Processes or Practices? Successful Business Innovation Takes Both

Jazz isn’t all about improvisation. In fact, most tunes you’ll hear on the radio will actually start with a pre-composed melody, or “head.”  And then there will be improvised solos after that, typically based to varying degrees on the chord changes of the original melody.

Many of the great jazz musicians, while almost universally master improvisers, have also been notable composers in their own right. Miles Davis, as well as Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane, who both played in different iterations of Davis’s quintets, spring immediately to mind.

And really, jazz wouldn’t be the same without the contributions of all three on both the composition and improvisation fronts.

Classical music has a similar dynamic at play, although somewhat in reverse. Compositions and composers are at the center of classical music. But it’s almost the point of many classical recordings that different performers will have sometimes deeply singular and contrasting interpretations of the same pieces.

There’s a similar balance that happens within businesses that are successful at innovation.

On one hand, there tends to be a more hierarchical side of an organization—the structure that gets things done. That tends to be called “process.”

But on the other hand, there also tends to be a side of a business that emphasizes the implicit coordination and exploration that produces things to do. That’s called “practice,” according to John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, who published an article called “Creativity Versus Structure: A Useful Tension” in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2001.

At the time of the article’s publication, Brown was chief scientist of Xerox and chief innovation officer of 12 Entrepreneuring in San Francisco. And Duguid was a research specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Practice without process tends to become unmanageable, according to Brown and Duguid. Meanwhile, process without practice can result in the loss of creativity needed for sustained innovation.

This tug of war between how companies generate knowledge in practice versus how they implement it through process is necessary, Brown and Duguid say. It’s a tension that reflects the countervailing forces that, on the one hand, spark invention. And on the other, introduce the structure that transforms those inventions into marketable products.

In isolation, these forces can destroy a company, Brown and Duguid say. But conjointly, they produce creativity and growth.

At a certain point in the development of many companies, establishing business processes becomes important, Brown and Duguid say. Process helps coordinate different communities within an organization—such as marketing and engineering—so that their practices, while allowed to flourish, don’t grow out of touch with one another.

On the other hand, aware that process can be suffocating — and seeking to foster creativity outside a process-driven structure —corporations will also often try to loosen the ties that bind them, according to Brown and Duguid.

The researchers point to AT&T’s Bell Labs, Lockheed’s Skunkworks, General Motors’ Saturn plant and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as initiatives of this kind.

These experimental “sandboxes” try to provide a safe environment for knowledge creation, Brown and Duguid say. But they can also run the risk of isolating new practices from essential process. Consequently, reintegrating ideas back into the organization can be remarkably difficult.

Companies that fail to manage the conflicting forces of practice and process thus at best alternate between attempts to foster creativity and attempts to exert control, Brown and Duguid say. And at worst, they pull apart or atrophy.

Meanwhile, productive companies, by contrast, yoke the two forces together, seeking so-called “creative abrasion,” according to Brown and Duguid.

The researchers point to Apple Computer, Adobe Systems and Microsoft as companies who have pulled this tension between process and practice off successfully. Including through their integration of ideas that were originally developed at Xerox’s PARC, such as precursors to the PC, the mouse and the Windows interface.

Brown and Duguid also point to the trek of early semiconductor ideas from AT&T’s Bell Labs to Shockley Semiconductor. And then to Fairchild and the so-called “Fairchildren”: Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and National Semiconductor. Which were other places where the researchers say places process and practice came into balance.

Overall, Brown and Duguid consider companies that can maintain forward progress to be the best-managed. Favoring neither practice nor process, but managing both.

And now, the news.