I've been thinking about the topic of innovation lately, and how it relates to legibility in (large) organizations. When I think about technological innovation I think about a product or a process that's significantly different from whatever came before it. Organizations creating net value, economic or otherwise, with said products or processes.
What happens to innovation when an organization starts to optimize for legibility? What I mean by that is an increased focus on standardizing and homogenizing internal processes, discouraging or outright disallowing deviation from them. The outcome of increased legibility is repeatability and reduced variance.
There might be good reasons for doing this from an organizational standpoint. Repeatability might be a good way to increase short-term profits, or it could be that you’re in a low variance, capital intensive field, where innovation is not key to business success.
Looking solely through the lens of repeatable innovation, however, I’m betting most of us would be hard-pressed to attribute an innovation to a particular set of formalized processes. Even harder would be to find examples of multiple innovations attributable to the same standardized process. This would mean that legibility and repeatability in large organizations don’t lead to innovation, but to consistency and maintaining the status quo. By definition, there can be no innovation from that starting point, since innovation is different from whatever came before it.
This is assuming that a status quo in process equals a status quo in outcome, which I think is a fair assumption. Consider that innovation itself requires variance, which comes from experimentation and feedback loops that the processes that I'm talking about systematically remove.
I’m using the word ’process’ pretty sloppily here. There can be innovation in process itself (a la Toyota). Process is also present even if it’s not always legible, a reality typical of startups, and indicative of the fact that innovation requires some kind of process to absorb variance. What I’m talking about here is the habit typically found at larger organizations, of narrow, formalized operating procedures, that optimze for predictability and therefore also reduce variance.
To be fair, or perhaps unfair, I don’t think that the main goal of such organizations is repeat innovation. I’m just saying that if that’s our goal, maybe we should stop assuming that post-hoc formalization of the assumed processes that led to our first success must lead to our next ones. It’s almost like the Observer Effect; the moment you try to formalize the conditions that produced an innovative outcome, you alter those very conditions. The system you create through formalization is no longer the system that generated the outcome.