Drilling Down and Whysing Up

Penetrating Barriers to Organizational Learning and Innovation

The organizational communication systems with which we work can be configured to promote collaboration, reflection, and experimentation – key elements of an organizational culture that result in innovation, learning and high performance. Today’s business leaders recognize the importance of designing communication systems that not only consider functionality, but also connect and align individuals and teams with the company’s vision and strategy. Effective communication design can enable workers to achieve the creative collaboration necessary to produce innovation ‐ novel products, services, and technologies for enhanced consumer experiences, employee engagement, and organizational learning.

In the context of an organization, the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices. It is often useful to explicitly distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is reserved for the generation of novel ideas, approaches, or actions by individuals or groups as a necessary step within the innovation process. Innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context and to some specific problem. While innovation begins with creative ideas, creativity is only a starting point, a necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation.

Alternatively, innovation is invention that has produced economic value and encompasses the complete process from conception to implementation. According to Hamel (2000), the capacity to re‐ conceive existing business models in ways that create new value for customers, and produce new wealth will become the defining competitive advantage in this new economy. Therefore innovation involves overcoming barriers at the idea generation, idea development, and idea communication stages. Underlying the innovation process is the problem solving process; at each one of these stages, a certain number of problems, challenges, and threats must be overcome.

Creative ideas are relatively easy to brainstorm and generate, but truly innovative ideas also solve old problems in new ways. Sternberg and Davidson (1999) assert that “no understanding of creative thinking – thinking that produces novel task‐appropriate ideas that are high in quality – would be complete without an understanding of the insights that seem to underlie such creative thinking” (p. 59). The biggest challenge for both the generation and implementation of innovative solutions seems to be getting ‘unstuck’ from old ways of thinking and acting.

For example: The first practical can opener was developed 50 years after the birth of the metal can. Canned food was invented for the British Navy in 1813. Made of solid iron, the cans usually weighed more than the food they held! The inventor, Peter Durand, was guilty of an incredible oversight. Though he figured out how to seal food into cans, he gave little thought to how to get it out again. Instructions read: “Cut round the top near the outer edge with a chisel and hammer” solving a new problem with old tools. Only when thinner steel cans came into use in the 1860s was the can opener invented. The first (patented in 1858), devised by Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut, looked like a bent bayonet. Its large curved blade was driven into a can’s rim, then forcibly worked around its edge. Stranger yet, this first type of can opener never left the grocery store. A clerk had to open each can before it was taken away! The can opener is a stellar example of how innovative ideas often demand further innovation in order to be implemented.

In our many studies with organizations, it has become clear that emotion and cognition play a large role in ‘stuck’ thinking. If a problem is perceived as threatening then the tendency would be to focus on the threat with great intensity and attempt to change or control it. Asking a person to let go of their ‘threat focus’ would be unproductive for we know that the physiological fight or flight response trumps rationality. We have found that in order to facilitate a more productive, goal oriented, and innovative focus, it is necessary to ‘drill down’ through the threat or ‘unpack’ the threat to better understand what makes it threatening to the individual. Unpacking the threat exposes, clarifies and brings into the focal frame the individual’s values, goals, and actual challenges resulting in what we call an ‘integrated focus.’ Utilizing the threat as a pathway to one’s values and goals enables the individual to reframe the problem from ‘how do I overcome this threat?’ to ‘how do I achieve my goals despite this threat?’

Reframing the problem in a more integrated manner leads to more insightful and innovative solutions as we saw with a large, urban healthcare facility studied recently. The facility was operating with success, employing over 1000 doctors and several thousand nurses and staff. A smaller health center opened within the same area, offering good care at a reduced rate, and soon lured a good portion of the clientele away from the larger centre. One can imagine the implications that a threat focused attempt to cut costs would have had upon both employee and client satisfaction. A more integrated focus was facilitated. The executive team ‘drilled down’ on the threat of ‘competition’ and revealed what was threatened was in fact their ‘market share.’ They reframed their challenge as ‘how can we build our clientele despite the lower priced services next door?’ The more insightful and innovative solution found the large centre focusing instead upon quality. Their new mandate of offering ‘quality care at a moderate rate’ found commitment from organizational members, was implemented over 2 years, and resulted in a growing clientele.

In an example of the power of an integrated focus at the individual level, one employee of a university where I recently consulted spoke to me of ‘wanting to apply for a job’ but being concerned about ‘the politics of the department.’ He explained that he had applied for a position before and that the group had ‘been quite black in their response, they had worn black and had treated his proposal for the position quite seriously and critically.’ He had been very turned off by their response. In this way, prior knowledge and assumptions can constrain thinking and result in a threat focus: ‘trying to avoid the politics’ or ‘hoping that they did not continue’ but neither of these options were sitting well with him and he was feeling reluctant to apply. When we drilled down on the threat, it became clear that what the ‘politics’ threatened within him were his core values of dialogue and collaboration. His eyes lit up as he announced ‘I needed to explain that I valued their input, that the proposal was a draft and that I had hoped to work with them to collaboratively develop it further rather than submit it as a fait d’accompli.’ He reframed the challenge as ‘how do I request collaboration respectful of the culture of the department?’ rather than ‘how do I avoid the politics of the department?’ He arranged a meeting the next day!

At the same university, employees voiced their concern about ‘a lack of clarity and apparent prioritization’ from the administrative team. After we ‘drilled down’ the group of front line workers and supervisors reframed the challenged from ‘how do we make admin be more transparent?’ to ‘how do we keep in the loop so that we can see the system as a whole and build our sense of pride and dignity despite the need for confidentiality at the leadership level?’ They then went on to generate twenty one strategies such as ‘speaking up and asking to be included’ (it had never occurred to them before!) and a photographic org chart. They also arrived at the concept of an Intranet which they had never been

motivated to create until then and which then led to over twenty more innovative and goal focused ideas.

A more integrated focus may serve to enhance organizational learning and overall performance by helping individuals and teams attend to the challenges a threat poses to values and goals, while sustaining a more productive goal focus overall. Navigating one’s threat focus will help problem solvers to overcome barriers at all stages of the innovation process and unlock innovative solutions more effectively. Organizational communication planning could overcome ‘stuck’ thinking by incorporating a problem solving component that ‘drills down’ on apparently intractable problems and threats in order to achieve a more integrated focus and more innovative solutions!

Sternberg, J. & Davidson, J. (1995) (Eds.) The nature of insight. MIT Press, Cambridge

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