This morning's short video has now been published. In it, I argue that thinkers exist to upset people. That's what “thinking outside the box” will always do. So, bosses don't want thinkers. They want “team players” instead. And that's why business in the UK has such a lousy track record when it comes to innovation.
The transcript is:
Why does society hate thinkers?
Have you seen the job adverts which say, “We want a self-starter: we want somebody who can think outside the box”?
And then they also say, “We need you to be a team player. And someone who has strong social skills, so that they can integrate into our team.”
Look, these things are contradictory.
They're meant to be. Because in reality, no company wants somebody who thinks outside the box. That's deeply upsetting for everybody who's thinking inside the box.
The fact is that we have a productivity crisis in this country. And that's largely because we actually suppress the ability of anybody who can think by telling them, “Think like everyone else”.
If we want to innovate, change, and advance our society, we have to start appreciating the thinkers that our big businesses most certainly do not at present.
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Being a team player does not mean “thinking like everyone else”! It means contributing productively to facilitate the goal assigned to the team. If that goal is constrained in some way it leads to groupthink, and anyone who points that out is likely to be kicked off the team. The problem lies in the restricted goals we set for teams – that’s about leadership and control. Our organisations are far too hierarchical and certainly don’t value “thinking outside the box”.
But teamwork and “thinking outside the box” are not necessarily incompatible.
I wish you were right
That’s not most people’s experience
I do wish you wouldn’t speak for most people, given your limited experience of working in large, successful, private organisations.
The small rural businesses, public sector, ‘academia’ and part time blogging/research roles are so far from the experience of many people in large organisations, particularly in the City.
22 years in London working with highly creative businesses, many deeply entrepreneurial, obviously gives me no experience of business at all.
Why do you people lie all the time? Is it 8n your dna?
@ Fiona
Had to have a wee laugh at your post.
As if the City was representative of the entire UK business sector and ‘thinkers’ are restricted to large enterprises..
Galbraith notes, in ‘The Anatomy of Power’ , that such organisations mostly require conformity within their corporate power structure.
Of course ‘groupthink’ hadn’t been invented as jargon when he published that book in the early 80s, though very much evident.
FYI there are 5.6m small businesses with up to 50 employees, and SMEs account for 61% of UK employment.
Large businesses with over 250 employees numbered about 8,000 in 2023.
Wider perspectives ought to encompass the full range of organisations, don’t you think ?
🙂
Institutions, ‘de facto’ typically do not handle dissent well, but are disinclined to advertise their dogmas. Every general rule has exceptions, but most institutions, including corporate businesses are not democracies. Competitive ideas are not outside the “box”, but outside altogether, in a competing business. There is a long history exploring the nature of the ‘institutionalisation’ of institutions; a history that I surmise implies a characteristic institutional tradition of conformity to the institution’s standard (from Weber and Michels early in the 20th century, through Merton, Meyer and Rowan, to diMaggio).
The Post Office is at an extreme end of the spectrum, I acknowledge; but one striking element of what we have seen there, is – I suspect and hypothesise – the longstanding power of institutional conformity quietly to eliminate dissent.
Much to agree with
Mr Gardener, picking up on your hiearchical point, this article starts to provide answers to the points raised by Richard (don’t be mislead by the title)
https://www.tni.org/en/article/beating-the-climate-clock
The bit about Lucas Aerospace is highly relevant: Extract.
Starts: Tony Benn, the Secretary of State for Industry in the 1974 Labour government, asked the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards what they thought about bringing the aerospace industry into public ownership. They responded instead by drawing up their own plan – in effect, their autonomous terms on which any form of state intervention in the company should take place….. plan was based on ideas put forward by union members across the company’s offices and factories and included around 150 medical, environmental, and transport products that these workers believed they could design and manufacture to save jobs – as alternatives to the military components that were the core business of Lucas Aerospace.
The shop stewards intended that these proposals should be included in their collective bargaining with management. They hoped, moreover, that, following their discussions with Tony Benn, the Labour government would support their plan, make state funding for Lucas Aerospace Ltd conditional on negotiations on the plan, and shift contracts for military aerospace to contracts for medical and environmental equipment.
Lucas Aerospace CEO James Blyth, speaking to MPs who had been impressed by the plan and wanted to know why the company refused to engage with it, was obdurate: ‘We do not need the combine committee to tell us to diversify’.
