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The Ford production line was the result of a visit to a Chicago slaughterhouse. Butchers—each skilled at taking one specific cut of meat—would do their work on one carcass after another, brought to them on a line of moving hooks. Literally food for thought.
The seed of the idea for Netflix came from a Blockbuster charge for returning a video late. Marc Randolph—former co-founder of a mail-order software business—decided to allow customers to use their mailbox, rather than trudging to the local video store.
These are two classic industry-disruptive moments. In both cases, they happened because someone applied 'inspired' thinking to a problem, analyzing it in a new way.
In other words: Innovative thinkers utilized an existing solution to solve a new problem.
In both cases, what happened was a bridging of worlds: A cognitive leap that enabled a person’s experience in one particular setting to be taken into a new setting, where it could suddenly flourish and mutate.
You Need Agility. But How?
Innovation and agility are the lifeblood of enterprises in the connected economy. To survive in markets that morph faster than most companies can organize, an enterprise must be able to turn on a dime—and think faster.
Significantly, agility can be created. If you change the way a company's internal structures work and communicate with each other, then you can speed things up.
But conventional wisdom says creative thinking can’t be planned this way.
My Ford and Netflix examples suggest that creative thinking and innovation actually can be planned. To change the existing corporate environment, here are five steps you’ll need:
1. Connect The Organization
Despite email, internal chat, phones, and company-wide social networks, the enterprise is still a largely siloed environment.
What happens behind the walls of one department rarely carries to others. What happens in one part of the company, usually stays there. This is an artificial setup, intended to create a structured work environment where command-and-control makes sense and where work becomes more manageable.
So, accept that this isn’t the way the world works. Create open collaboration and communication systems within your enterprise—you’ll have the means to tap into experience, expertise and a cognitive surplus that was never expected.
2. Create A Culture Of Communication
It’s ironic that the enterprise has traditionally driven the development of communication tools, yet it’s the last one to communicate easily within its walls.
The reason for this lies in the tradition that ascribes accessibility—or lack of it—to status. As long as that continues to be the norm, no implementation of communication tools will ever solve much. Creating an environment where everyone has the tools to communicate with everyone else will only work with a shift in the traditional mindset.
So, make good communication a reputational metric within the organization (just like public forums and social networks reward those who engage with “Good Karma” or “Followers”). You’ll immediately create an incentive for dialogue to start—and to continue.
3. Add Transparency
Ideas, opinions and suggestions that, once shared, appear to lead to nothing will quickly kill the incentive to engage in any communication activity.
So, build a culture of transparency, with clear internal policies that explain what happens when ideas and suggestions are shared.
4. Create A Level Playing Field
Within the company’s communication culture, there should be no hiding behind job titles. The only thing that counts is the quality of the ideas shared, and the value of the engagement that gets brought to each conversation.
So, accept that the existing communication channels may no longer work well enough for your enterprise to survive.
5. Allow Collaboration
Now that you have the right midset and culture, throw tools into the mix that allow teams to collaborate to help solve problems—both in real-time and asynchronously.
But make this an unstructured, self-organizing activity, rather than something that requires permission, or needs to happen within certain local parameters.
Five “Easy” Steps?
These are hardly the quickest of quick-fixes. But once implemented, these five steps can change the entire nature of a company’s culture.
When ideas become the stock-in-trade of a company’s employees—and when those ideas are acknowledged, discussed and implemented—employee engagement and job satisfaction will increase.
Not only that, but the organization finds itself undergoing a rejuvenation.
The Bottom Line
With higher employee engagement, much of the productivity-sapping internal friction in daily operations vanishes.
Working in a business becomes easier. Working for the business becomes easier.
That, in itself, is a competitive advantage. But as the Ford and Netflix examples show, the benefits are far wider and the potential rewards commensurately higher.
What's your take? Weigh in with a comment below, and follow David Amerland (Google+) @DavidAmerland (Twitter).
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