Teaming to Innovate

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Also by Amy C. Edmondson

Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy

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ISBN 978-1-118-78833-2 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-78827-1 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-118-78843-1 (ePub)

This short book is about leadership and teaming in the context of innovation. What is teaming? It’s what happens when people collaborate—across boundaries of expertise, hierarchy, or geographic distance, to name a few. Teaming is a process of bringing together skills and ideas from disparate areas to produce something new—something that no one individual, or even a group in one area of expertise, could do alone. This is why teaming is so crucial to innovation. When teaming works, the results are more than the sum of the parts, and those who participated are inspired by what they have created and by what they have learned. In some ways, teaming to innovate is the most engaging and rewarding kind of teaming there is.

The goal of this book is to compile key insights for managers who want to lead teaming focused on innovation. I introduce new ideas and case studies from my recent research, and also draw heavily from the longer book, Teaming, to suggest a particular approach to leading innovation. Teaming to Innovate offers succinct advice and a set of memorable strategies that managers and leaders can easily keep in mind to drive innovation.

I provide a road map for teaming to innovate, with five essential recommendations:

1. Aim High

2. Team Up

3. Fail Well

4. Learn Fast

5. Repeat (Start all over again! Innovation takes a few iterations.)

Each of the first four recommendations is illustrated with real-life examples that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can clarify goals, nurture creativity, and enable synergy.

Wherever you work, it is likely that intense competition, rampant unpredictability, and demanding customers are fueling a demand for innovation. But simply calling for innovation isn’t enough to produce it.

What It Takes to Innovate

The ability to develop creative, viable, new products or services that solve a problem or serve a need, and do so profitably, requires: teamwork, an organizational culture that embraces paradox, and an unusual leadership mind-set.

Teamwork

Innovation thrives when people from different disciplines and backgrounds come together to develop new possibilities that none of them could have envisioned alone. Making this happen requires that diverse individuals work exceedingly well together. Rather than just bringing their expertise, ideas, and biases to a project and tossing them into the mix, groups that end up innovating effectively find ways to roll up their sleeves and work together. They find ways to genuinely integrate their different perspectives so as to create brand-new possibilities. This is teaming.

Why call it teaming, rather than simply the creation of an effective team? Because innovation is a fluid process and follows an uncertain course. This means that it is not always possible to know in advance exactly what skills you’ll need on a team or how long you’ll need them, making it difficult to plan and build a stable, well-designed team before the job gets under way.

In a typical hospital emergency room, for example, patient outcomes depend upon seamless coordination and superb communication among diverse clinicians who may not even know each other’s names at the outset of the encounter. That’s teaming. High-quality teaming blends getting to know people quickly—their knowledge, skills, and goals—with listening to other points of view, coordinating actions, and making shared decisions.

Effective teaming happens when everyone remains highly aware of others’ needs, roles, and perspectives. This entails learning to relate to people who are different and learning to integrate different perspectives into new, shared possibilities, plans, and actions. Doing this well requires both affective (feeling) and cognitive (thinking) skills. It also requires leadership (more on this below). When it’s done well, teaming for innovation leads to new processes, products, and services that make the organization more valuable and those it serves better off.1

The core message of this book is that today’s business leaders need to understand and nurture this process of teaming for innovation to ensure the future success of the enterprise.

A Culture of Paradox

Innovative organizations tend to have cultures that embrace paradox. This is because innovation depends upon the coexistence of pairs of seeming opposites: play and discipline; high standards and a tolerance for failure; the use of deep experts and boundary-spanning generalists who deeply empathize with customers.

Playful chaos and focused discipline. Organizations that innovate, whether to invent a new business model, come up with a new product, or improve a process, know how to focus on an important problem. At the same time, innovation is an all-too-human process—inherently unpredictable and often chaotic. If you want to innovate, any idea has to be welcome, at least early on before ideas are winnowed down. But welcoming all ideas, “wacky” ones included, creates a sense of chaos.

The key is asking good questions—and not knowing the answer in advance! Franck Riboud is CEO of Groupe Danone, a creative and purposeful consumer goods company (best known for its yogurt) that has reinvented itself many times throughout its 94-year history. He welcomes the chaos of not knowing in advance what employees will come up with. In an interview for a Harvard Business School case study, he said:

It’s like a Lego box that you buy for your children. They start to play, trying to find a way to build the image on the Lego box. At the end of the day, they give up, throw out the box, and put the pieces away. The next weekend you put all the Lego pieces on the floor and then they try to imagine something. Not what was on the box, but what they have in their heads.2

To Riboud, strategy happens when employees come up with something new, not when they follow the instruction manual.

