Reinventing innovation for a remote-work world
Just do it work from office!
Last week, the CEO of Nike slammed remote work – blaming it for Nike’s innovation slowdown. In the interview with CNBC, he said: “it’s really hard to develop a boldly disruptive product on Zoom.” The Nike CEO is right. The practices of innovation that organizations have relied on for decades aren't just difficult over Zoom–they're nearly impossible.
But the SOLUTION to fixing this problem ISN’T what most leaders think.
We’re still in the aftermath of that discussion. But as soon as word of that interview began to spread, managers everywhere chimed in with “Yeah!”, “That’s what I’ve been saying!”, “See!”, “We told you so! It’s finally time to return to offices!”, and many more. It was just the validation they’ve been looking for.
On the other side of the debate, workers everywhere cringed. People on many teams have grown fond of this new normal and are fearful of the day looming ahead when they are condemned once again to spending hours stuck in traffic. When will they be forced to give up their working in pajamas and making it to afterschool soccer games on time? When will they be forced to give up their houses in affordable midsize towns, trading them for long commutes to zipcodes that are optimized for corporate tax credits, instead of being optimized for people and their families.
This Nike interview, like many of the others before it, will soon be followed by a string of leaders using it to make arguments for going-back to the way things once were. An argument now bolstered by this obviously clear evidence from a respected, global organization that – before COVID – had been innovating for decades.
It’s true. You can’t innovate over Zoom.
Or, actually, more precisely:
The innovation practices of the in-office era
DON’T WORK
in a remote-work world.
Now that our teams have scattered, teams can’t expect to get innovation in the same ways that they did prior to 2020. But that doesn’t mean that the solution is wishing the world was back like it was. You can’t cram genies back into bottles. Our teams have scattered. In the new remote- and hybrid-work world… which isn’t going away… teams need new ways of innovating.
For more than 15 years, I’ve been running DISTRIBUTED and INNOVATIVE teams at Google, McKinsey, and Atlassian. During the entire breadth of that time, my teams were scattered. We lived and worked in different zipcodes and in different timezones. We were separated by oceans! We worked from homes and offices. We worked from airport lounges, and libraries, and coffee shops.
Distributed teams aren’t new. You’re just late to the party.
That’s me with a lot less grey hair all the way back in 2014, giving my keynote called “Distributed Teams”. With this slide, I was talking about how having everyone together, side-by-side in an office was already the exception, not the norm. That was more than 11 years ago. It started becoming a remote-work world long before COVID.
However, it was also true that as soon as our teams started to scatter, we had to REINVENT the way we got work done. We weren’t together in the same buildings for 40 hours a week, and because of that, we needed to change the way we tackled innovation. We needed to trade talking around tables for sharing information digitally. We threw out the whiteboard markers (and let’s be honest… most of them were out of ink anyway).
Teams that want innovation in a remote-work world need to work in smaller, more MODULAR chunks.
Teams that want innovation in a remote-work world need to collaborate WITHOUT MEETINGS.
Teams that want innovation in a remote-work world need AUTONOMY–making decisions in new ways.
And when teams do come together physically, innovative teams need to reinvent they way they spend their time together! If your people are driving to an office just to sit on 7-1/2 hours of Zoom meetings, then it’s time to rethink what being in the office means.
The world is constantly changing. Are you reinventing the way you work along with it?