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Adam Grant is a professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Viking, 2016).
NICK VEDROS/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: STEPHEN WEBSTER
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part of a decade, and it turns out to be less difficult than I expected. For starters, leaders must give employees op- portunities and incentives to generate—and keep generating—new ideas, so that people across func- tions and roles get better at pushing past the obvious. However, it’s also critical to have the right people vetting those ideas. That part of the process should be much less democratic and more meritocratic, because some votes are simply more meaningful than others. And finally, to continue generating and selecting smart ideas over time, organizations need to strike a balance between cultural cohesion and creative dissent.
People often believe that to do better work, they should do fewer things. Yet the evidence flies in the face of that assumption: Being prolific actually in- creases originality, because sheer volume improves your chances of finding novel solutions. In recent experiments by Northwestern University psy- chologists Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren, the initial ideas people generated were the most conventional. Once they had thought of those, they were free to start dreaming up more-unusual possibilities. Their first 20 ideas were significantly less original than their next 15. Across fields, volume begets quality. This is true for all kinds of creators and thinkers—from com- posers and painters to scientists and inventors. Even the most emi- nent innovators do their most origi- nal work when they’re also cranking out scores of less brilliant ideas. Consider
Thomas Edison. In a five-year period, he came up with the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon transmitter used in telephones—while also filing more than 100 patents for inventions that didn’t catch the world on fire, including a talking doll that ended up scaring children (and adults). Of course, in organizations, the challenge lies in knowing when you’ve drummed up enough possi- bilities. How many ideas should you generate before deciding which ones to pursue? When I pose this question to executives, most say you’re really hum- ming with around 20 ideas. But that answer is off the mark by an order of magnitude. There’s evidence that quality often doesn’t max out until more than 200 ideas are on the table. Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes that the Pixar movie Cars was chosen from about 500 pitches, and at Skyline, the toy design studio that generates ideas for Fisher-Price and Mattel, em- ployees submitted 4,000 new toy concepts in one year. That set was winnowed down to 230 to be drawn or prototyped, and just 12 were finally de- veloped. The more darts you throw, the better your odds of hitting a bull’s-eye. Though it makes perfect sense, many man- agers fail to embrace this principle, fearing that time spent conjuring lots of ideas will prevent employees from being focused and efficient. The good news is that there are ways to help employees generate quantity and variety without sacrificing day-to-day productivity or causing burnout. Think like the enemy. Research sug- gests that organizations often get stuck in a rut because they’re playing defense, trying to stave off the competition. To encourage people to think differently and generate more ideas, put them on offense.
Idea in Brief
MATT CARR/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: STEPHEN WEBSTER
March 2016 Harvard Business Review 89
That’s what Lisa Bodell of futurethink did when Merck CEO Ken Frazier hired her to help shake up the status quo. Bodell divided Merck’s executives into groups and asked them to come up with ways to put the company out of business. Instead of being cautious and sticking close to established compe‑ tencies, the executives started considering bold new directions in strategy and product development that competitors could conceivably take. Energy in the room soared as they explored the possibilities. The offensive mindset, Carnegie Mellon professor Anita Woolley observes, focuses attention on “pursuing opportunities…whereas defenders are more focused on maintaining their market share.” That mental shift allowed the Merck executives to imagine com‑ petitive threats that didn’t yet exist. The result was a fresh set of opportunities for innovation. Solicit ideas from individuals, not groups. According to decades of research, you get more and better ideas if people are working alone in separate rooms than if they’re brainstorming in a group. When people generate ideas together, many of the best ones never get shared. Some members dominate the conversation, others hold back to avoid looking foolish, and the whole group tends to conform to the majority’s taste. Evidence shows that these problems can be man‑ aged through “brainwriting.” All that’s required is asking individuals to think up ideas on their own be‑ fore the group evaluates them, to