Innovation Imponderables

My tendency to be distracted is evidently in vogue. I’m not necessarily a “Look! A new shiny object!” kind of person, but I do tend to look at phenomena and wonder if there are impacts in other sectors or realms, and I do tend to fall into rabbit holes on occasion looking for more – explanation, evidence, impact. I am more or less continually looking for ways to advance a “whole person view” in human services, and so it is through that lens that I often consider distracting material. Sometimes I think I’m in danger of a Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance type of “What is quality?” madness.

Good ideas

An article I came across recently suggested that good ideas, sometimes life-saving ideas, may take inordinate amounts of time to mature into practice. An example from the article is the idea of anesthesia, which matured into practice very quickly. Few would argue that anesthesia is not a good idea, but the spread of the practice throughout the medical community hinged on the idea that patients would no longer be hollering and writhing in pain, making surgery easier on the surgeon. There was plenty of evidence to support this contention, and the practice quickly became the norm in operating rooms.

Another medical innovation occurred with hand washing and germ containment. We now know this to be a good idea, but this one did not catch on so quickly. You might ask why, as hand washing is an obvious way to contain the spread of germs. But at the time of the innovation, germ theory was very new, germs were invisible, and the idea that doctors could spread disease when they did not wash their hands was perceived as a criticism of doctors. While there was plenty of evidence to support it, hand washing took more than two decades to mature into common practice.

As a phenomenon, innovation is considered a social process that is spread by leaders/people who are known and trusted. Change happens with existing practitioners when they feel comfortable enough to let go of current practices and adopt new ones.  

Of course, the trajectory of implementation can be changed by those in charge – ideas can be pushed through to implementation quickly, or they can languish indefinitely. In the medical examples above, I might conclude (perhaps incorrectly) that good ideas with a positive convenience aspect will move faster than good ideas with a negative ego aspect. We also know from experience that bad ideas with a positive ego aspect (for the proponent) can be pushed through to implementation, but that does not guarantee universal acceptance.

My distractibility is intrigued with this notion of the length of time for innovation, especially when “problems” (germs, for example) are invisible. For lots of people, an invisible problem doesn’t really need a solution, and may not exist at all.

Generalists v. Experts

While I was pondering this, a couple of other writers have suggested that “expertise” in the workplace is falling out of favor. Driven in part by automation, the idea here is that generalists can learn what they need to know about several aspects of an operation without specializing in any one specific aspect. Moreover, they can share work across many facets of an operation – the ephemeral “cross-trained staff” we all chased in the aughts.  The US Navy’s move toward minimal staffing of combat ships with generalists served as the illustration for the article.

This generalist tack seemed hinged on a bunch of assumptions that were not obvious – that people are good at being generalists, that people like being generalists, that this is an effective way to run an operation and many more. There was no data offered to suggest what a career path might look like, or whether organizations would just need to ingest a constant flow of recruits suitable for the work. One important aspect that was mentioned is the notion that our entire education system and values around “conscientiousness” would need to change to produce workers with more “distractibility” who would make better generalists. This doesn’t seem minor.

Ultimately, the assumptions that had been made to implement the program proved to be incorrect. The decision to move ahead with the model initially had been made without unbiased analysis and data about how it would work in the Navy’s “industry”, but the Navy pushed it through quickly to implementation.  As the program wore on, the negative data piled up to the point where it could not be ignored any longer.

Is this what we expected from analysis? No, but that is because the analyses that were conducted contained explicit bias. Executives thought the idea was good (without complete analysis), so analyses that followed all corroborated that view.

Pushing what seemed like a good idea into hasty implementation without unbiased analysis had been a bad idea. The lesson learned by the Navy should NOT be that innovation is bad, but that unbiased analysis is good. That’s the lesson that all government needs to recognize too. In concept, the generalist idea may actually be good. But thinking it all the way through would have been even better.

A Paradox

So many good ideas in the public sector seem to fall into the bucket of the “hand washing” variety – there is an invisible “problem” (and possibly an invisible “reward” as well, until it can be quantified) that may be perceived as a nonexistent problem. 

We hear lot about digital innovation in public sector these days, and we might be tempted to think of this in terms of the “anesthesia” example; the phenomenon seems to be moving rapidly. But on closer inspection it may look more like the “hand washing” example. People involved in using the digital innovations often prove to be more recalcitrant than had been expected. Old behaviors are deeply ingrained, and few trusted leaders for broad stretches of the public sector have emerged.

We hear much less about innovations with people in the public sector. It seems much easier to introduce new technology tools than to innovate existing behaviors, collaboration, and team dynamics, but that is where innovation needs to occur. 

From thinking about the events in these articles, it struck me that problems involving humans are largely invisible. As we look at efforts toward achieving the whole person view, one stark observation is that new systems with the technical capability to share data do not guarantee the system’s use as intended. 

Something that the Navy did find in their generalist program is that people who are predisposed to “distractibility” do better at working across job functions and in teams. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be something that can be “change managed”. It is also not something that we’ve hired for in the past in the public sector.

Are case managers program specialists when we need to have generalists in this role? Are there implications for team dynamics that we are assuming but don’t really know? What does this mean for workforce recruitment? As we seek to create cross-functional teams to achieve the whole person view, there are plenty of testable hypotheses here to help us think it all the way through. Sometimes the lack of visibility is caused by lack of complete and unbiased analysis. Sometimes analysis would turn up some institutional knowledge that would save us from repeating mistakes. Sometimes the failure to value these analysis activities is astonishing. 

All of this left me in a distracted trance of thought about the “unstoppable force paradox” – you know the one – what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? The conventional argument is that nothing happens, because if you have either an unstoppable force or an immovable object, you cannot have the other. There are some creative arguments that use alternate interpretations, but the point of the paradox here is to illustrate some workforce issues that seem to be percolating.

I don’t think anyone would consider the public sector to be an unstoppable force – but if it is an immovable object, forces of innovation won’t get very far.

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Shell Culp is a Senior Advisor for Public Consulting Group and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Digital Government.