The shop stewards had challenged managerial prerogatives. Plus, Tony Benn, contrary to the procedures of the civil service, had made direct contact with and met engineer and designer trade union representatives, on the frontline of production, rather than go through national trade union officials. Ends.
Benn was moved sideways by Wilson – after all we can’t have originality can we. The UK is stuffed with rigid thinking.
Very true
After spending many years at sea, crossing oceans in small yachts, ‘thinking outside the box’ had become a natural survival instinct. When a piece of equipment ceases to function mid-Atlantic you must engineer a way around the problem to fix it the best you can as there’s nowhere to buy parts for thousands of miles. You naturally learn to think through problems logically and it inspires you to be innovative. For me this was the challenge that inspired me to invent pieces of kit.
For me a life at sea was the stimulus, but a number of ‘challenging’ circumstances will automatically stimulate innovative thinking. Disability, poverty, deprivation and living in a resource poor environment are all strong stimulators of innovation. They say that “Necessity is the mother of Invention” and after visiting a number of developing countries, especially in Africa, I can honestly say they have the motherload of necessity! I was genuinely impressed by the innovative coping skills I witnessed on my travels.
Sadly, after taking a junior role in a large Hospital, Jackson Memorial in Miami, I soon discovered that my creative input was seriously unwelcome. At one point the Managers offered us extra paid time off if we came up with ideas that increased productivity. I needed no such incentive, but this offer was later explained to me as ideas like a new place to store the mop heads.
Jackson has a sprawling multi area Emergency Department where patients often waited, sometimes strapped to backboards, for hours before they were treated. I drew the entire floor plan to scale by counting the floor tiles. I then produced a redraw that would facilitate an expedited steady flow of patients through the treatment area. The Doctors loved it; but the Managers hated it and were so outraged that they made my working life miserable, sabotaging promotions after binning my plans.
I ran into ever greater problems when I worked in surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland. Innovative people are more likely to recognize a potential danger than other employees, because they ‘think through problems logically’. Root Cause Analysis will flag up a potential danger that other staff may not notice, but alerting Management will get you targeted for removal. I was fired from Johns Hopkins after being targeted as a whistleblower.
Just expressing a legitimate concern is enough for Managers to want you gone: ‘shoot the messenger’. Innovative employees are more likely to be fired as Whistleblowers than those who never speak up. Often the ideas person fails to realize that raising an issue will put their job at risk, but it is career terminating! I was fired for ‘Disruptive Behavior in the OR. In the States that is typical coded language to signal that you were a whistleblower. If a potential future employer calls their HR they say you are “Not eligible for rehire”; code for troublemaker.
I ran into a similar problem during retraining at a major hospital in Oxford. This time I witnessed negligence that was far too serious to ignore, a failure to do instrument counts on an open abdominal surgery case. I had to tell the Course Lead and I was told that it would be taken very seriously. However, the following week the exact same delinquent practitioner was invited out to our university campus to teach a class! I was targeted with my training sabotaged to discredit me. After it was ignored by the Hospital and my Uni I reported the incident to the HPC.
When I attempted to return to the course, the Oxfordshire TrustI had the audacity to cite my protected disclosure as the reason they were banning me from practicing in any of the hospitals in Oxfordshire! I tried to charge them with libel and defamation by taking a case to the High Court Queen’s Bench in London. However the case was thrown out because ‘Absolute Privilege’ protects a university if they choose to defame a student! This is a very dangerous precedent capable of destroying the career of any medical student who dares to report negligence. The Public Interest Disclosure Act, ‘PIDA’ does not protect students. I made a protest banner that said ‘When is a law not a law?’ When It’s a Colander!
A few years later I attended a conference in London on the NHS in which the former head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, was a speaker. At question time I asked him about protecting NHS whistleblowers even during training and he was typically evasive. Later I was at a MedTech Innovation event run by Tony Young. A Surgeon and Inventor with tireless energy who had an innovation consultant role at NHS England. Young devised the Clinical Entrepreneur Program to support innovative med students and doctors with their innovations so that they do not drop out of training. Tony said he had seen a video of the event and he consoled me by saying that he too had been a whistleblower.
