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InnovationAndImprovisation

CJ, a second-level manager, wants her company to be innovative. She sees many first and second level managers receiving rewards for their improvisation -- being fast on their feet. But her company seldom recognizes innovation -- inventing and using new methods. CJ believes that until her peers and upper management put more emphasis on innovation and less on improvisation, the company's results will be much less than what they could be.

• Please share some examples of your experiences with innovating and improvising.
  
  
• Which of your experiences, if any, required both qualities?
  
  
• What do you see as the difference between innovation and improvisation?
  
  
• Do you think CJ is right about shifting management's emphasis?

SteveSmith 2004.05.30

It's very hard to say without first knowing what CJ means by "innovation". I've seen the term mean many things, from "Come on folks, get your heads out of the last century," to "I have a set of bright, shiney toys (technologies, methodologies, etc.), and they're not letting me use them!"

CJ believes that innovation means a planned introduction of new ideas. She is a practical person, which means she waits until shiney new toys become useful before she buys into them. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

I'd also like to hear more about the nature of the business, and something on the systemic effects of continued improvisation. In some enterprises, favoring improvisation is the right thing to do. In other, is hides and accrues debt. Which is it here?

CJ is second level manager in systems development for a financial institution. She doesn't oppose improvisation. She just thinks her institution puts too much emphasis on improvisation and too little emphasis on innovation. I gather that she thinks that rewards go to the clever manager rather than the thoughtful. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

--DaveSmith 5/30/04

Bad assumption. CJ works for a financial institution. [Please, please refrain from using a company's name on the wiki. It's a public forum. Anybody can read this post. If this were about XYZ, which thankfully it isn't, I would be violation of agreements that I have made. ] SteveSmith 2004.06.05

XYZ's core competencies revolve around electronic storage, so being innovative in developing new forms of storage, manufacturing and supporting existing storage products, and selling storage products in the market are probably good things for XYZ.

(as long as "innovative" means new and better, or at least new and providing a learning experience)

But you wrote that CJ wants to see more innovation in management. While it could be argued that good basic people management would be a welcome change in most modern tech companies, I don't think it qualifies as innovative. In fact, I view good people management as improvisational, where the manager has to be "fast on their feet" to allow his or her staff to be innovative.

Or I could be way off. I'd like to ask CJ what she thinks innovation looks like, and why it would be better than what she thinks improvisation looks like.

It looks intentional and systematic. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

--DaveLiebreich 2004.05.30

What an interesting framing for the problem, "innovation" vs. "improvisation" from a second-tier manager. Perhaps something like this in this context:

• "Innovation" is about new, different values, either offers to a customer, or How We Do Things Around Here. It's deliberate and forward looking: "If we do X, Y, Z, that would be better."
  
  

  Exactly. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

• Innovation seeks to be repeatable, once you've done it one time.
  
  

  A preference for CJ rather than a requirement. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

• "Improvisation" is about ad-hoc invention of ways to the stuff we already claim we do. It's reactive and backward looking: "To do X, which we've promised / claimed, we suddenly realized we need a solution to Y, so let's do <this random thing.>" Improvisation seeks to solve the immediate delivery, without creating something re-usable.
  
  

  CJ views improvisation as a gradient that moves from inventive to hacking. She admires people that are fast on their feet but finds that much of the improvisation is hacking that will come back to haunt the system development organization. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

Taken that way, rewarding "improvisation" amounts to rewarding people for patching over gaps in How We Do Things Around Here. Rewarding innovation would reward people for adding to the portfolio of What We Can Offer And Reliably Delivery.

For organizational change purposes, I am suspicious of big abstraction words like "innovation" by themselves, precisely because they lead to the kind of definitional tangle we're having in this thread. How do you make change happen when defining terms takes weeks, and in the end no one agrees anyway? So, I think to make change happen, the big power words also need some behavioral descriptions. "Less one-off solutions for stuff we claim we can already do." and "More shared, systematic changes to the offer(s) we make our customers, and how we do business."

What less big abstract words would you use?

A picture says a thousand words. And a word draws a thousand pictures. Words and pictures will always be subject to interpretation. That's why writers are also called artists. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

Reframing the conversation into something behavioral would be improvisation in undertaken to "fix" one project or initiative. It would be innovation if the reframe becomes an organizational habit.

JimBullock 2004.03.31 (Improvised, or innovated, I'm certainly not built as planned.)

Based on this, I would use the "evolution and revolution" analogy. Evolution focuses on incremental change. Adding adding a feature to the product. Changing how the product is produced to improve profit, quality, employee well-being. In comparison revolution would be something totally new for the company.

Side effects from not innovating are market share saturation (if no competition) or loss (to competitors). This leads to decreasing revenue and profit.

If first and second level managers are being rewarded for "being fast on their feet", innovation will suffer since the culture rewards the behavior (so she is correct about needing to change this) and it appears (as I read the story) there is no SLACK. Innovation requires SLACK. If you don't believe me, read the book.

In a music the ability to improvise indicates a mastery of the basics. What would it take for improvisation to lead to innovation? It doesn't seem the two should be mutually exclusive.

Neither CJ nor I think that they are. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

DonGray 2005.06.01

Primarily proactive. Sometime though improvisation is an adaptive and an appropriate behavior in some situations, especially the reactive. It's not a bad thing though. Improvisation just seems like it's overused in many organizations because no systematic actions have been taken to get out of the reactive context. SteveSmith 2004.06.05

-- JohannaRothman 2004.06.02