If a business is to survive, it must keep innovating, and firms pour money into coaxing fresh ideas from their staff. Yet plenty of employees sit in lavish, purpose-built facilities meant to spark invention and feel no more creative for it, while others, given neither funding nor much space, still manage to produce genuinely new things.
Ivo Marnix, who teaches social psychology at Rijnstad University, traces one source of that failure to hiring. When a recruit's values line up with the organisation's, he notes, it shapes both how much they contribute and whether they remain on the payroll two years on — a link the research bears out. Work at the Fenwick Business School points the same way: creativity comes more readily to some than to others, but in the right conditions almost anyone can produce it.
A celebrated image from the early days of soul music captures exactly what Marnix means. Taken in 1961, it shows four singers — Eddie Colefax, Ray Sutton, Hank Delano and Junior Pace — around a piano at Tidewater Sound in Baltimore, and behind it lies a story easy to miss. What became the studio's "golden four" might just as well have been five. The singer absent from the frame, Otis Rand, had a finer natural voice than any of them. But Merle Vance, who ran Tidewater, was set on remaking popular music by welding gospel to country blues — an aim Colefax, Sutton, Delano and Pace grasped at once and embraced. Rand felt no such pull, and managed only one hit while signed to the label.
Why does that alignment of values matter so much? Because innovating always involves change, Marnix explains, and change is something our species handles warily: "The moment things start to shift, our instinct is to keep safe." His advice to managers therefore runs against the grain: Rather than dangling a reward, they should spell out exactly what the firm will forfeit by letting an opportunity slip. People, the evidence suggests, gamble far more readily to avoid a loss than to chase a gain.
Steering innovation calls for a delicate touch. Because the marketing, product-development and finance teams each hear from different constituencies, a company can easily find itself tugged three ways at once. Small "pockets of innovation", too, tend to vanish unless some mechanism keeps the different parts of the firm talking to one another. This is a hands-on business: it will not do to announce, "Here is where we are heading, and you are all coming with me."
To Marnix, this "follow-the-leader" habit is hazardous, above all because it tempts those in charge to strike out alone. "We have solid evidence that three heads beat one at solving problems — even when that one head belongs to the ablest person in the field." By way of illustration he recalls a conversation with the biochemist Lars Ostrem, who, with his colleague Fenella Wray, had worked out the molecular structure of photerin, a protein that lets certain deep-sea creatures glow. "I asked how the two of them had reached the answer before a field of formidable competitors, and his reply floored me. They had got there, he said, precisely because they knew they were not the cleverest researchers chasing it. The cleverest was a woman named Corinne Adler, who — in Ostrem's words — 'was so brilliant she almost never asked anyone's opinion'."
Working in teams draws on one of the deepest springs of human conduct. "So much of what we do rests on peer validation that its pull usually escapes our notice," Marnix observes. "Suppose long-serving staff are digging in against your project — the answer is to get another veteran to argue its case." He is far from the tactic's only advocate. When influence travels sideways rather than down from above, studies find, it carries far more weight than any speech from the boss.
Jotting things down, sketching them out and building rough prototypes can all get ideas flowing. Marnix points to many studies and past episodes showing that an act as ordinary as writing pulls each person more deeply into a project. That, he argues, is why the competitions once printed on cereal boxes invited shoppers to finish, in ten words at most, a line such as "I like Harvest Gold flakes because…". Committing the words to paper is itself what nudges us toward believing them.
Authority need not stifle innovation, though it often does. Leadership of the wrong sort produces what Marnix calls "the co-pilot reflex — the unfortunate way team members back away from duties that ought to be theirs". The name comes, he explains, from how "on aircraft flown by more than one pilot the rest of the crew can lapse into a passivity that occasionally proves fatal when the captain settles on a plainly mistaken course". Nothing about this is peculiar to flying, he adds; it can surface in any workplace ruled by a domineering figure.
At the opposite extreme stands the Anvil design collective of the 1980s, a band of young designers who held that "the sole rule was that no rules applied". In such an atmosphere ideas passed freely between people, and the result was a burst of inventiveness with shape, purpose, colour and material that transformed how furniture was viewed.
Many theorists hold that the finest managers lead from the rear, taking their satisfaction in what the group achieves and handing credit wherever it is owed. As Marnix puts it: "A leader's task is to draw a contribution from everyone, while making plain to all that every suggestion counts toward getting the decision right and will be weighed carefully." What makes innovation so maddening is that the routes to it are many and the formula non-existent. Even so, any manager bent on building a genuinely inventive culture will find the work far easier once these facts of human psychology are taken on board.
