I have just finished a sensible little book on innovation called Mapping Innovation by Greg Satell. (I lasted a day without a map. To be fair, I was halfway through it before I wrote the journey without maps post. But still, I hear you say, but still…).
Mr Satell´s main argument is that innovation is “combination”, rather than a single event. And that to achieve innovation, collaboration is key. He has rather a lot of other handy stuff in his book and I may write a more detailed redux at a later stage to cover that off. But today I am thinking mostly about collaboration.
I have just returned from a walk under cerulean blue skies, on the Autumn Equinox, through fields of trees hanging low with apples and pears, ripe and ready for picking. It´s a path I often take so I have witnessed the efforts put in by the farmer to get these apples and pears to this stage over a season of growing. I have observed that no one single thing creates an orchard, but rather the combination of things that the farmer does through the year. The coordination of the elements necessary to make an apple strikes me as being a bit like Mr Satell´s opinion (which I share) that collaboration is necessary for innovation. Yet, if I think of all the organisations in which I have worked over the last quarter of a century, none has been structured in a way that would easily permit an apple to be grown. We still have separate soil departments looking after the soil, seed departments taking care of the seed, market departments selling the promise of apples not yet grown, no one really worrying too much about the weather – well, we hope the chaps in risk have some sort of a handle on it and some sort of a plan should we be hit with a drought or a hurricane, and the Chief Executive Farmer hoping all these departments is clear on what they are meant to be doing and have set and aligned their goals properly for the year. If a real farmer ran his apple farm like this, our apple-a-day health-prescription would need to drop down to a less frequent dosage.
If we want our companies to survive and thrive in an environment that demands constant innovation, we have to change our organisational structures which are still stuck in a bygone age of factories and line-management. If we are to innovate, (as I believe we must at both the individual and corporate level), we need to start thinking more like gardeners and farmers do: the firm as a holism, not as an amalgam of departmental holes.