An essay about being "truly innovative" in #LearningandDevelopment

The following was inspired by Brandon Carson asking a really good question...

So Brandon Carson, who has this little gig over at a small coffee company, wrote this post asking what people thought about being “truly innovative.” I was going to reply on that post, but in a shocking turn of events, my thoughts got a longwinded and I thought I had better reply here.

Brandon and I share a few aspects of how we are part of but not always belonging to, the #LearningAndDevelopment community/profession. This isn’t anyone’s fault in this industry, I just suspect that Brandon and I just feel like we come at things differently. I know as an anthropologist and historian, I’ve always felt like not an imposter but certainly a bit of an outsider. We also share this belief however, that this industry and this capacity in particular of #learninganddevelopment can be a huge competitive advantage but needs some changes to really maximize its impact. That feeling that L&D is both important and not always delivering its most positive impact drives an interest in both innovation and bringing innovation into this field. You should go read Brandon’s excellent post (and some of the great comments) but here are the pieces that stuck out to me.

Brandon asks: I'm solving a problem or meeting a need in a novel way. True innovation to me isn't creating something just to create it -- it will actually improves people's lives in some tangible way.>Yes...creating to create is invention. Innovation has an inherent quality of "moving to production" of "getting into the market"

Brandon says "I'm disrupting a market, behavior, or a way of thinking. Innovation is about questioning status quo -- challenging the way things are currently done -- but not being performative -- there needs to be an outcome to challenging status quo." Yes. 100%. BUT...I think we've put these invisible blinders on ourselves. Every "innovation" that's been created in the past 800 years or so, has done so within the bounds of double-entry bookkeeping. What's the last accounting innovation you can think of? The "innovations" that brought us the last financial crisis were just that, financial, they weren't about how we track and assign value to things. So let's say I come up with a novel and breathtaking way to train employees 300% better. Now that value may be reflected in increased performance but then you'll have to pay the now high performing employees more which means I just created a system that increases your costs - hopefully the performance returns outstrip the costs but see the problem. There is no way to value that innovation which has created all these high performing employees as increasing the value of assets - because employees are counted as costs. So I say, YES! Challenge the status quo but let's stop dancing on the surface and dig down and innovate at the foundational level.

The question Brandon poses is “what does truly innovative mean to you?” While I totally agree with Brandon’s first point that something that is “truly innovative” creates value and impact and that “true innovation has a measurable component that can show meaningful improvement and/or advancement” - I think we don’t pay enough attention to the word meaningful. It’s not enough for an experiment or a pilot to work, it must work so much better than the current method that it makes sense to move to it. Too many times, I've seen this applied as a binary and not a spectrum. What does that mean? That means that going in, we need to know not only what our success criteria are but what the delta is that will tell us that there is enough value in the idea, if it succeeds, to move forward. I’ve seen a lot of ideas that “work” suck the air out of the room from other possibilities because so much time and energy was being devoted to making the first idea work enough.

Another aspect of the truly innovative that Brandon identifies is that the idea is “ original and creative.” Importantly he also notes that “true innovation is about taking risks and coming up with something that hasn't been done before. This means leaning heavily on curiosity, imagination, and ingenuity.” YES and AMEN! How can you be innovative without those things? The program manager in it loves this so much that I want to start considering how this can happen programmatically. I want answers to questions like how do we account for good risk taking in our org? I'm not talking just about creating the psychological safety necessary for innovation but how do we literally account for it? How will it show up on our roadmaps and our org budgets? If we're taking risks, that means that we will find somethings that will not work. That's part of the deal. How do we defend those efforts? How do we show the value of finding what doesn't work? The other super easy question to answer will be how do we look for, find, compensate, train, etc. people to be curious, imaginative, and ingenious? I think most would agree that when we get those people in our orgs, its largely due to luck. They’re also some of the toughest to keep. Why? Because our systems aren't designed for them. Neither are our assessments, or pay scales or job descriptions and on and on. The point I’m aiming for isn’t that what Brandon hopes of is impossible -its exactly what we should be aiming for - I just want us to be clear about what it will take to get there so that we embark on that journey well-prepared and don’t turn into some organizational Donner party when we underestimate what’s needed.

Finally I’ll echo another point Brandon makes - read, watch, listen to, and consume tons of content totally outside the L&D field. Read stuff like sci-fi, or the Economist, listen to podcasts about innovation and how sectors like venture capital work. Read Lapham’s Quarterly. Or don’t consume any of those things but explore widely and then translate those lessons back into our field. You’ll stand a much better chance of coming up with something “truly innovative.”