Why companies stop innovating - Andy Walker

I’ve pulled out and summarised a few things, and it’s definitely worth reading the whole article.

When companies stop innovating then it’s the fault of their leaders.

As you progress through your career into a leadership role your job changes. Instead of being the one innovating you are, instead, responsible for creating an environment where innovation can happen. Eventually, your need to innovate becomes the problem. Then you try to fix it and make things worse.

You then get up on stage and say “we’re not innovative”. All people in the audience hear is that they aren’t working in an innovative environment and this becomes their truth. Or, worse still they start doing random things.

Phrases like “we need to be scrappy” or “we need to act like a startup” not only don’t they have the desired effect, they tend to encourage the worst behaviours. How should I be scrappier? In what way is what I’m doing stopping you? People start parroting these at each other to justify themselves without ever trying to align on a common understanding.

Nothing seems to happen so the leaders decide to step in and get things moving. Following the age-old maxim of “show don’t tell” the leaders of the organisation decide they need to be scrappy and get things moving. Rather than showing people how to innovate as they believe they are doing — what happens is they are telling their people what to do.

People need to own the problems they are working on. This is not to be confused with one of the great management antipatterns which is “holding people accountable”. People who own what they are doing build better products because they take accountability. As a leader your job is to give people the opportunity to own things, so they take accountability onto themselves.

create an environment where you get the best version of people. If you’re concerned that people are coasting (and accusing your people of slacking is never a good look) then set them up for success.

Seniority is not a proxy for success. Leaders should remember this.

people gravitate to the things that will get them recognition at the expense of the things which are critical for success.

leaders really screw things up — they try to instill a sense of urgency into people rather than asking “how can we iterate faster?”

If you can’t measure the impact you’re having then you’re missing out on one of the requirements for a high performing team. Goodhart’s Law “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” If you cannot measure success in a way that is meaningful then process becomes a proxy for success

When a leader proposes a solution (in order to get things moving) and it becomes an edict. People are going to try things that don’t work and that’s ok as long as they can learn from them. If we only reward impact and don’t include how people got there then we subject ourselves to outcome bias. This leads us to reward people who did the wrong things and got lucky or fail to recognise people who went about things the right way even though it didn’t pan out.

Every time you hire in a leader from outside you dilute your culture and, worse still, risk importing the shitty culture from wherever they came from

A leader’s job is not to make decisions (that way lies micromanagement and disempowerment) it is to ensure that decisions are made well. Your job as a leader then is to ensure decisions are made quickly and transparently so progress is possible, alignment is maintained and working relationships remain healthy.

As a company grows the number of stupid things that bring no value that people are expected to do (usually to satisfy the vanity of their leaders) increases.

One of the ways that leaders disrupt their teams is by forcing change on them without appreciating the cost of change. If you’re an exec, and you want high performing teams, you have to resist the urge to fuck with people’s org structures.

Leaders miss the immediacy of the feedback loops they had when they started out. Eventually, the input lag is so great that nothing appears to happen when you steer. At this point many leaders continue feeding input into their organisations in a desire to see a response. Too much steering input in a boat and you capsize.