Does Innovation Have Politics?: Part II

Guest Contributor
April 8, 2011

In Part I of this series, I highlighted an overarching theme running through Bill Taylor’s Practically Radical, namely that in today’s uncertain business landscape, the capacity for organizational innovation and change require a more democratic model of leadership.I riffed on this theme’s various implications, and landed here: The argument that organizational innovation requires a democratization of leadership suggests an inherent relationship between innovation and equitability.  Meaning, it’s not that organizations should be more equitable because it’s the right thing to do, which any labor advocate or even young child could have told you; rather organizations should be more equitable because it enables them to more successfully adapt and grow in uncertain circumstances.  The direct relationship between growth and equitability also manifests itself at the scale of the economy – the Gini coefficient illustrates that too much social inequality stymies economic growth (as does too little, albeit for different reasons).  All of which suggests that there exists the potential for powerful, seemingly counter-intuitive coalitions between business executives and labor advocates at the organizational scale, and between economic policymakers and social justice advocates at the economic scale.  What are the political implications of cultivating innovation?  Could it be that the ever-growing innovation sector bears some surprising and unintended benefits? 

The most fascinating question to me is: Why is there a direct relationship between innovation and equitability?  Why is it that “’innovation can’t be planned, it can’t be predicted; it has to be allowed to emerge’” and it “’emerges from the bottom up’” (Taylor, p. 198)?  Is this some divine decree that in order to play successfully we must play fair, or an indicator that the elephant which the blind men are fumbling with in this complex, recession-ridden room, to mix metaphors,* is social inequality?  Or is it a happy coincidence, my own apophenia, or something else entirely?  These are not rhetorical questions; I respectfully challenge Bill Taylor and other management theorists to unpack why it is the case that equitability be a mother of transformative innovation. 

Let me brave my own thinking on the matter, which as those who know me would suspect, is inspired by systems thinking.  In this context, the system is the organization and the environment is the business landscape.  The business landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade, in turn changing the criteria for organizational success.  Whereas half a century ago, success may have hinged on uniformity and affordability of products, today it increasingly depends on their quality and speed to market.  It is for this reason that US firms are recently reconsidering whether to outsource manufacturing overseas, because speed and quality are starting to trump affordability.  These are broad strokes to be sure, but the claim that that organizational success increasingly depends on the ability to innovate in uncertain circumstances is neither new nor unfamiliar.  The question then becomes: How can organizations create conditions conducive to the emergence of innovation? 

And that is precisely the way to frame the question because, as a property of the whole organization and not of its parts, in the language of systems thinking, innovation is an emergent property.  This is why Taylor and others correctly intuit that innovation can’t be planned or predicted, but must be allowed to emerge.  Like other emergent properties, innovation is about managing social interactions rather than actions; it’s about architecting the links of a social structure rather than the nodes.  A soccer team is able to succeed on the field due not only to the quality of individual players, but also the quality of the interactions between them (Gharajedaghi, p. 47).  According to Garnter analyst Nicholas Gall, organizations evolve resilience - the capacity to innovate in changing circumstances - “by creating better, more human-centered transformative experiences” (Gall, p. 6).  I wonder if Gideon Gartner, the founder of his namesake’s information technology research and advisory firm, ever imagined his analysts would be writing about human-centered transformative experiences.

Understanding resilience as “ultimately a personal issue, a team issue and a cultural issue – that is, a human issue,” in Gall’s words, makes sense of the relationship between innovation and equitability.  Zappos allows its customer service representatives to develop their own scripts, Whole Foods has a transparent salary system, lets functional teams vote on whether to keep provisional hires and what to stock, and makes ordinary employees qualify for stock options (and correspondingly limits executive pay to eight times that of the average frontline employee), and Gartner has observed that the performance of gate departure across airlines is largely determined by the degree of mutual respect among team members.  Such examples of human-centered transformation illustrate how creating conditions conducive to the emergence of organizational innovation requires creating more equitable relationships between organizations’ employees. There has even emerged a company wholly devoted to cultivating innovation through organizational democracy, namely WorldBlu.

Thus we arrive at this perhaps surprising but wonderful place in which the direct relationship between innovation and equitability is empirically justifiable.  It also just makes sense that in order to perpetually respond to ever-fickle consumer demand, organizations should devolve power to where they interface with consumers, i.e. to frontline employees.  How fascinating that unknowingly and unintentionally, we capitalists may have sewn the seeds for labor justice.  This topic could and should be a book.

Returning to the title of this series, it appears that innovation does have politics, and that those politics are explicably democratic.  In the examples I’ve cited, it is because organizations devolved power to frontline employees – because they adapted their social structure – that innovation, and in turn success, emerged.  But taken to the logical extreme, this would indicate that all organizations should shift to a decentralized social structure in order to be innovative and successful; an instinctively false premise.  Surely the organizations in the examples didn't decentralize decision-making power for all decisions, but for a carefully chosen set.  There is something more complex going on here.  I think it’s this: cultivating the conditions conducive to organizational innovation means cultivating the capacity to democratically adapt social structure to the circumstance at hand.  Because most large organizations are hierarchically organized, adaptation has generally translated into decentralization.  However, human civilization has birthed a diverse portfolio of social structures, each with its own unique capacities, begging a more methodological understanding of what social structures are best suited to what types of tasks.  Indeed the politics of innovation are democratic, but I’d further claim that they’re panarchic encompassing all social structures within a democratic umbrella.  As I like to say, I’m so open-minded that I’m even open to being close-minded, sometimes.  These panarchic politics of innovation will be the subject of the third, and last post in this series.

*Metaphors mixed = blind men and the elephant + elephant in the room.

References: Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems Thinking, Second Edition: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture. Butterworth-Heinemann. 19 December, 2005

Gall, Nicholas. "From Hierarchy to Panarchy: Hybrid Thinking's Resilient Network of Renewal." Gartner, Inc. 22 December, 2010.

Stephanie Gerson is a movement strategist at Purpose , and applies systems thinking to social innovation.