In the same way that too many cooks spoil the broth, too much input spoils innovation.
Conventional wisdom often suggests the opposite. “If you want better ideas, get as many people involved in the process as possible. The more the merrier, because the key to greater innovation and creativity is greater collaboration.”
But that’s baloney. It’s simply not true.
Remember, successful change agents and serial innovators think differently. They have an eerie ability to mentally model how people will respond. And once they “see the model,” they’re usually so confident of its clarity and accuracy that they’re willing to take what look like great risks based on it. Yet they also will turn on a dime when new information surfaces, morphing and changing the model until their idea succeeds in the real world.
None of this is normal. In fact, it’s weird. But it’s vital to the innovation process.
Inviting too many people into the innovation or decision-making process waters down the contribution of serial innovators. Their voices become just one of many (and often misunderstood at that). We risk diluting — even drowning out — the valuable counterintuitive insights they bring to the table.
Let’s imagine that you are a master chef opening a gourmet restaurant. You’d want to pull together a creative and enthusiastic team of waiters, bussers, kitchen help, and sous chefs. You might hire an out-of-the-box interior designer, a cutting-edge graphic artist, and a number of other creatives to help you stand out from the crowd. But when it comes to the menu, you don’t let any of them decide what to serve or how to cook, season, or present it on the plate.
It’s not because you’re arrogant. It’s because you’re a certified master chef and they are not. And while you’d be foolish to ignore others’ reactions (what dishes sell well, which ones come back half-eaten, and which ones no one seems to order), at the end of the day, you make the call, because customers don’t line up to try the Busboy’s Favorite or pay top dollar for the Waiter’s Delight.
In the same way, innovators need to be allowed to lead, paying close attention to the feedback of others and the real-world response to their ideas without ceding control of the process, final product, or decision to groupthink.
THE PROBLEM WITH GROUPTHINK
The crowd will have its day. Once a new program, product, or major change is introduced, they’ll vote with their feet and their wallets. They always have the final say.
But crowds aren’t very good at envisioning the future, either what could be or should be. They tend to evaluate new ideas and concepts in light of what they already know and experience.
That’s why most of my staff thought video venues was a bad idea, nothing but a glorified overflow room. It’s also why Swiss watchmakers gave away the technology to the quartz crystal. And why the manufacturers of traditional X-ray technology rejected a prototype of a CT scanner as having no market value. They couldn’t envision it becoming a useful or profitable medical device, especially since it originally was cobbled together using pieces of a toy train, a record player, and an alarm clock. So they turned it down.
The main problem with groupthink is not the plethora of opinions and ideas that people bring to the process. That can be a good thing. There’s often treasure to be found in the pile. The problem with groupthink is that it tends to succumb to a herd mentality and a desire for harmony. When this tendency takes over, it inevitably sabotages, postpones, or derails innovation and much-needed change long before they can get off the ground.
Here’s how.
HERD MENTALITY
A herd mentality is simply our natural inclination to look to others when deciding what to do or how to think. We all take cues from others. It can’t be helped. It’s how we’re wired. Even people who pride themselves on being iconoclastic and ignoring what others think and say have a tribe and a code they carefully conform to. It might be a small tribe, but it’s there nonetheless. A genuinely unique rebel is hard to find.
The First to Speak
This tendency toward a herd mentality is a powerful force in most group settings (be it a committee, a task force, a product team, or a Bible study group). Watch what happens after the first person speaks. Whatever they say usually ends up shaping the rest of the conversation. It doesn’t matter what others were thinking beforehand; once the first person speaks, everyone else tends to follow their lead and the topic they bring up.
In board meetings or planning sessions, this tendency can sabotage the decision-making process. It allows the most extroverted or negative person to frame the discussion and set the agenda. Whatever issues they raise become the issues that dominate the conversation, even if no one else shared those concerns when they walked into the room.
Conventional Wisdom
Another example of herd mentality at work is the unquestioned authority that we give to conventional wisdom. It, too, can lead to some really bad decisions.
Some conventional wisdom is spot on. That’s why it’s so widely accepted. It has been proven over time.
But there are also plenty of urban legends that are widely believed but patently false. And they don’t just have to do with alligators in the New York sewer system, airheads drying poodles in the microwave, or some crazy guy with a hook sneaking around Lovers’ Lane. They also have to do with our day-to-day assumptions about how life works.
Unfortunately, most of our false assumptions are buried deep within conventional wisdom. There’s no way to know they’re false until something happens to expose them. Which explains why everyone once believed that bloodletting could cure disease, that the sun revolved around the earth, and that doctors didn’t need to bother to sanitize their hands before performing surgery.
It’s enough to make me wonder what aspects of today’s conventional wisdom will make us look silly and foolish to future generations.
It also explains why committees and focus groups are innovation’s worst nightmare. Groups have a hard time escaping the gravitational pull of conventional wisdom. They tend to reject outright anything that doesn’t fit their standard paradigm or hasn’t been done before. Worse, there’s no way to convince them otherwise, since there’s no hard evidence to point to when something hasn’t yet been done.
