Business gurus and the media have celebrated innovation as the business equivalent of the philosopher’s stone, which would convert worthless metal into gold. Not surprisingly, the CEOs of the world’s largest companies have placed innovation high on their agendas, expressing their full support for bold innovation initiatives in their firms. Unfortunately, in most companies, reality is strikingly different when it comes to actual innovation. The majority of businesspeople, and middle managers in particular, are afraid of innovation.

Here’s why.

How ordinary is your business?

In their refreshing book Funky Business, the Swedish professors Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström write, “The ‘surplus society’ has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.” If everything in your company is similar to what’s going on in other companies, will you get different results? Outstanding, striking, extraordinary results? Of course not. You should expect similar results. In order to achieve the extraordinary, you need to be extraordinary. You need to be different. You need to stand out from the crowd. You need to be abnormal.

How insane is your business?

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” We all try to achieve extraordinary results in our organizations. Studies confirm that meaningful innovation improves both revenues and profit margins. But most companies, while paying lip service to innovation, produce at best incremental improvements, keeping firmly within the norms. Is your company doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results? How insane is your business?

How innovative is your business?

Most businesspeople continue to approach innovation the same way they always have, and continue to achieve the same incremental improvements. These businesspeople are not willing to innovate if it means changing the familiar ways of doing things. After all, it’s how “everyone else” does it. They talk a good game when it comes to innovation. They’ll list “innovation” as a key corporate value on their website. But their real attitude will be, “Innovation? Yes, but not too much, please!”

How open to real innovation is your business?

At Thinkergy, when we do innovation projects with companies, we often see a striking disconnect between intent (“We want to innovate”) and actual behavior (“We want to innovate, but not if we have to change anything”). For example, when performing the all-important initial exploration of a challenge, “we’re open to anything” soon gives way to “we don’t see why we should question our assumptions and beliefs.”

Similarly, when we suggest techniques for coming up with fresh, original ideas, we are often asked not to use our original, proprietary techniques such as “Unblinded with Science,” “Animal Kingdom” or “Read My Face,” but instead to go with familiar, overused techniques such as “Brainstorming” that are likely to produce the same results as always.

How ordinary do you want your ideas to be? Are you and your company willing to abandon a well-trodden trail and step into the unknown? How open are you to having your thinking genuinely challenged, to think in abnormal, extraordinary ways, to be among the few companies that, through innovation, produce the extraordinary?

Conclusion

If you say you want innovation, but are only willing to innovate in safe, “normal” ways, you will never be better than ordinary. As Ridderstråle and Nordström wrote, “Of one thing we can be sure: The average never wins. It never has and it never will. To succeed, we must stop being so goddamn normal. If we behave like all the others, we will see the same things, come up with similar ideas, and develop identical products or services. At its best, normal output will produce normal results. In a winner-takes-all world, normal = nothing.” Amen.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2011. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 29 September 2011.