead in
something. Maybe some organizations don't want to be
the first one out. Maybe you're much better at copying or
doing something, then when someone else has done it, making it better, than you
are at being the first organization in there.
So, let's think about some of the strategic trade-offs that you have to
make. We have these issues of in an
organization, people in the organization there have to decide you're making a
proposition for change this innovation. And what's the likely reward of that?
You know, what we have is risk reward trade-offs.
We have to sort of decide if it fails, how much did we spend.
If it succeeds, what's the return on the failure.
And in some organizations, they're not a very good language.
Not a very good set of discussions that take place around these trade-offs and how
it is we're going to make these trade-offs on a systematic basis in an organization.
Let me say that differently. In some organizations, if you don't have
the kind of language that's required to make these kind of, have these discussions
inside, to make the decisions on these basis inside, you're not going to have
good decision making around it. Someone's going to say, it's too risky,
it's too risky. And then, the op, the project will be
killed. Even though, risk is a relative term.
Even though, we haven't explained, what do we mean by risk?
We have another issue of the time investment required that people time, how
much people capital. And think, when we think of capital and
resources, let's think of financial capital, social capital, all those things
that they, we may need those for our strategy.
We may need to be able to use that stuff for our strategy.
And if it's tied up in some innovation somewhere, innovation that's not yet
producing, this can be problematic. So, you have a great idea for your
organization. It just requires a lot of investment and
maybe your organizational strategy is not to make those kinds of investments at the
until the time is there, that you're mature.
Also, and some of you noted this on the discussion forums, this idea of, of time
horizons. You know, what's a long term payoff,
what's the short term payoff? Is there a window of opportunity like,
what do we have to think about, in order to know that we're going to get there,
that, that the time that we're going to spend working on the innovation is
actually worthwhile. That at the end we actually get to
something meaningful. So, strategy constraints.
So, I've just talked about all of these strategy constraints, and now, what we'd
like to think about is how do I overcome those?
You know, what are the things I could do in my organization to overcome strategy
constraints? Both as a leader, so I may be a leader in
the organization, executive or a manager on an organization, but also as a
follower, a person inside the organization, what can I do to help our
organization overcome these kinds of constraints?
Well the first thing to think about is alignment that we need people aligned that
the organization strategy is to go in one direction and that people need to
understand, that's where we're going, because if they know that's where we're
going, then they are able to help, they're able to guide their, you know, their
innovative, their creative urges in that direction.
So, you may recall, we talked about Sigmund Freud.
And how we talked about the ego and, and how people want to create.
And, in fact, he said the, the inner drive is, is a drive for creativity.
So, people want to create. Why not channel that?
Tell them what the strategy is. Because without clarity about the strategy
people are going to push their innovation efforts in the wrong direction.
So, that's the most important thing. Know the strategy and teach people the
strategy if they don't know it. Another one could be to tell the story.
So, you have these big binders full of strategy documents.
Well, that's not very compelling, it's not very interesting.
It doesn't get people excited. Turn into a story.
Tell people a story, the story of how it is you compete.
A story of where it is you're going to go. There's a great story if you get a chance
to see it, I believe it's a, a video that's floating around on the history of
Nissan. It's a really good story about how they
created these cars, these certain particular cars and how they hit this
adversity, and then, how their going to move forward.
And inside of Nissan, the story has a lot of power.
The story actually tells people what it is they should do, how it is they should do
it, when they should be worried and when they shouldn't be worried.
And most importantly, what kinds of innovations are meaningful innovations for
them. Another thing we need to do is we need to
trust the doers. They're people in organizations who do
things. And they're competent and, and we need to
empower them, we need to give them the trust, give them the ability to get stuff
done, new stuff done, because people in your organization, they probably want to
help. They wouldn't be working there if they
didn't want to help, for the most part. And so, those kind of people, the ones who
are actually doing stuff, we need to trust them.
We need to help them move along in their change efforts, in their innovation
efforts inside the organization. Another thing is to have an understanding
of what risks are. What are the different kinds of risks?
Initiatives that look good to people in one part of the organization may not look
good to people in another part of the organization.
What this requires then, is for us to have a shared understanding of what we mean by
risk, what we mean by acceptable risk, we need to be able to take other people's
perspectives. In the project for you, you in the project
track, when I ask you what are the, who are the stakeholders, this is what I'm
talking about. The stakeholders may look at the problem
differently than you do or look at your potential solution differently and say,
wow, that looks really risky. I don't want to do that.
And so, we have to understand why they think it would be risky?
What do they mean by risky? What do they mean by too risky?
What do they mean by not risky enough? And that's the important thing, is
understanding and having a language for talking about risk.
We're going to talk about some of these things we have to have some exercise to
help that in the project on track. Also, there are going to be some hidden
stakeholders. And there's some people in organizations,
especially in big complicated organizations, that are in a position to
say no, but they're not in a position to say yes.
That is, they can stop you from moving forward, they can't make you, help you
move forward, but they can certainly stop you from moving forward.
You need to identify those people early, find them and figure out how they are
viewing our innovation. How are they perceiving this thing?
How can we then, get in front of them, get before them, in a way that we can actually
get the yes before they have the chance to say no?
Or, at least get them to withhold their judgment long enough that we can explain
to them, here's what we're trying to do, here's why it makes sense to me and here's
why I perceive this to have an, an appropriate amount of risk for what we're
trying to do in our organization given our strategy.
Next, we're going to talk about structural constraints in organizations.
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