The Black Smoke Cloud

I am really mesmerized with the amount of complex innovation frameworks that have been popping up now and then in books, blogs and speeches.
Some of them have bullets that goes from 1 to 10, others 1 to 36, but the fact is that if we put all together there would be like 700 bullets on a PowerPoint presentation (not counting the duplicates).
In my point of view all of these bullet points are only part of a huge black smoke cloud, like those ninja hiding clouds, strategically blowed just so companies don't have to get into the only real thing that keep them from growing creative thinking, which is: Their excessive focus on a culture of control.

Today there's a lot of Innovation talking, and also new innovation "guru's" are popping up everywhere.But as a matter of fact, how many companies do you know that are really open to drop the “control" mindset and implement real value + strong bold changes programs for innovation? And that includes hard to swallow strategies like give paid time to employees do their own stuffs.

There are some companies trying to fill this gap by asking their employees to do "creative home works".
Recently i was confronted with a strange, to say the least, case of endo-marketing, where HR was trying to convince employees to visit museums and parks in their weekends and free time. Their strategy, by their own words, was created for "opening the employees creative mind". (Maybe they’ve got this weird idea after a quick look on the book "A Whole new Mind" by Dan Pink)

How come an enterprise can achieve an Innovation mindset if investing in human resources (like paid time, in this case) is not even in the horizon? To the point they are asking employees to invest it themselves.
This was my question to the HR manager, and for that, here is the answer:
"We will always count on commitment from our employees and it is not a big deal to ask them to spend their free time in cultural activities. This will even make them some good".
Good…says who? And by the way who is "them" ?

Recently i was watching Daniel Pink's new speech on TED about his new upcoming book. In this book he presents a lot of scientific explanations in order to prove that “the carrot and the stick” way does not work for building up innovative cultures and collaboration.
His point of view is very simple. When rewarded with bonuses people tend to work more efficiently, but only in tasks that are analytical, and therefore needs lots of left brain resources. In other tasks that takes more cognitive and right brain processing, the traditional reward mechanism can even slow employees performance.

In his speech he also shows that in recent experiments a group that were under the promise to be rewarded scored much worse in their performance on “right brain tasks” than another group that were not under the same promise.

This happens because the excessive concern on delivery a great performance creates a funnel in the brain that doesn't allows the “Gestalt thinking” to kick on.

So, what now?

Now, Brands that wants to innovate... let me rephrase that... Brands that want to survive in the next years, will need to stop to intellectualize innovation and start to get the hands dirty on it. And by that I mean to re-design the critical and more polemic parts of their management model, trashing away some of the old school metrics, reward systems and management "best" practices.

Nobody wants to read about an intelligent "new and improved innovation model". What is really necessary now is to build a simple and humanistic model, based on a intelligent reward system that delivers benefits and real value to employees.

If your lower income employees cannot get to a deep understanding of your innovation strategy... guess what... your strategy is a failure.

Viktor Frankl in his book "Man’s search for meaning", concludes, after a strong and emotional narrative of the time he spent in nazi death camps, that the only thing that the human being really need to be happy is to engage in something bigger than himself.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in his book Flow presents statistics that shows how money is poorly, or even not, correlated with happiness.

In my opinion the rollout of innovation in corporations cannot be headed by the same people that, for years, were safe keepers of the management "best practices". And the reason for that is simple: There’s no way a "best practice" will ever generate an innovative concept.
The whole mindset of "best practice" is overwhelmed with the only thing that companies need to get rid off if they want to become innovative: An excessive focus on a culture of control.

Companies to really get on an innovation culture will need to go deeply in knowing it's employees and what make them tick and generate stories about their relationship with the Brand.
And based on this knowledge, there is need to re-design the reward system to rebuild it upon real value propositions


Damn right, It takes a lot of work. Are you ready?