by Brady Mick — The pendulum in the workplace is swinging. For the last two decades, the call for collaboration has been a front-and-center mandate. Across all landscapes, building types and business sectors, open, active and engaging workplaces have sprung up. Yet the very spaces that were once thought to be an answer to workplace design are now generating a new set of behavioral pains.
Due to complexity, speed of change and unanticipated business needs, people are suffering from lack of focus, inability to concentrate and minimal time to innovate. Since companies cannot thrive without innovation, the question is: Can collaboration and innovation exist in the same environment? The simple answer is: Probably not. Collaboration and innovation produce competing behaviors when it comes to work strategy and workplace design. They are exclusive in form and function and therefore cannot easily occupy the same space at the same time.
Defining innovation and collaboration
Collaboration — quite literally, “laboring together” — is a set of behaviors based on shared experiences. Like the classic hall of mirrors in a carnival funhouse, ideas are reflected to reveal many directions and solutions. Each person in the collaborative environment brings his or her own mirror into play to reflect and build additional solutions and outcomes. Collaboration, however, has a downside. Like a hall of mirrors, many of the pathways revealed are illusionary. They may lead in circles or to dead ends, offering glass walls rather than a clear path ahead.
On the other hand, collaboration can be very useful in unsticking problems because it brings together multiple viewpoints focused on finding solutions. For that reason, having a diverse team increases the odds of finding a workable path forward. Collaboration can be invaluable in today’s complicated and time-sensitive working world. Collaboration, however, tends to yield the same solutions to the same old problems. Under the pressures of today’s business complexity, it is advantageous to first create the right questions before seeking the answers.
That’s where the differentiated behaviors of innovation come into play. Innovation is the pursuit of discovering questions that lead to different or unexpected results. Its root comes from the Latin novus, which means new. Innovation seeks to break the work patterns that don’t contribute to revolutionary new ideas, much less evolutionary ideas.
While collaboration asks how business can fill a need today, innovation asks how business will solve future desires to discover the next gamechanging product, service or solution. Accordingly, using collaboration as a strategy to affect change is ultimately less valuable to business results. More often than not, collaboration can represent the definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.
Differences in form and function
Do collaboration and innovation compete when they find themselves in close proximity, or can they exist in the same workspace? By nature they compete, because innovation requires setting aside the norms that have created workspaces in order to adopt new behaviors and work expectations. In the collaborative business world, ROI, steady growth, increasing profits and “failure is NOT an option” are often the measures of success. Innovation demands that people step outside of conformity and baseline expectations, with the understanding that not only is failure an option, but failure can often be a precursor to future results. This is a language that business does not speak with ease. Yet creating future results from innovative forms of work behaviors is exactly the rallying cry that is coming from all corners of business leadership.
Impact on work behaviors
At its core, collaboration is best created from an extroverted set of behaviors. Employees share pieces of their ideas focused on a problem, build upon the common themes and combine them to achieve a predictable goal. Collaboration is more giving than taking. Collaboration is good at breaking down silos, creating crossdepartmental teams and accepting input from anyone in the chain of command or the production process. Conversely, innovation is more introspective and introverted. Innovation encourages the use of one’s own inquisitiveness, learning style and creative instinct to create new questions and perspective on a problem. Innovation is more taking than giving — taking divergent ideas, perhaps, and synthesizing them into a concept of new perspective and understanding.
We are now entering an age of “small innovation.” The work of the future will be dependent on the ability of people to create and deliver small daily innovations to people-focused problems. Instead of waiting for the next big innovation to arrive to solve business problems, people in business will be required to look inward to create their own innovations to small problems. A benefit of small innovation will be a reversal of today’s diminished worker engagement.
Case study: Nike
What images come to mind when considering the Nike swoosh? You might see a high-caliber athlete talking about achievement, or possibly the shirts hanging in your closets or the shoes on your feet. What about Nike’s FuelBand bracelets, which feed biometric data directly to personal digital devices to help people track their daily physical activity levels? Nike is banking on the FuelBand technology as it expands its business competency across new venues. In 2013 it achieved the top ranking in Fast Company’s list of “The World’s Most Innovative Companies.” If Nike is truly aligned with this distinction, would collaboration be its strategic driver for the design of the workplace?
The answer: No way, according to Nike CEO Mark Parker. “Business models are not meant to be static. In the world we live in today, you have to adapt and change. One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that’s happy with its success. That will wind up being your death in the end.”
Different results
So innovation and collaboration don’t mesh well together, but neither do finance and marketing, where the ROI for a promotional campaign may be difficult to capture on a spreadsheet. Yet business overcomes these hurdles, so why can’t competing ways of working coexist?
Because innovation and collaboration involve different kinds of work behaviors, they are best supported by different kinds of workspaces. Collaboration, being extroverted, is discouraged by closed doors, working from home, remote workspaces and closed floor plans. Open collaboration and community amenities such as employee cafeterias encourage workers to stay on campus and constantly interact. In contrast, innovation often benefits from quiet, private spaces that allow for individual thought or “ingenious settings” — places where “Eureka!” (“I have found it!” in Greek) replaces collaborative interaction time with self-exploration.
For example, collaboration has resisted the creation of personal, closed offices, because the behavioral expectation of the office assignments has traditionally been focused on individual status. (Status is not a supportive behavior of either collaboration or innovation.) Under the focus of innovative behaviors, a closed, introverted setting, whether assigned or unassigned, creates a new purpose in the workplace.
Additionally, the conference room has been seen as a location for collaborative work. Yet the traditional fixed tables and focus on a leader driving the team to collaborate are already being replaced with team rooms, mobile furniture and innovative equipment such as technology and display surfaces. The shift toward supporting innovative work is underway.
The next generation of workplace is focusing on “activity settings.” Activity settings develop contrasting environments of differing sizes and setups to encourage choice and selfdetermination from workers. Teams and individuals are choosing the setting that best supports the work behaviors required to deliver high levels of innovative business results. Some settings will be highly collaborative to deliver the daily ration of shared ideas and functional problem solving. Some areas will support the rote and response that all businesses require. And some areas will focus on the creation of what is next in business, which is independent of the past and focused on the future.
The future
The future belongs to innovation. If that’s true, what’s holding innovation back? The answer is fear of complexity. Business manages toward the expected (collaboration), not the unexpected (innovation). Collaboration delivers greater efficiency and predictability. Innovation demands a readiness to accept perceived failure as a likely outcome. It is much easier to sell the less complex, comfortable world of collaboration to corporate boards and shareholders than it is to convince them to support unproven ideas. In the future, as business becomes more adept at dealing with complexity, success will be tied less and less to the expectations of past results. Business knows the work practices of collaboration well. These have been adopted, studied and refined in workplace strategy over many years. But with the rise of innovation as the key driver of work, business will have to invent, adopt, study and refine work behaviors and spaces. Practices from the realm of big innovation will be translated into the daily work of small innovation. Evolutionary improvement will be nurtured in a workplace where revolutionary improvement is created by daily leaps of innovation.
Brady Mick is client leader with BHDP Architecture. He provides expertise in strategic design, culture, social dynamics, work process and change alignment. For more information, visit bhdp.com or call +1-513-271-1634.