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Set task lists with due dates, sub-tasks, and start discussions. It’s connected to your projects, so you can also add connected goals, key resources, and important updates.

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Tasks—Toblerone

Almost every company would like to be &ldquo;innovative,&rdquo; but what do we really mean when we say that, and what are the critical ingredients to make innovation happen? 
To find out, I scheduled a chat with <a href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/phil-budden" rel="follow">Dr Philip Budden</a>, researcher and senior lecturer at MIT's Management School, where he focuses on innovation, both inside the corporate setting and in external regional ecosystems. 
<h3>Hi, Phil. Thanks for talking to us today. Can you tell us a bit about your research with MIT?</h3>
In my current role at MIT, I study innovation, looking at why it happens, where it happens, and why it doesn&rsquo;t happen everywhere. The goal is to understand how we can achieve more innovation, whether that&rsquo;s for companies, communities, or countries. 
<h3>And what actually is innovation? </h3>
It&rsquo;s such an overused word, and there&rsquo;s a risk it becomes a bit of a buzzword, but it&rsquo;s a very real phenomenon. At MIT, after much discussion, we settled on quite a simple definition. We describe innovation as the &ldquo;process of taking ideas from inception to impact.&rdquo; 
The &ldquo;process&rdquo; definition is important because it highlights the fact innovation is not a single moment or a single person having a bright idea and that being enough. The reference to impact emphasizes the importance of having an actual impact in the world, which might not just be profit. And then in the middle of the definition, there&rsquo;s this concept of an idea. The MIT definition of an idea is a hypothetical match between a problem and a solution. And the better the match between the problem and the solution, the better the idea. 
<h3>What are the typical ingredients you need within an organization to be innovative? </h3>
There are lots of ingredients that take an organization from &ldquo;business as usual&rdquo; to becoming innovative, but I like to focus on two that I think are most important. 
First, there&rsquo;s the design of the company. This is the internal &ldquo;system&rdquo; within an organization, which either facilitates or does not facilitate innovation. Is the organization optimized and measured just for business as usual or is space made to explore innovative ideas? Is it dominated by legacy IT or are there platforms for innovating? 
Secondly, it&rsquo;s the people. This is partly a question of mindset, but also the incentives and culture within the organization. For example, an individual can have an innovation-oriented mindset, but if the culture and underlying incentives - such as KPIs, OKRs, and commissions - don&rsquo;t favor innovation, it can be very difficult.
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/ZEHn0UzwTTuHQ9h9mZ1W" alt="undefined" width="661" height="446" />
<h3>Given this, what are the common barriers to innovation? </h3>
As you&rsquo;d expect, the common barriers flow from these two dimensions: the system and the people. For example, the CEO might be calling for innovation, but unless they architect the system and incentives in a way that is conducive to innovation, then it won&rsquo;t happen, even if the frontline employees rally to meet this demand. 
Particularly if you&rsquo;re trying to implement transformative innovation, you need to give people the space, permission, and scope to go beyond business as usual. Middle management also needs to be incentivized to enable innovation in their teams. Finally, it&rsquo;s critical staff have the <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/barriers-to-collaboration/" rel="follow">tools for collaboration</a> and information sharing, which can often be more difficult for businesses burdened with legacy IT systems. 
<h3>How does this change for small organizations as compared to large ones? Or perhaps high growth organizations?</h3>
 Organizations by their very nature are organized to achieve a purpose. Large organizations have special challenges because they usually consist of various business units and layers which oversee them, which all add up to a rather large bureaucracy. This results in a system which is not architected to enable innovation because frontline staff are often separated from each other in business silos and middle management may be incentivized just to optimize the legacy organization&rsquo;s business as usual, rather than innovate even modestly. 
Typically, that&rsquo;s why smaller organizations tend to be better at innovation because they don&rsquo;t have the bureaucracy. But they&rsquo;re not immune either, as you&rsquo;ll often find legacy family-run businesses struggle too. Ultimately, it tends to be new businesses who are most innovative and good at achieving high growth. 
