Kaylea Hascall
Imagine: One fine morning, the boss walks into your office and says “I need your group to be more innovative.” Hmm. What does she mean by that statement? How are you supposed to go “be innovative”? What questions do you ask her about this new mandate? Can you do it? Can your staff?
Right after I was made a supervisor, I attended an on-campus seminar on management. The instructor described analyzing staffing in terms of two components: Willingness and Ability. Staff might be Willing, Able, both, or neither, and the course included practical suggestions about how supervisors could address each case. This is a reasonable way to begin, but once you add innovation to the list of departmental goals, these two components are too simple a criteria. Innovation requires a third component. We call it “Spark”.
Willingness
In the innovation context, the crucial question is: are your staff willing to get involved with new ideas and to question old assumptions? If so, great — you can get started, and your task will be to work with them to maintain willingness. If not, willingness will be your first and primary challenge.
It’s important to distinguish between staff cynicism and staff unwillingness. You need your cynics to point out the weakness and risks of a new idea, and to provide you with a way to measure how the group is doing in the process of analyzing a problem or idea. Refusing to allow negative opinions to enter the debate is a great way to shut down the flow of positive ideas as well. And besides, it’s fabulously useful to have a cynic in the room when you talk to vendors.
But some staff may approach new ideas and strategies with an adamant, thoughtless refusal — a frustrating visceral reaction that may or may not be in your power to address, but which can thoroughly poison the group.
Willingness to innovate is all about building and maintaining motivation. Motivation is different for everyone, and also varies by context. I’ve divided motivation into three categories: Passion, Purpose, and Profit.
Passion — motivated by personal areas of interest or identity: a love of the subject area, a joy in the beauty of a well-crafted algorithm, the thrill of success, a drive to be the absolute best, the fun of playing with something new and interesting. Passion can be tricky to deal with, but it’s a powerful force.
Purpose — motivated by a sense of the meaningful nature of the work to be done, an understanding of the value of IT projects within the university and the university’s role in the world, an acknowledgement of the significance and the usefulness of an idea or strategy, an abiding satisfaction in a job well-done. Purpose is a little harder to build, but might out-last passion in the end.
Profit — motivated by more immediate rewards, although not strictly or necessarily monetary. The profit motive is primarily focused on short-term gains — do this, and you’ll get this other thing. I would also categorize negative motivation as appealing to the profit motive — do this, and you won’t get fired. While immediate rewards are important, if profit rewards are the only kind of reward you have to offer, I contend that the innovation you get will be of lower quality and not as sustainable. That said, it’s pretty easy to build — you just make a promise or a threat, and then follow through. Ugh. In general, people are going to have a profit motive somewhere in them — we all have bills to pay, and work can’t be joyful or deeply meaningful all the time. But if immediate gains or punishment are the only thing that motivate your staff, I have to wonder what they’re doing in higher-ed IT, where purpose and passion are supposed to compensate for the size of the paycheck! Understanding what kinds of projects have what kind of appeal to staff can help you to match them up, and also give you a sense of how to scope, describe, and design the project to get the most out of people’s abilities.
Ability
In the innovation context, the crucial question is: are your staff able to do new and innovative work? Do they have the background and training? Do you? Do they have the time?
I characterize ability of a group to innovate, or of an individual within a group to innovate, as a matter of culture. In particular, the overall work culture that surrounds the individuals and is generated by them. My experience has led me to identify a group of cultural keys — elements or values that must be reflected in the way that people interact with ideas and with each other, and the expectations that they have.
Be Flexible — If you’re doing something new, you’re not going to know the full picture up front. Demands and conditions shift and will continue to shift. New products and technologies will come out. You just don’t know what all the unknowns are, and the first way you choose to attack the problem will probably end up being a throwaway. There won’t be a linear progress bar from 0% to 100% complete. There’s no project plan for innovation. Embrace Failure — A work culture that drives people to defend or hide their mistakes instead of owning up to them and sharing what they’ve learned is dangerous — for innovation, it can be poisonous. Think like a faculty member doing research. If every one of your experiments succeeded, it would mean you’re not trying hard enough. Learn, laugh, drink a toast to the foolish error of your ways, and move on.