This revelation, from someone I have a huge admiration for, led me to the conclusion that innovative employees are more likely to expose problems or negligence and be targeted as whistleblowers. What does this mean for the NHS or UK industry? We are deliberately eliminating all the most creative people, and fear of retribution is silencing those who attempt to expose dangers or negligent practice. This is why we have seen so many huge scandals, everything from Greenville, the Post Office to the infected blood scandal.
Thank you for sharing and I a, sorry fir your experience
Your treatment typifies what I was referring to
Hi Kim SF
Your run in with a university might be something that the Good Law project are interested in if you would like to look them up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-sQSp5jbSQ
I was probably 6 or 7 when I listend to this, stayed with me. Conformism, built in at every level of society. Easier to go with the flow, than oppose or stick out.
Only when society faces an emergency is “the awkward squad” given some freedom.
As for productivity, this is linked to a failure to invest. Taking one example – the motorcycle industry.
The Japanese perfected die-casting (for horizontally split crank-cases) in the late 1950, early 1960s. Brits stuck with sand-casting (vertically split). From that point on the Brits were doomed – because it is very expensive to make the multi-cyclinder engines one sees with vertically-split cases. Indeed, expertise in die-casting led on to the mastery of metal stamping – video-cassette recorders have a “mechadeck” – the metal stamping that carries the motors etc to dirve the tape. Japanese produced them well and in volume etc – others struggled to compete.
That video might get an appearance on the blog
Thanks
Well yes Mike, isn’t it well documented that we never invest enough in this country? Private industry is dominated by the short termist mindset of the City, much more interested in short term financial engineering than the kind of long term large scale investment needed for, say, switching to EVs. And as we know, the public sector has been starved of funds since 2010 thanks to the Tory imbeciles.
And leaving the EU has got rid of all those bloody foreigners who used to do the long term investment our own useless lot wouldn’t do.
So remind me how labour are going to increase investment when they are refusing to contemplate re-entering the EU because of their obsession with pandering to dimwits who still can’t admit voting for Brexit was wrong?
I remember “Little Boxes” being sung on Jackanory, or was it Crack-a-Jack? I was the first person in my family to attend a university and, as a child, I did not even know of the existence of such things as summer camps. For my parents Little Boxes World was not a world they inhabited, it was a world they aspired to. I don’t think they ever understood why I eventually rejected the “oppotunity” I had to join it.
I joined it
But never believed the drivel I was taught
I used to be a partner in a small training company specialising in leadership and team development. We were invited to bid for a management development contract by a major company who said they were looking for a change in organisational ‘culture’ from one that was very rules driven to a more innovative style where ‘out of the box’ thinking was encouraged. They whittled the candidates down to a short-list of two, my organisation and another. Our style was very informal, for instance, in order to break the corportate mould we never wore suits (this was even before the days of dress-down-Fridays), the other organistion was run by an ex army major whose mode of dress was very much the sharp suit and military tie. Guess who got the contract. In my experience, when organisations say they want change it’s always change they recognise and can control. They are terrified of truly ‘out of the box’ thinking.
Agreed
Belbin argued that a successful team needed nine people each with a different dominant personality characteristic. He gave them each a name. The “thinking outside the box type” was called a Plant. The name derived from needing to plant one in your team to improve a team’s chances of success. Many of the people who contribute to this blog can be regarded as having a dominant Plant disposition.
https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles
We did the Belbin thing when I was working on an acute psychiatric ward in the early 2000s. I was a humble nursing assistant but they employed me specifically to use my skills as a qualified psychotherapist. Find by me – I didn’t at that time need another high powered job. So I just tootled along at the bottom of the hierarchy.
I’d been there about 4 years when we had a training day dealing with roles, and did the Belbin tests. We were a solid team, and knew each other well.
The only person surprised when I turned out to be the Chair or Coordinator was me. Much hilarity. Since then, life experiences have brought out the Plant in me.
I like that…..
Whilst a student I was browsing the journals and came a cross an article about officer selection in the British Army. The case was of a choice between a bright working class candidate who discussed the task in hand with his team and the thick public school boy who made a hash of it but with the right level of reckless enthusiasm. You can guess who was chosen.
A thinker is not what the large organisations are looking for.
Most thinkers learn to keep a low profile until the last minute.
When they can emerge to solve the problem.
And their ideas are stolen.
