How corporate workplace culture discourages innovation

Innovation is creative work. To do creative work, you have to go through many rough drafts. Sometimes you have to invest time into an idea that doesn't work out, but which reveals some other idea that makes exploring that first idea worth it. Or sometimes it doesn't work at all, and you move on to the next idea.

This process is completely antithetical to corporate workplaces, and one reason why I do not trust any large corporation's claim that it is able to "innovate." Maybe this happens in some R&D division in large companies, but it certainly does not happen in most departments.

Corporate workplaces thrive on predictability. Management does not like surprises, because surprises mean risk. And the best way to ensure your department will deliver on what it is committed to is to reduce risk to near zero by maintaining a top-down, command-and-control management structure.

In the real world, command-and-control type managers do not look like the cartoonish boss in Office Space. They look a lot more friendly than that. They are typically nice people who you would love to have as a neighbor or friend. Mean or angry people are not really management material and their rage usually prevents them from developing the political acumen to make it in a corporate environment.

Middle management is made of an army of Ned Flanderses. They are often polite family men and women, who just want to help everyone get along and hit the quarterly revenue targets so we can all enjoy our two weeks' vacation. And creative or "innovative" approaches introduce unnecessary risk, so they must be avoided. The Neds of the world are the ideal shock troops to instrument a top-down system of control that masquerades under the guise of an "innovative" organization.

Corporate environments also discourage creativity by committee thinking. The more people that are involved in a decision, the worse that decision will likely be. This is counter to the belief of the Neds who seek to pull in as many people as possible into a decision, to ensure that the risks are completely eliminated from it. But decision-making often requires a creative vision. A few human brains can agreed on a vision and their intelligences combined can have a multiplicative effect. But throw together a dozen different middle-managers who are all primarily concerned with removing risk, and you can be certain that the result will be mediocre at best.

This is easily verified. Take the scenario where you have a project and assume you have two talented but strongly opinionated, creative people available to work on it. Assigning one of these individuals to the project will ensured that you get a quality result – and one colored by that individual's opinions. But if you assign both people to the project, and tell them to work together, you are all but assured to get a result that is a compromise with none of the unique features of either individual approach. In other words, it is less innovative (and lower risk).

This is what happens at a scale in most companies. It is often called "collaboration" by the middle-managers of the world. But in truth it is a risk-reduction process designed to smooth out any and all risk (and creativity) from the final product.

It is plain to see why startups are our primary source of innovation. Startups are devoid of the Ned Flanderses of the world. Their business model has built-in risk. It is normal for many startups to scrap their initial idea and "pivot" to another idea – which is exactly the "draft" model I began this article with.

Startups are also known for operating on the "one brain" principle. Instead of making people "collaborate" to produce a compromised end-product, pieces of the product are often handed over to a single person who is allowed to work autonomously. No planning, estimation, design review, etc. The whole process, from beginning to end, takes place in one person's brain. What a concept!

Innovation is the first thing to go when companies become successful. Creativity is only strictly necessary during a company's initial growth and experimentation phase. Once the company finds a business model that works, it becomes important to reduce risk, which means reigning in the creative types or encouraging them to leave. Middle-management typically starts to appear here. Once middle-management is established, innovation asymptotically approaches zero – and this is as it was designed.

But this is foolish because innovation is important. Companies die all the time because they failed to innovate, and a competitor comes along with a better product produced by creative people, working autonomously, with minimal management oversight, who are understood to be taking a risk.

To have innovation in a company, you have to introduce risk. Do you want the value that comes from innovation? Do you want to have a product that out-competes your competitors, both present and future? Then you have to accept risk, which means avoiding the classic middle-management structure, or at least keeping it to a minimum.