Unleashing Innovation (book by Snyder & Duarte)

Unleashing Innovation

Nancy Tennant Snyder & Deborah Duarte

Unleashing Innovation

 This book describes some of the elements of the effort to embed innovation in Whirlpool, and some of the lessons learned in the process. At the time of this book’s publication, the journey was not complete, but one thing had become clear. Systems to support innovation are necessary, but not sufficient. Without an equal engagement of people’s attention, innovation will not be sustainable. This is a book about the real world of corporate life where history and expectations both influence the effort and the results. This also constrains the book a bit. Some stories that would illuminate the process can’t be told without breaching confidentiality. Some of the methods employed in Whirlpool’s effort are the property of the consultancy Strategos, so can’t be described either. Despite these limitations, this book describes a balanced and clear approach to innovation that deserves attention.

 

Whirlpool is over 100 years old and has been a leading manufacturer of home appliances for decades. The industry had become relatively static by the early 1990s and a sustained effort to establish operational excellence through six sigma quality had been deployed. Six sigma was a good fit for a company already highly oriented to operations and process. But this did not create the desired growth, so the CEO decided that the organization needed to become innovative. This was expressed as a vision of “innovation from everyone everywhere” and the principle author was appointed to lead the effort.

 From the beginning, considerable effort was devoted to installation of a set of tools and processes to guide innovation. A cadre of people was trained to facilitate teams through the process. Rewards, planning methods and metrics were altered in support of the change. Critically, the vision of “everyone everywhere” influenced both the “rational” and “emotional” design.  During deployment, the importance of emotional drivers became more obvious and the deployment began to cultivate these drivers consciously. The book is divided into two main parts. One part describes the process and supporting systems. The other part describes the emotional drivers.

 The development of Whirlpool’s innovation approach clearly shows the effect of design-influenced thinking. Based on the vision (everyone, everywhere), a few design principles were developed and used as architecture for the approach. Major principles that might be deduced from the system’s description include:

• What is and is not innovation must be clearly defined
• Inclusiveness and transparency of information and activity must be increased
• Permission to initiate small experiments, to learn, to have ideas, to be different, to dream must be given
• Learning is a central part of innovation
• Innovators must be supported with training, resources, tools and mentors
• Rational and emotional must work together

The principles appear in many ways in the examples provided in the book. It is not clear to me from reading this book what the exact design principles were – or if they explicitly knew them during development. The principles might have been suggestive rather than descriptive. But it is clear that these principles emerged early during development of the Whirlpool approach and “created” the system they have today. One of the principles is explained as follows. Too often, companies start an innovation initiative that works against the currents of human spirit through misguided command-and-control innovation operatives. They can marginalize the emotional drivers by making hollow promises of enlightened innovation that does not come about. In the best case, well-meaning innovation hoopla without the corresponding framework that makes innovation work overshadows emotional drivers and becomes gimmicky. In the worst case, emotional drivers are snuffed out by limited innovation programs that bring in consultants or geniuses to do the innovation for you.* Sustainable innovation requires commitment over time, through successive groups of leaders. Sustainable innovation must be developed within the existing culture of the organization. For most established organizations, the existing culture has been successful and, successful or not, will be difficult to change by “force”. In fact, the book suggests that cultural change should not be an objective of embedding innovation, but culture will probably change as a result of embedding innovation.

 Whirlpool began developing the rational side of their system by creating a strategic architecture including the definition of innovation that Whirlpool would use: Innovation provides unique and compelling solutions valued by our customers and aligned to our brands; creates competitive advantage that is difficult to copy; and creates differentiated shareholder value. It took Whirlpool three years to refine this definition and some words are very deliberately chosen. This definition ultimately creates the criteria to test ideas against. Not all improvements are innovations, and the Whirlpool has not abandoned incremental improvement in products or processes, but they often fall outside the scope of innovation.  Innovation is a means to a strategic goal for a company and those goals are an important part of the architecture.