Known for its success in product development, IDEO, the design firm, has received media attention for its freewheeling idea-generation, a process which gradually narrows in on compelling solutions for customers. The company deviates dramatically from the cubicle culture dominating modern workplaces, where people’s tasks are highly constrained. IDEO exudes playfulness, complete with a “tech box” full of odd objects for triggering associations, patterns, and ideas. The firm deliberately hires across an array of disciplines—putting people of differing backgrounds, who look at situations from varying angles, together in project teams.3

IDEO’s approach to product innovation emphasizes collaboration in multidisciplinary teams, fresh thinking, and empathic devotion to user needs. But it also involves a disciplined process. For all the exploration and experimentation, each stage of this process has “deliverables,” and a concrete, results-oriented mentality is at work.

Deep experts and broad thinkers. Innovation happens when diverse experts (in a specific topic, subject area, or clinical specialty, for instance) and broad, general thinkers come together. The generalists keep their eye on the ball, on the goal—something that has usually never been done before. Without them, the specialists can get mired in the past, convinced of what has previously been possible, or impossible. But the generalists lack the depth and practicality of the specialists’ experience (technical, procedural, even emotional).

Lake Nona Medical City is a 7,000-acre residential and research cluster in Central Florida.4 The idea for this living laboratory was spearheaded by Tavistock Group, a private investment organization. The project aimed to develop an innovation cluster, complete with a master planned community, focused on biomedical research, clinical care, and medical education in a healthy, eco-friendly environment. Tavistock founded Lake Nona Property Holdings to develop the community and the nonprofit Lake Nona Institute to support the mission. By 2012, a diverse group of partners had moved onto plots of land at the development.

To realize the community’s ambitious goals, Thad Seymour, president of the Lake Nona Institute, knew that he would have to work effectively with a growing roster of partners across sectors and industries. Rather than hiring traditional developers, Tavistock’s leaders staffed Lake Nona Property Holdings and the Lake Nona Institute with executives from a variety of backgrounds, each bringing an area of expertise that reflected one or more of four pillars: sustainability, technology, health and wellness, and education.

The success of the project was summarized in a speech by City of Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer in February 2012:

Realizing that we would not be able to compete for companies and jobs of the future unless we redefined the way our entire region worked together, this community committed itself to a level of cooperation never before seen in Central Florida. In fostering the partnership necessary to create the Medical City, we didn’t just build a one-time project. We also created a road map for how to get big, important things done and how to overcome the challenges that confront our community.5

Many in the Lake Nona project pointed to the role of the institute’s culture in promoting innovation. To encourage innovation, Lake Nona’s leaders had followed an unusual approach for real estate development. Leaders of the various tenant organizations described Lake Nona as an “accelerator,” a “manager,” an “engineer,” a “conductor,” and a “builder of collaboration.” The Lake Nona team’s strategy, they stressed, was to encourage innovation by investing in collaboration.

High standards and high failure tolerance. Innovation happens when the organization’s culture promotes high standards and high tolerance of failure at the same time. That sounds wrong at first, but in fact it’s sensible. Innovation requires iteration. It requires drive and ambition, but also accepting that you’ll almost never get it right the first time. And spreading successful innovation in a large organization requires finding ways to shine a quiet spotlight on innovators so that others are drawn to try it, too.

The technology company 3M has earned a reputation for successful product innovation by encouraging deliberate experimentation and by cultivating a culture that is tolerant, even rewarding of failures. Failures are seen as a necessary step in a larger process of developing successful, innovative products. Apocryphal stories such as that of Arthur Fry and the failed super-adhesive that spawned the Post-it note industry are spread far and wide, both within and outside the company. Setting goals, such as that of having 25 percent of a division’s revenues come from products introduced within the last five years, means that divisions must be actively experimenting to develop new products.6

An Unusual Leadership Mind-set

In any successful organization, leadership exercises three basic levers that influence the actions of others. The first is communicating an inspiring picture of a desirable future. Whether you think of it as a vision or a compelling shared goal, this future-oriented communication is designed to inspire and motivate others to go further than they would ordinarily go. The second lever is modeling desired behaviors. Those in positions of power and status are watched closely. In that way, what leaders do powerfully influences what others do. The third is direct coaching and feedback, which help individuals and teams develop into great producers and leaders themselves.