Some years ago when software as a service (SaaS) was beginning to get noticed but had not yet become the phenomenon that it did, quite a number of Indian IT services firms didn’t take to it as they were focused on large scale system integration (SI) projects, implicitly treating the two as mutually exclusive when they were not. The problem lies in the thinking which, in most cases, fails to rise above operations or specific areas. A leader is one who can rise above and see a better picture (not a big picture) than what is seen by operations. A good leader is one who also simultaneously grasps the operational requirements of the alternative especially whether the two can co-exist in the same entity. A great leader is one who can consistently deliver this. It is good to be completely consumed by what one is currently doing but a leader doesn’t have that luxury. He needs to have a grasp of enough details so as to be grounded but not so much that he cannot see anything else. Great leadership doesn’t come easily to everyone. No wonder they are scarce.

Much the same affects innovation. There is this mistaken belief that to be innovative means giving up what we currently do. Most of us have this romantic but deeply wrong notion that you need to completely break with the past to create something new. If you accept that an organization is an evolving body, past, present and future can co-exist. Every past is not some untouchable element; you can creatively combine elements of the past to create a piece of innovation.

More than a decade ago, Michael S Slogun, the chief innovation officer at Air Academy Associates has proposed the idea of ‘ambidextrous innovation’, borrowing it from Michael L Tushman’s “The Ambidextrous Organization” which describes how mature companies can pursue breakthrough growth through a two-pronged effort in which they separate their new, exploratory units from their traditional, exploitive ones while maintaining tight links across units at the senior executive level.

Consider this. Children naturally use both hands with equal felicity; it is only when they grow up that it gets blunted and that is largely owing to social reasons. In a sense, we forget how to simultaneously use both hands. Ambidextrous innovation simply suggests that we free ourselves from (artificially created) polarities and go back to what we are capable of. The chief merit of ambidextrous organisations is that they are adept at balancing priorities, which we know is a constant need. Ambidextrous innovation carries the concept to innovation balancing between tactical and strategic innovation.

Let us pause for a while before we get carried away. It is dangerous to think of an entire organization as a unified, cohesive whole. Such a species has never existed and likely never will, because it is unnatural. The point of making this observation now is to caution against thinking that an entire organization is ambidextrous. It doesn’t even have to be but the leadership must, absolutely must. In fact, this is a basic observation never to be forgotten since this is true of any group of people, even those brought together by common objectives.

In effect, there could well be two sets of people and it will test the ability of a leadership to hold them together as a single entity. It is not surprising then some keep one set of people physically away from the other. Microsoft did this while developing the X Box 360. A fine business leader once told me (when I was with The Economic Times) that she believed in carrying people with her. This will become a mandatory skill for any leadership that wishes to maintain a consistently innovative environment.

Not by intelligence alone

You need guts to be innovative because innovation can be intimidating. An innovating culture is therefore also an accommodating culture. Accommodating of failures, that is. Which is one of the reasons why quite a bit of the work on innovation also deals with organization theory. There will be mistakes. You just have to make sure that mistakes are ‘caught’ early. There are individuals who have a strong and perpetuating innovative streak. But this will come to naught unless they are housed in an environment that encourages, intensifies and rewards the spirit of innovation. Yet, since we don’t want an unintended division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ within an organization, we have to also focus on creating a learning organization. This is also an organization’s insurance.

And it’s not necessary to let people loose as the only way to innovate. Any innovative spirit let loose will end up a ghost. As Mohanbir Sawney and Robert Wolcott put it, you must combat structure with structure (http://www.tetriscg.com/downloads/SevenInnovationMyths.pdf). (I don’t agree with everything they say in this article but this is a powerful insight.) Create a structure that enables innovations, that protects without turning people defensive, conservative. The moral is that you have to have new ideas about new ideas, as Shira P White would say. White even wrote a book by that name to emphasise that you have to be innovative about being innovative (https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/shira-p-white/new-ideas-about-new-ideas/9780738207803/).