The Illusion of Innovation: Escape “Efficiency” and Unleash Radical Progress
Elliott Parker
Ideapress Publishing (April 2024)
How and why the best innovations lead to more and even better innovations
George Bernard Shaw once observed, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” I think the same can be said of innovation.
According to Clayton Christensen, there are three types of innovation that organizations can pursue:
l. Performance Improvement (i.e. replacing a product or service with one that offers greater value)
2. Increased Efficiency (i.e. doing more and doing better in less time)
3. Radical Empowerment (i.e. a transforming product or service that creates new classes of consumers, expands or creates markets, and/or generateds jobs for the originator or economy)
In this context, I am again reminded of an observation by Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
Elliott Parker: “Here is the dilemma: The first two types of innovation, while necessary, do not create enduring, resilient enterprises. Only empowering innovation, repeated over time, can build an enduring, resilient business. [begin italics] The pursuit oƒ safety and efficiency as an expense of new market creation is incredibly risky over the long run [end italics].”
Parker focuses on a key insight or theme in each of the twelve chapters. Here are the first six:
Chapter 1. In an environment of rapid change, what feels safe is counterintuitively risky.
2. Sustained focus on efficiency creates remarkably capable — but fragile — organizations.
3. Thriving companies are deliberately messy, not sterile.
4. Corporations must reconsider their purpose, approach, and governance in a decentralized world.
5. A new era of decentralization is empowering small teams and individuals to disrupt traditional corporations.
6. Corporate leaders can learn from enduring natural systems, which innovate without management or objectives.
With rigor and precision, Parker explains HOW to respond effectively to challenges posed by these and other realities in a business world that is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall.
Many years ago at one GE’s annual meetings, its then chairman and CEO, Jack Welch, was asked to explain the reasons why he so highly admired small companies. Here’s his reply:
“For one, they communicate better. Without the din and prattle of bureaucracy, people listen as well as talk; and since there are fewer of them they generally know and understand each other. Second, small companies move faster. They know the penalties for hesitation in the marketplace. Third, in small companies, with fewer layers and less camouflage, the leaders show up very clearly on the screen. Their performance and its impact are clear to everyone. And, finally, smaller companies waste less. They spend less time in endless reviews and approvals and politics and paper drills. They have fewer people; therefore they focus on doing what is most important. Their people are free to direct their energy and attention toward the marketplace rather than fighting bureaucracy.”
Presumably Elliott Parker agrees with Welch about the importance of establishing a workplace culture — in almost any organization, whatever its size and nature may be–within which empowering innovation is most likely to thrive. Anything less is, at best, an illusion…or worse yet, a delusion.
To those who share my high regard for The Illusion of Innovation, I recommend two others: Keith Sawyer’s Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity (2013) and Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (2013) co-authored by Tom Kelley and David Kelley.