7-Step Guide To Crushing Innovation In Its Tracks

July 26, 2007 · Filed Under Business, Creative Thinking Techniques, Creativity, Facilitation, Innovation

Is your organization just too damned innovative? Do you suffer from exquisitely sustained product lines, great branding, and excessive profits? Do your people bear the burden of creativity, happiness, and motivation? Do your customers endure the drudgery of a one-of-a-kind experience? Do your collaborative partners curse your name as they share in your great success? These simple steps will help you kill innovation more effectively than a bludgeon to the head.

1. Not Invented Here (NIH). This will get rid of that nasty ‘collaboration’ advantage in a hurry. Devalue all ideas from outside your core organization. Create a culture of ‘We Know Best.’ Give everyone in your organization shiny NIH badges. Force your partners to accept only your ideas. Better yet, punish them for the mere suggestion of outside creativity.

2. Punish Failure. This has a two-fold purpose - it kills creativity on sight, and weeds out your more creative individuals. Since innovation is the result of free-thinking prolific ideation, prototyping, and experimentation, innovation takes a lot of healthy failure. When your people learn that only perfectly formed, rational ideas are allowed, they’ll stop that pesky imaginative thinking.

3. Experts Only. How do you solve a problem in marketing? With marketers! How do you engineer a new product? With engineers! What possible insight could a marketer, anthropologist, sociologist, computer scientist, or housewife have on product design? Devalue the cross-disciplinary approach, eliminate all outside perspectives, and let the engineers stick to engineering, thank you.

4. Use the Lucy-Holding-The-Football Approach. Get everyone together for a brainstorming session, only this time open it with the following: “We know that, in the past, we’ve asked for your ideas, only to ultimately ignore them and maintain the status quo. But THIS TIME, it’s gonna be DIFFERENT.” That will get your people fired up to start pouring out idea after idea. And at the end of the day, emotionally thank everyone for creating the foundation for a new, better organization.

Then discard all ideas that weren’t suggested by upper management.

5. Solve the Wrong Problems. Don’t waste time trying to focus on solving the real problems - go from the gut. State the problem in the most general, least offending way possible, and just solve it as is. Don’t restate it, don’t look at it from other angles. “We Don’t Make Enough Money” is far more comfortable than “We Don’t Provide A Unique Customer Experience.” Plus, it’s inwardly-focused, and puts the blame on mysterious outside forces, which is ALWAYS a plus.

6. Maintain a Dogged Devotion to Sanity and Order. Wild, crazy ideas aren’t allowed. Playfulness is rejected. Everyone wears the same clothes, works in the same cubicles, thinks the same thoughts. And popularize the idea that innovation only works from 8 AM to 5 PM, Monday thru Friday, so don’t be late.

7. Kill The Innovators. Not literally, just take everything meaningful away from them. The freedom to create, the latitude to collaborate, the incentive to think laterally. Make their lives miserable. Focus the negatives in their ideas, ignore the positives. Soon, disheartened from the loss of their innovation haven, they’ll leave for greener pastures.

Then it will be just you, the negative thinkers, and the drones.

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