Innovating During a Crisis
A few weeks ago, I launched a companywide bottoms-up innovation initiative at EVENTEQ. I was often asked how can we prioritize innovation while we were faced with such uncertainty and turbulence? For me, the answer is simple — downturns are prime territory for disruption. In 2000, Janssen defined the idea of “Employees’ Innovative Work Behavior” as the intentional creation, introduction, and application of new ideas within a work role, group, or organization, to benefit role performance, the group, or the organization.”
As deServing Leaders, promoting bottoms-up idea generation, promotion, and realization is essential to empower your teams psychologically. During times of crisis, it can help your teams believe in their self-worth, skills, abilities, and impact their work outcomes in a meaningful way.
Why focus on innovation during a crisis — put simply innovation is one area where less truly is more. Interestingly, the root cause of organizational struggles can often be too much investment or too many people that slow things down. In the AV industry, I have heard a lot of talk about how to leverage our extensive inventories during tough times. I contend that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity exists for organizations to take the blinders off, think way beyond our existing businesses, and become disruptors in the new norm.
How can deServing Leaders drive innovation during tough times? Here are a few ideas:
Purpose: Having a purpose provides a clear, concise direction to those driving innovations within your organization. It also helps teams focus the unusual spike in energy during tough times towards a clear purpose. One of my colleagues suggested that all innovation ideas at EVENTEQ must be aligned with our company values. We took our core value of servant leadership beyond the company walls and pivoted our scenic manufacturing capabilities to manufacture face shields for frontline workers.
Make it a journey not a destination: By definition, innovation is an iterative process. It must never stop. You have to always be willing to risk the usual to discover the extraordinary.
Be Action Biased: It is natural for growing mature organizations to add structure to create scale and predictability. Crises changes all of that. It is vital to remove all bureaucratic approvals and allow for fresh thinking. More often than not, the best ideas come from the team rather than the leadership. As Theodore Levitt said, “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”
Fail Fast and Fail Forward: You have often heard me talk about the idea of failing forward. It is perhaps most important when it comes to innovating during a crisis. You must empower your teams to increase the speed of ideation, decision making, and execution. They should experiment quickly, see what does or doesn’t work, and experiment some more. Empowering the teams to fail forward allows them to test different thinking and move forward. This perhaps is the textbook definition of innovation. There is no innovation without failure.
I have always believed that imagination trumps knowledge. Today, all that we know is being challenged. Perhaps there is no better time to imagine an entirely new future!