The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.
Interpretation
Innovative companies often face internal challenges that can lead to confusion, but people find creative solutions to overcome these issues.
This quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter highlights the inherent complexities and challenges found within innovative organizations. These challenges, such as ambiguities and conflicts, can frustrate employees, yet they often inspire them to think creatively and develop new approaches to navigate these difficult situations. This process of overcoming obstacles contributes to the company's ability to innovate and grow.
In practice
In a team meeting where we discuss how to handle unexpected challenges in our project.
Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.
Organizational structures that allow divisions and departments to own their turf and people with long tenure to take root creates the same hardened group distinctions as Congressional redistricting to produce homogeneous voting blocs - all of which makes it easier to resist compromise, let alone collaboration.
The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc.
The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.
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What makes the United States great, the reason people wanted to live in the United States, move here still, is because of our ability to innovate.
The company's most urgent task is to learn to welcome, beg for, demand - innovation from everyone.
Most innovative things are not obvious to other people at the time. You have to believe in yourself. If you've got a good idea, follow it even though others tell you it's not.
To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.
There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
Just as producers often give consumers things they want but didn't think to ask for, consumers sometimes come up with surprising uses for new inventions. When a new product appears, it can uncover dissatisfactions and desires no one knew were there.
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