NY Times Reviews "The Innovation Killer"

NY Times: Attitude Isn’t Everything, but It’s Close, 2006-Aug-6, by Paul B. Brown

Ms. Rabe, a former innovation strategist for Intel who founded Zero-G, an innovation and strategy consulting firm, contends that knowledge and experience can actually kill innovation. “When we become expert,” she writes, “we often trade our ‘what if’ flights of fancy for the grounded reality of ‘what is’ ” and so limit our approaches to challenges.

Compounding the problem, she says, are the two ways organizations typically go about making decisions. The first is “groupthink,” the tendency of people who work together as a team to try to reach unanimous decisions “even if those decisions aren’t necessarily good ones.” The second, she adds, is “ ‘expert think,’ the tendency people have to make decisions based on their own expertise, the opinions of other experts or the opinions of those in authority.”

Both approaches severely limit thinking.The net result, Ms. Rabe says, is that companies face a dilemma. “When it comes to innovation, the same hard-won experience, best practices and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it,” she writes.

Her solution is to introduce “zero gravity thinkers.” They are, she explains, “outsiders who are not weighed down by the expertise of a team, its politics or ‘the way things have always been done.’ They are temporary team members who can help a team push beyond the limits of its existing mindset.”

The problem, of course, is that the very organizations most in need of these new types of thinkers are the ones most likely to resist their introduction. That is something that Ms. Rabe barely addresses.