Collective Genius

Nowadays, the organisational culture focusing on the ‘collective genius’ is regarded as the breeding ground for corporate innovation⁹⁷. If people are given opportunities, encouragement and motivation to come up with new ideas, they will produce a surprising amount of good proposals and ideas. It has been found that there are significantly smaller differences between peo-ple in terms of creativity and innovativeness than it was previously thought.

The reason for which the apparently non-innovative and the silent majority did not come up with new, creative ideas was not their inability to do so, but the fact that the organisational culture and leadership style unfavourable to innovation discouraged them even from giving it a try. In a culture promoting and rewarding originality, however, a surprising number of good ideas emerge and are put to good use. For example, since the Dutch subsidiary of

96 Hogarth, Robin M. (1987): Judgement and Choice. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley.

97 Hill, Linda A., Brandeau, Greg, Truelove, Emily and Lineback, Kent (2014): Collective Genius.

Harvard Business Review, 92(6), pp. 94–102.

the Tata Steel company group had introduced an organised suggestion pro-grammed, it achieved great results, even saving USD 750,000 in one year alone. A typical employee of the company would make 6-7 suggestions every year and see 3-4 adopted⁹⁸.

Innovation usually emerges when diverse people work together to produce a wide range of ideas, which are then refined and developed into even more novel ideas through give-and-take and often heated debates. This means that collaboration must also include passionate opposition. It might be difficult to bear frictions and clashes of ideas since they generate tension and stress. Or-ganisations often disapprove of and try to minimize disagreements, but by doing so, they only stifle the flow of ideas and meaningful discussions needed for innovation. Leaders must manage this tension by creating an at-mosphere that is both supportive, so that people be willing to share their tal-ent, and confrontational enough so that they can improve the existing ideas and come up with new ones.

Innovation also requires us to try again and learn from our mistakes and fail-ures. In most organisations, people like to proceed systematically towards the desired outcome: by setting a goal, preparing a plan, assigning responsibili-ties, working step by step, and monitoring progress until reaching the goal.

Innovation, however, cannot be managed in this manner: implementation is not enough; improvisation is also essential.

In order to produce something new and valuable, we must leave the ‘ei-ther/or’ approach behind and move on to the ‘both/and’ approach. Groups and their leaders often make decisions about the solution of problems through domination or compromise, which leads to less-than-inventive solutions. In-novation requires the integration of ideas into more novel and better solu-tions, even if, at first sight, they seemed to be mutually exclusive. Leaders must show enough patience to enable the members of all parts of the organ-isation to produce great ideas.

The community’s will and capability to innovate are essential, and it is the duty of the manager responsible for innovation to create this combination of willingness and ability. Both conditions comprise three factors⁹⁹.

Willingness

98 Grant, Adam (2016): How to Build a Culture of Originality. Harvard Business Review, 94(3), pp. 86–94.

99 Hill, Linda A., Brandeau, Greg, Truelove, Emily and Lineback, Kent. op. cit.

Innovative organisations must maintain a community spirit that relies on the following three elements:

Purpose

In this context, the purpose is not what exactly the group is doing but who is in it and why it exists. A collective identity must be created, and members must focus on a more general, superior and attractive common goal. Purpose makes people willing to take risks and do the hard work inherent in innova-tion.

For example, a study of the collective identity of Volkswagen employees found that people were proud of VW’s role in driving technological and eco-nomic progress and they were excited to be part of the effort aimed at build-ing one of the industry’s leadbuild-ing brands.

Shared Values

To form a community, group members must agree on what they consider important. Such values influence the group’s decision-making priorities as well as individual and collective thought and action. Each community has its own values, however, there are four values that all truly innovative organisa-tions cherish: bold ambition, the responsibility to the community, collabora-tion, and learning.

Rules of Engagement

Purpose and values, together with the rules of engagement in joint work, keep group members focused on the most important things, encourage activities that foster innovation, and discourage unproductive behaviour. Rules of en-gagement fall into two categories. The first category contains the rules appli-cable to the interactions between people: group members are expected to show mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual influence. All members of the community have a voice, and even the least experienced members should be allowed to influence decisions. The second category contains the rules appli-cable to people’s way of thinking: everyone is expected to question every-thing, be data-driven, and have a holistic view.

Ability

The willingness of the organisation is necessary but not sufficient for suc-cessful innovation. Companies also need the ability to innovate. That re-quires developing three types of innovation capabilities.

Creative Abrasion

The group must be able to generate new ideas through discourse and debate.

Instead of obediently following the instructions, the members must debate and argue. Creative abrasion has two essential ingredients: intellectual diver-sity and intellectual conflict.

Creative Agility

The organisation must be able to test new ideas quickly with multiple exper-iments. This must be followed by a reflection on and learning from the results of the experiments. Then plans must be adjusted on the basis of the newly acquired knowledge, and new tests and experiments must follow. This cycle must be repeated until a good solution is found or it becomes clear that the basic idea is not going to work.

Creative Resolution

The organisation must be able to make integrative decisions that combine disparate or even opposing ideas.