Sustaining Innovation (in Many Different Situations)

I'm in Europe right now, on a mix of vacation and work. The work is focused on "innovation." Last week, I sat on the jury for the first Cultural Innovation International Prize given by the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, and this week, I'm offering a workshop for museum professionals across Poland participating together in a "Museum Lab" in Warsaw.

Innovation is often represented as a shot in the dark, a one-time project, something prize-worthy. But one of the biggest challenges our Barcelona jury had was the reality that innovation is situational, not universal. What feels innovative in one context feels tired in another. The most innovative institutions find meaningful ways to challenge the prevailing wisdom in their own specific environments. And hopefully, they don't just do it once; they do it again and again.

These thoughts made me go back to one of my favorite books, Sustaining Innovation by Paul Light. Paul Light profiled 26 nonprofit and governmental organizations in Minnesota in the 1990s, each of which innovated over time, changes in leadership, and circumstance.

In 2011, I reviewed Sustaining Innovation, bringing in voices from Museum 2.0 readers like you as well as a colleague from one of the institutions Light profiled (Sarah Schultz, then at the Walker Art Center). If you're interested in innovation in museums and nonprofits, you may enjoy:

• The first post, which outlines Paul Light's fundamental ideas and the most compelling lessons I learned from the book, including my favorite: "how to say no, and why to say yes."
• The second post, in which Museum 2.0 readers shared their own experiences of how organizations support or block innovation. Including some very real stories and reflections... please consider contributing your own experiences to the vibrant comment thread.
• The third post, in which I interviewed Sarah Schultz, who worked at the Walker Art Center for 22 years, on her experiences from "inside" one of the institutions highlighted in the book.
• The fourth post, which raised a question about two different conditions for innovation--a stable institution with slack to foster innovation, versus a hard-driving institution making change on a shoestring. Which would you prefer?

Sustaining Innovation Part 4: Slack or Shoestring?

This is the last in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post is another "open thread" encouraging conversation about a core question that arose for me as we've explored the topic this month.

Last week, this blog featured an interview with Sarah Schultz, a long-time staffer at the Walker Art Center, about her experiences working in an innovative arts organization. One of the things Sarah focused on is the idea of having "slack"--money, time, and headspace--to pursue experiments and let innovative ideas germinate. As we discussed slack, I was very sensitive to the fact that Sarah works in a big institution where there IS money to find in the corners of the budget and where there are enough people to be able to put together creative projects without completely abandoning their basic work requirements.

Most museums, frankly, aren't like that. The majority of museums are quite small in budget and staff. Sarah may be looking for slack on the order of $10,000 while your museum might be lucky to scrounge $100 for new ideas.

And this makes me wonder: is the "slack" model as appropriate to small, scrappy institutions as it is to larger organizations? The alternative is the model that startups use--the "shoestring" model--where passionate people bootstrap their vision into being, constantly facing threats from the outside. In Paul Light's book, he describes several nonprofits that are more shoestring than slack, fighting every day to make their innovative ideas happen. One of those--the Phoenix Group--overextends itself and has to close up shop, but the others survive and thrive.

Picking this apart requires differentiating organizational maturity from size or budget. In her great book on nonprofit lifecycles, Susan Kenny Stevens defines seven stages of nonprofits: idea, startup, growth, mature, decline, turnaround, and terminal (if the turnaround doesn't happen). The Walker is clearly both mature and large. As a mature institution, it needs to focus on using slack to drive innovation, since innovation often falls off the table when an organization reaches maturity. Without continuing to innovate and stay relevant, the organization goes into decline.

But for institutions that are not yet mature, baking in slack may not be necessary or even feasible. An institution that is (whether by design or accident) constantly in startup or growth mode is one that is constantly innovating by necessity. This mode of operation can be exhausting and risky, but it's also exciting and not as prone to slip into the self-congratulatory irrelevance that marks the shift from maturity to decline.

