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Teamwork, creative setting and freedom to fail seen as key innovation ingredients

WILLIAM MZIMBA South Africa can effectively change the status quo by leveraging the digital revolution and must broaden innovation, especially in education

LISA BODELL We do not have the mindset for change, but change can be achieved by collaborating in simple ways

SEBASTIAN THRUN Learning must become a continuous and daily habit and there is a need to make education available through smartphones in people’s pockets

GREG BRANDEAU The innovation process is often difficult and awkward, and forces a reassessment of assumptions, but improves the outcome

15th May 2015

By: Schalk Burger

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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The biggest obstacle to innovation, which can develop new enterprises, industries, companies and jobs in South Africa, is a propensity for stagnation and intellectual stasis.

Innovation can effectively be implemented by encouraging teams of employees to deal with well-defined problems by exploring diverse solutions or novel concepts on a trial-and-error basis.

“Changing corporate culture is often about creating space for change, and requires a simple approach where the rules are different or suspended,” says corporate innovation consultancy Futurethink founder and CEO Lisa Bodell.

She adds that resistance to change is natural and, although governing policies and procedures are put in place to ensure that tasks are completed, “policies and procedures are often an excuse for not doing anything”.

Exploring Innovation
In corporate culture, small teams working iteratively is key, as they can help to make the culture of change – innovation – a familiar routine, says animation giant Walt Disney former executive VP and chief technology officer and co-author of The Collective Genius Greg Brandeau.

“No company can hire only the best people, so an innovation culture is often about how you manage and organise people and combine their slices of genius. Companies can build innovation into their organisations.”

Leaders who lead for innovation learn to harness and share the diversity of thought in their organisations, which teams can use to solve problems.

“It is a myth that ideas simply leap from our minds. Diverse chunks of information and influences help us to think in new ways and adopt new perspectives,” notes Brandeau.

Similarly, Bodell notes: “It is ridiculous to think that only certain people can have good ideas. Everyone must be able to innovate and express his or her ideas. People must become invested in the process.”

She emphasises that people do not recognise their own biases that prevented change in their organisations, which is why multiple ideas and influences, as well as formal spaces within which to explore concepts outside the often-limiting procedures, are useful elements to accelerate change.

“We do not have the mindset for change, partly because we are confined by our own limited experiences. However, change does not have to be complex and can be achieved by collaborating in simple ways.”

She notes that taking shortcuts and finding answers quickly with a clear goal in mind, even if they were the wrong answers, improve thinking by helping to expose faulty assumptions of the problem and potential solutions.

Creative agility can be fostered using an effective method of testing and rapid refinement through quick and minor changes, affirms Brandeau.

Freedom to Fail
Internet giant Google VP and Fellow, and online private education company Udacity cofounder Sebastian Thrun states that failure is important, as it enables teams and organisations to learn how to change.

“Failure means that we have to learn again, how to pivot and how to change direction. We should feel pleasure at being wrong, as it helps us to think better and gets us closer to achieving the goal.

“Companies must legitimise failure; it should be acceptable to fail. Innovation requires dedication and resolve to achieve the distant and seemingly unobtainable goal,” he explains.

Brandeau agrees: “Iterate a bunch of times to figure out how to do it. You are doing something you have not done before, and you do not know how it works. Thus, you must let people fail and try again.”

Further, Bodell notes that rules should not stifle people, although Brandeau states that people must understand the rules of engagement during such processes to ensure that the focus remains on achieving the goals.

“It is not necessary to tell teams exactly what to do, and it is often about doing less to provide space for people to do new things. Rather define the objectives clearly than prescribe how to achieve them,” says Bodell.

Clarity of purpose and persistence allow for goals to be achieved, despite wrong turns that cannot be planned for, adds Thrun.

Mistakes often provide more clarity on the questions than necessarily providing answers, and asking better questions is the most effective way of shaping responses to achieve objectives, says Bodell.

“Criticising an idea makes it better, even though there is significant emotion involved and heated debates. These interactions help to build teamwide purpose and goals, refine the problems and foster the sense of community that is needed for innovation,” says Brandeau.

Determining what faults and weaknesses represent risks or restrain the business is an effective way of improving innovation, Bodell confirms.

Bodell is the author of Kill the company: End the status quo, which proposes that employees be asked to design ways to put the company for which they work out of business. This exercise helps to expose what employees at various levels perceive to be the main weaknesses or competition for the company.

It is a different way of looking at strategy, as employees are forced to articulate the flaws of the company, she adds.

Brandeau, a former senior VP of technology at computer animation studio Pixar, describes the value of taking into consideration diverse opinions.

He cites his time at Pixar as an example, where scenes of movies that the company was working on were shown every four months to everyone in the company – from security guards and cleaners to graphic animators and directors. They would then be polled to determine if the scene achieved what the directors had intended it to.

“Sometimes our employees would tell us that they did not understand the scene or that it was not relevant to the movie, or that it was good, bad or did not evoke a strong reaction. The directors were then able to tweak the scenes to improve them or even scrap them in some cases.”

Brandeau adds that this process is “difficult and awkward”, as it forces a rethink and reassessment of assumptions. Although it also leads to more work, it improves the scenes and, therefore, the film as a whole, “which is good for everyone at the company”, he emphasises.

Education Innovation
Technological innovation is leading to a digital revolution, and leveraging this to effectively change the status quo of South Africa is a dire imperative, says Accenture South Africa CE William Mzimba.

“It is important for us to talk about innovation and, when we review global innovation indexes, the human factor is a critical element of innovation,” he adds.

Yet, as a nation, the human factor is a challenge for South Africa, with its low levels of skills and education.

Without innovation, there will be little impact from education, and South Africa must be innovative in the ways in which it educates its people, says Mzimba.

The value of education is rapidly fading, while the growth in the cost of education consistently outstrips the growth of inflation worldwide, states Thrun.

With the average timeframe of employment having decreased to five years, and many qualifications becoming largely redundant after seven years owing to rapid technological changes, the learning needs of businesses are vastly different from those of the past, he explains.

Learning must become a continuous and daily habit, adds Thrun, who is a part-time robotics professor at Stanford University.

“There is a need to bring education to you, on your smartphone in your pocket. This is the premise of Udacity, which generates content by collaborating with companies and develops six-month-long courses that provide marketable skills.”

Thrun worked on a pilot trial to assess the impact of massive open online courses (moocs), which involved 160 000 people and a Stanford University robotics honours class of 200 people. The trial showed that the students learned more from quizzes and exercises than from listening to a lecture.

The shear volume of students during the trial necessitated automated assessment, exercises and open access to education material.

“We proved that a mooc can teach better than a Stanford professor on stage, as 23 000 out of the 160 000 participants finished the course at a level equivalent to that of a Stanford education. Further, though many of the Stanford students performed well, the 412 best-performing students were mooc participants, with the top-performing Stanford student registering in position 413.”

“South Africa must focus on the role of innovation and how it can propel the economy to greater heights. As Accenture South Africa, we want to stimulate discussion in all sectors about innova- tion, including government, society and the youth, as well as the employed and unemployed. If we can improve the growth prospects of the country, it will provide all sectors with a chance to prosper,” concludes Mzimba.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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