An imperative for innovators is the creation of value. Aligning yourself to innovation requires a self-awareness that enables you to determine gaps in your capability set. These gaps can be represented in skill sets, resources, access and multitude of other enablers that will determine how effectively the innovation on which you are working can be delivered to its recipients. Without such awareness the ability to execute required to innovate, will fall short. Addressing those deficiencies through selective collaboration is essential.
How do we tackle addressing those gaps at an organization-wide level?
This process is not as simple as the pre-school observation: “Plays well with others.” Although playing well with others is key trait it is not the most important. The process of collaborative innovation involves a series of actions, each building on the last, to produce a combination of learning and outcomes to arrive at a valuable end result. To bring the new to fruition and address a meaningful design challenge requires interdisciplinary engagement that requires a mindset focused on contributing to an act of creativity. That creativity takes different type of people and a scale of organization that can accommodate the flexibility and resilience that innovation demands.
Translating expertise
Cultures of innovation are those that foster acts of applied creativity. There are clear, measureable outcomes at each step of the innovation process. The process of creating in a collaborative manner requires that participants each bring two things to the table: a deep expertise, skill or body of knowledge; and, an ability to make that personal expertise recognizable to and useful to others with similarly deep, yet different, expertise. The kinds of people best suited to this have been popularized by co-founder of IDEO and current Executive Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum , Bill Moggridge, as “T-shaped people.” (David Guest is the first person to have coined the term in the British newspaper, The Independent in 1991.) The vertical aspect of the T represents a depth of expertise in a given area, and the horizontal bar is the breadth of the person’s ability to translate and link that expertise to others.
These kinds of people are the ideation specialists in collaborative innovation cultures. While those with deep subject matter expertise might have the seeds for a potential solution in their knowledge, without a way to make that meaningful to others their expertise is useless. Working with T-shaped people, the potential for cross-genre hybrids to develop is heightened.
Being additive and connective
Another key shape of person in the innovation-capable enterprise is the “Y-shaped person.” These people are the connectors. They recognize patterns in behaviors and data, and forge connections between subject matter experts. They actively suggest new collaboration opportunities and potential paths for exploration. Their perpetual curiosity creates an organizational adhesion which binds many disparate elements together.
The Y-shaped person reaches out and across the organization. They are fascinated by the new and by seeking new perspectives on the old. They question everything. As such the Y-shaped person is often seen as a gadfly, little concerned with focusing too long on any one subject, and frequently annoying in their seeming inability to sustain their attention on a single subject. In their boundary-crossing behavior they serve an essential role in establishing new lines and links of communication which would not exist without their intervention. Where the T-shaped person is designed to engage more readily with others across the organization, the Y-shaped person is dedicated to connecting people who might not otherwise recognize that the other exists. They are a form of planned serendipity
Too big to think
Interdisciplinary organizations of this type are by their nature unstable. Without a central motivation, like the profit motive, to align them these organizations can evolve and dissolve in a number of different ways as they grow and shift over time. Given the expertise represented they might slide into specialization, which may run at counter to the innovative problem solving being sought. Ensuring that the design challenges being addressed are maintained front and center is necessary to maintain the entire organization on collaborative contribution. It is at this point we come up against an organizational constraint that directly affects the capacity to perform.
You have likely heard some organizations deemed “too big to fail.” The focus of the TARP efforts on the part of the Bush Administration (the Troubled Assets Relief Program) were financial institutions that were “too big to fail.” For organizations dedicated to innovation there is a maximum threshold size beyond which members begin to lose sight of each other, resulting in a corresponding loss of familiarity with each other. These losses diminish the ability of the organization to collaboratively innovate. That size is associated with Dunbar’s number.
Based on the concept proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, this number is derived from an understanding of the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained. That number is commonly pegged at 150 people (although it has been expressed as low as 100 and as high as 230.) For the innovation-capable culture this theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships also means that increased size, while introducing access to more expertise, does not equate to increased innovation.
Pushing the envelope yields little benefit in this light. Which brings us to a final insight that, regardless of how well we work together, the collaboration required for effective innovation need only last as long as the presenting design challenge remains in force. Once the value has been delivered it is time to pivot and shift to address the next challenge and that, more than likely, will require a new set of players of all shapes and kinds.
What shapes are the people who comprise your organization?