Make Time — You have to allocate a chunk of time during which these experiments and failures can occur.
This doesn’t mean you have to throw all accountability to the wind. But you have to leave time for fits and starts and new beginnings. My group talks about whether a problem seems to be “responding to pressure” — if you’re pounding away on something, and it’s just not budging, we set a time limit on the approach, and agree to give up and try another strategy.
Another strategy for dealing with time is the dedicated block. I’ve made (and kept) promises like “I’ll give you six weeks to bury yourself in this project, and I’ll do what I can to keep all the other activities, distractions, and new projects at bay so that you can focus.” Some of my staff have morning work-at-home time or designated work-at-home days so that they can avoid the inevitable interruptions of being at the office.
But what if you have so many things going on that you don’t have time to allocate for innovation and experiments? The first place to look is for tasks that can be automated. Taking the time, or making the time, to automate, may mean you have to say “no” to new requests or turn them around more slowly. But it can also be the only way to make progress. I’d rather see staff spend time on the more interesting task of automating routine work than spend even a tenth of that time doing routine work that could be automated.
All of our investments in automation have already paid back the time spent on them. We construct quarterly lab builds in three weeks and push them in one week, rather than seven and three weeks, respectively. We use configuration management, so we can build new custom servers in forty-five minutes or less and manage all of them with a few scripts. We use a virtual machine infrastructure so that we don’t have to spend time worrying about hardware. We created a self-service environment for smart web forms, integrated with campus LDAP for logins and pre-populated with directory data, stored in a dynamically self-generating database and exportable via CSV or SOAP.
Trust — All of the above factors hinge on trust. You’re asking staff to take risks, to share their ideas, to turn over more of their creative energy to work-related tasks. If they’re going to be castigated, blindsided, demanded, and rushed, why bother? A manager has to keep her promises, be honest about motives, risks, and politics, and communicate expectations, goals, and timeframes. Staff have to be able to trust each other to work hard, to give graciously of their time and expertise, to share credit, and to forgive and forget instead of blame.
Spark
Willingness is your oxygen and Ability is your fuel, but it takes Spark to get flame. This is a slippery concept, the kind that makes its way into job postings in the form of phrases like “fast-paced work environment”, “able to learn new things quickly”, “self-starter”, and “self-motivated”.
Ask yourself:
If you gave this person an open-ended project with a murky scope and priorities, how would he handle it?
Does she suggest “crazy” ideas? Bemoan the “crazy” way that things work now?
Is he over-solving and over-analyzing problems? Does she seem to attach critical importance to minor requests and work on them until the wee hours?
All of these are signs of spark — a desire for challenge and a willingness to contribute one’s own ideas and energy above the ordinary demands of the job. If your staff have spark, you’re lucky — now your task is to keep it going and build a proper fire. If you don’t have spark, it’s time to figure out how to get it. You can coach staff on willingness, and train them for ability. But you have to engage and inspire and protect people to get spark.
I don’t have a spark formula, and I can’t break it down into bullet points,not yet anyway! But my main observation about spark is that it’s highly individual, and doesn’t respond to top-down managerial pressure. People have to spark on their own, but good management can help.
Think about your own moments of inspiration, your own spark — the idea you have in the shower, the sudden enlightenment when pieces of a puzzle come together and you see connections that were less visible or less real to you before. Now tell your idea to someone who won’t listen, won’t see it, won’t give you time to pursue it, won’t buy in, won’t help you learn how to make it happen, and won’t spark back. And don’t take the time to write it down, or sketch it out, and certainly don’t start on making it a reality.
Pretty soon, that idea starts to die, and to slip beneath the waves of everyday life.
And maybe the next one doesn’t flash quite as brightly. It would take a pretty amazing spark to sustain itself against all odds, without a supportive environment, surrounded by distractions and demotivations and demands. There’s a reason brainstorming includes a “no bad ideas” rule. Sparks die out quickly if you let them.
So if you want your group to be able to do something new, something that’s better, easier, cheaper, smarter, and more fun than what’s been done before, if you want to innovate, then don’t let your sparks die. Value them. Build up people’s willingness to have new ideas and share them, and give them a culture where they can grow in all of their abilities. When the sparks come, be ready.