I am not sure how much this idea theft is conscious. I have worked for organisations wherein the only way to get a new idea accepted was to convince the boss that it was, after all, his/her idea all along.
Sometimes it’s hard not to believe that this isn’t a parody account – the irony and lack of self-awareness is off the scale.
Indeed, you might actually get my subscribers if you advertised it as such.
The weird thing when talking of parody is that you were called Andrew the last time you appeared Ursula
Well then Andrew/Ursula, you’ll just have to learn that sometimes your beliefs are mistaken.
Imagine a country where the public sector was 100% of GDP. The multiplier effect of only government doing the spending would surely maximise the country’s national income. Of course GDP isn’t the only thing, as one of the Kennedys said, but it does allow you the latitude to do other things that add value to living here on earth.
There would be no mixed economy in this scenario but if you tried to create a mixed economy you would have to cut the government part, if only to free up the labour.
If you prsetn shit scenarios for consideration expect shit outcomes is my suggestion
Some thoughts on thinking in boxes, tanks and bowls.
How can anyone actually think in a tank? or any other echoing silo like structure.
The creative imperative in urging people to “think outside the box” – is often itself a pretty useless aphorism for wild conjecture.
The very title thinktank screams group think, because a tank is confining..
I understand that isolation tanks, where sensory deprivation can lead to intense reflection might have a minor role …. but …. think tanks ?
They are little more than a euphemism for lobby groups of various intent, with pseudo legitimacy through what claims to be objective statistical analysis, but often highly selective and always with an agenda.
Their credibility is stretched even further by who funds them – unsurprisingly always a sectional interest, often kept secret. The Kochs, and Gates both have very fixed world views.
Thinktanks rarely use critical reasoning, and consider only a very limited range of alternatives.
Yet think tanks often have a spurious credibility and are used ‘for balance’.
The BBC invariably use the IFS, which is firmly rooted in neoliberal mainstream economics, and even more in Gramscian hegemony, which it invariably reinforces, but whose analysis is surprisingly treated as independent. Yet it has a classic ‘conventional’ wisdom mindset.
It is evidently not unprejudiced but is rarely if ever called to account for faulty assumptions and opinions.
Amusingly, the 20thC Chicago School of Economics – pretty much rigid, right wing, neoliberal and full fat free market, is entirely different in mindset from the Chicago School of Sociology which massively broadened out sociological studies into ethnography and anthropology.
It is worth revisiting how Galbraith thought organisational power structures operated, and why, in reinforcing leader cadres, an “agree with the boss and yer okay, disagree and that’s yer career up in smoke” mentality was so prevalent.
I read Galbraith maybe 45 years ago…he was right then and still is
Until fairly recently, my sister, an engineer, worked in the Safety and Reliability Division of Rolls Royce Aerospace in Derby. She said that quite the worst example of Management Bollox she ever heard at a “motivational meeting” was:
“Let’s all scuba around in somebody else’s thinktank”
Yuk
@tony, It’s interesting that for you the term thinktank conjures up the image of an isolation tank as for me it conjures up the image of a military tank, of a group of people intent on beating others into submission by weaponising thought rather than using physical hardware.
Maybe I am more cynical than most.
🙂
Hi Richard thanks for your post as always.
I have just come back from ten days off starting in Cromford in the Derwent river valley ending up in a village close to Hunstanton.
I studied history and can’t get rid of the interest. So in Cromford it was very interesting to see the first Arkwright mill.
The history panels in the mill said that when Arkwright started the mill it was an era of invention.
My question to you and your readership is two fold. Would left leaning people be able to kickstart a second era of invention? And if so how?
Thanks for all your work and everyone’s posts which are often v interesting.
I’d love to know how we could improve our country for the many not the few.
Look at the history of innovation -most of which in recent times has begun in the state sector. Yes, is the answer. Since when were profit and curiosity related?
Wasn’t Einstein a socialist ?
Indeed he was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F
If you take the example of the mobile phone, there are twelve technological innovations that are crucial for the technology to work.These were all developed by CERN, NASA or the US military. The further development of the technology in the private sector, which accounts for the differences between different phones, is trivial in comparison.
So we don’t need the private sector or markets for innovation to occur.
Thanks
Bernard, slightly off main thrust of the topic ….. What are the 12 key innovations you refer to?