For large organizations and more traditional small ones, an effective way of counteracting this can be to create an entirely separate business unit that is explicitly focused on being less bureaucratic and taking things forward. This makes it easier to introduce new systems for sharing information and collaboration, for example, without worrying about the legacy IT systems. You can implement new incentive structures and make sure the culture is aligned with the goals of innovation. 
<h3>Have digital technologies changed our ability to innovate?</h3>
 Undoubtedly, yes. Because they create a new framework for humans to communicate and interact. But they&rsquo;re not a magic wand that makes everything better. 
If we take a very simple example, like the introduction of email. On the one hand, it made it much <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-technology-transformed-our-perception-of-time/" rel="follow">easier for people to communicate</a> and share ideas with much less friction, all across the globe. But there were also inadvertent consequences, like the rise of spam, which distracted us and slowed us down, and phishing emails, which facilitated crime. Then you got another round of email innovation, which mostly solved these problems.
 And I think we&rsquo;ve seen a similar dynamic play out with newer technologies in the workplace today. They have made it even easier to collaborate in some ways - but the instant nature of them can, with notifications on our phone, can make people <a href="https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/" rel="follow">feel as if they always have to be online</a>. And there are now so many <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/productivity-tools-killing-productivity/" rel="follow">different apps</a> that the volume of information can often be overwhelming, with information now inadvertently harder to find.
 That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s critical that we take more of a systemic approach and think about how we can use digital technologies to create an integrated experience. 
<h3>What&rsquo;s your view on the value of &ldquo;watercooler moments&rdquo; and their importance in innovation? Is there a digital equivalent? </h3>
So called &ldquo;watercooler moments&rdquo; are serendipitous moments of interaction at work, whether by a watercooler, in a lift, or on the bus home from work. In my view, they&rsquo;re brilliant for innovation, as they facilitate interactions that aren't transactional, where people share ideas and make new connections that might not otherwise have happened. 
However, there&rsquo;s also a risk that we overstate their significance, as these interactions are often inaccessible to large swaths of an organization. Imagine you work in different regional offices, or even different areas in a large office complex. Those people would probably never have a watercooler moment with others, especially senior management. 
What&rsquo;s interesting about digital technologies is that they can level the playing field and create systems to facilitate these interactions in a much more intentional way. Thinking through how you set this up in your organization and what sort of permissions you need to make possible are really important to make sure that it's more inclusive than the original in-person water cooler moments. 
<h3>Does access, visibility, and discoverability of knowledge and information affect an organization&rsquo;s ability to innovate?</h3>
The answer here has to be a resounding yes. Innovation is not a single moment of inspiration, as we often hear. As I mentioned earlier, innovation is a process, and to move forward that process, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/distributed-companies-need-centralized-knowledge/" rel="follow">you need a way of sharing information</a>, showing what&rsquo;s happened in the past, who to engage with, and a system for documenting ideas. This is especially important within large or high growth organizations, where there is often an uneven distribution of information. This is where digital tools can be really important. 
But there&rsquo;s also lots of <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-knowledge-management/" rel="follow">tacit knowledge</a>, and this tends to be the kind of knowledge that&rsquo;s not written down or captured by traditional information management systems but is still very important for innovation. That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s crucial the next generation of tools and technologies take a more holistic approach and capture a broader range of knowledge and information. 
<a href="https://qatalog.chilipiper.com/book/round-robin-queue?utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_source=press&amp;utm_campaign=blog&amp;utm_content=13-1-sam" rel="follow">Book a demo</a> to see how <a href="https://qatalog.com?utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_source=press&amp;utm_campaign=blog&amp;utm_content=13-1-sam" rel="follow">Qatalog</a> can supercharge innovation and make information visible across your organization, with a bespoke operating platform designed just for you.

