All around us we hear the clarion call for more Innovation. All around us, we hear the need to take more risk. All around us we hear the need to navigate through the uncertainty of our chaotic present.
But what I see in response most often is a state of "Busyness" that leads to paralysis.
I post this today because I found this excellent link from Kathy Sierra to this piece from Slow Leadership that sums up years of my frustration.
Snip - Stress, tiredness, fear of risk and constant exposure to unreasonable demands paralyze people's willingness to make decisions—especially risky ones—since anything beyond obvious routine poses a personal risk. That's why managers try to protect themselves with ever more exhaustive analyses, approval procedures, consensus-building meetings, memos, e-mails and all the other time-devouring elements of bureaucratic defensiveness. Of course, long before all that political maneuvering is over, and everyone is sufficiently certain (read armor-plated) to decide, the data is out-of-date, the customers have changed their minds…and any competitive edge is long gone. How many promising ideas are tested and analyzed to death in the name of caution and practicality?
In pressure-based cultures, old ideas are continually re-hashed, new ones tested to destruction, and any spark of innovation drowned in consensus-building. An idea that can't be grasped in under five minutes by executives so distracted they can't recall the next meeting on today's schedule—or what was agreed at the last—is dead meat. There's no time to be wrong, so there's no time to be right either. Stick to what you've done before and get a move on. With such penalties for trying anything new, is it any wonder everyone quickly gets the message that, whatever fine words executives use, innovation isn't wanted or valued?
These high-pressure, "the bottom line is all there is" organizations don't simply shoot themselves in both feet; they use machine guns. Their attitude ensures no new ideas will survive, so they get further and further behind less macho, results-driven competitors. As a result, they must run still faster to stay in business at all; and so have even less tolerance or time for risky, creative ideas. The result is self-induced obsolescence, followed by commercial suicide. Look at the "established" US airlines. When did one of these last produce a fresh idea to counter their new, risky, low-cost competitors? The best they can do is copy them—usually long after whatever they're copying is past its sell-by date.
Slowing down, making time and space for innovation and its inevitable mistakes and false starts, isn't just a better idea. It's the only idea that works if you want to be around for the long term."
Technorati Tags: Culture, Organization, Kathy Sierra