get all the possibili‑ ties on the table. For instance, at the eyewear retailer Warby Parker, named the world’s most innovative company by Fast Company in 2015, employees spend a few minutes a week writing down innovation ideas for colleagues to read and comment on. The com‑ pany also maintains a Google doc where employees can submit requests for new technology to be built, which yields about 400 new ideas in a typical quar‑ ter. One major innovation was a revamped retail point of sale, which grew out of an app that allowed customers to bookmark their favorite frames in the store and receive an e‑mail about them later. Since employees often withhold their most unusual suggestions in group settings, another strategy for seeking ideas is to schedule rapid one‑ on‑one idea meetings. When Anita Krohn Traaseth became managing director of Hewlett‑Packard Norway, she launched a “speed‑date the boss” ini‑ tiative. She invited every employee to meet with her for five minutes and answer these questions:
Who are you and what do you do at HP? Where do you think we should change, and what should we keep focusing on? And what do you want to con‑ tribute beyond fulfilling your job responsibilities? She made it clear that she expected people to bring big ideas, and they didn’t want to waste their five minutes with a senior leader—it was their chance to show that they could innovate. More than 170 speed dates later, so many good ideas had been generated that other HP leaders implemented the process in Austria and Switzerland. Bring back the suggestion box. It’s a practice that dates back to the early 1700s, when a Japanese shogun put a box at the entrance to his castle. He rewarded good ideas—but punished criticisms with decapitation. Today suggestion boxes are often ridi‑ culed. “I smell a creative idea being formed some‑ where in the building,” the boss thinks in one Dilbert cartoon. “I must find it and crush it.” He sets up a sug‑ gestion box, and Dilbert is intrigued until a colleague warns him: “It’s a trap!!” But the evidence points to a different conclu‑ sion: Suggestion boxes can be quite useful, precisely because they provide a large number of ideas. In one study, psychologist Michael Frese and his col‑ leagues visited a Dutch steel company (now part of Tata Steel) that had been using a suggestion pro‑ gram for 70 years. The company had 11,000 em‑ ployees and collected between 7,000 and 12, suggestions a year. A typical employee would make six or seven suggestions annually and see three or four adopted. One prolific innovator submitted 75 ideas and had 30 adopted. In many companies, those ideas would have been missed altogether. For the Dutch steelmaker, however, the suggestion box regularly led to improvements—saving more than $750,000 in one year alone. The major benefit of suggestion boxes is that they multiply and diversify the ideas on the horizon, opening up new avenues for innovation. The biggest hurdle is that they create a larger haystack of ideas, making it more difficult to find the needle. You need a system for culling contributions—and rewarding and pursuing the best ones—so that people don’t feel their suggestions are falling on deaf ears.
Generating lots of alternatives is important, but so is listening to the right opinions and solutions. How
90 Harvard Business Review March 2016
that require an initial investment of no more than $200,000, and those costs must be recoverable within a year. Peers review the submissions, with monetary rewards going to the winners. Innovation researchers Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich report that over more than a decade, the resulting 575 projects have produced an average return of 204% and saved the company $110 million a year. When an innovation tournament is well designed, you get a large pool of initial ideas, but they’re clus- tered around key themes instead of spanning a range of topics. People spend a lot of time preparing their entries, which can boost quality, but the work hap- pens in a discrete window of time, so the contest is not a recurring distraction. Thorough evaluation helps to filter out the bad ideas. The feedback process typically involves having a group of subject matter experts and fel- low innovators review the submissions, rate their novelty and usefulness, and provide suggestions for improvement. With the right judges in place, an innovation contest not only leverages the wisdom of the crowd but also makes the crowd wiser. Contributors and evaluators get to learn from other people’s successes and failures. Over time, the culture can evolve into one where employees feel confident in their ability to contribute ideas—and develop better taste about what constitutes quality. Because successful innova- tors earn recognition and rewards, everyone has an incentive to participate. So start by calling for ideas to solve a problem or seize an opportunity, and then introduce a rig- orous process for assessment and feedback. The most promising submissions will make it to the next round, and the eventual winners should get the staff and resources necessary to implement their ideas.
