Creators & dreamweavers: Building conspiracies for innovation☆
Article Outline
Innovation is rarely what we think it is. If innovation were readily available and applicable, it would occur more often. The lack of innovation in organizations is testament enough to its elusiveness. Creativity can be found in organizations, but only under the most specific circumstances in the most unique people. The fact that innovation is not easily found is evidence of the value and importance of cultivating it in the system.1
The need for innovation
The need for innovation and creativity has never been greater for most organizations. The new century heralds the emergence of a level of technical transformation never before experienced in health care. Although the 20th century can be remembered as the most active age for health innovation, the 21st century promises even more technical creativity and service transformation.2 Increasingly, therapeutic services require little manual or mechanical intervention, take less time to perform, and facilitate easier healing processes. Noninvasiveness has become the cornerstone of future clinical therapeutics. Even drug and gene therapies promise to assume more of the burden of treatment with a resulting healthier population living better and longer.
The litany of new treatments and therapies could fill a library, and that is just the beginning. The promise of even more inspirational innovation lies at the horizon, changing every notion of health service and care we have. To thrive in this place, we need an entirely different attitude toward the work of health care and the delivery of service. In fact, we need a conspiracy for change.
Few would question the fact that nurses are a great challenge to change.3 By size, location, and disposition, nurses are poorly disposed to embrace and engage change. Although nursing has a great history of adapting to circumstance and transition, it has not always been easy. Rarely do we find the profession leading the way in actually creating and changing the very social and functional foundations of health care. It's not that nurses do not have wonderful ideas and great plans; they do. What they lack most often are the dynamic, systemic skills necessary to translate great ideas into ways of doing business—the key to successful innovation.
Disruptive innovation
Often the complex processes used to address the needs of others are not the sustainable solutions that will work over time and make the best use of resources.4 In fact, the more complex a procedure or process is, the less utility it has for the whole population. The secret is to make simple and generalizable processes for more people.5 Statin drugs have proven to be a far more effective and affordable approach to the treatment of potential cardiac disease than all the open-heart surgeries in the world. Diet and exercise management is a far more successful treatment regimen for diabetes than all the insulin treatment available. Yet we often choose to promulgate and pay for the more complex, late-stage, and reactive treatment processes over the far simpler, less expensive, and more sustainable clinical processes.
Making these types of changes calls for a more innovative way of thinking about how to make these realities normal practices—in short, how to make innovations work.
The innovator realizes everything has economic value
Before Americans can embrace a generalizable innovation, it first must affect their pocketbooks. Nurses are beginning to learn this truth, but not fast enough. A good thing in America is not good if it does not have a financial value.6 It must either make money (preferred), save money (less valued), or create a whole new market with the potential for great personal reward. It is not enough that the innovation saves time, improves life, or advances quality. It is good that an innovation may do this, but goodness is not enough to engage buyers and users. An idea is good only if it can be sold and a return can be realized at some level. We need only look at the tremendous success of the pharmacy industry to realize the importance of this element of innovation.
The innovation must have utility
There are many good ideas, but their value is imbedded in their usefulness.7 The work of a good innovator is grounded in the ability to translate an idea into a useful application. This means more than simply converting an idea into a useful project. For a good idea to have a sustainable application, the innovator must be able to engage their audience in a way that extends the sense of value and usefulness. Promoting the fact that the idea has general value and can be useful in a larger context helps create buy-in.
The innovator must have passion
Another element of the translation from idea to reality is the commitment necessary to see the process through to completion. The vagaries of this process demand a person who can fully commit the energy necessary to see a good idea through the development and implementation stages. Because a new idea often means a change in the way of doing business or providing a service, some people will be opposed to it. This is the point at which the energy and passion necessary to overcome such opposition are critical.8 If the innovator is not committed to changing the way of doing things, the innovation will be lost in this stage. Good ideas generally don't fail because they're not good enough; they don't succeed because someone has not seen them through.
Political skill sustains innovation
Political facility is a fundamental part of any business process9 and an essential component of all social interaction. Simply defined, politics is the management of human relationships; it is also a learned skill. Every human endeavor first begins with engaging the right stakeholders in a way that can expand the interest in an idea. The effort involved in getting others on board or motivating the interest of key people takes up 90% of the time spent making an idea work. The greatest political challenge is determining and accessing the right people at the right time. The wise innovator knows just who needs to be invested in the implementation process and at what time they should be approached. As the process, product, or implementation matures, different stakeholders are involved in moving the process toward broader engagement and ultimate success. Understanding this political process and how to use it effectively is one of the most critical elements in innovation.
Adaptability and change must be built into an innovation
A critical element of successful innovators is their ability to adapt to reflect the times in which an innovation will have usefulness. Time and circumstances are always moving and changing, becoming something different. The innovator recognizes this fundamental circumstance and adjusts the creative process accordingly.10 Innovation itself creates the foundation for further innovation. No idea is permanently ensconced on the landscape of implementation. The wise innovator therefore builds into the process a mechanism for change and further refinement. In this way, the innovation advances the quality of life or human experience until it is eclipsed by tomorrow's new idea.
Making innovation work
Real innovation in organizations doesn't move into action unless some threat or challenge emerges to encourage the need for change.11 Innovation is generally a response to an existing need, and for it to succeed, it must become the way an organization does business and inculcated in the culture to the extent that it becomes a part of the way people work. The smart innovator recognizes these circumstances and harnesses the change cycle as a vehicle for moving an innovation forward.
Creating “noise” in the system propels most innovations. The effort of implementing an innovation is directed to changing behavior and making transitions in work processes within the system. Change of this kind often begins with a few key players and expands throughout the system through stages of development, much like a conspiracy. The smart innovator recognizes that he or she must work through others to generalize the innovation throughout the system. In other words, the good innovative leader allows others to take credit for various components of the innovation and its implementation. The more successful a leader is in getting others on board to promote the process, the more likely it is that the innovation will work. A group of people committed to the innovation can survive any restrictive efforts better than individuals. Recognizing this fact, the leader creates many strong bonds with innovation implementation members so that their identification with each other is as strong as their relationship to the organization.
Conclusion
Clearly, innovation is more than a good idea. For innovation to be successful and sustainable, several intellectual, relational, political, and strategic forces must be acted on. Indeed, most of the work has little to do with the idea itself and more to do with getting others to embrace it and pursue the activities of transforming it from notion to reality. Such is the nature of all successful conspiracies.
The good innovator is a good leader who recognizes that support for a new process or way of working is rarely spontaneous. The innovative leader can fully invest all the processes and dynamics necessary to generate action and engage the stakeholders in its application to the organization. Although this work is not easy, it is a part of the creative dynamic that every wise innovator knows is necessary to bring an idea to fruition.
References
- . Shaping the adaptive organization: landscapes, learning and leading in volatile times. Chicago: AMACOM; 2000;
- . Our posthuman future. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 2002;
- . Staff nurse work empowerment and perceived control over nursing practice: conditions for work effectiveness. J Nurs Adm. 1996;26(9):27–35
- . Disruptive change. Harvard Business Review. 2002;80(5):95–101
- . Will disruptive innovations cure healthcare?. Harvard Business Review. 2000;78(5):102–112
- . Turning point: the end of the growth paradigm. New York: St. Martin's Press; 1998;
- . New ideas about new ideas. New York: Perseus Publishing; 2001;
- . The passion plan. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers; 1999;
- . The future of success. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 2001;
- . Corporate creativity: how creativity and improvement actually happen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers; 1997;
- . The anxiety of learning. Harvard Business Review. 2002;80(3):100–106
☆ He can be reached at (706) 746-7575 and tim@tpogassociates.com.
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