I'm not sure what's better: to be a mature institution with various systems to continue promoting innovation or to be a startup institution that is always hungry for innovation to drive growth. I know that Paul Light would say it's the first one, because nonprofits need to avoid risk to sustainably deliver on their missions. But I'm not sure I agree, or that that model is best for everyone. What's worse, the threat of irrelevance or the threat of insolvency? How would you rather innovate--on a shoestring, or with built-in slack?

Sustaining Innovation Part 3: Interview With Sarah Schultz of the Walker Art Center

This is the third in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post features an interview with Sarah Schultz, a museum staffer at one of the institutions Light profiled in the book (the Walker Art Center). Sarah has worked at the Walker since 1992 and is currently the Director of Education and Community Programs.

As a long-time employee of the Walker, how do you react to Paul Light's observations about what makes an institution innovate?

I honestly wasn’t aware of the book when it first came out. But having just read it, I think it's really accurate. Light’s notion of innovation as an organizational practice that has to be continually nurtured is right on. I've had the benefit of being in an organization that really does practice and value innovation at every level. There's a high tolerance for risk and failure, trust from the top, and a strong sense of mission in everything we do.

In my experience, innovation is about flexibility, capacity, and collaborative relationships. It's the ability for me to work with my CFO to be able to budget and align the right kinds of resources for new projects. A crew that has the capacity to build a sign at the last minute. Guard staff who are willing to let an artist step between two panes of glass to perform. Our collective willingness to be nimble and generous is really the reason I've been able to do any kind of innovative project here.

How does the process of getting an innovation off the ground work at the Walker?

One key idea that Paul Light talks about is the notion of slack. You need the headspace and the free time to think of ideas, and the resources to make them happen--whether that's $30 or $300,000. A good organization will value unstructured time and a good CFO will help you find that financial slack. Every organization has pockets of restricted and unrestricted money. To innovate, you really need those unrestricted dollars. How do you loosen up funds? My CFO has been very proactive and a wonderful partner in figuring out how to create an overall department budget that frees up small pockets of money for new projects.

Can you give me an example?

It's always seemed challenging here to find funds for interpretative materials. It's easier to secure grants for community-based programming or exhibitions, but it's not easy to get funding for some of the core work that museums do. So when we want to innovate with interpretation, we have to budget creatively. For example, Card Catalogue is a project around our permanent collection, an evolving catalog made up of printed cards visitors can collect and keep in a binder. It’s a great project that allows us to keep researching and creating content around our collection, and we need about $10,000 per year to produce it. That is a not a major expense here, but we also don’t have $10,000 just lying around. It's too small to write a grant for, too big to assume we just have the money. Working with the CFO, we went through my budget and found ways to realign funds to find the money to do the project.

You talked earlier about the importance of flexibility and nimbleness on staff--the proclivity for people to be open and say yes to something new rather than throw up barriers. What do you see that makes that possible--or not possible--in different situations?

I can't stress enough the importance of opportunities for staff to gather informally, be collegial, and play together. That's how we build trust. The Walker is also a place where everyone is committed to supporting artists and new work, so every time we bring in an artist, staff are enthusiastic about the idea of coming together to create something. It's inherent in what we do.

That said, the fact that we work with contemporary artists can also create a lot of stress in our institutional systems. Their processes can be really different from ours. We just had a situation with an artist collective that came for a site visit and decided they wanted to build an igloo. Their process was to plan what and how we will work together this coming summer is by actually by doing a project together right away. While everyone supports the energy of working with artists, when it's -10 degrees and you're being asked to help build an igloo on the fly, people can get frustrated. A lot of these partnerships push against our internal ways of working, and while that's a healthy tension, we need to be sensitive to the stress on our organizational systems and each other. This is especially true in today's climate, when everyone is trying to do more with less.

It seems like when that happens, you'd have to ask yourself: should we change the system based on this experience, or did this push us beyond our ability?

Exactly. Every time, we have to ask ourselves that question, balancing innovation with our institutional capacity. Asking those questions and refining your practice is precisely how you continue to stay inventive and responsive.

