Innovation and the circle of influence

Do you remember how we used to do our homework when we were kids? We used to try to do it ourselves first and the ones, which were very difficult, keep getting help from various people. We first used to approach our family (maybe an elder brother or Dad/Mum if they are in a good mood) and then slowly expand our circle of influence. Our close friends next, and so on, expanding our circle of influence until we find somebody who has all the answers.

Cut back to our office today – we seem to have forgotten this old and sure shot way of solving problems. We let our egos and other silly adult habits get in the way of collaborating openly and finding solutions. Today in most large organisations, people are more comfortable passing problems around and finding excuses for not working together rather than solving problems together. And how is this affecting us? This affects the organisations’ ability to innovate and its ability to react to business changes in a timely manner.

So how do we solve this problem? Unfortunately there are no easy methods of bringing about changes and any change is going to be resisted and opposed by many. However there are many steps which can be taken to break this chain. Here I have highlighted the major steps in this direction:

• Encourage employee to employee communications – Employees (mainly those having a flair for problem solving) enjoy finding solutions to challenges. They don’t let organisational structures and hierarchies get in their way of problem solving. These are your best ambassadors to break the shackles. Identify them and encourage them and provide tools to facilitate and achieve their goals.


• Increase Transparency and remove all bias – The best performers within an organisation should be known to everybody within the organisation. This is possible only if there is a transparent way of showcasing their achievements for all within the organisation to see. Managers or other executive staff should not have any way of manipulating this. This will lead to increased transparency and less political interference.


• Incentive to Innovate – It is a well known fact that time is of the essence when it comes to innovation. Also the world will not stand still while the innovators are at work – in other words there will always be business as usual work to handle along with innovation related work. So how do I prioritise and encourage innovation related work? By offering an incentive. It is also a good way for employees to discover their hidden potential by exploring problems outside of their focus areas.

Channel for mentoring and grooming new talent – Slowly over a period of time, this channel can be used as a means of identifying and nurturing talent throughout the organisation. Best Performers who have distinguished themselves through the innovation channel and best placed to play the role of mentors and responsible for grooming new talent.

Let me end with a story which is well known amongst the cloud computing fans. In 2007, the New York Times faced a challenge. It wanted to make available over the web its entire archive of articles, 11 million in all. It had scanned all the articles, producing a huge pile of 4 Terra bytes pile of images in TIFF format. But since TIFF format is poorly suited for online distribution, the NY Times thought of pre-generating these PDF files so that it can be rendered more easily when requested by the customer. That was a huge computing chore, requiring a lot of computer processing time. Fortunately one of the software programmers at NY Times accidentally came to know of this challenge and to make a long story short, was able to use his knowledge of Amazon Cloud Computing facility(gained by generally playing with it) to solve this challenge with the minimal of money and in a very short time.

So in summary - learn to break your organisational barriers and make your biggest challenges known to as many employees as possible. The solutions and the different thinking that comes from the different groups within your organisation will surprise you truly!!!

Try it!! You don't lose anything - you only stand to gain....