One of the topics I have heard about and spoken about often with others is the lack of innovation in the United States compared to the rest of the world, and compared to the nation's own history for innovation. In a daily summary of articles on leadership I receive, one section is dedicated to articles dealing with innovation - primarily, how to encourage innovation within your team.
An article came up that gave me a chuckle, though. In it, baseball is used as an example for a practice in innovation using attribute dependency. Basically, attribute dependency, as explained in the article, simply means listing all of the attributes of a given process, finding the links, and looking at how either creating new links across attributes or breaking links across attributes might affect the process.
I chuckled first because my husband has discussed baseball before, and things that might make it more interesting. The changes that are outlined reminded me very much of his own proposals.
But here's an interesting observation that might have something to do with why innovation doesn't happen as often as we might expect: even though my husband is often playing around when telling people his ideas for things like making baseball more interesting, the majority of the time, those listening will just shrug off the ideas as silly, drastic, or even flat-out crazy. Baseball is baseball; the game has been played the way it's currently played for years. Sure, it can be a bit boring at times, but changing the game? That seems pretty drastic!
However, in business, regardless how long a process has been in place, and regardless how long "it's just been done that way," perhaps taking a step back and looking at ways to truly change the game is just what needs to happen. It's tough to convince people to do that, though. Why? Often, the feedback to a proposed change runs along the lines of, "Why change what has been working well enough for so long? Sure, there have been pitfalls in the process, but, for the most part, it works." In essence, "Why change something that isn't broken (even if cracks are showing)?"
Too often, I think groups and businesses get stuck in a rut because there is fear of change - fear the change will over-complicate things, fear the change will require more time rather than less time (especially if it's a change intended to create efficiency), fear the change simply won't work and will mean wasted time.
I think innovation is often overlooked because we are worried what the results of implementing innovative ideas will be. In a nutshell, we fear failure, and have had ingrained in us the idea that innovation must always succeed. If there isn't guaranteed success, we don't want to take the risk.
So, the real question is: how can we overcome these fears and be more open to innovative ideas to begin with?
I remember a thing my company went through a few years ago : "Celebrate your mistakes." Laughable ... in fact, pretty much opposite of the company's culture. To be innovative, your organization must tolerate some level of risk.
ReplyDeleteBaseball doesn't change the rules all that often anymore (the last big change was in 1973 with the DH rule), but I don't think it's fair to say they don't innovate. They have innovated significantly in how the game is presented to fans, with local cable contracts, the Extra Innings out-of-market plan, the development of (and financing of) new deluxe ballparks, and even things like extra camera angles, pitch tracking, and continuous on-screen display of counts and scores. They have also done a lot of business development, with recruiting in Latin America and Asia, continually evolving roster rules, interleague play, and adding an extra tier games to the playoffs.
ReplyDeleteOne of the appeals of baseball is its history - there was a period in the late nineteenth century when the rules were in flux all the time (the ball and strike rules changed yearly in the 1880s), but since about 1920 the game itself has been pretty much indistiguishable from the modern game. And that's a good thing, business-wise, because that continuity is one of the things most baseball fans like about the game.
But the *business* of baseball is in constant evolution, and, given the way the revenues keep increasing, it seems hard to argue that these innovations aren't working.
I think it is more about Lawyers getting in the way: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/771
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