One observation from studying innovation is the underuse of the other i-word: imagination. It’s a word for creativity that’s associated positively with children: “Jimmy’s so imaginative with his stuffed animals.” but negatively with professional adults “My CEO is so imaginative with his annual profit report”. You rarely hear managers, doctors, or politicians praised for their imagination – it’d be a veiled insult if, when asked, the i-word was the first adjective used to describe most professionals. If I told you “He’s an imaginative heart surgeon”, I doubt he’d be first in mind while in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

The word imagination suggests daydreams and doodles – the ability to invent worlds and wild concepts. But since these talents rarely maps directly to business plans, org charts and customer satisfaction reports, the word isn’t used often in most places of work.

What’s curious then is the popularity of the word vision. Somehow this word, tied to shamans and hallucinogenic drugs, made its way to the center of the suit and tie workplace. People talk of vision documents and vision setting in the same conversations as status reviews and performance audits. Knowing something of vision quests and pagan vision rituals, a part of me both laughs and cries every time I see a businessman, wound repressively into a creativity-resistant suit and tie environment, uses that word.

That tragedy is how we forget that a vision is the product of someone’s imagination. Someone makes it up, writes it down, and only then does it become something that other people can follow. Even people who earn the label “visionary” or “genius” use their imagination, doodles, crazy ideas and all, to create their visions. Yet somehow despite people’s interest in visions, they’re unlikely to encourage the create force, in the form of people’s imagination, required to create them.

Creative relationships and teams are easy to spot: just look for people equally savvy in sharing their imagination as they are their logic.

“Imagination is one of the vaguest words in the language, embracing everything from vain fancy to magisterial achievement. Using this word has the effect of boxing the mind into opposed categories (reason/imagination) that falsify the much more interesting processes of creative thought. Appealing to the imagination of ones children, students or office staff thus tends to polarize their self awareness in a rather unproductive way. ”

– Robert Grudin, The Grace of great things.

One great misnomer about innovation is that big organizations can’t do it. There are many stories of great innovations done by big companies. We love entrepreneurial stories and small is beautiful philosophies, but there are many great inventions from big, and old, organizations.

Many of the greatest technological innovations of all time, landing on the moon (NASA), the creation of the first PC, mouse, personal network and laser printer (Xerox), and the development of the Internet (DARPA) all took place inside of large organizations. Then of course there is the ENIAC (first PC), the first jet engines (RLM), and countless other inventions created, or successfully made into products, by various large organizations throughout history.

I’m not saying innovation is easier in large companies (although occasionally it is) – I am saying that the size of an organization is rarely a deciding factor: it’s the organization’s attitude towards change that matters. For example,  If the CEO of SuperBig Inc. decides to pay $1mil to any employee who prototypes new product ideas, guess what he’ll have? Lots of hard working people willing to take risks with new ideas. Alternatively, if the CEO yells at people for taking chances, and pays bonuses exclusively for complacent status-quo behavior, he’ll never see innovation no matter who he hires, what he says or what books he reads.

One hypothesis is innovation hinges on two things:

1. Willingness to take risks
2. Commitment to hard work developing new ideas

Both are hard to achieve in any sized organization. Talent, resources, and luck are irrelevant if no one is taking the risk of pursuing something new  (#1) and working hard to make them pay off (#2).

There are many caveats. Risk aversion is rampant in big organizations, but a small team in a big company that is successfully lead by someone comfortable with risk, and capable of managing large company politics,  may be free from the problems the rest of the company suffers from. There are enough examples of innovations by (small or medium sized groups inside) big organizations to render size a less important variable than is commonly believed.

Instead of lamenting “my company is so big it never innovates” – a more accurate complaint is “my boss’s decisions don’t reward people with ideas for positive change”.