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August 20, 2005

Invention, Improvisation and Innovation

I.

Every day, operations proceed with essential concerns about continuity and direction, within this same basic value-management cycle:

- Can we do it? / What are the outcomes? / Why is that important? / (Repeat) -

At each point in the cycle, operations managers presume that the desirable answer is a logical result of cause-and-effect. Putting pressure on each point, meanwhile, are significant forces (such as, respectively, skills and knowledge, location, and competition) that are tough-to-manage variables affecting the actual answer.

Now, with unexpected or rapid change occurring independently at each of the three points, as well as across them, more and more time is spent trying to overcome complexity in determining the difference and the linkages between intended cause-and-effect versus actual cause-and-effect.

Without this determination, management cannot know whether the most effective operational path to meet currently targeted ultimate objectives is through the existing environment or through a modified environment in the future.

There are many ways to conduct an environmental review that generates both an assessment of the current environment and a design of a future environment. All of them have the purpose of solving the same "You can't get there from here..." problem, by either repairing critical stepping stones or building a new path.

But always just as important as the path itself is how you run on it. For organizations whose management feels (rightly or wrongly) that it is in a known, locked down environment and needs more effectiveness from its activity within that environment, that train of thought is increasingly important. Here is where Invention, Improvisation and Innovation have pushed to the foreground, being additional ways that management can run.

Each option is an idea with important cache that, if abused, will reduce it to a buzzword. To prevent doing that here, let's point out the source of each one's attractiveness --that is, the associations that explain why each merits any attention.

a - invention: relates to products and productivity
b - improvisation: relates to capacity and agility
c - innovation: relates to differentiation and advantage

At a given time, the relative attractiveness of any one of them likely reflects the organization's current estimation of its performance problems. Any week spent reading the management trade mags will bear this out in the columns of strategic advice.

Meanwhile, it also seems easy to indulge the implication that the group of three line up as a "chain" of success factors, a-b-c. Indeed, what often happens in discussion is that the lines are blurred between the three, such that any one of them appears to be a spoke leading to the the same virtuous hub called NEW -- which reduces them to being synonyms for each other, or to being alternatives just requiring some pragmatic prioritization.

Those views are not always the case. But at worst case, misperceptions readily lead to misinterpretation and misuse. For the sake of being more proactively positive and avoiding "lost opportunity", we can look at the way that invention, improvisation and innovation generally get traction, and use that visibility to guide ideas about how to most sensibly incorporate the interest in them, as part of management.

The following diagram illustrates business components and relationships with which managers generate business capabilities. At any of these same touchpoints, management can manipulate capabilities with a range of options including invention, improvisation and innovation. But effective organizations take invention, improvisation and innovation seriously by managing the operational environment necessary to see them through the value cycle of can we do it, what are the outcomes, and why is that important. The high-level view shows infrastructure, goals and culture holding down the three points in the value cycle.

The picture's high-level story is about the complexity involved in the balance to be struck between value and its associated risks, and likewise between requirements and the options for meeting them. Respectively, high-level improvisation and innovation engage those tasks.

Let's look at invention, improvisation and innovation one by one, to start factoring in their opportunity, purpose and effect.

II.

In its literal root sense, Invention refers to "finding something within". Practically, this sense is associated with exploration and experimentation, the two activities that typically host and court the experience of invention.

Because both of those activities can be structured, their practice may be placed on a supporting mechanism designed to make them accessible, accountable, regular and persistent. We can see that underlying mechanism as a combination of methodology and infrastructure.

But once methodology and infrastructure are in place, they become the key constraints on invention. The challenges become to maximize the effectiveness of leveraging them, and maximizing the ability to re-engineer them if necessary. The importance of this is in the need to know whether they are promoting invention more than they are inhibiting it. As we increasingly find in the arena of knowledge management, invention is a fundamental daily activity necessary to site-specific problem solving in the organization. Nonetheless, an equally big challenge is to commit the investment in that methodology and infrastructure to actual invention as opposed to routine production -- otherwise the methodology and infrastructure are unlikely to change towards effectiveness. This commitment is seriously challenged because of the similarity thatinvention has to production activity. The similarity makes it easy for the organization to appropriate the means for one purpose instead of for the other; so invention must compete for priority in order to keep its means:

PRODUCTION
- manage compliance to known causes that effect specifications
INVENTION
- Manage attention to assumed causes that effect theoretical outcomes

If the organization does not have theoretical outcomes representing high mission priorities, then it is less likely to find the fortitude for sustaining use of its methodology and infrastructure to drive invention. This would likely prevent R&D in infrastructure and methodology. With the pace of change in business requirements today, that would be crazy: who was it that said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result?

III.

Improvisation, in its literal sense, refers to "the unforeseen". From that, it attributes two key characteristics to activity -- unplanned, and extemporary (casually observed as in "the heat of the moment" and "at hand"). Importantly, it involves no lack of understanding of what is to be produced; rather, it is concerned with how the production was organized. Being aimed at a target "effect", improvisation seems to be related to invention. But the real difference is that while invention proceeds according to a plan to make something of undetermined value, improvisation is unplanned but aimed at making something of determined value. The even more important issue with improvisation is that, unlike invention, it occurs under production pressure: that is, an acceptable outcome is already described and targeted, and the means of generating it must succeed within the excited restrictions of available time and materials.

In short, the problem in improvisation is not so much "product" as it is "process". As a shorthand for what could be another whole discussion in itself, let's think here of process as navigation. In this way it is easier to recognize the real significance of improvisation as a production mode -- which is not that it is any less rigorous than following a plan, but that it relies on a different frame of reference for guidance. The star-charts and weather forecasts of the operation's environment -- such as scorecards and dashboards -- must be the basis of decisions about pace and course corrections.

