Innovation Happens in the White Spaces Between the Organogram

Disclaimer : The title comes from the book “Slack” by Tom DeMarco ( Thanks @Anonymous for the reminder – I could not remember )

Innovation does not happen in the Organogram.

In any growing business that is looking to improve reliability and predictability you need to spend time setting up processes that are repeatable – this processes are managed, cryptically by managers, and done by the people on the ground.

This patterns repeats itself up the levels of abstraction so that you have ( wait for it ) : managers managing many managers. Follow that recursively up the tree to the CEO / Board, draw it down on paper, and lo and behold you have an organogram.

But the organogram only represents the work that needs to be done, it is by definition orthogonal to innovation, since innovation is not about repeatability, it is new.

Some might argue that you can simply place innovation on the organogram. Appoint an Innovation Team with an Innovation Product Manger so that innovation is no longer in the nebulous white space, invest money in it and off you go.

While that is a good idea, it will not work,  at least not as well as it could, unless you understand where innovation actually happens.

Where does innovation happen ?

Innovation happens in the mind of a person. Any Person. Period.

So What is the White Space ?

If you were to draw a box around an organogram, this area would represent the mental space, time  and interactions of  the people in your company. The blue blocks are the people that mange and execute your processes - that are the bread an butter of your company.

The white space is any and every time someone spends time outside of a defined block. When that happens you are coming dangerously close to having someone trip over an innovation.

You can promote this in an infinite number of ways :

* Build slack into your projects
* Formal Socializing
* eating together at lunch
* Google 20% style projects
* Encourage internal and external Blogging
* Cross division Information sharing ( many time this would be helpful just within a single division )
* ….. anything that puts people out of their block - in your time, once they go home don’t expect the innovation to be directed to you.

Sadly many real organograms may look like this, especially in a software development environment. Carefully designed to eliminate  as much innovation as possible, both from work and peoples personal life.

Start-ups are naturally innovative

Start-ups are naturally innovative because they have loosely defined roles which people move between quite fluidly and as such spend a disproportionally large amt of time in the white space.

It is not about the passion and drive of a start-up that breads innovation, it is the time spend in the white space.

You have the same potential for this in a larger company too, if you find the white space.

Putting Innovation on the Organogram

Now if you understand where the white space is, and you have the courage to encourage people to spend time there, then you can and should put it on your organogram, so that you can manage - give the same reliability and predictability - to any innovative idea.

Just don’t make the mistake of thinking the innovation will come from inside the blue innovation block – that block can only manage the innovation to delivery.