To ex teacher
Muzzucato in her book entrepreneurial state discusses these . Well worth reading .
@Ex teacher. I was afraid someone might ask that. The precise number depends on how you count them. 12 is the number normally quoted, but in reality this is an underestimate because some of the technologies are the result of decades of work in the public sector.
I have somewhere a paper somwhere that neatly lists 12 technologies that are essential for a smartphone to work. Off the top of my head I can think of the following:
The touch screen: this originates with work done in 60s at the Royal Radar Establishment but, in its current form, was developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the US military.
The various Loadstar position, torque and orientation sensors were developed by the US Navy for use in unmanned submarines.
The miniature hi-res camera and the high capacity compact battery technology were developed by NASA for use in space exploration. It should be noted that
miniaturisation itself was driven by work at NASA.
A cellular communicatios network with the ability to implement the physical layer of the OSI protocol stack allowing it to carry internet traffic. A combination of DARPA and other agencies for the US government. Of course the TCP/IP and UDP/IP protocols themselves which are fundamental to the internet were developed at DARPA, while the HTML protocol, including the version cHTML, used by smartphones, needed for the transmission of web pages, is the result of work done at CERN.
Encryption systems for stopping cross talk between phone calls and stopping anyone with a radio scanner listening in to phone calls (These were problems on the earliest cell phone networks in Japan): various US government agencies.
The GPS system, developed by US government agencies (starting in the 60s) for military use, at present administered by the US air force and provided to users free of charge. This in its turn depends on satellite and rocket technology developed by NASA.
I will try to find that paper.
Thank you
I think you are looking at this from the wrong perspective. Anyone may have an idea, and States and institutions are dependent on people. But to turn an idea or invention into innovation requires resources. The private sector claims it has all the innovation, but the claim is false. The private sector is essentially parasitic; it doesn’t like risk, and it particularly doesn’t like ‘no track-record’ risks, where many ideas, inventions come from. So the private sector piggy-backs on someone else taking the first development step for them without taking any risk.
Allow me to give an example how, typically it really works. The initial algorithm developed by the brilliant Google founders (all gone from the corporatised Leviathan we see today) was funded by a Federal Grant. Only then, did American capital move in; and American capital takes much more risk than capital in Britain, which spends most of its time looking for low hanging fruit. Furthermore, many of the most iconic consumer goods of the second half of the twentieth century developed from scientific ideas first invented and developed for the State (US and UK) to fight WWII, and then post-war turned to consumer use. Capital doesn’t like risk, if it can possibly avoid it. Capital seeks the largest return for the smallest risk it can find; and we know from the history of capital (notably its long and lucrative investment in slavery), that capital has no innate scruples.
Most of the great shibboleths of politics an business are based on mythologies that hide the real history.
Thanks
I ran a marketing/design agency for many years with major clients including Hewlett-Packard, Cadbury Schweppess, Distillers and a number of educational and Business Link organisations before working for a fuel poverty charity just at the start off tory austerity. We were invited in by mostly close minded well in the box clients to be the very out of the box thinkers you refer to. Very often it was my job to tell the clients that their aims were often inspiring but the methods they sought to use were often completely irrelevant to th e success they sought. By doing independent research into their aims we could reflect back to them entirely different solutions that would lead to successful outcomes. One of the best ways was to challenge the Marketing Department’s assumptions by talking directly to the Sales teams and their customers to ascertain the accurate perception of the client which was often far removed from the group think within the client organisation. Similarly when attending APPGs on Fuel Poverty, Ed Davey’s New Green Deal, and discussions on Health inequality we found the almost despairing lack of inter departmental working and institutional narrow sightedness of government departments, and their relationships with their external suppliers like the NHS, Local Government departments, the third sector (often the only free thinkers in the game). I really think (and have said this before) Govt needs to set up a forum of thinkers and radicals to set the real agenda for change based around developing the people’s wellbeing and cohesion of society, free from political dogma, capitalist unsustainability and full of humanity and empathy.
Much to agree with
Richard, you have assembled quite a collection of examples of the problem of proposing new ideas in any institutional setting. It is like a draft for a major, comprehensive case study. Hannah’s observations from the perspective of ‘acute psychiatric nursing’; with the briefest reflection on what the meant, I found quite humbling.
I agree
But I doubnt I will have time to use them