JimCarroll

I’ve been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I’ve discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next.

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“Organizational sclerosis is clogging up your innovation arteries!”

I didn’t coin “organizational sclerosis” to be clever. I use it because it’s medically accurate: it’s what happens when the arteries that used to carry new ideas through an organization slowly clog with process, precedent, and fear, until nothing moves, even when everyone inside still believes they’re agile.

The dangerous part is that sclerosis is painless until it isn’t. Things still run. Meetings still happen. Reports still get filed. And then a StarKist comes along and makes $200 million by simply switching from a tin can to a resealable pouch, a move a sclerotic competitor could have made years earlier, if anything could have actually moved through their system fast enough to try it.

The fix isn’t a single bold initiative. It’s treating the clogging itself as the disease, actively testing whether ideas can still move through your organization at all, not just whether you have any.

If the problem is organizational sclerosis, the treatment starts by restoring movement. Here are three ways to test whether ideas can still flow.

Action Items:

• Time how long it actually took your last new idea to go from “suggested” to “shipped.” If you don’t know the number, that’s your first symptom.
• Identify one process, approval layer, or sign-off that exists purely because “that’s how it’s always been done” and remove it this month.
• Ask two people at different levels of the organization how hard it is to get a new idea heard. Compare the answers.

Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.

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Real-World Examples

These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world.

Becton Dickinson: Great engineers trapped by an inherited hierarchy

When Edward Ludwig assumed leadership of Becton Dickinson’s Diagnostic Instrument Systems division in the late 1980s, he found a business with strong engineers and credible technology that was nevertheless falling behind a competitor in important product dimensions. The problem was not simply that no one could invent.

Nor had management neglected to draw a modern project-management chart. The division had already installed a structure intended to bring functions together. But a hierarchical culture, inherited from an earlier owner, made departments wait for direction and avoid candid discussion of the obstacles slowing development.

Managers quietly understood parts of the difficulty but did not tell the whole truth across functions or up the chain. Ludwig began a deliberately open conversation about strategic capability and internal barriers. Harvard Business School researchers reported that the process identified the cultural bottleneck and helped the division regain market leadership.

This is a precise picture of organizational sclerosis: investment in talent, technology and process diagrams can coexist with habits that make cooperation impossible. What changed was not an additional innovation program. It was a decision to confront the operating behaviours that rendered earlier improvement efforts ineffective.

Why it matters: A brilliant engineering team can still lose when inherited decision habits prevent its ideas from reaching the market.

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GE Appliances FirstBuild: A microfactory to escape mass-production habits

A large appliance manufacturer is very good at doing what it already does. The machinery, procurement process and product approval routines are built for standardization and volume. Those strengths can become liabilities when an unusual new product deserves a quick trial but cannot yet justify mass manufacturing.

In 2014, GE Appliances launched FirstBuild in Louisville, Kentucky, with the University of Louisville and the open-innovation specialist Local Motors. It was a small-batch microfactory and an online community where engineers, makers and consumers could suggest ideas, prototype them, test demand and bring limited runs to market.

Its original facility occupied roughly 35,000 square feet in a former warehouse. The production process did not require a new appliance concept to survive the full conventional factory investment cycle. Early crowdfunding and co-creation tested whether anybody cared before scaling.

FirstBuild still operates as a specialized innovation environment; it did not abolish GE Appliances’ core manufacturing discipline. That is precisely the point. Rather than ask an established system to behave like a start-up, management created a place where different rules could operate and successful ideas could later graduate to scale.

Why it matters: When the normal organization cannot move without protecting yesterday’s processes, create a disciplined route around the blockage rather than merely exhorting everyone to move faster.

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