Three Percent Time
The argument of this blog is that three percent is the healthy ratio of innovators versus adaptors, improvers, and other types in an organization.
That assertion holds specifically if we define innovation as we do: changing how people organize themselves, do business and live their lives.
Improvers – often confused for innovators – can be accommodated in much higher numbers. (When gurus say that everyone in a company should be involved in “innovation,” they are really talking about improvers.) Improving how we serve customers and perform our core activities is far less disruptive than working to change what we are in buiness for.
Extending this thought a little further, consider how many times you’ve been in a meeting and wished that the innovator in the room would just shut up? What’s happening here? Don’t we want good ideas for change? Isn’t that what the boss told us to find? In cases where the innovator is actually pretty smart and making good points, why do we still want to murder him after his twelfth play at grandstanding?
Let me suggest that three percent is not only the healthy ratio of active innovators in an organization but also the right portion of meetings for innovators to fill.
So if you are that person with a head afire with great ideas at the team meeting, think about the three percent, and have the discipline to stay within that limit. If it is a 60 minute meeting, you have approximately two minutes of innovation time. Not a lot, but true innovators have to learn the art of the one minute elevator pitch. That gives you time to present two whole ideas before you need to hunker down, shut up, and write down that third, fourth, fifth, n’th idea for later use.
You have to trust that the good ideas will stay with you and come back when they are needed.
As an improver myself, I will defend my kind and say that the enlightened ones are necessary to execute the innovators’ ideas. A former Innovator colleague – yes, labeled an amusing “court jester” at best and troublemaker at worst – was part of the 3% and very adept and seeing the unseen and what could be (which of course was radically different from the current situation – and even threatening to it). His problem with being taken seriously was that he was not able to put his ideas into a business case nor articulate how to get from point A to Z. That was my very important role. Move the organization closer to Z or at least closer to accepting Z as a possibility.
Brilliant point, and as has been said on this blog – one of the big problems with the watering down of the word “innovation” is the pervasive, unspoken notion that somehow innovation is more valuable than invention or improvement. In actual fact, innovation destroys value more often than it creates it. Nothing wrong with being an improver. Everyone loves the improvers.
Part of the point of thethreepercent.com is finding ways for people who are innovating to be better at exactly what you mention – articulating, structuring business models that can force change without getting crushed from the start, maintaining balance, building personal power…and not getting stuck into the court jester spot.
(Important also to remember that anyone can be an innovator at any given time. The idea of three percent is not that only three percent of the gene pool can innovate. On the contrary, it is that at any given time, only about three percent of a company’s population should be actively trying to shift the foundation of the firm’s core concept. That three percent can be different people all the time, shifting in and out of that mode. Take a writer for example. I’m working on another book at the moment. Out of a whole year, 365 days, if I spend each of those days writing a completely new book, I get nowhere. But if I don’t spend a week or two of that year thinking up new book ideas, I’m going to get bored and not have a project when I finish this one.)
Your innovator was lucky to have you. When it is you that comes up with a mad intention to recreate your company, when you move into the innovator role, the real trick will be using those diplomatic, business planning, and operational skills you already have to keep yourself from being thrown into the jester box.