 The other main component of the architecture is the management system. Management systems that drive the enterprise are usually designed to promote stability and predictability, not the ground-breaking change of innovation. And we rarely view them with a critical eye; they are just there, surrounding us, the water in which the fish swims. To embed a competency…critically examine the pervasive, unquestioned management systems that surround you – all of them. Management systems address financial, operational, performance, career, knowledge/information management and leadership. Each of these interacts with an embedded innovation system to promote or retard progress in embedding or executing innovation. Systems can be subtly influenced to aid innovation. For example, insertion of a few innovation templates into the template for an annual planning meeting resulted in extensive discussions of innovation where little had occurred before. But some systems may require more significant change. Knowledge management (KM) is an underappreciated contributor to innovation. KM involves idea development, after-action project reviews, inter-team and intra-team information transfers and market/customer information. In some organizations, information is held within silos and by hierarchical levels. Innovation from everyone everywhere creates a need to make much more information widely available. To a great extent, anyone at Whirlpool could look at the innovation record system to see what projects were underway, their intent and status. People with ideas could, and did, contact the teams to offer their knowledge. As in most companies, market research information was generally available for a few people in marketing and was not seen as accessible to people in all parts of the company. Embedded innovation requires that market and customer information be accessible to everyone. Deep customer insights and the requirement to start with the customer’s needs are clear outcomes of embedded innovation. In other words, the innovation vision required a change to some management systems. Changes were also deployed to financial reporting, career development, compensation and leadership development systems. Embedded innovation influenced who was hired.

 One form of knowledge management was enacted through iMentors. Originally, a group of 75 individuals and eventually over 1000, these individuals had 3 weeks of intensive training in the system and tools to support it, then mentored a few innovation teams through the process. At the end, people completing the program were certified and most returned to their businesses to mentor innovation teams. This program helped establish a solid uniform base of skills, created a network of people across the globe, and provide support to teams who were trying new things. It was also an expression of commitment by the organization because this experience became a part of many people’s leadership development process.

 The authors describe the deployment of their innovation system as a process with a number of stages. In each stage, they identify factors that can prevent the innovation system from becoming embedded. In the early stages, a big risk is not approaching embedded innovation as a system (focusing on innovations themselves rather than on the processes and strategies that make them possible) and weak or disingenuous leadership. They go on to say that early in the embedding process there may be few results to see, even when there is some emphasis on quick wins. This is where determination by leaders and a balance of process and content must be maintained. Measures in the early phases of embedding tend towards participation, learning and use of tools. Indirectly, embedding is a cultural change which takes time. Late in the deployment process the biggest problem can be complacency. Results are coming in and it looks like there is no longer a reason to maintain the infrastructure to support innovation. Realistically, it takes a long time for anything to become embedded, new people are constantly arriving, and it is easy to decrease the effort. Maintenance and continuous improvement are important.

 Embedding innovation is a strategic action that will change the organization. An organization that is launching an innovation system is asking their employees to change the way they work, think and interact; in effect they are undertaking an emotional journey. This can be a slow process and requires patience and constancy of purpose. Two years into embedding, Whirlpool’s European business was under pressure and the regional head decided to put innovation on hold while getting business back on track. Two years later, he told his peers that he had made the biggest mistake of his career when he put innovation on hold. He said that he did not understand at the time that the best way out of his daily business pressures was to keep innovation going. It was not the revenue coming out of the pipeline but rather the mind-set, the emotional drivers that embedded innovation engenders, that could have changed his day-to-day business results. What he came to realize was that when he stopped innovation, he “killed the hope” of the people of Whirlpool Europe. When the organization falters in its commitment to change, it is harder for the employees to be steadfast.

 The authors believe that there are 5 main emotional drivers: learning, dreaming, creating, heroes and spirit….new ideas and breakthrough results are created not by frameworks or systems, but by people who dare to dream, learn, and create. At the heart of embedded innovation is learning. People must have permission to learn and act on their learning. Much of this is learning by doing, not classroom learning. Interviews with Whirlpool innovators indicated that the opportunity to learn was one of biggest motivations. Many early participants were “super learners” who delighted in the new opportunities to learn about the innovation system and tools, customers and the actual innovation challenges. Systems that support learning include: idea and knowledge management systems, global innovation forums and project review processes. The authors note that learning is both an input and output of innovation. Learning is something that can’t be mandated, just encouraged.

 Dreaming and creating are both emotionally rich activities that seem incompatible with work. The CEO that initiated the innovation deployment recognized that dreaming was essential to innovation. They are a source of ideas, but more importantly they are a source of ambition. Peoples’ dreams of changing the world in large or small ways are a major source of energy. Organizations need this individual sort of dream, but they also need something called social dreaming. Teams that engage in ideation are doing a sort of social dreaming when one creative idea stimulates another. Teams that build insight about the unmet need of a customer through intuitive leaps are social dreaming. Social dreaming establishes a possibility of a different future, and that is a starting point for innovation.