Can you think of a time when you changed the system in response to an external need or stress point?

In the 1990s, we decided we wanted to engage a teen audience. This would be a major institutional undertaking. We created a teen arts council, invested in staff, and invested in programming. We discovered that teens felt uncomfortable in the galleries because they had to check their backpacks and they felt the guards were watching them. And the guards were watching them; they didn't trust teens. So we had to do a training program with the guards so they could understand teens and change their behavior in the gallery to make people more comfortable. From that one experience, we are now much more sensitive to how different people experience the galleries and the guards. Guards, visitors services, and education staff have become leaders in advocating for visitor experience--and we're much better at staff training and being responsive to issues that arise.

How do you think the current economic climate has affected your ability to innovate?

I do think the combined intensity of institutional ambition, public expectation and constrained resources is stressing people out. It's harder to find that slack money and free time now. We are culturally in a time of serious recalibration and that's a bumpy ride. There are moments when we get through it very gracefully, and there are times when we don't.

I don't think this is specific to the Walker. Museums are in the business of the public good and the people who work in them are very committed and creatively ambitious. We tend to be generative and generous people and we want to make things happen. We want to deliver on our promise and try to provide something for everyone. Strategy is hard because strategy is about sacrifice. It's hard in this line of work to say no.

My favorite part of Paul Light's book was his discussion of "why to say yes and how to say no."

Everything we've been through economically in the last two years could help us learn how to say no and how to focus and prioritize. This is actually my personal struggle--how to do less better. I'm hungry and my staff is hungry and we want to do everything and we can't. And so we have to focus and find the most effective work we can do. It’s finding some optimism in that saying, “never let a good crisis go to waste." Ironically, this can lead to greater innovation.

How does the need to say "no" affect your approach to innovation in lean times?

We have an inclination to innovate becuase we're constantly asking ourselves how we could a do better job. At the same time, we're dealing with this question: what happens when you do something innovative and it becomes the status quo - internally and externally? In the 1990s, we were an innovative leader in teen programs. Now the teen arts council model is no longer considered innovative. Do we focus on implementing the programs we know are successful, or should we be pushing out in a new direction?

You could spend all your time doing what you now know works, and spend no time on new creative challenges. On the other hand, innovation for its own sake isn't productive. I get frustrated when a client asks for something no one has done before. That shouldn't be the reason we try something. But I know that funding and media often demand it.

If a funder is saying they will fund something new, or if the media attention is for something new, or even if innovation is part of the narrative of your institution, it is sometimes going to drive some of your decisions in a way it probably shouldn't. That is part of the challenge and lesson in learning to say no.

If you start with the right question and a real desire to create something of public value, it can lead you interesting places. We didn't start our teen initiative to do something new; we did it because we believed there was a real need and opportunity to serve teenagers in a way that no one was doing at the time. It drove us in a direction that turned out to be very innovative. But we don't always have to be the ones with the new idea. You know, MOMA did a really great project with visitors with Alzheimer's. When we were researching this idea (which is now our Contemporary Journeys program), we consulted with them. We shouldn't redesign that wheel but maybe just adapt it. The goal is to do great work, not to be innovative.

Have you ever done a project that was innovative but didn't hit your goals in terms of serving your community?

We are committed to serving a broad audience and to supporting artists who are pushing at the boundaries of artistic practice. That's a really interesting tension, and it's allowed us to do a lot. It also means we're sometimes out of step in one direction or the other.

Back in 2004, just before we opened the building, we undertook a project to conduct some local research about art and civic engagement. Our metaphor for the new building was a "town square," and the research project was intended to help us figure out what that would look like and feel like. We talked to 30 audience representatives--artists, activists, local leaders--and we dove into the work that Barbara Schaffer Bacon and Pam Korza had done through Animating Democracy. We created a framework for how this would look in the institution. We made a full color poster, a spectrum of civic engagement, lots of materials, and we were going to give this to the curators to use. This would be a model for the new way we were going to work with artists and audiences.