How to enable innovation in a digital world - according to MIT’s Dr Philip Budden.

The ingredients of innovation

When I was invited by <a href="https://qatalog.com/pricing/?utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_source=press&amp;utm_campaign=blog&amp;utm_content=cta-siobhan" rel="follow">Qatalog</a> to participate in their <a href="https://language.work/documentary/timeless-work/" rel="follow">language.work documentary</a>, I took some time to reflect on how the structure of our work impacts both our experience of the world and our experience of time. The majority of us grow up in environments where time is structured for us. We go to school where we are subject to the bell, the rota, and the timetable. Our days and weeks are structured for us into time at school and time outside school, and the years are carved up into school and holidays. 
We grow up taking for granted that our days are split into blocks of time that involve things we have to do (school or work, usually) and then time for things that we want to do. However, it&rsquo;s not always been this way, and it&rsquo;s only since the Industrial Revolution that the world has been so obsessed with the clock. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/tools-that-changed-the-world/" rel="follow">Pre-industrial revolution</a>, when work was carried out on a domestic or small workshop scale, workers were task-oriented. There wasn&rsquo;t much need for synchronization, so people worked in a task-oriented manner, just doing the amount of work that was needed: producing a certain number of shoes or a length of cloth, for example. 
<h2>Task-orientation vs. time-discipline </h2>
Task-orientation is associated with work pre-clock in rural societies, and any culture that disregards clock time, judging time based on factors such as the rising and setting of the sun. Work is approached through necessity, not because of the time on the clock. People who work in a task-oriented manner have a more blurred boundary between &ldquo;work&rdquo; and &ldquo;life.&rdquo; 
With the Industrial Revolution and the shift to industrial capitalism, time-discipline started to be introduced to laborers, and with it timesheets and monitoring. Laborers were paid for the hours that they spent at work and money would be deducted for infringements such as being in taverns, reading the news, or loitering. Through work, time became carved up and workers were expected to structure their life around work&rsquo;s timetable.
<img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/b9bM4lh0SSu09Qz8gmYA" alt="undefined" />
The introduction of time-discipline in factories was accompanied by pamphlets that sought to encourage &ldquo;time-thrift&rdquo; in domestic and social life. This new work ethic decried the older ways of life and work: they saw task-orientated workers as lazy and lacking in urgency. Pamphlets decried laziness and promoted putting every moment of one&rsquo;s time to good use. There was a widespread moralism about the use of time. As John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, wrote, &ldquo;See that ye walk circumspectly, says the Apostle&hellip; redeeming the time; saving all the time you can for the best purposes; buying up every fleeting moment out of the hands of sin and Satan, out of the hands of sloth, ease, pleasure, worldly business&hellip;&rdquo; 
In the three hundred years since the start of the shift from task-orientation to time-orientation, we&rsquo;ve seen greater and greater emphasis on time. In today&rsquo;s society we are so used to time-discipline that there is nothing remarkable about bells and timetables, we expect to work a nine-to-five, and for many people there is a clear demarcation between the time of work and the time of life. 
<h2>Mass communication technology changed everything</h2>
But with the permeation of the internet into every aspect of our lives, we are seeing a new revolution in how we approach work. Mass communication technology means that we no longer need to use time and space as the means by which we coordinate and synchronize our work with one another. We don&rsquo;t need to be in the same space, nor present at the same time, in order to get work done. This frees us from time-discipline and allows us to think about how to approach work in new ways.
Related reading: <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/timeless-work-the-death-of-the-9-5/" rel="follow">Timeless work - the death of the 9-5</a>
This isn&rsquo;t a straight-forward return to task-orientation, however. Pre-industrial revolution work was much less complex than work today and required less coordination across different tasks. In a world where I don&rsquo;t need to work at the same time as you, but we do need to coordinate our work, what do we need to focus on to make sure that we are effective together? A number of factors come into play: information, for one thing, making sure that you have the information you need to get things done when I am not around; the right tools to ensure that we can communicate <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/async-the-promise-vs-the-reality/" rel="follow">asynchronously</a>; the flexibility and technology to get on a call when we need to. We shift from an emphasis on time at work, to an emphasis on technology, and revolutionize our approach to how we get work done.
 The new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, such as the steam train, the telegraph, and industrial machinery, changed how people worked together and created new industries and new opportunities, demanding a new relationship between people and the work that they do. The digital revolution we have all lived through once again requires that we rethink work, our relationship with work, and let go of old ways of thinking about the 9-to-5. We must let go of time as being the framework within which we work and explore the new ways of working that technology enables. 
Qatalog not only makes asynchronous work possible -&nbsp;it also makes it simple. Find out how it can help you shift from a time-focussed to an output-based culture at work. Just <a href="https://qatalog.chilipiper.com/book/round-robin-queue?utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_source=press&amp;utm_campaign=blog&amp;utm_content=cta-siobhan" rel="follow">book a call with our Customer team</a>, or sign up for a <a href="https://qatalog.com/pricing/?utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_source=press&amp;utm_campaign=blog&amp;utm_content=cta-siobhan" rel="follow">free trial</a>.

