Blue Jean Fridays Make Way for Innovation

As a student at CoachU, we were told, "If you want your life to change, clean out a closet." The premise was that you needed to clear away clutter to make room for something new. I didn't know at the time how powerful that advice would be.

Flash forward 15 years to my participation in a team that launched an online suggestion box for the UT System Administration. It was a simple, yet radical concept: staff could post, anonymously if desired, ideas for improving their work or the work environment. Other staff vote ideas up or down and comment. Two years later, our cup overfloweth with so many ideas it's been a challenge to keep up with them all. It's not that we didn't have creative or innovative ideas, it's just that most staff did not have a path to get their ideas up the food chain.

In his book, The Invisible Advantage, Soren Kaplan discusses the path to a culture of innovation and suggests that 70% of changes fall in an "incremental" category - small changes indicating continuous improvement. The next category is "sustaining," representing major changes in the core business which should account for about 20% of an organization's change effort. Game-changing ideas or "disruptive" ideas end up being about 10% percent and our results are beginning to reflect those targets.

At first we received a lot of the niggling tolerations - quality of paper towels, lengthening the time before an automatic log off, etc. These were the things that alone were not significant, but were stealing a lot of staff's time and energy. They became the "quick fixes" that once raised, could be easily resolved.

Then came blue jeans Friday. While there has never been a dress code, some departments allowed staff to wear jeans on Fridays while others did not. It became an equity issue and once posted, this idea received more "up" votes in one week than any other idea. Our culture encourages decision making at the lowest possible level, so there was some resistance to overriding department head authority; yet this suggestion became a pivotal shift from incremental to sustaining for us. Granting blue jeans Friday was the equivalent of cleaning out a closet for us.

The tone of our ideas shifted from "please fix" to "what if?" What if anyone could host a speaker on innovation or leadership? What if anyone could lead the effort to change a process or policy that no longer makes sense? What if we centralized certain functions to let departments focus on their core work? What if we created "brain trust" groups to identify and solve system-wide problems?

After two years of consistently cleaning out the closet of what we had been tolerating for so long, we are seeing more sustaining ideas that have the potential for major change within our core business. I am confident that game-changing innovation is just around the corner and can't wait to see what our talented staff suggest next!