Listen and learn to innovate effectively in times of change

MANAGERS ON MANAGEMENT: Dr Bettina von Stamm  THE PROBLEM with large companies is that, while they constantly invite a multiplicity of views on how they should operate, the reality is that they do not brook dissent and gradually shut out those who criticise even with the best of intentions.
Part of the reason is that management, because of the processes it entails, tends to attract people with a particular mindset – typically, says Dr Bettina von Stamm, people who are "utterly risk-averse, very conscientious and conservative".

While these qualities may make them good managers, they’re also qualities which can make it difficult for them to think innovatively about their own organisations – or to accept the maverick approach that innovation more often than not requires.

As a result, real innovation stalls though the concept continues to be paid lip-service.

“It’s very easy to produce hard evidence which shows managers that innovation improves the performance of companies. The problem is that, while they may get the idea with their heads, often they don’t really get it with their hearts. They don’t get it with their hearts because innovation involves changes in values and behaviour. That’s something that frightens them. It’s scary territory they’re not really happy to venture into.

“So yes, there can be a disconnect: there are people who jump onto the innovation bandwagon or who think they can bolt innovation onto their companies – but who don’t actually get what innovation means.”

As the founder and director of the Innovation Leadership Forum – essentially a forum for the exchange and application of knowledge on innovation, whose supporters include a plethora of household names, from Diageo, BP and IBM to GSK, Microsoft and Total – von Stamm’s job is to lead business leaders back out of that cul-de-sac.

In her books, The Innovation Wave and Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity, she draws on her professional training as an architect to promote the concept of “design thinking” as a process or tool which managers can use to help facilitate innovation. “By their nature, designers like to challenge assumptions”, she explains. “They like to start with a blank sheet. They like to question. They take nothing for granted. And they have tools and techniques which allow them to experiment and explore.

“As human beings, we all have a hard time changing. So why not bring together the two types of mindset: those whose inclination is to focus on processes such as cost-cutting and efficiency and those who like to consider a whole range of possibilities and alternatives?

“We need to bring together different mindsets in order to innovate, otherwise everyone’s approach will be the same. So, in order to innovate, a good manager will bring together different people and allow them to be different.

“I would suggest to managers, for instance, to check out the scale of the diversity in their businesses, not in cultural or ethnic terms, but in terms of different mindsets.

“The next time you do a project, do it differently, explore different avenues. Give the people in your organisation an opportunity to share their thoughts through open innovation. Try to find some weird and wonderful people and ask them what they think of your company and its product . . . ask children, ask an artist, anyone you would not normally ask.”

Von Stamm – a member of the IMI Innovation Bizlab network – accepts that the tendency of large companies is to stifle rather than to promote the maverick tendency within their ranks. But the ability to innovate, she argues, is a gradual process, a culture change which can be made but which takes time to nurture and develop.

“This is a process about collaboration, about experimentation, about values, about behaviour – and, in particular, about learning. Because unless we learn and understand something we have not understood before, and unless we use that learning to challenge existing wisdom and thereby create new wisdom, we probably will not innovate.”

Next week: Martin Murphy, managing director of Hewlett Packard Ireland, on how leaders can embed a high-performance culture in their companies.

[ petercluskey@yahoo.fr ]

Name:Dr Bettina von Stamm

Organisation:The Innovation Leadership Forum

www.innovationleadershipforum.org

Job:Founder and director

Management advice:Design thinking can offer you innovative new ways of looking at your business