The research was sound, the model was pretty good, and it basically went nowhere. It just went into people's file cabinets. I think there are two reasons this happened. Our internal team, including myself, was not yet the most skilled at the internal advocacy needed to move the project forward. So the institution couldn't seem to wrap its head around how to put this research into action.

What I'm now finding 5 years later, is that a lot of these ideas are manifest in Open Field--a current project to explore how an institution, artists, and a community can come together to co-create a place for creative exchange. I don't even think I was conscious of the connection between the research and Open Field. The research turned out to be a seed we were planting. It just took awhile to find its ground. I think Open Field would have been almost impossible without that map, but it was not a linear journey.

You need to be open to the purposelessness of innovation. Some things move at different paces. This is why informal staff discussions and time together is so important. When we invested in a new outdoor grill and some large communal picnic tables last summer as part of Open Field, suddenly a lot of ideas were generated between staff at lunches and casual time together. You can't go to a meeting and be innovative. Innovative thinking is a balance between structured collaboration, happy accidents, and serendipitous conversations. You can't really say I'll be innovative at 2pm on Fridays. You need a balance between structure and openness to make all of this possible.

Thanks to Sarah and the Walker for providing such powerful, honest, realistic stories of innovation in action. Sarah will check in with the blog to respond to comments or questions you might have for her.

Sustaining Innovation Book Discussion Part 2: Your Experiences with Innovation (and Lack Thereof)

This is the second in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post is an "open thread" post, in which you are encouraged to share your own experiences (positive and negative) with innovation in organizations. Next Tuesday will feature an interview with Sarah Schultz, a museum staffer at one of the institutions Light profiled in the book (the Walker Art Center).

This post is number 500 in the world of Museum 2.0. It's a long time coming. I've wanted to do open threads for years--to, at least part-time, transition this blog into a more democratic conversational space for cultural professionals. I think (hope) that Museum 2.0 now has a critical mass of readers and participants that we can make this work.

So I'm just going to ask two questions and then open the floor. Last week, I reviewed Sustaining Innovation, a book that explores management styles and internal procedures that support innovation at non-profits and government agencies. And so I'm curious:

• In your own work experience, what practices have you seen that encouraged or made innovation possible?
• What practices have you seen crush innovation or make it impossible?

Please share your stories (anonymously or otherwise) in the comments!

Sustaining Innovation Book Discussion Part 1: What Does it Take Innovate Naturally and Frequently?

This is the first in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post is my review of the book. Next Tuesday, we'll experiment with an "open thread" post, in which you are encouraged to share your own experiences (positive and negative) with innovation in organizations.

The longer I consult with museums and cultural institutions, the more time I spend peering into people's eyes, wondering: do folks here feel able to innovate? Is this a place where staff members are comfortable taking risks? What divides an organization that is ready to experiment from one that is not?

Sustaining Innovation is a thoughtful, comprehensive book that has helped me think more concretely about these questions and their answers. It's an atypical book about organizational innovation for two reasons:

1. It focuses on non-profits and government agencies instead of for-profit companies.
2. It focuses not on single acts of innovation, but on the organizational conditions and management strategies that support natural, frequent innovations.

What differentiates innovation in non-profits and government agencies from that in businesses? Light argues that while in business, any new idea that generates revenue can be an innovation, a new idea or technique is only valuable for a non-profit organization if it contributes to that organization's ability to deliver on its public mission. He suggests that it's often too expensive (and distracting from mission) for organizations to get on the hamster wheel of pursuing new ideas for their own sake. Instead, Light defines innovation as "an act that challenges the prevailing wisdom as it creates public value." It only matters if it matters.

To write the book, Light selected and studied 26 innovative non-profits and government agencies across Minnesota during the mid-90s. Some are primarily "what" innovators--changing the prevailing wisdom about what their organization should do or whom it should serve. Others are "how" innovators--using unusual techniques to accomplish traditional goals. All operate "just beyond the possible" to achieve their missions and serve their clientele. Of the 26, two are museumish: the Minnesota Zoo and the Walker Art Center, and three are arts organizations: Artspace, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater and Theatre de la Jeune Lune. The rest are schools, mental health facilities, housing, social justice, economic development, and environmental organizations.

