Tech Drives Innovation, But Leaders Must Create The Environment
I saw an interesting event hosted by the IBA Group recently that was entirely focused on innovation. It was this Camunda Breakfast event in Warsaw in June where the IBA team talked with an in-person and online audience about using Camunda business process management (BPM) tools to help create a more innovative business environment.
I do agree that BPM can create a more effective and innovative business environment. If business processes can be optimized, especially across silos, and information shared more easily, insight and new ideas can be generated.
One of the difficulties of any bureaucratic institution is that departments are created with hard borders and they stop people and ideas moving from one area of the business to another.
This type of software can help, but I think there is an important cultural shift that also needs to take place in any business that really wants to encourage more innovation.
The senior leaders need to encourage new ideas. They need to be asking for ideas, even demanding that the team is always looking for something new. The leadership also needs to accept that most new ideas or new ways of delivering a service will not work very well. They need to create an environment that encourages ideas and pilots, but with an acceptance that not everything will work out.
Why is this culture and insistence on ideas so important?
The thing about truly innovative companies is that they are always testing out new ideas. When an idea is new, nobody knows if it will really work. It might be the best new technology or service that your team has ever seen, but if your customers are not interested then it’s not going to work.
I’ve heard a business executive say to his team, be innovative, but only bring me new ideas that work. This is not how innovation works. You can only find what works for your business by trying something new. Most new ventures will actually fail.
The superpower that needs to be introduced by the senior management is therefore an acceptance that if the business tries a lot of new ideas then most of them will not work, but they are not seen as a waste of time or as failures, because the only way you can find the really good ideas is to always be testing what might work.
Amazon is one of the most innovative companies in the world. They are always launching new products and services, from the cloud to retail to physical stores to products such as the Echo and Kindle. But look at how many products they have launched that failed. This article lists 60 of them!
Sixty experiments that failed, but without testing those ideas they would not have the ones that really worked out.
Some management consultants talk about embracing failure, because it always teaches you something new. I don’t think this is realistic, nobody wants to embrace failure. Most managers don’t even accept failure from their team.
The real message from companies like Amazon is understand when an experimental project is working or not. Be ruthless and kill it quickly if it is not working out. Nurture the ones that look like they are working. You are not embracing failure, you are using all those failed projects to find the ones that will really work and help your business.
Systems like Camunda can really help your team to work together better by improving the flow of information inside your business, but ultimately innovation comes down to whether the leaders in your business will allow your team to experiment with new ideas. That’s how to really generate innovation.
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