Earlier this week I was working with a senior manager from one of our clients to draw up a text that is meant to both illustrate his commitment to innovation and also call the company’s employees to action. In this text he used words as “killing ideas” and “Innovation projects bleeding to death.”
The reason I’m writing a blog post on the subject is that this guy is not the only one to use such terms. It is ingrained in corporate culture.
We are convinced that using death as metaphor is not helpful (put lightly) when you are trying to activate your people to show more innovative behaviour.
Consider the below phrases we came across:
“Employees start of with an idea very enthusiastically, but eventually it bleeds to death in the heat of the batlle……..such an idea simply goes down in the hectic of every day.” In one or two sentences this particular person has linked developing ideas to bleeding to death, war, batlle, and sinking ships. The intentions of this person are sincere, but would these sentiments help you to enthousiasticly start working on a new idea?
Another example uses the phrase falling down and failure:
“It’s also a question of understanding that failure comes with innovation and that falling down comes with the turf.” Again, the point that you need a lot of ideas to strike gold is valid. However, you could try and phrase it in such a way that doesn’t scare your employees.
I am convinced that we should phrase the selection process more positively and use more appropriate vocabulary. This would help people show more innovative behaviour, and not be so scared to fail, be butchered, or sink their career.
I am still struggling to come up with a truly positive way to describe this process myself and have decided to crowdsource it. If readers have ways to positively describe this, I would be much obliged!
1:30 pm
My suggestion: turn towards (sports-) coaching. One of the main things I’ve learned as a coach is that you always need to talk task-centered, goal-orientated and positive. Don’t focus on what shouldn’t happen, focus on what should and how you could accomplish that. For innovation, the same applies. Like Yoda said: do, or do not, there is no try.
This means there are no failures, only learning points. What can we learn from stuff that turned out different than we expected? How can we apply those learning points towards future initiatives? As far as your example goes: don’t focus on preventing ideas from bleeding to death (-), instead learn how to keep them alive (+)!
2:13 pm
Thanks Bart. Great examples. However, I am specially looking for a positive word for deciding not to further invest in an idea/project. As in general you need to decide this 99 times to find that single piece of gold (1 in 100).
Jaap
2:31 pm
The basic premise is that every idea brings you closer to the piece of gold, right? Then why not broaden the death methaphor? I think every idea can do one of the following things:
1) provide fundament (new insights, knowledge)
2) provide direction (process)
3) provide movement (momentum, spirit, vision)
4) cross the finish line (goal)
When observed like this, an idea is never worthless, it just has a lifecycle. And all completed lifecycles of different ideas lead to added value (1 through 4) for the organization. So, when an idea reaches the end of its lifecycle, or dies, it’s up to you to decide how that idea is remembered. How did it contribute towards the organizational/innovation goals?
If you approach it like this, there’s no failures or dead ideas, only learning points or contributions. You could even use a methaphor of an idea-relay-race, where ‘dead ideas’ could be called sprints
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1:15 pm
Focusing on the positive insights/experience an idea brought you would be best.
If your are looking for a single one or two word description this might be hard to capture; you could try to use terms like ‘learning project’, ‘experience’ or ‘eye-opener’. Otherwise it would at least be a big improvement to use terms like ‘discontinued’, ‘parked’ or…. instead of ‘killing’ and ‘death’!