Innovation: tech “firefighters” cannot create

Some teams only work on “putting out fires” or managing day-to-day problems and have zero time to reflect on how to improve their systems. If everyone in your organization is acting like a firefighter, there’s no point in saying that there’s room for people’s creativity to flow.   

Technical debt, incidents, and malfunctioning systems also end up compromising a team’s or an individual’s ability to be creative. In general, the company’s systems need to run without frequent incidents and complications, so that people can free up more of their time to think beyond the existing problems. Consistently dealing only with problems ends up generating frustration and burnout in employees.   

Although it’s common for startup employees to work long hours because the team is small and everyone is rushing to produce initial versions of products, that doesn’t mean that this way of operating should be perpetuated as the company’s working model once it matures.

Ideally, unless there is a high-priority incident, everything that a team does today should be doable tomorrow. Emergencies must be seen as one-offs, not day-to-day work, and it’s up to the leadership to spread this type of corporate culture.

Unless there is a high-priority incident, everything that a team does today should be doable tomorrow.

Not every apparent good idea works

In engineering (as well as in other areas), you always learn from your mistakes, since you have to investigate what went wrong and find ways to figure out future adjustments of ideas. For example, maybe something that doesn’t work for project A will work if applied to project B, and there will be no time wasted trying out ideas that have already been proven not to work well.

All professionals want to get things right more than they get them wrong, and the level of risk appetite varies greatly from one professional to another. People with a more rigorous academic background understand that it is part of the scientific process to propose a hypothesis and test it to reach a conclusion and that many tests will fail.

The scientific method is gradually being integrated into the culture of technology companies, and employees are becoming more and more comfortable with the process of experimentation and gathering data to test new ideas and products.

Agile work philosophies, such as the “lean startup” methodology first described by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Crown Currency, 2022), establish that there should be a simple and quick way to initially test an idea and gather data before moving on to a large-scale implementation.

Employees are becoming more and more comfortable with the process of experimentation and gathering data to test new ideas and products.

Amazon, whose management methodology is described in the book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (St. Martin’s Press, 2021), has also had a big influence in business environments with the concept of managing with data and metrics, including how and why to promote ideas and products that boost the business in light of customer needs.