Becoming Bicultural

3. BECOMING BICULTURAL

A subtle area of attitude and skill, one that seems to distinguish serial innovators like Saillant and Galloway, involves never losing touch with the larger organizational environment—something we call “becoming bicultural.” While this sounds easy, failing to consider the greater environment has proven to be the undoing of many otherwise successful learning initiatives. One of the most painful lessons of the first ten years of the SoL network was discovering that success did not always lead to success. We lived through many examples of small-scale or local applications of learning tools that accomplished a great deal but did not spread in the larger corporate environment. Indeed, these successes often got the innovators into trouble.

One of the best documented examples of this phenomenon was a pioneering product development effort, “AutoCo’s Epsilon team,” that enabled a new model-year car development team to effectively shave a year off a five-year development cycle, return more than $50 million in allocated but unspent overrun costs, and achieve what many observers called “the smoothest new model launch in company history.”9 Still, when a major reorganization unfolded during the waning months of the project, the senior leaders on the team were not offered positions they considered attractive and all took early retirement. This experience came as something of a shock to many of us at that time, but it was an important awakening.

It turns out there is a rich history of successful innovations that fail to spread. For example, in The Age of Heretics, Art Kleiner documented early adopters of team-and process-oriented manufacturing processes in the mid-1960s, two decades before such practices became widely accepted, who were driven out of their companies.10 “Corporate heretics,” as Kleiner calls them, may play a key role in the larger patterns of innovation but often suffer personally for their efforts. The “build a better mousetrap” theory—“if we innovate successfully, the world will beat a path to our doorway”—provides a poor guide to the complex political dynamics of large organizations and how they respond to innovation.

But such fates are not inevitable. As we came to understand these problems, we discovered that one source of the trouble lay in the very enthusiasm and passion of the innovators themselves.11 Without this passion they would never take the risks involved in doing something truly new. Without this passion they would not have the patience and perseverance required to succeed. Nor would they attract others who shared their passion. But their passion can also get them in trouble. It can blind them to how they are being perceived by those who are not part of their effort, and it can make them uninterested in how their efforts affect others.

Fundamental innovations that produce significant leaps in performance can be threatening to people and teams performing closer to the norm. When such improvements are achieved through significantly different methods—methods that are poorly understood by others—the threat increases. And when the advocates for those methods describe them with an air of jargon-laden mystery, their group can easily be labeled a “cult.” “Whenever I met with [the managers of the team] they talked about ‘ladders of inference’ and ‘systems thinking,’” said the VP of product development at AutoCo. “It was all quite incomprehensible to me.”

“They were having too much fun,” said another team leader bluntly. “Nobody enjoys work that much.” Assessing performance is always complex, and enthusiastic advocates are usually prejudiced. They see what is improving and may be inclined to disregard other aspects of their performance that cynics or skeptics consider substandard. Eventually we dubbed this host of problems the “true believers syndrome” and realized it is a primary reason that promising innovations often fail to spread.

The other side of the coin to “starting where you are,” the second strategy we discussed, is becoming adroit at working with the political forces within an organization. Innovators intent on building cultures of learning and openness sometimes feel that they are living in two worlds—the open, learning-oriented world of the team or organization they are working to develop, and the more traditional world of the mainstream organization. As we came to understand the problems of innovators who ran afoul of the corporate immune system, we started to see that sustaining innovation requires leaders who become bicultural, moving back and forth effectively between the two different worlds, respecting the ground rules in each.