Because the focus of the book is on organizational structure and not on specific acts or events, Light spends almost no time describing each organization or its particular innovations. Instead, he uses illustrative examples from each to support broad theses about leadership styles, internal structures, and operational strategies. These pick-and-choose examples can feel a bit disorienting and manipulative, since it's hard to draw your own conclusions with little context about the organization being mentioned. But overall, I found his approach effective and strongly preferable to the common alternative--an anthology of case studies devoid of connections or overriding conclusions.

So what did I learn?

There should be an entire book about innovative failures. By far the most educational stories in the book concern the Phoenix Group, a housing/economic development non-profit that imploded over the course of Light's research. Part of me wonders whether the organization was actually built to "sustain" anything (it may have been a deliberately unsustainable business model). Phoenix was an over-innovator: they said yes to everything, intentionally ignored or eschewed basic accounting and management principles, and pursued flexibility to the extreme. They were highly exposed to risk, and when one project failed, it took down the whole organization. Great food for thought about the negatives of treating internal structures (especially related to finances) as unrelated or adversarial to "real" mission work.

Innovation is for everyone. Light hammers again and again on the fact that the capacity to have good ideas is not limited to designated "creatives" or executives. Much of the book focuses on how to cultivate good ideas throughout an organization. Many of the institutions profiled have formal processes for inviting ideas from across the institution, including innovation investment funds in which promising new ideas can receive some startup money to get going. In a few of the schools and community organizations, this openness to ideas extends to students/clients/audiences who are given significant opportunities to propose, evaluate, and pursue new experiments.

CEOs of innovating organizations are not grandiose heroes; they are visionary structuralists. The leaders Light profiles work tirelessly to push authority downward and cultivate innovation at all levels, creating structures that reward good ideas with clarity and transparency. They find ways to budget, schedule, and structure organizations so that management is an asset rather than a hindrance. These managers, directors, and leaders spend their time encouraging internal collaboration rather than furthering their own pet projects. They shepherd the mission, make clear decisions, attend to outside forces... and they go home for dinner.

Trust and follow-through are really, really important. Empty promises about collaboration, risk-taking, or permission to fail are far more dangerous than no promises at all. In a surprising turn, Light comments that organizations in which leaders and staff talk about "faith"--in each other, in the mission, in a higher power--seem particularly effective at supporting each other through the stresses of innovation. But where faith isn't discussed, frequent cross-departmental communication suffices. Leaders in innovative organizations "communicate to excess" with staff, especially in encouraging, rewarding, and celebrating innovative practice. For example, the Minnesota Zoo has a comprehensive system for responding to staff suggestions and complaints, with a specific timeline for acknowledging, considering, and acting on the ideas (all while maintaining the employee's desired level of confidentiality).

The hardest thing for an innovating institution is figuring out "how to say no and why to say yes." This was my favorite takeaway from the book. As Light puts it, "the challenge for an innovating organization is to distinguish between compassion and loyalty to its employees on the one hand and toughness toward the ideas they produce on the other." It's difficult to cheerlead staff and make rigorous decisions at the same time. The best internal investment fund programs have formalized internal vetting systems in which diverse members of the staff (and sometimes, clients) are able to evaluate and prioritize new ideas. Light calls out four common questions used to evaluate new ideas:

1. Is this faithful to who we are? (mission)
2. Can we do what we plan? (capacity)
3. Will what we do actually make a difference in outcomes? (impact/workability)
4. Can we get the dollars we need to act? (resources, secondary concern)

Light notes that the fourth of these is a distant follower to the other three. If it's a good idea that's right for the mission and for the organization, leaders at innovative institutions don't tend to worry about getting the funds to make it happen.

