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All businesses must be innovative if they want to survive. If a company stalls, doesn’t keep up with the rate of change and doesn’t learn how to utilise new technologies, it’s likely they’ll see customers decline and eventually they’ll be a business no more.
But innovation isn’t easy. It’s not something you can just throw money at, as you might to solve a known problem, nor can you just put more resources and efforts towards it. It involves creativity, the right people, the right resources and the right environment to do so – innovation is not a clear linear process.
When we strip down innovation to its bare essentials, we see how this concept is about imagining the world as it could be, as opposed to how it really is, which requires a different mindset.
Get comfortable with chaos
The first lesson for leaders who want to initiate change is to forget about order and predictability and be prepared to embrace uncertainty and chaos. Leaders need to recognise innovation can be messy.
Researchers from the University of Minnesota tested how well students embraced new ideas when working in orderly versus messy work areas. They found working with a clean desk encouraged generosity and conformity, while those working in a disordered setting were more likely to come up with new ideas. Great innovators like Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Thomas Edison famously had messy desks, yet the modern office is often a cathedral of clean lines and minimalism that can kill creativity.
A workplace that encourages future thinking has dedicated space to make a mess. Think of Google’s War Room: a place to capture shared thinking and encourage team cohesion. Multiple whiteboards, glass walls to write on, or even just packs of sticky notes and an empty wall. People can make their offices a mix of communal areas where teams can carry out activities together, and private pods where people who want peace and quiet can work quietly alone.
As well as space to think together, businesses should make their offices a space where people can relax and be distracted. That’s when the best ideas can happen. I have my best ideas in the shower or while being in nature. Good office design can encourage distraction with careful use of colour, lighting and nature-inspired design.
These ideas can be extended to the digital space too. Nothing can replace face-to-face interaction, but COVID has brought new challenges and many teams have moved to hybrid and remote working. Businesses can use digital war rooms to make the process of working together as collaborative as possible. Tools such as Miro boards and MURAL can encourage creativity in remote teams.
Mindset change: measuring what matters
It’s not just about the outer environment. An innovation mindset is also about being able to deal with a certain amount of cognitive messiness and learning to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. In the world of innovation, we call this the fuzzy front end.
Design thinking is a human-centred approach that starts with the discovery phase. We present a problem and we don’t know the answer. We are prepared to go down rabbit holes to find out. We’re fuelled by curiosity. And we’re also ready to be wrong. Thomas Edison once said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Leaders can learn from failures, but first they have to give up control and predictability and create an environment where new ideas can be generated.
Change has to start at the top. Leaders can model the behaviours and values they want to cultivate in the workforce. They can introduce new measures of success beyond KPIs, such as valuing empathy and encouraging experimentation. That also means giving employees space to fail.
Invest in innovation
Good design – both in our workplaces and processes – needn’t be expensive. When companies ask me about the return on investment of implementing design thinking, I ask them to reflect on the price of not innovating. Companies face increasing competition, and they either must innovate or perish. Dr Ralf Speth, CEO of Jaguar Land Rover, said: “If you think that good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
A cultural shift won’t happen overnight. Business leaders may not be able to remodel their offices straight away, but they can start by upgrading values and behaviours. Leaders can build in planned and unplanned distractions. Planned distractions can include away days that have nothing to do with work, but everything to do with building culture. Creating space to think together can encourage teams to come up with novel solutions. It can also foster empathy, which is a core component of design thinking.
Empathy is a gateway to compassion, and in today’s volatile world, we need that more than ever. That’s the difference between humans and machines: human intelligence has feelings, and being human is sometimes a messy business. The future workforce is one that can tolerate uncertainty and make space for messiness and mistakes. Design thinking can boost both wellbeing and the bottom line - helping companies to thrive. Together, we can imagine and create a better future world. And it may start with getting a little messy.
This article was authored by Dr Ileana Stigliani, Associate Professor of Design and Innovation at Imperial College Business School.
