While animals accept their surroundings’ offerings, making but minor and unconscious alterations to the amenities afforded, human beings innovate. We build dams, organize governments, and manipulate molecules to redesign our contexts. The drive to innovate is a unique characteristic of human beings. Innovation is also a defining source of competitive advantage. Innovative societies dominate less innovative ones. More innovative companies outperform their competitors. And individuals who can most effectively cause innovation hold disproportionate influence over the future.
The most influential individuals of recent time – Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shared an uncommon ability to innovate. They saw a future others did not see and redirected the course of events toward the realization of that future. |  |
Yet why are most of us ineffective at causing change? How can we reach higher levels of effectiveness at transforming our environments, at causing the changes that will improve our school systems, companies, communities, or countries? Over the past eight years I have analyzed over 300 cases of corporate innovation. These cases reveal a widely held misconception about how innovation comes to be: the belief that science and logic bring about innovation.
Science and logic are essential for understanding and improving our world. But they are, at the same time, limiting. By relying on them too heavily and in the wrong situations – as most corporate decision-makers do – we unnecessarily stifle out ability to cause change.
To see this, simply chart the patterns of change. Every significant innovation – whether social, political, or corporate – is born out of an illogical proposition. Dell’s idea to sell directly to consumers, for example, flew in the face of an entire industry convinced that customers needed to buy computers from retailers. Southwest Airlines’ decision to adopt a point-to-point model when its competitors had evolved to a hub-and-spoke model made little logistical sense. And Mahatma Gandhi’s suggestion that Great Britain would simply walk out of India was almost universally deemed crazy.
Logic and science only catch up with an innovative idea after the ideas has taken root. As Joseph Schumpeter, the German economist who revolutionized the study of innovation and entrepreneurship, noted, "Here the success of everything depends on … seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at the moment."
That change is born in an absence of logic is in itself quite logical. An idea that is already consistent with prevailing beliefs is by definition not innovative because its realization does not require change. If people believed customers would buy computers directly from manufacturers, for example, or that Britain would voluntarily leave India, neither Dell’s nor Gandhi’s ideas would have caused change … they would simply have resonated the inevitable.
People who wish to change their communities, companies, or societies must resolve a dilemma. On one hand, existing logic is unlikely to support their innovative idea and on the other hand, without the support of logic building support for the idea is difficult. As Niccollo Machiavelli warned in The Prince, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, than to take a lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovation has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."
Successfully causing change requires being both crazy and convincing. It requires ignoring logic at some stages and using it to your advantage at others.
This dilemma appears repeatedly as an idea travels from thought to reality. Through our work helping companies unlock innovation and growth, we have found that innovative ideas must pass through four levels of such obstacles. As your idea propagates through these four levels it will inevitable bump against networks of opposing beliefs and logic. Your ability to understand and anticipate these obstacles will help you become more skilled at causing change.
Four levels of obstacles:
1. Mental level – our language, mental models, and problem-solving approaches unnecessarily limit our ability to see or believe in the crazy, out-of-the-box ideas that lead to meaningful innovation. Adopting new language and problem-solving methods not grounded in logic (see "Add patterns to your problem-solving toolkit" below) will help you overcome your natural tendency to kill off unorthodox ideas too quickly.
2. Team level – all innovations require the efforts of a core team whose beliefs and motivations may not initially align with the fulfillment of the innovation. Identifying who will believe in your idea because they believe in you (i.e., not because your idea seems logical) will help you form a core team. New CEOs tend to bring with them a team of trusted, and trusting, executives for this reason. The team is willing to execute the CEO’s plans before she proves the plan with hard logic.
3. Organization level - the team operates within an organization (e.g., a company, a community) that has adopted a set of beliefs and practices that your innovation may challenge. Like any self-preserving mechanism, your organization will defend itself. The key to navigating this level is to identify which beliefs are inconsistent with the fulfillment of your idea. You must then either dismantle these beliefs or alter your message so that it appears less threatening. Beliefs are for the most part artificial, rooted in a shaky foundation of evidence and logic. By offering opposing evidence and logic you will begin to change people’s minds. The same psychological principles that apply to public relations will work within your organization.
4. Environmental level - your organization, in turn, operates within a larger environment, with its own network of beliefs and practices some of which must be dismantled to give room for your idea to take hold. In a business context, the environment includes your customers, suppliers, and regulators. In a social context the environment may include the government and interest groups. Effective innovators are able to clearly distinguish which stakeholders are critical, understand what motivates them (i.e., "get into their heads"), and persistently deliver tailored messages to each stakeholder to win support.
By recognizing these obstacles you will learn to manage them intelligently. With practice you will even become skillful at causing change. To set you on the path to becoming a competent innovator put three practices in place.
1. Add patterns to your problem-solving toolkit.
By adding a problem solving method that does not depend on logic but rather is rooted in pattern recognition, which more closely resembles the approach with which human beings naturally create, you will begin seeing out-of-the-box options that we did not see before. Cognitive scientists are beginning to change their view of how the mind operates. They are discovering that we naturally solve problems not by logic but by finding a stored pattern that is analogous to the problem we are working on. We build these patterns through past experience. The key to generating creative solutions is to expand our reservoir of patterns beyond the few we have developed from direct experience. To do this, read related histories outside of your field and see how these might serve as analogies for you. Go to the bookstore and pick up 5 magazines you would not otherwise read. Begin stocking your reservoir with patterns. 2. Abandon logic.
When you next work through a problem, on your own as part of your company’s strategy development process, set aside two half days to generate creative options devoid of logic, analysis, and criticism. Agree that you will fully analyze the ideas generated before implementing them but you will do this later. We have found that by keeping ideas on the table before imposing the tests of logic, companies can extract exciting, creative new opportunities for achieving their aspirations.
3. Be crazy.
Athletes view pain differently from non-athletes. They do not shy away from it but rather experience it as a guide. The right pain means they are getting stronger. The wrong pain means they may be hurting themselves. No pain means they are getting nowhere. An innovator must similarly view being perceived as crazy as an indicator. When your community thinks you are crazy, maybe this means you are forcing your community to develop and grow. When people do not think you are crazy, maybe you are following the pack. Maybe not being crazy means you are not making a difference.
Kaihan Krip-pendorff is the author of The Art of the Advantage: 36 Strategies to Seize the Competitive Edge and a partner at The Strategy Learning Center LLC.
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