Insecurity, the biggest killer of big business innovation and how to overcome it.

“Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively than the fear of making a mistake.”

— John Cleese

While these words were uttered by one of the world’s most famous comedians, they stand all too true for anyone tasked with doing things differently in a big business today. One of the biggest inhibitors to corporate innovation comes down to the fear of innovation leaders.

The problem is that for the most part, people who land in innovation roles tend to be in their mid to late 30s, often have young children and hefty mortgages. I’ve heard it said that their ‘mortgage is bigger than their courage’ (thanks Bowers). The extent of this depends on where they are based, for I have a theory we experience this the worst in Canada.

In 🇬🇧 it is surprisingly difficult to get sacked. So if you get an innovation remit, do something a bit out there that doesn’t work, you probably just get moved to a less prominent position, still get paid but will be tagged as the person who mucked it up.

In 🇺🇸, it’s very easy to be fired, but if you are, and you position yourself as having learned much, the chances are a competitor will take you on. Failure is still somewhat celebrated as learning.

It’s perhaps why we do see a few more examples of corporate innovation coming out of these markets.

In 🇨🇦, it’s the worst of both scenarios. It’s very easy to get fired, and if you have failed, then you will be followed around by that label with nobody prepared to hire you again. It’s perhaps why Canadians are always so obsessed with asking “but where have you done this before” while asking for something very new. I’ve been told the situation is similar in much of 🇪🇺.

Big businesses usually see their team’s biggest, best and most disruptive opportunities and ideas watered down through layers of decision making, overly rationalized and justified in boring PowerPoint presentations, then forced through business case templates that crush new ideas. What this is actually attempting to do is to mitigate the risk of blame should it go wrong, which it almost certainly will, because innovation leads rarely have the remit and resources to genuinely disrupt the status quo.

Today, it’s pretty common for a startups, even in a seed round to be better funded than innovation teams at their corporate competitors. While startups are focussed on getting to market and acquiring customers, corporate innovators are stuck making decks, justifying why they should get a tiny piece of the mid-term plan or IT roadmap.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this as a consultant. Broadly speaking, unless someone with ‘Cxx’ in their title is closely involved, then you will not see any real innovation or transformation beyond the incremental or shiny throwaway prototypes being ‘socialized’ at internal meetings more than they are tested with customers. It’s infuriating to spend all this time working with a client you can tell really cares while lacking the right support. It’s equally depressing to have a client that talks a big game but isn’t willing to bite the hand that feeds them on a bi-weekly basis and make a stand.

“I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

— Steve Jobs

And can you blame them? It’s a lose-lose situation. If they put the hours in, play the game and somehow manage to make it successful, then they watch someone else take the credit as by the time the rewards are there they’ve been shuffled into a new role. Are you prepared to put the hours in, take on the risk, deal with the stress knowing at the end of the day the commercial impact for you and your family might not be much?

Further, what if it doesn’t yield the results the bosses anticipated? Let’s face it, some slightly optimistic numbers were probably included in an attempt to get the funding to build it. Or if it does work, it still takes a long time to see real commercial returns. Change does not happen overnight or an organizational reshuffle happens where innovation isn’t thought of in the same way … suddenly they’re trawling LinkedIn as ‘open to work’.

The CEO must be intimately connected to their innovation team.

Any CEO worth their salt should have more than just an eye for the future, not only the quarterly results. Innovation leaders need a direct line to access resources and skirt internal roadblocks, not going through a VP to their SVP to the Chief Digital / Experience / Commercial Officer to the CEO. Skipping this chain is needed to give corporate innovation teams the power to actually enact change, and be seen as an integral part of the future of the organization, not a nuisance getting in the way or the ‘cool kids’.

I would argue that innovation leaders need a different employment contract that protects them from the risk of failure, and incentivizes them with a significant upside.

Startup founders are buying a lucrative lottery ticket where if their hard work, big idea and the stars align, significant rewards are possible. Corporate leaders might have a solid paycheque, but where’s the reward for the risks they should be taking more of? There are much easier ways to work your way up the corporate ladder and hit the balanced scorecard for the year.

I’ve had many chats with C-suite execs wondering why their innovation teams aren’t producing for them. Often it comes down to their own financial security and risk. As Rory Sutherland puts it, where much of our consumer behaviour is to minimize regret, much of our business behaviour is to minimize blame. Far too often a corporate innovator is reduced to passing off rigour to cover their arse as opposed to taking their shot.

As we start to see big businesses embrace innovation again, we need to bring executives much closer to the innovation remit, help remove the insecurities their leaders face and inject confidence back into those tasked with creating the future.

Innovation is a momentum game, once you have a quick win, it’s incredible how much seems to be achieved. Sadly the opposite is also true, but when you have a team that’s too scared to fail, the mountain of their PowerPoint will tell you.

I fully believe in big business innovation, and over the coming months and years every big business is going to have Now or Never moments. Moments in time where with courage and guts, they can take advantage of societal, technological, political, regulatory, environmental change to create better businesses for the future.

I’m quite good at helping people with this, through Now or Never or Irregular Studio, I bring unconventional and irregular thinking, methods and people to create new products, services and businesses.