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Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

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Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#41

Post by merely-unlikely »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11
setgree wrote: post #4

I favor the general point here, but the leading anecdote doesn’t really fit with the lessons learned. A government organization generally does not need an innovation doctrine to avoid being outcompeted because they are a monopoly provider. They maintain that monopoly through force. If you want to get a government agency to perform better, fix the incentives.

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: "…

> 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.

That sentence is the essence of generic corpo-speak. Doesn't really mean anything without specifics.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#42

Post by solatic »

Author clearly has no understanding of why startups move quickly. Startups have the same Legal, Procurement, Security, etc. needs and responsibilities as any large company or government agency - its just that these responsibilities are looked after by generalist founder-executives, not whole departments filled with specialists. Any "innovation department", if it ever wants to actually ship anything, still needs to get BigBureaucracy on board, which is where the vast majority of time gets eaten up to ship anything. Startups don't need buy-in and alignment from whole departments full of specialists, just the executive-founders with unrelated titles and experience who are still nonetheless nominally responsible for those areas.

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

Leadership's first responsibility is to keep the system happy and running smoothly. The first responsibility is not to shareholders, not to attempting to seize potentially higher profits, but to the organization itself. The organization may be "dysfunctional" and "broken" but this is completely irrelevant - the Fortune 500 is still generating massive profits and the public institution is still nominally discharging its duties. This is why the vast majority of Fortune 500 CEOs are "caretaker" CEOs and why deep cultural change of public institutions is so difficult.

Culture is fundamentally a question of who you hire, who you promote, and who you fire. Those decisions do not happen overnight in healthy organizations. That's why it's slow.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#43

Post by toomuchtodo »

merely-unlikely wrote: post #41
toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: "…

> 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. That sentence is the essence of generic corpo-speak. Doesn't really mean anything without specifics.

Someone has the authority, budget, competency, and stamina to make change happen. I spend quite a bit of my time speaking with execs, my apologies.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#44

Post by quesera »

EncomLab wrote: post #26

Relate to the four stages of employment: 1) This is the new person "X" - they are amazing and are going to solve everything! 2) "X" is pretty good, but maybe not as good as we thought. 3) "X" turned out to just be another average performer. 4) "X" is obviously terrible or they would have left for someplace that would treat them better than we do.

I've never seen this written down, but I've definitely seen it in action.

Experienced leaders try to avoid deluding themselves at step 1, and work to prevent things transitioning from step 2 to step 3.

But sometimes it's impossible (or I'm not experienced enough!). Some employees really do start off strong and then fade out, even if the incentive structures are "good" / "above market" / etc.

Honestly, I've seen the roots of this in myself too, in classes, jobs, relationships: initial enthusiasm wanes and at some point it's time to make a different decision. Personally I prefer to move on instead of stagnate, but some people are perfectly happy to ride the suboptimal until a decision is made for them!

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#45

Post by charles_f »

I fully agree with the sentiment, as I immediately get discouraged of doing anything as soon as it requires the approval from someone in another organization, which in large companies will often take weeks, if it happens at all.

There's an argument to be made for bureaucracy: once you reach a certain scale (of complexity and/or size), the law of large numbers makes that you're prone to more risks than when you're a startup. It's "fine" for a startup to not be aware of the latest development of privacy policies in Finland, and if you provision a couple resources in the cloud everything's fine because when looking at the bill, you can simply ask around "who owns that thing?". At enterprise size, you're much more prone to be audited by governments, to be attacked by hackers, to be the target of lawsuits, to have runaway costs that get hard to diagnose ; and the complexity of your systems (wet or hard) doesn't increase linearly. I don't think you can avoid having some processes to control that.

The problem is when the enterprise gets into a vicious cycle in which the only fix to any process issue is to slap on more process rather than rethink the existing ones. Such as illustrated in that post, where the solution to a lack of innovation is the creation of innovation heroes to incentivize the behaviour. I've been in three enterprise organizations, two of them have policies where you need to ask for permission, the other grants permission by default but reviews what's been done. That second policy is much better, as the level was quite high, people tend to respect the rule, and get caught if they don't. That allows for faster work.

But then there's also the matter of recruitment. As a startup you can handpick people, create a team that's functional and with an edge. In an enterprise, recruiting is done at an industrial scale, where your inbound fresh flesh exposes you to the simple truth that, by definition, half of humanity is below the mean.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#46

Post by JohnMakin »

This is true, but I am unsure of the fix prescribed here.

For me, I had experience with a project like this - a large, extremely bureaucratic company tasked my team with a nearly impossible task, I think in an effort to lay off the team - which eventually happened. I fought with tooth and nails and was already doing fairly well in my role, so they gave me a shot and assigned the task, which I won't belabor the details of, but it was basically to implement a fundamental service that every application in the company would use to authenticate to the backend system (plus a lot of other reliability/availability guarantees).

The problem was, with their architecture being a central hub cluster of servers that provided core services to hundreds of edge servers around the world, it would have been fine to just throw this service into the central server and call it a day. However, the eggheads in executive leadership felt this was not acceptable, so the requirement was to make a new "central" cluster to connect to not only all the edge clusters in the company, but all the backend office/admin stuff as well.

