Re:Think: Do you have irrational, non-linear, passionate people in your team?

Over the years, we have continuously innovated to improve efficiency thereby increasing profits and reducing costs (Efficiency Innovation as coined by Clayton Christensen). This has led many business functions to continuously improve their process efficiency and move the mundane and non-core functions to shared services.

If we look back over the years, we have also encountered our team members, passionate about technology, who came with an irrational, non-linear solutions that did not fit into the scientific program and project management processes that defined the organizational goals and objectives. Teams also strived to develop unquestioning corporate obedience to these policies and procedures.

But all this has restricted the scope of innovation to only one of the two types of innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen – Efficiency Innovation. Think on how we can bring back the second form of innovation – market creating innovations.

Use these uncertain times, take time to reflect into the past. Many of these irrational ideas made a lot of logical sense, and some of them made business sense, but due to various constraints like budget, risk, governance, disruption, business acceptability etc., we have put them on the back-burner.

It is time we came out with models to encourage these irrational, non-linear thinkers, who will work beyond the boundaries of the program and project management processes, beyond the technological boundaries, self-delusional, and underestimate the risk. The standard appraisal process and people management skills may not be applicable. Encourage them. Do not try to make them prepare a business plan or project plan. They may not even have the end-solution in mind. They may not even be able to define the customer-segment. Many of these can be evolved as the project progresses.

Every CIO should create a small percentage of their budget that should be completely at their discretion to encourage such projects. Trying to perform technology forecasting on such projects would also be a challenge. From Medieval times of Alchemists to current innovators, many of them have begun their journey and stumbled upon their solutions and inventions that may be completely different from their original ideas.

It would also require CIO’s to become change managers. Because these innovations would not only lead to technology changes but also organisational and cultural changes. This would be extremely challenging as the existing process have reached the pinnacle of cost efficiency of high profits, and all new innovations usually start with a high cost, low profit model till they reach scale. As Jeff Bezos put it, the decision should be based on “regret minimization framework”. Every CIO needs to allocate some amount of their budget for innovative ideas that defy all established processes and procedures, and take a decision purely on their gut feel.