Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

> To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line

This always confused me. It looked from the outside like Google does so many things right on the innovation front, but after some early success they have had a rough streak.

I'd argue that one thing that Google is doing wrong is gatekeeping promotions based on (overly) well-defined criteria such as new products. Goodhart's Law applies to this situation: you're sure to see lots of new products if its highly rewarded - a lot more than you'd see naturally. As the author mentioned - this might still be desirable depending on the market conditions, but there is a lot more to this discussion, and it's not entirely clear that Google has it wrong.

I'd argue that they emphasize comparability of assessment results(e.g. being able to quantify someone's output like a percentage grade in a course) over the actual relevancy of the assessment criteria/work/kpi to the company's bottom line(e.g. does the course's test actually prepare students for the real world). This probably comes as a by-product of the organization's heavily academic-focused staff - so it might actually be the best culture choice for them given that context - but it might also lose to companies that can successfully put a bigger weighting on the right "intangibles".

Not sure that you can fix a calcified bureaucracy with "doctrine". I sort of get the angle, I think -- if the org operates within a rigid rule framework, you need to speak their language to get anywhere -- so, doctrine is best, because everyone is used to being told what to do? I feel like that approach is counter to the spirit of innovation, that's akin to being forced to have fun; nothing truly innovative will come from it.

I think it's more of a lost cause, really. If you want to work on cool new stuff, don't work at a large org. I play the "innovation hero" role often enough, and the diversity of pushback we encounter is impressive. It ranges from thinly veiled hostility, the sdev equivalent of NIMBY, lies through omission, through nonviolent noncompliance, all the way to blithely unaware absurdity.

One amazing moment stands out to me - we were jumping through the usual hurdles as described in the article, trying to get a prototype to prod, and in one meeting the head of IT indignantly exclaimed "I am not here to solve problems!". To paraphrase a scene from the Big Short: he wasn't confessing, he was bragging. The top brass exist to stifle any and all deviation from the norm.

Another commenter in this thread makes a very good point: most of these innovation initiatives die stillborn, because the existing power structures exist, their MO is to maintain, and the C-suites would rather buy a successful startup than take any political risks internally.

>> Why is it that innovations require heroics to occur in our organization?

Why do we immediately assume that innovation = progress? Sure, the things that SURVIVE are useful, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of ideas are just like mutations in evolution more likely to be at best useless and probably damaging in various ways.

You see, social constructs are not as dumb as they appear to be to the armchair intellectual. "Why, we should embrace innovation and immediately adopt any idiocy that Mary from accounting is suggesting as our global company policy". I assure you that by natural law, if "random idea from random guy" were profitable on average, we'd have a system that would encourage such ideas. The sad fact is that they aren't and will never be.

Friction (named in the article as "Dysfunctional Organization") is an unfortunate but necessary process which ensures "survival of the fittest", even among "innovation". It's as simple as that.

I honestly don't know where innovation exists that doesn't require "fighting the system" to some degree.

There are a lot of bad ideas out there and the "system" is there to weed out the bad ideas. However, you can have too much system where it will defeat even the good ideas too, so there's a sweet spot.

IMO it's comes down to how much leftover budget (time or money) the organization has. You don't need processes or procedures for innovation... you need people with enough leftover money and time who can "screw around" a little.

Also a place where everyone is not grumpy.

To be fair, creating a process for innovation is hard and expensive - especially if you want it to apply across the board at a large organization.

I have been on multiple "incubator" development teams in the past and although we did move faster, my times at smaller startups still felt significantly more productive.

You want something that is the right balance of bespoke and standardized/transferable. Its not easy, but there is so much room for improvement at these bigger organizations that there is huge value to getting it right.