Innovating in a mess
The pandemic has led many to ask their teams to innovate faster and harder. But, paradoxically, clinging to familiar processes when uncertainty abounds stymies agility. A little mess wouldn’t do any harm…
Research from Hila Lifshitz-Assaf and Sarah Lebovitz proves a counterintuitive strategy for innovating fast, without compromising on quality. They tracked the development of 13 health-tech projects across two hackathons and identified two pitfalls and, in following, two strategies for innovating better during turbulent times:
Pitfall 1: Compressing established processes into a tighter time frame.
The best standard innovation practices cannot be compressed to adapt to a shorter time frame.
Pitfall 2: Attempting to fully coordinate upfront.
In general, coordinating and building shared understanding of work processes makes teams more efficient. However, it also tends to impede the ability to be flexible and adapt to the unexpected.
Although it can seem counterintuitive, because it’s completely natural to seek order and stick with what we know when things become chaotic, teams in charge of innovation need to quickly drop lengthy initial processes and adopt minimal and adaptive coordination techniques – because, sometimes, the only way to succeed is to embrace chaos.
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Embrace a Little Chaos When Innovating Under Pressure
Hila Lifshitz Assaf and Sarah Lebovitz
(Harvard Business Review, september 2020)
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