Innovating within a risk averse environment
30/04/2010, Author: Luigi Paiano
What barriers to innovation have you come across?If one of them is simply an overwhelming aversion to risk, then please do read on as I have two suggestions to overcome this particular barrier that I hope you will find useful. I have personally used both and guess what – they worked – so I am only too happy to pass them on!
1. Chunk it down – take an incremental approach
If you have an interest in innovation as a topic, then you will be familiar with the terminology ‘incremental’ and ‘radical’ innovation. If you aren’t, then in a nutshell, incremental innovation is ‘doing what we do but better’, and radical innovation is ‘ground breaking and new to the world’. The problem is that many organisations shoot for and will only accept the latter, and as we know, often with the innovation process will come a degree of failure, re-try time and cost. So, whilst some organisations will take this challenge on with open eyes and arms, some will see the potential high profile failures and demands on costs and time and back off. Sometime they will back off so far that any creative culture evaporates and the innovative mindset is completely stifled.
So why not try to innovate incrementally? There are many ways to do this, all of which essentially boil down to you chunking the challenge. Look at what you are trying to achieve – can it be broken down into smaller chunks? If you are thinking of creating the next ‘bouncing bomb’ – what processes or component parts can be altered to help you achieve your innovative aim by stealth?
2. Make it real – retrospective justification
Consider the consequences – i.e. if the innovation were not to happen, what are the alternatives? We do this when we are making decisions or creating a business case (or at least we should!) - we express what will happen if the idea we are pitching or if the purchase we are making were not to happen. We have plenty of ideas as to what would happen if we weren’t to go ahead and we speak with passion about (effectively) something that doesn’t even exist yet. To even the least risk averse person we would still have to make the argument convincing and to do that we need to inject reality – in other words, the ‘prove it’ challenge.
Now, if we are struggling to even get to that stage because of an aversion to risk and a stagnant innovative mindset in the first place, try some retrospective justification to kick-start the mindset. Go back in the history of your organisation and highlight an innovation - i.e. an idea out that was implemented.
I will be stunned if there has been no innovation at any stage, and whilst it may be a very old example, it may just be the innovation that underpins the reason for your organisation’s existence! By doing this you have highlighted an innovation that has an impact on the organisation, and, radical or incremental, you are using something tangible in your argument and are therefore providing some of that reality.
There are of course a myriad of other ways of innovating within a risk averse environment and these are just two suggestions. I am sure you have a couple yourself – so please do share!
Until the next time
Luigi
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