Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

steveblank.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 170 posts

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#71

Post by foobarian »

cogman10 wrote: post #50
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 mana…

> Leadership does not trust the grunts to do productive work

Not only that, but unfortunately they are usually right. Without oversight the in-house team has high likelihood of building NIH spaghetti, which causes more problems down the line. To avoid the negative outcome leadership needs to be technically competent and resourced, and that's the other side of the coin - usually they don't have the expertise so in a way they also do not trust themselves to lead the project to a positive outcome.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#72

Post by danaris »

cogman10 wrote: post #50
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 mana…

> This all, imo, is simply a trust problem primarily from leadership. Leadership does not trust the grunts to do productive work.

Which, IME, stems from a deep-seated classism that sees "grunts" today as being essentially no different than assembly-line workers in the Industrial Revolution: you're just a pair of hands who not only doesn't know enough to make changes in the process, you shouldn't even think of it, because it's not your place.

In this worldview, it's managers (and up) who have the education, intelligence, and breeding to know best, and lowly workers just need to shut up and do what they're told.

...This attitude is also responsible for a lot of other really destructive problems in the modern world of work.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#73

Post by loceng »

tredigi wrote: post #14

I agree to the overall tone, but there are also counter points. One of them is the Google example. To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line. Result? They have so many new things happening all the time, all of them suck, and then just move on to the next. Eg how many chat products do they need to invent before they settle on one and let it mature?

So that will result in an "innovation hero" improving on Google's model so the fundamentals don't create such waste, no?

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#75

Post by lanstin »

The thing is there's a lot of dysfunctional organizations, and being an innovation hero is an easier and more fun career path than fixing dysfunctional organizations, which seems (as someone that only half-heartedly tries to keep insane decisions from the top from ruining things) to not necessarily be possible; there are often hidden agendas and people more interested in their cash out than the viability of the organization long term.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#76

Post by constantcrying »

ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

>No of course not, we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint, where we were congratulated by everyone for our phenomonal estimation.

Are you sure this is a negative example? You even have a work around which makes everyone happy.

This isn't what a dysfunctional organization looks like.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#77

Post by nathan_compton »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #3
nathan_compton wrote: post #2

God yes please give us an "innovation doctrine." This is certainly an interesting article to read about but I'm not sure his suggestions or analysis are that substantive. Complex institutions develop rules to simplify decision making and streamline information flows. They choke otherwise. "Develop an innovation doctrine" isn't really effective advice.

There are various articles on developing a culture of innovation, e.g. https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-hard-truth-about-innovative-cult... . Probably some books too. Even ChatGPT probably has decent advice. Management is not technically complex, it just requires putting in the work. But of course it is not easy, e.g. the first advice in the HBR article is to fire incompetent people, whereas the example here was governmen…

> chatGPT probably has decent advice

If chatGPT has anything other than banal platitudes, I'll eat my hat.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#78

Post by withinboredom »

Angostura wrote: post #38
shermantanktop wrote: post #17

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 t…

I think there is possibly a third way. I’m currently working with the NHS in a Quality Improvement role in a hospital. The team exists to give grass-roots folks the tools they need to make change happen when they spot something in the system which is less than ideal. We offer training, help with setting aims, running projects, finding stakeholders, analysing data etc. These aren’t huge system transformation projects,…

> in fact some of them can be quite small

The biggest changes always start with someone taking one small step towards their goal.

Some of the biggest software (used by billions of people) I've ever worked on started as a simple script made by a teenager.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#79

Post by apozem »

ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

That is amazing. I worked with a (different?) finance company that did the same thing - every team was judged on their burndown charts.

From what I saw, it did no good. Teams simply did not use tickets to track work. If a story surfed sprints, its “ticket” was closed at the end of one sprint and a new one was opened for next. If a priority bug came in mid-sprint, we simply worked on it without a ticket.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#80

Post by loloquwowndueo »

constantcrying wrote: post #76
ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

>No of course not, we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint, where we were congratulated by everyone for our phenomonal estimation. Are you sure this is a negative example? You even have a work around which makes everyone happy. This isn't what a dysfunctional organization looks like.

It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level.

The team that decided to do this to keep the metrics happy rocks, though :)

Post reply on HN