Building a culture of nonconformity begins with learning how to generate and vet ideas, but it doesn’t end there. To maintain originality over time, leaders need to keep fighting the pressures against it. We used to blame conformity on strong cultures, believing they were so cultish and chummy that members couldn’t consider diverse views and make wise decisions. But that’s not true. Studies of deci- sion making in top management teams show that cohesive groups aren’t more likely than others to
seek consensus, dismiss divergent opinions, and fall victim to groupthink. In fact, members of strong cultures often make better decisions, because they communicate well with one another and are secure enough in their roles to feel comfortable challenging one another. Here’s the evidence on how successful high-tech founders in Silicon Valley built their start-ups: They hired primarily for commitment to the mission, look- ing for people who would help carry out their vision and live by their values. Founders who looked mainly for technical skill or star potential didn’t fare nearly as well. In mature industries, too, research shows that when companies place a strong emphasis on culture, their performance remains more stable. Yet there’s a dark side to strong, cohesive cul- tures: They can become homogeneous if left unchecked. As leaders continue to attract, select, and retain similar people, they sacrifice diversity in thoughts and values. Employees face intense pressure to fit in or get out. This sameness can be advantageous in predictable environments, but it’s a problem in volatile industries and dynamic mar- kets. In those settings, strong cultures can be too in- sular to respond appropriately to shifting conditions. Leaders have a hard time recognizing the need for change, considering different views, and learning and adapting. Consider BlackBerry: After disrupting the smart- phone market, senior leaders clung to the belief that users were primarily interested in efficient, secure e-mail. They dismissed the iPhone as a music player and a consumer toy, hired like-minded insiders who had engineering backgrounds but lacked marketing expertise, and ultimately failed to create a high-qual- ity web browser and an app-friendly operating sys- tem. The result? A major downsizing, a billion-dollar write-off, and a colossal collapse of market share. So to balance out a strong culture, you also need a steady supply of critical opinions. Even when they’re wrong, they’re useful—they disrupt knee- jerk consensus, stimulate original thought, and help organizations find novel solutions to prob- lems. In the navy’s rapid-innovation cell, the norm is “loyal opposition,” says Joshua Marcuse, one of Ben Kohlmann’s collaborators in the Pentagon. “Agitating against the status quo is how we contribute to the mission.” In short, make dissent one of your organization’s core values. Create an environment where people
92 Harvard Business Review March 2016
can openly share critical opinions and are respected for doing so. In the early days of Apple, employees were passionately committed to making the Mac a user-friendly household product. But each year, the Mac team also gave an award to somebody who had challenged Steve Jobs. Every one of those award winners was promoted. Cohesion and dissent sound contradictory, but a combination of the two is what brings novel ideas to the table—and keeps a strong culture from becoming a cult. Here are some ways to hold these principles in productive tension: Prioritize organizational values. Give people a framework for choosing between conflicting opin- ions and allowing the best ideas to win out. When companies fail to prioritize values, performance suf- fers. My colleague Andrew Carton led a study showing that across hospitals, heart attack readmission rates were lower and returns on assets were higher when leaders articulated a compelling vision—but only if they spelled out no more than four organizational values. The more values they emphasized beyond that, the greater the odds that people interpreted them differently or didn’t focus on the same ones. Values need to be rank-ordered so that when em- ployees face choices between competing courses of action, they know what comes first. At the software company Salesforce.com, trust is explicitly defined as the number one value, above growth and in- novation. That communicates a clear message to employees: When working on new software, never compromise data privacy. At the online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos.com, CEO Tony Hsieh prioritizes employee happiness over customer happiness. The airline WestJet identifies safety as its most important value. And at GiveForward, a company that helps people raise money for causes, compassion tops the list. Although media coverage is critical to the company’s success, cofounder Ethan Austin notes, “We will not push a story in the media unless we are certain that the customer whose story we are sharing will benefit more than we do.”
Once you’ve prioritized the values, keep scruti- nizing them. Encourage new hires to challenge “the company way” when they disagree with it. They’re the ones with the freshest perspective; they haven’t yet gone native. If they familiarize themselves with the culture before speaking up, they’ll have already started marching to the same drummer. At Bridgewater, when new employees are trained, they’re asked about the company’s principles: Do you disagree? Solicit problems, not just solutions. When working with executives, organizational psycholo- gist David Hofmann likes to ask them to fill in the blanks in this sentence: “Don’t bring me ____; bring me ____.” Without fail, they shout out, “Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions!” Although leaders love it when employees come up with solutions, there’s an unintended conse- quence: Inquiry gets dampened. If you’re always expected to have an answer ready, you’ll arrive at meetings with your diagnosis complete, missing out on the chance to learn from a range of perspec- tives. This may be especially common in the United States: In a recent study comparing American and German decision groups, the Germans made twice as many statements about problems and 30% fewer statements about solutions. “Americans are driven to find solutions quickly,” the researchers observe, “often without a complete and thorough analysis of the problem.” When individual members of a group have different information, as is usually the case in organizations, it’s smarter to get all the problems out there before pursuing solutions. At the digital music company Spotify, instead of working on projects, people organize around long-term busi- ness problems. “If they were easy to solve,” chief technology officer Oskar Stål notes, “we would have solved them already. When we create a new team, people typically stay together on a business problem for at least a year. If it becomes successful, the team and mission will exist for a long time.” Angie’s List cofounder Angie Hicks holds weekly office hours to hear concerns from employees. And when Anita Krohn Traaseth became the CEO of the Norwegian government’s inno- ISTOCKPHOTO; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: STEPHEN WEBSTER vation efforts, she again used
March 2016 Harvard Business Review 93
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