Blog about Libraries

I have been thinking lately about what it takes to manage innovation. For the most part, I have always been considered an innovative person, but this is due mainly to the fact that my supervisors gave me a lot of leeway to experiment, to try things out and to explore new ideas. There may have been a good idea here or there, but for the most part my ideas have usually been impractical, naive, or just downright cooky.

But they let me work on just about anything I wanted. What they understood is that managing innovation is quite different from managing operations. The former requires a high comfort level with uncertainty whereas the latter is all about closing loose ends and developing highly predictable futures. Every once in a while something good came out of my head, and for those things (and not the abject, humiliatingly awful failures) I got a little glory now and then.

Eric Schnell posted this article back in April in which he created an interesting table that describes the difference between managing sustaining and disruptive technologies. There are similar iterations of this table elsewhere and many contain the same basic theme; that operations and innovations are two separate environments. I would do Eric a gross injustice if I tried to summarize the entire article (I suggest you read it instead), but my takeaway was this- in order to support innovation, managers and administrators have to be comfortable with a little bit of chaos. In order to do so, we have to understand that we are managing two distinct and opposite processes- the closing of loopholes and the creation of possibilities.

Roger Bean and Russell Bradford have written on the business of managing innovation. They discuss a similar litany of opposites:

"Management is nothing if not the art of manipulating contradictions into a coherent and efficient system to provide something someone wants. Here are a few of the contradictions confronting managers every day:

• Hierarchy versus anarchy


• Control versus flexibility


• External versus internal


• Serendipity versus goal clarity


• Individuality versus collectivity

How these contradictions are resolved, also determines the climate for innovation. Experienced managers know that Solomon like decisions are never really an either-or proposition. Instead, sound decisions are nearly always a balancing act that places the specific situation somewhere between the two polar extremes."
Managing Innovation Managers Innovative Leader, V 11, No. 5, May 2002 by Roger Bean and Russell Radford

Another consideration is the role managers play in creating innovation. Should the manager be the person who comes up with new ideas? Sometimes the relationship between the manager and staff can thoroughly screw up the process of bringing innovations to maturation. For instance, how many staff would rather brainstorm with coworkers than their boss? How many staff are comfortable critiquing the boss' ideas? Quite possibly this isn't a problem for many people, but it can't be overlooked by a manager. It may be more important for managers to support innovation by just not saying "no" themselves. Sure, lots of ideas may be wrongheaded, but if I want to nuture innovative thinking in my library, I have to be prepared to work with what I've got. Bad ideas have a tendency to reveal themselves as such and good ideas will float to the top. After all, in my career none of my crackpot innovations has ever made it to production, thanks to the deliberate, thoughtful input of coworkers and good bosses.