Innovating in an Individual Capacity
Scratching an itch shared between you and your organization
This is the fourth in a series of posts around innovation at our typical workplace. The previous posts covered the idea of Innovation, learning innovation from a master chef and how innovation ends up being constrained by space and time in an organization.
As noted in the previous post in this series, few organizations are able to sustain the quest for innovation through the course of a whole year, and across all kinds of teams. Innovation ends up being artificially constrained by time (hackathons, innovation days, etc) or by space (“The X Team”, “Labs Project”, etc) within a typical organization.
As an individual contributor, primarily responsible for your own outcomes as part of a team, how do you break free of these artificial knots in the space-time continuum and attempt to bring your creativity to work more often?
Let’s start by looking at what this innovation might look like.
Choosing a problem
We glimpsed at what shape this innovation could take earlier, when comparing an engineer with an innovative chef. One can find obvious and not-so-obvious opportunities in our daily work; the obvious ones might include using Generative AI to make an experience super productive for the user, while the not-so-obvious ones might include automating a mundane, error-prone operation you take for granted.
There are typically a plethora of choices when you look closer at your day to day. Ask yourself these questions, for example.
Architecture: Did you find yourself jumping through hoops solving a particularly straightforward problem recently? Should it have been so hard?
Complexity: Are systems so intertwined and coupled that a change in one leads to a surprising regression in another?
Automation: Do you find yourself following the tedium of a process when the whole thing could be automated for the most part?
Productivity: Are there obvious inefficiencies in your work that can be at least minimized with deliberate effort?
Frustration: Do niggling issues bother your customers repeatedly, leading to customer-facing teams getting annoyed internally while putting a calm face externally?
Serendipity: Is the timing and technological landscape just right for solving a problem you put on the backburner in the past? Maybe if you approach it now, everything is likely to click.
If you just know what to ask and where to look, problems are aplenty in any organization. The most important thing is to have a pulse on what matters to your team, your organization and your customers, which is typically available through regular conversations around challenges and opportunities with your immediate leaders and peers.
But, how do you know what to pick? The art of picking a good problem to innovate on, will include the following considerations.
Relevant: The organization, and at a minimum your immediate leadership, is ready for this, and sees value in the effort invested.
Interesting: The problem is a personal itch and ideally something you would get value out of as well.
Feasible: You are confident you can show a prototype quickly to win the support for further investments.
Better Together
This is the secret sauce, so pay attention now! You have a better chance of taking something up if it goes well with another business priority, or better still, improves the quality of that work in at least one dimension.
Let’s say you’ve always wanted to desperately decouple two services that lead to painful deployment planning each time you make a change in one. Note that this makes this problem Interesting to you personally. The organization has recently suffered a few security scares and leadership desperately wants to keep out of trouble.
A new project comes along, requiring work on both sides of this coupling, and you know a way to make this solution a lot more secure with a decoupling. This kills both the birds - relevant to the organization and better together. You have a deployment and migration plan prepared that you can demonstrate will be achieved with zero downtime for either service, proving this is feasible.
Get the right attention to the right details, using the help of your manager or another champion, and you are likely to win the support of your leadership and your team to finally get this off your bucket list.
Timing
In business, as in sports, timing is everything. So it is with any innovative journey you decide to bake into your everyday work.
In the Desperate to Decouple example above, asking for the decoupling prior to leadership’s senses becoming sensitive to the term “security” would likely have landed on unprepared ears. It therefore behoves us well to maintain a running list of such problems and carefully prowl behind the tall grass of the corporate savannah waiting for the right wildebeest of an opportunity.
Of course, the other timely opportunities such as Hackathons, Innovation Days, are right around the corner, if you are happy to wait for them.
Practical approach
Now that you have the green light for your “itch in time” project, your focus should be on getting something out of it and winning the support to scratch more itches in the future. Let’s look at a few thumb rules that will come handy.
Transparent: Do your innovative work in the open such that it is plainly visible. Track it on the issue tracker, document on the wiki, commit to git, etc. You want your reporting manager to trust you with how you use your time.
Flexible: Be open to tuning the scope of the exercise depending on how much time, or any of the other resources, is made available. Progress is more important than making it big.
Iterate: The needs of the Business always take priority and something may come trump your plans without warning. Make sure your plan is iterative with multiple checkpoints, so you can pause, reap some value, and pick up later if needed.
Align: Leverage your partnership with your manager or another senior leader to identify how the outcome of this exercise could align with one of the priorities or pressing needs that the organization cares about. Without this alignment, your efforts are deemed as useful as pursuing a hobby.
With the right problem, a deadly better-together combo offer no one can refuse, an innovative attitude to make progress and show results, and patient timing to do this at the right time, you and your innovative spirit are an unstoppable force. What itch will you scratch that simultaneously scratches one for your team as well?
The final post in this series will cover the perspective from an Engineering Manager/Leader so they can look for opportunities in their team’s everyday work too.