Do Or Die? Do A Dyson

Jennifer Harris mentions the "Semmelweis Effect" in a recent Management Today piece. Semmelweis discovered that getting maternity ward doctors to wash their hands regularly cut the mortality rate of mothers from 18% to 1%. This was in 1847. He was ignored and ridiculed.

Harris says that successful people can become resistant to innovation because they begin to see success as a right, rather than the outcome of work and thought. "The way to prove them wrong is to do a Dyson," she says: that is, go off and do it anyway.

For organisations to establish innovation as a process, they need to question their own complaceny, traditions and superstitions. Change is as much, if not more, about loss than gain. Loss of status or hard-won expertise in the face of innovation is a very real, if rarely articulated, fear.

Leaders need to remind those around them that successful organisations practise rational decision making. They move forward on the basis of sound analysis of good data. If a new process demonstrates the kind of performance benefit that Semmelweis achieved, then it gets implemented - no matter how cherished the theories it displaces.

How is it, then, that so many organisations seem to survive on a mixture of irrational decision making, poor innovation and luck? The truth is that they're either burning off a stockpile of good will, market momentum and inherited assets, or they're working some kind of monopoly. Everybody else gets found out.