Overcoming Resistance to Innovation

To drive innovation at your company, you need to change the mindset about resistance in this important way. People get emotionally attached to their ideas. There’s no such thing as an ugly baby! Well, that’s not completely true. Your employees need to realize that every new idea has some ugly spots.

Now here’s a tip. Most employees tend to sell their ideas on the positive aspects while ignoring the negative aspects. That’s completely backwards. You don’t need to sell the positive aspects. They sell themselves.

Employees will be more successful if they point out the weak spots - the sources of resistance, and show ways to overcome them. Let’s look at how using a resistance scorecard. This is an example of how we might score an idea for Amazon using drones to deliver packages to people’s homes.

According to the scorecard, you would expect resistance in two of the ten areas: complexity of implementing such an idea and inherent risk. Managing a massive fleet of drones going back and forth from the warehouse to people’s homes just boggles my mind. And the risk of something happening to a drone? What if it hurts someone or damages property?  Those are huge risks.

But now we know where to focus. To raise the overall caliber of innovation in your company, your teams must develop this skill of where to find and focus on resistance.

For the Amazon example, the questions become: how do we reduce complexity and reduce risk. For example, could Amazon partner with an organization already using drones like the US military or a university? Could it reduce risk by using the drones only in certain areas where property and people can’t be harmed? What other ways can we containerize these issues to make the idea more acceptable?

The more your people can dial down the sources of resistance, the more likely the idea will move forward. And that’s what the most innovative companies do. Generating great ideas is not the hard part; it’s identifying and reducing the sources of resistance. Like innovating new ideas, it’s a competency that can be learned and mastered in a systematic way.