 When we started our efforts to embed innovation at Whirlpool, we did not spend time or money trying to make people more creative. A key principle underlying embedded innovation is that people are inherently creative and have the desire, skills, and need to create and innovate….Most organizations, especially ones that are older and more established, have built-in structural mechanisms that actually block creativity. Many things contribute to an anti-creativity environment, but the greatest is the number of people who can say no, and the ways they can say it. Excess process, bureaucracy, tradition, defined roles and extensive “evaluation” suppresses new and different ideas. Performance review processes at Whirlpool did not support or account for creative activity. While some parts of the company’s system were too process heavy, there was a simultaneous absence of process to take and help build ideas. One of the first steps Whirlpool took was to recognize that these barriers were in the domain of management practices and that these could be changed. Action took place in 6 areas.

• Balance process orientation with flexibility

As mentioned earlier, the question is not freedom or process – it is both. Process owners reviewed their processes from an innovation perspective (using the design principles) and brought them into better alignment.

• Give creativity a time, place, and structure

Some of the rational parts of the innovation system establish space for creativity. Of particular importance is giving people time and context to be creative. Eventually, it means an environment where creativity is part of everybody’s job structure and creative time is built into the job.

• Provide tools that enable creativity

People may be naturally creative, but they may struggle with communicating or focusing their creative efforts. Good tools help unleash their creative abilities on “good” problems.

• Help people say yes

 Experts know how to say no, but they also bring a lot of understanding to evaluation of ideas. Whirlpool learned that you needed to combine their insights with a process oriented to accepting ideas and doing experiments to test the ideas. Regional and corporate seed money funds were established and regions were instructed to invest that money in ideas. Regions were free to invest more. A portion of the effort also involved coaching managers to listen more and take a chance on new ideas.

• Manage risk taking

Innovation involves uncertainty. Information is not always available to resolve the probability of success. The best that can be done is to experiment, and Whirlpool developed an approach to doing market experiments that uncovered how ideas would be received and helped determine which ideas to develop further and which to drop. This often revealed that an idea was just too early, so the organization would hold the idea until the time was right.

• Have patience

In the early stages, people may not be able to recognize non-viable ideas and keep projects alive too long. But they do learn and improve their management of the idea pipeline. People need to learn the process, learn to experiment, and learn to understand customer’s needs. All of this takes time. While there may be quick wins, the real gains come after the organization’s skills reach “breakthrough”.

 The importance of heroes and spirit came as a surprise to Whirlpool. Heroes should be thought of in classical terms. These people (and teams) are ordinary people who undertake an adventure that tests their abilities, but through persistence, adaptation, luck and intelligence overcome the obstacles to find success. Heroes are not chosen by leaders, but they are acclaimed by the members of the organization. Many senior leaders might be surprised to find out who are considered heroes in their organization; they may not even know who these people are or why. This is an informal status; to formalize it by making the identification and labeling of heroes a corporate initiative is to kill it. Though hero recognition might be detrimental, it is useful to understand where heroes come from. In brief, four kinds of heroes were identified: searchers, orphans/outcasts, thrill seekers and rebels. What is immediately obvious is that none of these groups are at the center of most organizations; they are all at the fringes of the organization – or may be hiding closer to the center, but feeling like they are on the fringe. The fact is part of why innovation must embrace diversity in thinking styles, approaches to work and motivations.

 Spirit is an expression of the emotional will to win or overcome obstacles. Most business organizations are competitive in orientation. Spirit is an expression of this competitiveness. The spirit of winning was the original motivation to embed innovation at Whirlpool and the most important. Innovation should help Whirlpool win and keep winning in the marketplace. Winning and confidence go hand-in-hand, so a big contributor to spirit is confidence. Leadership involves creating confidence in the individuals and teams that they are succeeding and will succeed in the future. Leaders create organizations and cultures that develop confidence in advance of victory….Confidence breeds success, and success enhances confidence. Winning also requires composure in the face of adversity. Innovation will involve adversity. Performers (athletes, musicians, actors) develop composure by practicing. An innovation system offers a framework for practice that helps people develop composure in the face of adversity. The system prepares them to expect adversity so they don’t feel like every problem reflects on them. This is one of the subtle ways that a system supports the emotional drivers.

