HESSELBEIN & COMPANY
FINDING INNOVATION AT THE INTERSECTION
Many of the greatest discoveries, inventions, and enterprises have come from a place I call “the intersection.” The intersection is where ideas from different fields, disciplines, and cultures meet and collide, ultimately igniting an explosion of extraordinary discoveries. When leaders harness the power of the intersection, they find that it has remarkable applications for motivating teams, stimulating research and product development, generating new business ideas, developing high-potential employees, and solving problems of all kinds.
Three critical factors—the movement of people, the convergence of science, and the leap in computation—are increasing the number of intersecting fields, disciplines, and cultures we can access. Stepping into one of these intersections is essential if you wish to generate innovations and use them to become more competitive in a business environment where disciplines and cultures are connecting faster, more often, and in more places than ever before.
Finding New Connections
Once you start looking for interesting connections in business, you’ll start to find them everywhere. Here are some examples.
What do goat’s milk, spiders, and fishing lines have in common? Biotechnicians at Nexia inserted a silk-producing gene from a golden orb-weaver spider into a herd of goats. The goats produced milk that contained the essence of spider webs, a material with amazing strength, that they could use to “spin” threads five times stronger than steel. The applications for this intersectional innovation range from fishing line to ophthalmic sutures to artificial tendons.
What do ants and truck drivers have in common? In the early 1990s, Eric Bonabeau, an R&D engineer at France Telecom, and Guy Theraulaz, an ecologist studying social insects, met at a seminar held by the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. The talked about, among other things, how the collective behavior of ants creates a dominant pheromone trail, establishing the quickest path to a food source. Ten years later, Bonabeau started applying the ant metaphor to routing, a recurrent telecommunications network problem. He went on to found a company called Icosystem, which applies this type of computer algorithm to large-scale business problems such as factory scheduling, control systems, and telecommunications routing.
What do children’s laughter and clean water have in common? A nonprofit called PlayPumps wanted to help rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, who were suffering from a lack of clean drinking water. The water was there—but the resources and pumps to extract it weren’t. What these villages had plenty of, however, were kids. The organization developed a merry-go-round pump that would be powered for free by kids having fun, while providing ample clean water for the villagers. PlayPumps has installed more than 700 pumps as of this writing, making a significant change in the quality of life for thousands of people.
By keeping an open mind, standing outside your normal associations, and inviting new people with different ideas into your personal and professional circle, you can often find remarkable connections waiting to gel.
Finding New Combinations at Work
The act of moving between, or switching, fields through different jobs, projects, or hobbies can be an effective way to generate unique insights. I call this occupational diversification, and it is a common way of finding intersections.
Unfortunately, most organizations do not encourage occupational diversification. Usually a company is set up to identify the optimal job for each employee. Once that position or area has been identified, the company then supports further specialization.
One firm that understands the advantages of workers with highly varied experiences is Bain & Company, one of the world’s leading strategy consulting firms. While Bain certainly has practices and experts, its consultants also work in areas outside their specialties. You can find the head of health care, for example, working on media strategy. The company makes people switch areas and fields on a regular basis.
A variation on this theme happens at Corning. Lina Echeverria, head of the glass research group at Corning, encourages creativity in her researchers. To get them to innovate, she tells them, “Follow your heart. Do something you are interested in, do something you can get energized about.” In other words, stepping outside known boundaries is rewarded at Corning. Echeverria asks people to interact, share, and collaborate in order to create or join projects they are excited about. She even created a special “creativity room,” where people can talk about whatever is on their mind, to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas.
How Diversity Drives Innovation
One way to create more opportunities for intersectional thinking is to bring people of different ages, races, countries of origin, economic backgrounds, fields of expertise, hierarchical status, and so on together. Even though this seems like an obvious truth, it is remarkable how seldom we use it. People tend to stick to their own disciplines and domains. They stick to their own ethnicities and cultures.
Why are we so hesitant about working in diverse teams? The reason is at least in part a function of human nature. Humans have a tendency to stick with people who are like themselves and avoid those who are different. Psychologists have a name for this tendency—they call it the similar-attraction effect.
The similar-attraction effect can have a devastating impact on our efforts to create diverse teams. Professor Robert Sutton of Stanford University, in his book Weird Ideas, suggests a number of methods to diversify our organizations. One of his weird ideas is to hire people who make you uncomfortable, even those you dislike. If you are thinking of recruiting a candidate because “I like her” or “he’s just like us,” these might actually be reasons not to hire the person, assuming the job or team requires creativity.
Now, simply bringing people together from different disciplines and cultures, with varied thinking styles, different values, and diverse attitudes, is not the same as putting together an innovative team. Basic problematic group dynamics will work against you unless the group is managed properly.
However, here is a classic example of how well-managed diversity on a team can drive innovation. In World War II, the Allies were fighting a losing battle against the German navy. When a German submarine spotted an Allied convoy, it would send a coded signal to other German submarines in the area. These submarines would then gather into a group formation, known as a “wolf pack,” and attack the ship with punishing success. Between 1940 and 1941, the Germans sank more than 50 ships a month, with casualties exceeding 50,000.
The Allies were helpless against these attacks because they were unable to break the German coding system, which was produced via a coding machine known as the Enigma. British intelligence therefore built the most formidable of code-breaking teams, headquartered in a large Victorian mansion called Bletchely Park. Although cryptologists had traditionally come from the field of linguistics, this group also contained mathematicians, scientists, classicists, chess grand masters, and crossword addicts, all of whom worked together in supreme secrecy. Together, this diverse team managed to break the Enigma and, as a result, turned the tide of the naval battle.
Standing at the Intersection
To see how intersectional thinking can drive innovation in your business, consider the Medicis, a 15th-century banking family in Florence. The Medicis funded creators from a wide range of disciplines—sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects—who converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures. Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance.
Forward-thinking leaders in today’s rapidly spinning business universe can do the same thing. Look for new connections. Engage in creative thinking. Encourage your people to step outside of their comfort zone. Seek out diversity in all of that word’s meanings.
Frans Johansson is the author of the award-winning book “The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us about Innovation.” Raised in Sweden by his African-American-Cherokee mother and Swedish father, Johansson is a frequent speaker on the power of creativity and innovation. Recent audiences have included Sprint Nextel, Nike, Pepsi, General Motors, SAAB, Motorola, IBM, EDS, Unilever, JP Morgan Chase, Pfizer, TeliaSonera, and Honeywell. Visit www.themedicieffect.com for more information.