Edit 8th of May, 2020: This is a bit old text. I hold by the points raised about the necessity for a simple mechanism to facilitate spontaneous innovation in an organization. The only thing I disagree at this point that a simple 20% mechanism without any guidance or accountability would be a feasible solution in most organizations.
I want to put into words a few rationales for my belief in the main advantage of the 80/20 policy regarding working hours some technology companies now apply to their employees, which means 20% of work time can be applied to personal projects related somehow to the employer and professional development. Let's call this playtime.
This means new ideas can be quickly tested and discarded, or, if they look promising, more work can be applied to them. Spontaneously. Ubiquitously. By every expert and employee hired. I would also emphasize the word "can". This means the whole organization is not spending 20% of its time slacking off. It mean spontaneous innovation has a higher chance of emerging - well - anywhere, if you think of the organization as a black box whose all capabilities you cannot understand since individuals are very complex, and, societies, even more so.
Let me elaborate a bit. I'm not an expert on the subject. These ideas of organizational dynamics have been bothering me lately in my thoughts. In order to make room for new thoughts, I've purged them here. I use the word 'innovation' several times. Briefly, the difference between invention and innovation - and this is a critical one - is that invention is about bringing forth a new thing, while innovation is about recognizing either a new context for an established thing, or a way to improve it. As we are still fairly immature in some fields in applying the fruits of computer engineering and science, the opportunities for innovation should be a multitude where these can be applied.
I suggest the most important thing this playtime brings to an organization is the mental capital to facilitate innovation. It may not breed new products or fabulous inventions, but I believe the company that has a flat organization [1] and has fostered an atmosphere of innovation through playtime will have more concrete ideas on how to develop their business onwards than the one that did not. Small growing companies are in a natural mode of innovation until they find the patterns of work that generate revenue. And, more often than not, then they stop innovating and focus on repeating the established patterns as meticulously as possible.
Oh my god, it's full of patterns
Typical work in a large company is usually about applying existing patterns to known problems. Complex technical domains might require good craftmanship to keep the ship floating, the production rolling, and so on. However, mastering complex craftmanship does not imply skill in design.There is a cautionary anecdote of what happens when there is no design effort in one's day to day work in Christopher Alexander's book "Notes on the synthesis of form" [2](p.53).
Alexander tells the tale of Slovakian peasants who used to be famous for the beautiful, colorful shawls they made from yarn dipped in homemade dyes. However, when they started using new industrial colors, the shawls they made were no longer delicate and subtle, but crude and vulgar. Compared to the beauty of the previously made shawls their results with the new dyes were disappointing to say the least. What happened? The new colors themselves were not worse in any objective way when compared to the old ones. They were just different, and the established patterns did not quite work with them.
The peasants had a long tradition of shawl-making. Their patterns descended from a long lineage of protoshawls, where tiny changes had been adapted as part of the tradition incrementally. The shawls were not pretty due to the extreme artistry of the individual, but rather due to the repetition of patterns evolved through the generations. They knew how to replicate existing patterns. They had no experience in inventing new ones.
When the old pattern did not work with the new colors that well - and all the colors had changed - they could not design new patterns that would have been as beautiful - errorless - as their old shawls.
"Faced with the complex unfamiliar task of actually inventing forms from scratch, they were unsuccessful."
writes Alexander.
An analogous situation would be that you were taught how to assemble a house from ready blueprints and existing parts, and would then be given drafting tools and bricks and asked to design and build a mansion.
Design - which is about realizing and implementing a specific intent - is hard. We identify things that are wrong quite easily - everyone can be a critic. It's a lot harder to invent correct things than things that are somehow broken. It's hard to identify things when they work, and identify the things that are correct. Trial, error, experience, knowledge and epiphany is needed to bring new correct, unbroken, beautiful things into existence.
Human beings are not that good in innovation or invention. We are great at copying, though! Only few occasional innovations and inventions now and then are sufficient to drive cultural evolution forwards, to bring forth new patterns of how to do things, patterns of thought, patterns of form. But the innovations themselves are not programmed in the DNA of their inventor. They must be found out through thinking (conscious or unconscious) and experimentation. And the new knowledge must be understood and absorbed by a sufficient population, lest it be forgotten. It's not sufficient to create something new. You must also explain it to someone.
Fail often, fail fast
Let's rewind a bit. Why did I say more concrete ideas back there in paragraph two? Why would the population who had the chance to spend 20% of their time on personal projects be generating better ideas since everyone has ideas, always, in huge numbers. The thing is, usually the only way you can find out if an idea is a good idea is through prototyping or some research effort. If the idea is bad, but it was not discarded right away, means that there were unknown parameters involved that were not obvious that had to be discovered or learned through hard work.
Once an idea has been followed through a bit, successfully or not, better approaches can be thought out. To quote Mr. Edison [2], the inventor: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.". He had so many ideas, but only through experimentation and prototyping he could find out the ones that carried him to the right patterns to realize his ambitions.
The essence of new ideas can be hard to capture in words in research proposals and project plans without some working prototype or worked out examples. One idea can be very valuable, but you might need several tries to get it just right. This is one of the reasons why invention might take time. They idea itself can be simple, but it can take a tough grind to make it work.
Is it more skillful* to create an innovation department, or just set all your employers on a quest for new ideas? What's the expected return of investment? Let's rephrase this proposition.
If all time is directed only towards meeting economic goals set up the upper echelons of the organization, then there is no energy left to think of new ways to delight the customer and make work more efficient (efficient in the sense of making things easy that can be made easy. Think of the Amazon one-click. Not about working your arse off towards some impossible deadlines.). Realistically, some ideas require project level effort to follow through. But, sometimes only a little bit of persistent work is required to guide a successful new idea forward.
I am not suggesting that this 20% could be used to replace an established R&D department - really complex technical problems are not solvable by occasionally tinkering with them but through persistent, consistent effort. But I'm absolutely certain that there is an unlimited number of useful innovations that can be brought to fruition through occasional playtime.
To summarize:
- Creating new things is difficult.
- To create something new you need often some experience of creating something new.
- Sometimes, all it takes is an interested individual and sufficient amount of time.
- New ideas can be hard to communicate.
- "Show and tell" - the best way of communication is often through a worked out example, e.g. a prototype, with sufficient proof of the idea's usefulness to another specialist in the subject.
- Compared to any other industry, creating software prototypes can be ridiculously cheap but extremely valuable if they pinpoint to a better or a new way of doing something.
References and notes:
[1] Steve Denning has a lot to say about lean, flat organizations:
which has inspired Jussi Pakkanen to write a very entertaining analysis.
[2] Alexander, Christopher. Notes on the synthesis of form. Harvard University Press,1968. (a book about design process in architecture that quotes graph theory and AI research and speaks volumes to all who deal with design on a day-to-day basis, including software engineers. It's not apparently as well known as his "The Timeless way of Building" and other books but is a really good, and short, read).
[3] Thomas Alva Edison
*Skillfull as in zen-buddhist literature were the term is used to describe behavior through which one can reach set goals elegantly and effortlessly.