 At the time of writing, the authors summarized three big areas of learning. Innovation requires a combination of rational process and emotional enablement. The process of embedding innovation changes the culture in ways that impact more than innovation. Embedding innovation requires flexibility and perseverance. It is common knowledge that change efforts in large and established organizations take between five and ten years. If your organization is not committed to that time frame and unwilling to wait several years for results, our advice would be, don’t even try. Our experience is that embedded innovation is a very long-term effort that requires long-term commitment and a high degree of flexibility and adaptability….Innovation at Whirlpool still has a long way to go. We are perpetually dissatisfied, and we continue to learn more and more about embedding innovation.

 Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

-Margaret Mead

 Comments and interpretation:

• I heard Nancy Tennant talk about the Whirlpool experience and this book. Hearing this talk about the relationship between system and people kicked off a multi-year reading binge. Ironically, it took a few years to get around to reading the book that started it all. One of the things that most attracted me was her answer to two questions. When asked about “innovation systems”, she said something like ‘You need to have one but they are all about the same. I’m sure yours is fine.’ Clearly, she thought that obsessing about the details of any system wasn’t the best use of time. The second question related to rewarding innovators. She said that ‘Being involved in innovation was a reward for most people. Innovators want to innovate, to be involved in something new and useful. And modern innovation involves teams. If you start handing out rewards to innovators, where do you stop? Who do you insult or disengage because they got a smaller reward or were forgotten. When innovators were asked this directly, this is one of the fears they expressed. They were concerned that their teammates’ contributions would not be recognized’. Both of these answers rung true for me. I think that it is easy to spend too much time thinking about getting the system exactly right, when it should be approximately right. And we spend too little time thinking about why people want to innovate and what stops them from being innovative. Innovation from everyone everywhere is a very powerful concept and one that more companies need to adopt. Returning just for a moment to the irony of my reaching this book almost 3 years after meeting Nancy, the first book I did read was Innovation to the Core, which was written by members of the consultancy that Whirlpool engaged. Mentioning these two books is my way of suggesting that if you want to increase innovation in the organization where you work, these are the two books you really need to read.
• The book had an interesting perspective on recognition derived from work by Patrick Parnaby and Vincent Sacco (Deviant Behavior (January 2004), 25 (1), pg. 1-26). At opposite ends of the recognition spectrum are fame and acclaim. Fame is a reputation that is unconnected from accomplishment. Some people are famous for being famous. Fame lacks substance. The opposite of fame is acclaim. An acclaimed person is one who is admired for their accomplishment. Heroes are acclaimed and accept that the accomplishment and the acclaim are linked. Recognition is intermediate between fame and acclaim. Recognition implies approval, but may lack the same universality. Organizations offer few meaningful ways to recognize contributions and rarely offer acclaim to people below C-level executives. This is an interesting comment. How often are non-executive individuals named in company-wide communications?  In contrast, how often are executive individuals named? Is the drive to improve recognition sufficient for an organization? What might a culture that embraces acclaim look like and what effect would it have on an organization’s effectiveness?
• Social dreaming is an interesting concept. I have been in groups that start talking about ‘what might be’.  There seem to be two possible outcomes. One is a type of descent into fatalism and the other into a sort of optimistic future. One person may express a “wish” and others react to this wish by adding to it. I found this description: Social dreaming has the potential to transcend the individual; by listening to dreams in community, we learn more about our culture and society providing us all with transformative potential without having a particular goal in mind. (from: 12-ideas-on-how-to-do-social-dreaming )  Clearly, this comes from more of a social change perspective, but innovation is a social change process. Applied to a business context, social dreaming is a form of group expression. Individuals give their dream to the group and the group elaborates it. There is a creativity tool called “wishful thinking” that is a formalized form of social dreaming. When a group wants to develop a “radical perspective” and develop big ideas consider this approach: Wishful thinking. Many people might be reluctant to participate in this sort of exercise, so it is quite important for a recognized pragmatic person to ‘just say yes’ in the spirit of experimentation and learning.
• That organizations resist creative ideas is an old and common view. People talk about organizational immunity. This link leads to a short animated video called Anti-Creativity Checklist . I have played this for groups. My interpretation of their reaction is that they are familiar with this list. I wonder how many of them recognized their own reactions in the list.

 *text in italics is quoted directly from the book