It’s no wonder that serial innovators generally seek permission to field-test their ideas rather than sell their ideas. They know that it’s much easier to get a group to grant them permission to try an idea than it is to get permission to launch an idea. Once their idea has been field-tested, they know they’ll have a few facts with which to push back on conventional wisdom. And if the test is successful, they know there’s a chance the herd might actually listen to what they have to say.
The Curse of Expertise
It’s not just committees and focus groups that succumb to the herd mentality. So do the experts. They have it just as bad as everyone else.
Consider the long list of Nobel Prize winners. It’s amazing how many of them had to endure rejection and ridicule from their fellow scientists before their facts finally won the day. You’d think that a group of people who pride themselves on research and hard facts would welcome someone who has new facts for them to consider. But once the experts all agree on something, they’re just like the rest of us. They tend to close ranks and listen to one another.
It’s easy to see why. Experts rise to prominence by having a deep understanding of their field. They know it inside out. They know what works, what doesn’t, and why. They’ve “seen it all.”
But their deep knowledge of the present can blind them to the future. They can be so consumed by what is and has been that they have little bandwidth for what could be. That’s why there are so many stories about brilliant leaders ignoring, rejecting, or even giving away the technology and innovations that eventually ate their lunch.
It also explains why a panel of experts can be the death knell for innovation and major change. If an innovation is groundbreaking or paradigm shifting, odds are the experts won’t see it as such. Experts tend to see anything in their field that they don’t know about as trivial and anything they don’t understand as nonsensical. After all, they are the experts.
THE DESIRE FOR HARMONY
Another significant innovation killer is the built-in desire for harmony that most boards, committees, and project groups bring to the process.
Now you might be thinking, “How can that be? Aren’t boards, committees, and project groups notorious for conflict?”
Yes, they are.
But their conflict is often rooted in a misguided effort to maintain harmony. They can’t make a tough decision and move on. In an effort to find a solution that keeps everyone happy, they keep picking at the scab.
This gives inordinate power to those who are angry or stubborn. All they have to do is blow up or dig in their heels, and most groups will back up and start looking for a compromise. Everyone else in the room may have been ready to sign off and move on. It doesn’t matter. The moment that discord arises, most groups immediately will slow down, table, or radically alter whatever it was that caused the stir. They’ll let their desire for relational harmony trump making the right decision almost every time.
LOW-LEVEL FRUSTRATION IS NOT MUTINY
Boards, committees, and leadership teams also tend to confuse low-level frustration with mutiny. They worry too much.
There will always be some members who hear isolated complaints or criticisms and extrapolate them into mass dissatisfaction. When they bring their concerns to the leadership team, some folks will panic. They forget that late adopters are never thrilled about any change on the front end, even those that prove to be highly successful and game changing on the back end.
After you’ve made a significant change, the important question isn’t, “Are some people unhappy or mildly frustrated with this change?” The key question is, “Are they leaving or just griping?”
I’m reminded of the time we moved onto our new main campus. It was a massive upgrade. Yet there were plenty of low-level frustrations linked to all the changes that came with it. Hearing lots of complaints, many of our staff members were deeply concerned. They wondered if we had made a huge mistake. They assumed that if we had done things differently or communicated better, everyone would be fine with the new classrooms, chairs, parking, venues, and restroom locations. Some were so concerned that they thought we should halt any further programing changes and send out an all-church letter or hold a special meeting to address the things they heard people complaining about. They feared we were on the cusp of a mass exodus.
But they were wrong. We were simply experiencing the natural pushback that comes with any significant change. For those who liked familiarity, nothing was familiar. For those who liked to gripe, there were lots of new things to gripe about. For those who were late adopters, it was too soon to settle in. None of this was unusual. All of it was predictable.
So I gathered the staff and once again walked them through research on the diffusion of innovation and how groups process change. We had covered all of this before. But at that time it was mere theory. Now we were in the midst of real-life confusion and discord.
To their credit, they got it. There was nothing we could have done that would have turned our late adopters into early adopters. Better communication, or even a redesign of the buildings, wouldn’t have changed a thing. There was no silver bullet to make the process painless for everyone. Six months later, the complaints and frustrations had dissipated. We were settled in and moving on.
The fact is, there will always be some level of organizational frustration surrounding any significant innovation or change. Expect it. Embrace it. There’s no way around it.
Unfortunately, this is a hard concept to get across to a board, committee, or leadership team. No matter how badly a change might be needed, someone will always want to slow it down, table it, send it out for further study, or alter it beyond recognition in a futile quest for harmony.
Many leadership teams would rather hurt the cause than hurt someone’s feelings. Which explains why any innovation or major change that has to pass through a gauntlet of committees or boards seldom escapes unscathed — and often never makes it out alive — and why too much groupthink is a guaranteed innovation killer.