“We just seem to recycle bad ideas or imitate our competitors.”
The innovation team of a major FMCG company nodded in agreement with the senior executive in charge of marketing. I was there to talk with them about innovation, change and strategy.
“What’s worse, the business expects predictability at the same time as innovation.”
One of the problems they related was that they found innovation challenging internally. They found that they could not get ideas to flow or shake up the way things had been done for years. They found themselves imitating competitors, late to market on concepts, resistant to changing packaging concepts and reluctant to take risks.
As we explored ideas together they explained their idea management practices and budgeting processes.
They really were not happy with their performance and seemed stuck.
They wanted a new solution. A tool or technique, something to help.
Yet, the problem didn’t seem to be with their processes.
What they were doing with their idea management and stage gates seemed fine. Necessary hurdle rates were there. Perhaps there could have been more experimentation with test markets or consumer interactions, but those were a matter of tweaking rather than fundamental problems.
As I looked around the team I noticed something.
It was subtle, but important.
Everyone was wearing a striped shirt.
The executive’s shirt was clearly the most expensive and adorned with cuff links, but every striped shirt spoke volumes about what was going on in that organisation. Every striped shirt revealed a layer of the internal struggle between being successful as an individual and successful as an organisation.
They had demonstrated the paradox of conformity.
The paradox of conformity is the uncomfortable reality that being successful in an organisation requires you to fit it, but often generating successful change requires people to stand out. As a consequence, people tend to adopt behaviours and standards of dress that reflect success in where they’re going.
You can see this in both corporates and creative firms. In fact, it’s often the reason corporates rely heavily on their creative firms: the ability to stand out and be creative is the conformity required to thrive in a creative firm.
The paradox of conformity can suppress innovation, ideas and change. It can discourage people from speaking up and, almost by design, result in the promotion of similar individuals.
And yet, conformity has its benefits.
Before you start looking for the symptoms of conformity or hiring people who seem not to fit in, consider the benefits that come from conformity. Benefits like:
- “Easier” management practices
- Shared culture
- Like-mindedness
- Adherence to processes and rules
- More predictable outcomes.
Yet each of these items comes at a cost.
It’s a matter of understanding whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
How can you respond to the paradox of conformity?
Responding to the paradox of conformity requires you to solve the paradox for yourself. It doesn’t mean that there’s a simple elegant solution for anyone, let alone your organisation (that’s why it’s a paradox).
- Some organisations solve it by creating and enforcing silos, where the accounting team never quite understand the R&D or marketing or operations teams.
- Others use an external ‘creative firm’ (an advertising agency, consulting team, facilitator) for tasks that run counter to the prevailing culture or success formula.
- The military run simulations, where they insert their own counter intelligence guys as “the enemy”.
- Some might permit “skunk works” projects to exist at the fringe, or create teams with the intention of radically changing the business (as was commonly adopted during the dot com boom).
- Others might encourage a program of incremental innovation rather than discontinuous or radical change.
Whatever the solution adopted, it has pros and cons.
It represents a compromise between individual success and organisational success.
It’s a bargain that can deprive organisations of continuous sources of renewal and creativity, but can also prevent the organisation from destroying itself .
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