The challenge of "how to say no and why to say yes" applies to funding as well as ideas. Both when desperate and very successful, organizations may be offered funding that is not in the best interest of the core mission. I was really impressed by the stories of organizations that said no to grants that would either lead to program creep or come with strings attached that might unproductively constrain the organization. Notably, one organization, Chicanos Latinos Unidos En Servico (CLUES), gives back leftover grant money when their projects come in under budget to keep their focus tight and their funding relationships disciplined.

Merit pay does not promote innovation, and may be generally unfit for non-profits and government agencies. Light closely examined merit pay and pay-for-performance programs and found no correlation between them and innovation. From his perspective, these programs don't work in non-profits for a few reasons, but the primary one is practical. The money available for merit pay programs is usually pretty small and often threatened by outside, non-performance-related events like salary freezes. If you can only give someone a 5% bump for their creative merit, that may not be enough to have significant impact, especially if that person isn't in it for the money. Instead, Light suggests it is more important that organizations measure outcomes and frequently celebrate innovative acts--both successes and failures.

Innovative organizations are stressful places to work. An innovating institution is relentlessly, sometimes thanklessly, pushing against the status quo. It can be fun and exciting, but it is rarely an easy place to be. Light notes that it's less stressful to work for a "how" innovating organization than a "what" innovator, since "how" innovators aren't trying to change the core principle of the mission, just accomplish it in new ways. For example, the Dowling School, a "what innovator" that transitioned from being a school for children with disabilities to being an integrated magnet, has to constantly fight to demonstrate that children of all kinds can get high-quality educations by working alongside students who are diverse in physical and mental ability. In contrast, Cyrus Math/Science/Technology Elementary School is a less stressful "how" innovator whose innovations primarily focus on how the school is governed and how teachers do their work. Many organizations transition in and out of being innovative over time, and staff stress tolerance and fatigue can be a big contributor to how long an institution sustains innovation.

In the end, Light says it takes four characteristics--trust, honesty, rigor, and faith--to sustain innovation. It's not about money. It's not about size. Light profiles organizations with all kinds of disfunctions--executive turnover, bureaucratic stagnation, chaotic funding, competitive market forces. You don't need to be perfect to be innovative. You just need to focus on mission, support the heck out of your colleagues, and make clear decisions. Easy, right?

Next Book Club: Sustaining Innovation in Nonprofits and Government Organizations

There were so many fabulous recommendations for the next Museum 2.0 book club, in which we'll focus on a business book about innovation and organizational learning. After much perusing, I've selected Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally by Paul C. Light.

This book, suggested by Susan Wageman, looks like a fabulous, off-beat, and highly pertinent read for librarians, museum folk, and cultural professionals of all sorts. The author, then-director of the Public Policy Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, studied 26 Minnesotan non-profits and government organizations in writing this book. It appears to blend high-level recommendations with specific case studies. Including one on Wile E. Coyote.

More importantly, this book appears to confront questions I've been hearing frequently this year: Now that we've tried a couple new things, how do we institutionalize innovation? How do we move from one-off experiments to something more sustainable?

It's time to figure out some answers to these questions so we can keep moving forward. Enter Sustaining Innovation.

This book club will work like the last one. Starting in January, on Tuesdays, the blog will features a mixture of my thoughts along with guest posts from you reflecting on how the book is useful in your own work. If you'd like to participate...

1. Get your hands on a copy of the book in the next couple of weeks.
2. Read it (or a large chunk of it).
3. If you are so motivated, fill out this two-question form to let me know you want to write a guest post or participate in a group discussion about the book. I'll be looking for guest posters who represent different types of institutions, countries, and approaches to the material. You don't need to be a museum or library professional to be eligible--just a good writer with an interesting perspective to share. In this case I'm particularly interested in people who are in institutions that are trying to "sustain innovation" in some way.
4. For four weeks starting in January, each Tuesday there will be a Museum 2.0 post with a response to the book. I'd like to write one or two of these at the most. The goal is to make the blog a community space for different viewpoints.

Happy reading!