Problem was - the people who wired up the networking and everything else with the central server had been gone for 10+ years. Barely anyone even knew how it worked, and unfortunately as I took this on, the network team got laid off, replaced by people who also had no clue how it worked. As we connected more and more services to this new hub, a bunch of skeletons emerged - the funniest being a server cluster in a region and account that no one had access to, or knew what it did, other than when it crashed other servers had issues. No one had accessed it for years. That was fun hacking into.

There were tons of hurdles like this at every step, basically being that this touched so many teams in so many different areas of the infrastructure, the organizational hurdles trying to even get the information you need to do the job required a ridiculous amount of heroics. I hated it. Basically, you need to create urgency any way you can - whether this is by breaking things, horse trading, political maneuvers, begging, intimidation - your livelihood is on the line. Other teams sensed what a difficult ask this was so early going was extremely difficult getting cooperation from the 30+ teams this touched.

Anyway at the end of the day I was able to do it by finally escalating urgency to the executive level and they made it a priority one quarter and it quickly got finished. If they hadn't, it would have been very difficult. They had the issue of having too many layers of management below them and had no idea, all they heard is "why is this project you said would take 2 months taking almost 2 years" and a bunch of manager speak trying to explain why.

I would never, ever want to work on any project like that again. 2 years to complete, should have taken 2 months if working as an IC, 2 weeks with a full competent team and good management. There were some good things that came out of it though - processes got improved, collaboration improved, and we were able to use it as a chance to refactor the IAC in a way you could deploy these hub servers again in a much easier way that didn't require the ridiculous amount of detective work to figure out the first time.

Oh yea, forgot to mention the actual application took about 2 days to configure. All the rest of it was what took 2 years.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#47

Post by smugglerFlynn »

solatic wrote: post #42

Author clearly has no understanding of why startups move quickly. Startups have the same Legal, Procurement, Security, etc. needs and responsibilities as any large company or government agency - its just that these responsibilities are looked after by generalist founder-executives, not whole departments filled with specialists. Any "innovation department", if it ever wants to actually ship anything, still needs to ge…

Some orgs of Fortune 500 caliber have innovation units that help to process ideas and changes. To be efficient, these units must have buy in on senior leadership level and high level of exec sponsorship, ideally they would also have C-level representation in a form of dedicated “innovation officer” or similar role.

It is definitely not a new area, and author is on point with one key idea: organisations where heroes are praised as miracles generally don’t give a damn about continuous improvement, innovation units just never happen there. Praising individuals who swam against the flow for a year is pure virtue signalling in these orgs. In 2024 “running things smoothly” is almost a synonym for “continuous improvement”; building latter requires intent, not miracles.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#48

Post by verisimilidude »

bearjaws wrote: post #16

> Why Innovation Heroes are a Sign of a Dysfunctional Organization Because often you can solve 99% of companies problems with boring software. I am reminded of this blog post from earlier this week: > Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of m…

"Innovation" in this context does not mean cutting-edge technology. It just means changing processes to deliver better results. The tech is often the easy part, and there's plenty of room for boring software.

The hard part is navigating the bureaucracy and building consensus toward a change. This management-craft is where the clever thinking and emergent solutions are found and deployed.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#49

Post by JohnMakin »

novagameco wrote: post #36

I worked for a large company and started seeing opportunities for automation immediately. I proposed some solutions to my boss, and he told me that he agreed that these tasks could be automated, but that we have 10,000 other tasks that could be automated, and each one takes a few months to get the resources provisioned and also set aside developer (me) time to get it done, which could be spent on other projects. What…

So much feel this and have seen it many times. A complete unwillingness to spend a few hours to save hundreds of hours later, because too much is urgent. It's a little bit like a thrashing OS, too many competing resources so the result is everything slows to a crawl or breaks.

I've clawed my way out of situations like this but it does require some heroics in the beginning and probably longer hours than your role requires. I am the kind of person that will ask to slow a project down or delay it if it means we get a chance to do things correctly and in a maintainable way, but certain types in management will not really understand enough to completely buy in.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#50

Post by cogman10 »

Jun8 wrote: post #13

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…

This all, imo, is simply a trust problem primarily from leadership. Leadership does not trust the grunts to do productive work. So in order to make sure productive work is done, they build elaborate systems of cases, reviews, meetings, planning, scheduling, fighting, readjusting when the schedules are invariably missed, and finger pointing. All almost always completely devoid of input from the grunts.

The middle management problem is they are right in the worst place possible. They are removed from the actual work being done so they don't know what it actually takes to do anything and they are blamed for things not accomplished. Further, they are rewarded for every little stupid thing done. It hyperintensities them to do lots of small safe initiatives and vehemently oppose anything with any sort of risk. All while being almost completely disconnected from what actually needs to be done.

This all leads to a culture meant to squash innovation. Middle management isn't rewarded for implementing a grunt's idea, they are rewarded for delivering CEO initiatives. Anything that takes time away from that is seen as waste.

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