Why Peace and Harmony Are Bad for Innovation - Research - Harvard Business Review

Why Peace and Harmony Are Bad for Innovation - Research - Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review *

Why Peace and Harmony Are Bad for Innovation *

10:39 AM Friday February 26, 2010 *by Andrew O’Connell Comments (9) *

To me, one of the most disturbing images in literature isn't Big Brother's menacing stare or Anna Karenina's body under the train, but what the Parsee did with his cake crumbs. When I was reading How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin aloud the other night, I was struck by the Parsee's cruelty in sprinkling those stale, tickly crumbs inside the hide of the rhinoceros, who had taken it off to go swimming. They were as exquisitely irritating, Kipling says, as crumbs in a bed. I still feel itchy thinking about it. *

Crumbs in a bed. There are just too many workplace analogies to that. The relentlessly negative economy — that's one. Or the competitor who doesn't have the decency to give up. What's terrible and unfair about life, though, is that a big, persistent annoyance can be just the thing to get people moving and innovating. *Two researchers recently wrote to me about this. Gary R. Carini and Mark G. Dunn, professors at Baylor's Hankamer School of Business, say an "unanticipated exogenous shock or destabilizing force" often seems to be a factor in prompting rapid, enduring, significant change in organizations. Citing examples from wartime as well as from the current downturn, they say they've found that "shocks and surprises did not deter progress, but actually drove it forward." *

Makes sense, and other researchers have reached similar conclusions. Some of the deepest thinking about creativity and innovation comes from Dorothy Leonard of Harvard Business School and Walter Swap, formerly of Tufts, who have written about the value of "creative abrasion," a term they attribute to the auto designer Jerry Hirshberg. It's the process by which "intellectually diverse people generate, vigorously debate, and ultimately implement ideas," Leonard and Swap say in a 1999 article, "How Managers Can Spark Creativity." *

Sounds pleasant enough when they put it like that, all those intellectually diverse people vigorously debating and implementing. But I think business writers, in trying to be helpful, sometimes go too far to avoid negative language and end up censoring themselves. Abrasion is abrasion. Hirshberg himself is more blunt: "Friction can produce wonderful creative sparks," he says. Saj-nicole A. Joni and Damon Beyer probably hit it squarely on the head when they say, flat out, that "a peaceful, harmonious workplace can be the worst possible thing for a business." *

Like most people, I despise the abrasion part of creative abrasion, but I can see its value — in hindsight. To the extent that I've ever been creative, it has usually been because I've had to deal with difficult situations, the psychic equivalent of cake crumbs in the bed. Give me an assignment to innovate and put me in a nice, crumb-free hammock between tall trees, and I'd probably just nod off. *

Andrew O'Connell is an editor with the Harvard Business Review Group. *

Access Original Post:***
http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/02/why-peace-and-harmony-are-bad.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.