Leading Innovation Is Messy, So Get Over It

An engineer working in a messy home laboratory.

To seriously innovate, forget order and predictability—and fully embrace the mess.

These days, leaders are striving for more and more innovation in their organizations. And to achieve this goal, they apply more resources and management focus, wholeheartedly believing that results will inevitably follow. They tell their teams to “go forth and innovate” and then expect everything to go according to plan. But innovation doesn’t work that way. Why? Because what you’re attempting to achieve has never been done before.

Innovation is a process of trying your best ideas and seeing what happens. Then, based on what you’ve learned, you can adapt what you do next. The whole process is inherently unpredictable, and as a result, disappointment and frustration often set in when things don’t go as planned. 

The problem is that most leaders fail to recognize that innovation is messy. And if you’re going to be successful at it, you have to do more than allow for the unexpected. You have to embrace it.

For instance, consider the world’s largest biopharmaceutical companies. While they’ve made huge investments in drug development over the last decade, they’ve been met with ever-declining success. In 2018, a study by Deloitte revealed that at 12 large-cap biopharma companies, R&D returns declined to a mere 1.9%—the lowest level in nine years. That means, counterintuitively, more resources actually led to fewer innovations.

Another study, cited in Forbes.com, found that 30 large and small pharmaceutical and biotech companies examined by IDEA Pharma got just 11% of their 2017 revenue from drugs developed within the past five years.

So what’s going on here? By all accounts, in attempting to control and manage the R&D process, the companies limited the very essence of innovation: the potential for chance and unpredictable outcomes. As one industry analyst put it: “Ignoring the stochastic nature of drug development has led to costly mistakes and, ultimately, the industry’s decline.”

Innovation and “the fuzzy front end”

The most innovative companies approach innovation in a way that allows for, and encourages, accidental discoveries along the way. Bill Coyne, who served as a top innovator and leader at 3M for more than three decades, once said:

“[Don’t] try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky, glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long-term growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn’t neat. We stumble on many of our best discoveries. If you want to follow the rapidly moving leading edge, you must learn to live on your feet. And you must be willing to make necessary, healthy stumbles.”

Messiness and creativity

So how do you go about protecting the fuzzy front end of innovation?

One method is to, quite literally, embrace the messiness of discovery. In fact, studies show that the messier an environment is, the more innovative people become.

In a New York Times opinion piece “It’s Not ‘Mess.’ It’s Creativity,” Kathleen Vohs, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, reported on an experiment that she conducted with two of her colleagues, splitting a group of 48 research subjects, who came individually to their laboratory, into one of two rooms: one messy and the other tidy. Each subject, regardless of the room they were assigned to, was asked to come up with new uses for ping-pong balls and to write down as many ideas as they could. Then, Vohs and her colleagues recruited independent judges to rate the subjects’ ideas for degree of creativity, which can be done reliably. The results?

The subjects in both types of rooms—messy or tidy—came up with about the same number of ideas. Nonetheless, the messy-room subjects were much more creative. Not only were their ideas 28% more creative on average, but when Vohs and her colleagues analyzed the ideas that judges scored as “highly creative,” they found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room. In fact, those subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.

“While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow,” said Vohs. Additionally, she noted that the experiment’s results were confirmed by independent researchers at Northwestern University, who found that subjects in a messy room drew more creative pictures and were quicker to solve a challenging brainteaser puzzle than subjects in a tidy room.

Details and dirty hands

Another challenge for leaders is that, by and large, they’re trained to delegate problem solving to their team. And while that may work for predictable or proven processes, when it comes to innovation, the most critical insights and solutions almost always lie in the details.

You see, innovation is about repeatedly changing your plans and adapting to new information. So if you’re not plugged into the details, it’s virtually impossible to make the right changes at the right time. In other words, as a leader, you have to be willing to get your hands dirty early and often. Otherwise, you and your team will have your collective heads in the sand, missing the context so critical to success.

Ready? It’s a lot easier to talk about leading innovation than it is to actually do it. But if you’re serious about success, start now to scrap the tidiness. It’s only in forgetting order and predictability that you can fully embrace the mess.