For management, the decision to improvise is challenged mainly by the dual concerns of accountability and risk. Thus, the choice to improvise must be made through prioritizing effectiveness over the expectations of accountability and risk. Deep experience, for example, offers a cognition and frame of reference that allows a manager to abandon what seems to be a failing prescription and improvise instead. We tend to discuss this in terms of "instincts", but for most managers, confidence in actually executing this way requires an understanding of the difference between process and "technique" -- with confidence in technique. Both process and technique are ways of describing "the method of procedure", but the difference is that process is specifically about the method of activity, while technique concerns itself with the method of using available tools and materials. Consequently, the key contrast is between improvisation and construction:

CONSTRUCTION
- organize production procedure around accountability and risk standards

IMPROVISATION
- organize production procedure around resource availability and logic

Usually, for improvisation to take hold, the organization's management must decide that in the face of a construction's projected inadequacy, the consequences of ineffectiveness are too harsh to tolerate. This explains why improvisation is most often considered for issues where unexpected failure looms. But it is also the case that improvisation serves as research for future construction-process improvement. So improvisation becomes an extremely valuable experience for enhancement through re-invention...

IV.

Taken most literally, innovation has the fascinating responsibility of "introduction". In turn, introduction has a core meaning of "to lead into" a position. This accounts for why every vendor touts itself as the "leading" whatever, because the vendor stakes its argument for your attention on the idea that it has "introduced" its particular distinction into some context with which you identify. But if all comers are "the leader" then what matters is what might be new about each one's effect. As noted frequently in content here in the Archestra collection, there are at least three main ways of being significantly "new", and the value of each will obviously depend on how relevant it is to the occasion at hand:
- new solution for a new problem;
- new solution for an old problem;
- old solution for a new problem.

As we know, any of those results might come from invention or improvisation... but to the extent that this is true, it occurs because there is a concept of "solution" that is actually applied to a problem. On the one hand, this application might be speculative. On the other, it might be highly strategic. On either end of that spectrum, motivation levels may be just as important. The issue is to determine the source of the motivation and whether the source remains a catalyst or driver. In short, is the innovation "needed"? The most important context for determining the answer is likely to be one that examines priorities for innovation versus improvement:

IMPROVEMENT
- increases the value of the result by enhancing its current type
INNOVATION
- increases the value of the result by changing its type

The key challenge to management is that innovation creates pressure on competency at an elemental level, possibly interrupting the terms of value already established for resources through their existing configurations. While the point of innovation is to get to a result, the practice of innovation requires that organization and competency are not misaligned through a redirection provoked by innovation.

V.

That leads us to the observation that infrastructure must be balanced against culture if the organization is to "get there from here."

In our environmental diagram (repeated below), this idea is illustrated as components and relationships that management can manipulate, with a range of approaches including invention, improvisation and innovation. Organizations take invention, improvisation and innovation seriously by managing the operational environment necessary to see them through.

Again, the picture's high-level story is about the complexity involved in the balance to be struck between value and its associated risks, and likewise between requirements and the options for meeting them.

At any given time, the current operational environment plays mediator by determining what types and levels of value correspond with given types and levels of risk. Meanwhile, norms (primarily including expectations and standards) usually set the terms on which operational alternatives are committed to requirements.

In situations of potential invention, improvisation or innovation, the broad middle zones of environment and norms are where change (through management) creates the energy and leverage that drive potential results.

VI.

In the diagram, the key change-points can be seen within three perspectives that comprise the environment: infrastructure, goals, and culture.

Strictly speaking, all three are generated by invention -- with the form of invention variously being physical or conceptual, essential or political.

Each perspective includes a characteristic value objective that is associated with a characteristic issue of risk. For example, infrastructure value is essentially expressed through management's ability to assure its availability, but meanwhile the risk inherent in infrastructure is in the configuration that it currently presents, which is also a consequence of better or worse management.

Typically, innovation adopts a new example of the value objective and calls for the risk to be realigned to it through the environmental factor. The major precedents for this have been reorganization and re-engineering, but the main observation that this illustration makes is the layout for integrating a variety of internal innovations. This puts the organization on an evolutionary path to threshold-level ability for producing and supporting a successful external innovation.

VII.

Two facts common to enterprise change also distinguish one organization's efforts from another:
- Direction creates focus; but different cultures have different ideas, which sets or resets direction.
- Competency creates opportunities; but different norms set different tolerances, which motivates or inhibits competency.

Management is working on direction when it tries to link goals to culture. When it tries to link infrastructure to goals, it is working on competency.

Improvisation navigates the potential connections in real time, which is the prerequisite for what the enterprise calls agility. Thus, improvisation works out alignment across the perspectives rather than within them.

However, the horizontal alignment effort that management has usually committed to is process improvement. In the big picture, that helps opportunity, but it only affects things from one perspective. Its relevance to goals and direction is still critical to protect its power to enhance the overall benefit of the operation. Infrastructure must be balanced against culture if the organization is to "get there from here..."

VIII.

A final observation about the model in the diagram is that it is an abstract model, not a literal one. This means that it is "scalable", because it can be applied to a small end-to-end effort as well as to a very large one. Wherever an effort can be described in terms of the related options, norms and requirements, there will be aspects of the effort paralleling "infrastructure" (the means), "goals" (the authorizing target results), and "culture" (the permissions and tolerances surrounding the effort). That means, according to the model, that invention, improvisation and/or innovation may be applicable.

Furthermore, since small efforts combine to complete larger efforts, we can see in a logically abstract sense that, for example, an innovation on one scale might be a component of improvisation on a higher scale.

Is this meaningful? As an example of "yes", consider that an innovation in infrastructure might enable an improvisation in business process -- one way to describe the architecture of a breakthrough to agility.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at August 20, 2005 7:51 AM

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