Turning Your School Into A "Skunk Works" of Lateral Innovation

Innovation should not be linear. Most of us are familiar with examples of the great innovation teams from the business and engineering world. Examples such as Xerox- PARC’s group, to Apple’s Macintosh group, to Lockheed Martin’s famous “Skunk Works” have lead many of us to believe that innovative ideas should be developed by groups of “creative people” somewhere outside of school and then be brought into the school for teachers and administrators to execute. That is linear innovation and linear innovation should not be the goal of schools and school districts. Innovation should not be separated from schools and the district.

Group Genius author Keith Sawyer puts is this way..

“If innovation is linear, the idea stage can be separated out and placed in a more creative unit of the organization, and the execution can still take place in a more traditional bureaucratic structure.”

Many of us have been conditioned to believe this is the way is should work in our schools. Let the experts come up with the ideas and then tell us what to do. But if we allow that mindset to continue then the schools or school districts never develop the capacity to bring their creativity, knowledge, and ideas to bear. Simply sitting back and waiting for other to think it up for us does nothing to develop innovation abilities.

Sawyer points out that,"... although separation can be good for short-term creativity, it interferes with long term innovation: An isolated “skunk works” usually has trouble communicating with the rest of the organization because innovation requires collaboration across the company.”

In other words, for the long-term benefit of the school or district, the best innovation is not linear, but lateral. We need to innovation and create together because everyone at the school or in the district is needed to collaborate on the new idea of innovation to effectively implement it and embed it. Collaborating laterally, across the team, the grade level, the department, the school, and the district.

Different cultures, different styles of communication, and different perspectives are natural barriers to those on the outside of the school or district. It makes it difficult to interface with the school or district, which are being asked to execute their innovations.

“The skunk works model places all its hope on one big flash of inspiration that must come from a select group of special people. But we’ve seen that even the most transformative new products and systems emerge from many small sparks of insight. Successful innovative companies keep these small sparks inspiring the next one.”

Lateral innovation occurs when teacher and administrators working next to each other day-in and day-out collaborate on these “small sparks” of insight and inspiration to produce innovation from within. These innovations are more likely to overcome the barriers that innovation from outside faces. Lateral innovation has more buy-in, is more contextual, and more focused.

If you want to make innovation a strength and capacity of your school or district, don’t look outside for linear innovation, but look inside for lateral innovation.

Comments

[twitter.com/kdwashburn]

Are you familiar with Thomas Sergiovanni's ideas on educational leadership (book: Moral Leadership)? His emphasis on community and shared values fits nicely with your thoughts on lateral innovation. Excellent thoughts! So often when I visit schools it seems like there's a covert war be waged—an "us vs. them" battle between teachers and administrators. More important things, such as innovating for improved teaching and student learning, often get pushed aside for silly things like who will control access to the construction paper. It's frustrating. Thanks for reminding us it doesn't have to be that way and that "working next to each other" produces better results.

[Rob Jacobs]

Kevin thanks for the thoughts. I will look into Sergiovanni's work. Lateral Innovation is powered through the stewardship of the knowledge, abilities, creativity, and ideas of those teachers and administrators working together. I call it Wisdom Stewardship. As you say, working next to each other does produce better results. Pulling out what is already inside of each of us.