Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

Incentives matter, certainly, but you must suss out what those incentives are and what they need to be to arrive at the desired outcome. Look no further than the US Digital Service and 18F (within GSA). You are not paid top dollar, but you are put in front of meaningful work and enabled to deliver (although that in itself is an incentive for the practitioners recruited). From the bottom of the impact report I cite: "We need you. Let’s help millions of people together." right above the Call to Action to apply.

The USDS is enabled to succeed in this mission through the support of the Executive Office of the President, the equivalent of corporate executive sponsorship. Culture comes from the top.

https://www.usds.gov/impact-report/2024/

https://www.usds.gov/impact-report/2024/by-the-numbers/

(full disclosure: went through a USDS interview cycle and was extended an offer, no other affiliation)

This a million times! I’ve been in the position of the “innovation hero” but also was unfortunate enough to work on “innovation pipeline” implementations within a large company. These never work because:

1. (99% of) employees don’t care. They have their own job to do and working on other things is an eyebrow raise from their manager (see 3). And what’s the e benefit? Mostly it’s a pat on the back or some “points” in the company award system that you can use to buy shitty merch at the end of the year.

2. Executive leadership doesn’t care because for the most part they don’t trust their own tech team to innovate. Why take the risk when you can buy a startup which comes with a bona fide certificate of innovation.

3. But the real problem (as commonly identified) is middle mgmt, who not only don’t care but are generally hostile to nonstandard work. The reasons for this are complex, partly it’s the aging manager suffering from Peter Principle, partly it’s the fear of negative pushback from senior leadership.

PS: Steve is amazed, but 10 months for the sort of setup he describes which includes HW buy and setup, in a Big Corp is very fast.

POSIWID implies that unchange is the desire of the government. People desire unchange and this is a tool they use to try to force it on everyone.

Reminds me of the Drucker quote about “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

The problem is that large organizations naturally drift toward inertia and ossification. If a forward-looking leader wants the culture to change, they are faced with a conundrum:

- use a strategy like this (e.g. some top-down “innovation center” approved at the C level) which reinforces the rigidity and process-oriented thinking that needs to change, or

- create an insurgent skunkworks group that hopes to prove a different approach via undeniable results. This usually ends with back-alley knives getting unsheathed.

> what we just witnessed was leadership rewarding and perpetuating a dysfunctional and broken system.

It's not clear that it is dysfunctional. If innovation is not a particularly high priority, but risk reduction is, then the system is working as designed - all of the checks are necessary. Compare to the "innovative" Boeing-type company which streamlines production by removing all safety checks.