This article is the third video excerpt from my 2016 interview with the Business 901 podcast and Joe Dager. In this segment, we cover key organizational learning and innovation issues. Ideally, organizational learning and innovation are complementary activities, each adding to the overall process of improvement. The ultimate purpose of learning is to inform innovation and improvement, and scientific methods can be combined with creativity to enhance both processes. Here are some additional thoughts and comments on the key points in the video.
Scientific Method
The scientific method is at the core of the most effective learning models I know. Then when you couple that [scientific methods] with other creative processes like design thinking and systems thinking, they often can form a complementary combination. The scientific method is the core of many organizational improvement processes, including Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA); Six Sigma; Lean, and so forth. Much of our thinking and application of the scientific method to work processes have been based on a physical sciences perspective that is often deductive and experimental. If we are not careful, these can be deductive and incremental.
We often forget to emphasize or focus on the creative side of developing a new “hypothesis.” How do you create that new solution that we think will work well? That’s where I think some of the other concepts, tools, and techniques from design thinking and systems thinking can be infused and used to develop better designs. One challenge organization architects face is the nature of work in organizations varies widely, from working with physical things on the manufacturing floor to working with information and custom solutions.
Nature of Organizations
In fact, the mix of work has shifted from a majority of work with physical processes to more and more work involving information and digital processes. Organizations, regardless of the type of work, are human-created. One of the big issues we face with organizations is that they really aren’t the “natural” world. While we study human behavior using scientific methods, in the social sciences, we seldom, if ever, develop “laws” that are generalizable to all individuals and contexts. The main reason scientific laws elude social scientists is that people are complex, seem to come in infinite variety, and can change their thinking and behavior (they are not static). When we combine them into groups, the permutations are infinite.
When we apply scientific methods to organizations, we’re applying them to something that doesn’t exist in nature it’s something we created. So we’re evaluating and gaining insights into our creations and how humans react to those designs. The best we have been able to do is to produce insights about specific humans in specific contexts or situations. But that knowledge is very useful to help us create even better organizational designs. We apply the scientific method to gain insights into the organization to reimagine it. Once we use the insights to [re]design the organization or some part of the organization, we can test the results of those changes. How do humans react? However, testing and validating a design in one context doesn’t mean we will get similar results in another.
Copying vs. Creatively Adapting
Creativity is often inspired by other works. One of my favorite architects, Norman Foster, noted, “Everything Inspires Me, Sometimes I Think I See Things Others Don’t.” Studying other organization designs is an important input to the creative process, but don’t get caught in the “copycat” trap. We can learn from others, and we can be inspired by others, but if we don’t creatively adapt that and create our custom solutions, at best, we’re going to be followers of our competitors; at worst, we are going to implement things that simply aren’t gonna work in our organization, and the examples of that are our legion. Copying can be useful in some circumstances, but at best, it limits the improvement, and at worst, it fails and makes things worse. We’ve got lots of examples where people copied stuff from one cultural context, put it in another company culture context, and it failed miserably. They blamed the tool when in fact, the people implementing that tool…without creatively adapting it was the problem. While copying might seem a safer approach, it is actually dangerous.
Taking Risks & Innovation
If you want to lead and create something new, then you’ve got to take some risks, break some molds, come up with different solutions, and test them. Unfortunately, most organizations are designed to avoid risks. One of the biggest issues we face in our companies today is that we really don’t want to take risks. We say we want innovation, yet we’ve got an entire system set up where you have to have predictable results before anybody will spend any time or money on it. And predictability is at odds with innovation. If you’ve got predictable results, then you’re not doing anything innovative. If we can predict the results, we already know the answer; it’s not new. So the only time you’re doing innovation is when you are doing things that you really don’t know what the result will be or how successful it will be. Scientific methods, systems thinking, and design thinking are powerful combinations for the organization architect. Don’t be afraid to take a few risks.
