Pony express rider. Undated watercolor illustration. The Pony Express was an amazing communications ... [+]
Today, as this is written, it is impossible to speak of heroism without acknowledging that real heroism has rarely been so abundantly visible as it is, at this very moment, in the streets of Ukraine, in the face of the Russian military attack on that nation. But, what about at work? Do we expect, or even want, heroes in our offices? After all, doesn’t most heroism require risk to be faced, and would we wish for jobs where such risk is present?
The Pony Express and Risk at Work
A bit more than one hundred and sixty years ago, Americans were gaga over a communications innovation that promised to dramatically shorten the time that it took the East Coast and West Coast to speak with one another. It was called The Pony Express, and not only was it a major time-saver, cutting delivery time from twenty-five to ten days, but it was also dangerous; risk was everywhere, from exposure to the elements, to attacks on the trail. The work on the Pony Express was considered so dangerous that the company explicitly announced that they preferred to hire orphans for their riders. Clearly, this suggests a level of risk that would be unacceptable to most of us in our work lives. The Pony Express lasted only eighteen months, disrupted by the telegraph. In the end, from a career standpoint, the real danger to the Pony Express was not so much the risk of the trail, as it was with technological innovation doing away with the trail entirely.
None of us want to be a Pony Express when it comes to risk. Steve Blank, one of the principal figures in the launch of Lean Startup, has reminded us that even in the world’s most technologically savvy organizations, heroism should not be a normal part of a work environment. Blank’s experiences of attending too many innovation award ceremonies, where the label “hero” is frequently bandied about when it comes to innovation, and wondering why no one in these organization’s leadership had ever thought to question “Why is it that innovations require heroics to occur in our organization?” Innovation, by definition, already entails professional risk, why would any organization choose to add career risk on top? He concluded that innovation heroism was a sure sign that leadership was rewarding and perpetuating a dysfunctional and broken system.
The Emergence of Product Champions as Innovation Heroes
As bizarre as it might appear to make it difficult for new ideas to be considered in any organization, Blank’s experiences are neither new, nor novel. As early as 1963, Donald Schön, in a Harvard Business Review article, had identified individuals playing informal roles essential to the survival of new ideas, and emphasized that because of organizational inertia and resistance, new ideas either find a champion or die. Peters and Waterman’s trail-blazing analysis of “America’s best run companies,” In Search of Excellence, found such heroes to be so important to organizational innovation success that it was they who coined the term “product champions,” and a subsequent review of product champion activity argued that “innovations are lost without champions...”
While the existence and importance of the champion’s role was supported in later empirical research, many of the conjectures associated with it were subsequently labeled to be “myths.” There was no empirical support found for these roles contributing to market success, nor was there found a relationship between product championship and the radical nature of a new idea. What was deemed not mythical, however, was the very real the significant risk associated with playing the champion, or hero. Champions appeared to understand what they were getting into, however, and their choice to be involved in such idea promotion was fueled by their passion for what they were doing. In the end, the weight of the aggregated research findings was that the champion/hero role is a real, powerful and important force, often played by individuals perceived as being “difficult-to-manage.”
But why do such roles emerge in organizations that pride themselves on logical thinking and carefully thought-out processes? Is it just the cantankerous nature of the individuals who choose to battle the organization’s existing processes, or is it that the processes, themselves, were dysfunctional? By 1986, the product champion/innovation hero issue was well enough recognized that a paper, co-authored by the present author, concluded that product champions/heroes arise due to organizational imperfections, or “in a perfect organization, there would be no need for champions [heroes].”
What About Processes?
The key to all of this debate for the present day is the inability of some innovating organizations to ever get sufficiently close to their customers to really know what they want. That’s when heroes are needed, especially in organizations that are seen as being inflexible, often when involved in the production of high-volume, standardized offerings, or what Eric von Hipple refers to as “manufacturer-dominated” firms. This takes us directly back to Steve Blank’s observation that organizations whose processes are not designed for non-standard work, require individuals to move these organizations into market responses that they would otherwise not consider. Innovation heroics are, indeed, a symptom of a lack of preparedness for surprise, and as surprise becomes more frequent, as the unfamiliar becomes more present, and as time to market continues to shorten, something needs to be added to organizational culture to reduce a reliance upon what would otherwise require an inexhaustible supply of candidate heroes. Let’s be clear, however, that what we are looking for are neither heroes, nor processes; heroes are an admission of process failure, and most processes are not sufficiently flexible for whatever the future is likely to bring. We should not forget that over the short life of the Pony Express, it was managers, those mid-level employees who manned the supply stations along the trail, rather than riders, who were much more likely to die on the job. The riders, were always in motion, in charge of their own activities, and they had more autonomy to steer through the unknown.
Innovation Doctrines
Blank’s call for more reliance upon innovation doctrines is a wise one. What is needed is a shared understanding of principles that authorize a natural way for the organization to allow unscheduled innovation to happen, and a trust in the employees to make the right choices. This is not heroic, and processes are not involved, either. Instead, it is a combination of beliefs, understanding and staff buy-ins so that the organization is prepared to take surprises in stride. None of this is instinctively easy for leaders; forging an innovation doctrine means hard, introspective discussions about beliefs and aspirations that are often difficult to articulate; giving up processes means giving up control. The advantages of such doctrines are huge, however. They recognize that smaller business units are more nimble and can get closer to the customer, but this only matters if they are able to act on their own. Innovation doctrines focus on guiding inputs, such as operational choices and talent, not measuring outputs, and, as a result, are another way of saying that in complex situations we should be focusing on what characterizes the way we work, and why, rather than only looking at the results. In fact, there is growing evidence that common beliefs, rather than common behaviors, are more likely to mark a successful innovation culture, especially in complex organizations, which is very much in agreement with an innovation doctrine approach.
