The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.
Interpretation
Innovative companies often face internal challenges that can lead to confusion, but people find creative solutions to overcome these issues.
This quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter highlights the inherent complexities and challenges found within innovative organizations. These challenges, such as ambiguities and conflicts, can frustrate employees, yet they often inspire them to think creatively and develop new approaches to navigate these difficult situations. This process of overcoming obstacles contributes to the company's ability to innovate and grow.
In practice
In a team meeting where we discuss how to handle unexpected challenges in our project.
Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.
Organizational structures that allow divisions and departments to own their turf and people with long tenure to take root creates the same hardened group distinctions as Congressional redistricting to produce homogeneous voting blocs - all of which makes it easier to resist compromise, let alone collaboration.
The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc.
The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.
I've found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.
Leaders is the new organisation do not lack motivational tools, but the tools are different from those of traditional corporate bureaucrats. The new rewards are based not on status but on contribution, and they consist not of regular promotion and automatic pay rises, but of excitement about the mission and a share of the glory of success.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies - in the minds of those closest to the work.
When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.
The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products.
There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
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