Technology has opened our eyes to a world beyond the 9-5. It's time our work culture reflected that, says Siobhan McKeown, COO of Human Made.

How technology transformed our perception of time

Your business is unique. The products, customers, employees, structure, industry, markets, processes, goals, communication style - everything is distinct. But the software tools you use to do your jobs are not. 
And you&rsquo;re using hundreds of them. Research suggests your company of a few hundred people is using <a href="https://www.okta.com/sites/default/files/2022-02/Businesses-at-Work-2022-Annual-Report.pdf" rel="follow">89 apps</a> on average, up 24% from 2016. And if you work in a larger company of 2,000 people or more, it&rsquo;s almost twice that. No wonder it often feels so hard to keep up with the endless stream of notifications. 
Software bloat is running out of control, with a sprawl of generic tools, and the customer has been overlooked. We've created endless iterations of spreadsheets and documents for almost every problem, but none of these tools reflect the way our business actually thinks or operates. We need to take a step back and consider and empower how an organization actually functions in order to better serve our customers. 
The problem is so pervasive that we are almost desensitized to it. It&rsquo;s as if we have forgotten that digital technology was meant to make our lives easier. Make no mistake, today&rsquo;s software often feels like forcing square pegs into round holes. 
For starters, each piece of software brings an entirely new set of terminology into your business&rsquo; lexicon, which you&rsquo;re now forced to use. Is it a board or a workspace? A database or a dashboard? An interface or a channel? The list goes on. Then it shoehorns a bunch of processes and structure into the way your team operates, with a completely different way of organizing your work. This often triggers the following sequence: 
<ul>
<li>Adoption is limited - Some people in the team struggle to get their head around the new tool. Although they have had some training, there are new words for everything, redesigned processes, and additional information required. It doesn&rsquo;t feel intuitive at all, so they just stop using it and carry on as before.</li>
<li> Workarounds are created - Although &lsquo;X tool&rsquo; has most of the functionality required, it becomes clear that it&rsquo;s missing a few important capabilities, so another tool is needed to fill the gap. Some kind of workaround is created where information has to be copied manually from one place to another. It just about works, but the process has now become clunky and crucial information is often lost. </li>
<li>Back to square one - The combination of weak adoption and broken processes starts to hurt productivity and damage team morale. The intended goal of improving efficiency seems like a distant memory and the concern amongst management is that it&rsquo;s having the opposite effect. 12-18 months later, after a huge investment of time and money, they scrap it and look for an alternative. </li>
</ul>
It&rsquo;s a cycle that is repeated over and over, as companies search in vain for a workable solution but all the while, their software subscriptions keep rising. It&rsquo;s astonishing really, because all the companies we speak to want to reduce the number of tools they use. The first reason is obvious. Paying for hundreds of software subscriptions is insanely expensive. But the second reason is arguably even more costly, and that&rsquo;s the enormous hit to productivity and employee experience. 
This was laid bare by a recent study of <a href="https://hbr.org/2022/08/how-much-time-and-energy-do-we-waste-toggling-between-applications" rel="follow">a Fortune 500 company</a> which revealed that its employees were switching applications and websites 1,200 times each day on average. It estimated this took two seconds each time, equivalent to just under four hours a week, or 9% of their annual time at work. As the study describes, &ldquo;for most employees, there isn&rsquo;t an obvious way to avoid ping-ponging between documents, websites, and apps &mdash; it&rsquo;s just how the work has to be done&rdquo;. 
This echoes the findings from <a href="https://language.work/research/workgeist/" rel="follow">our own research with Cornell University</a>. We found that employees are wasting an hour every day trying to find information hidden within apps, and 43% say they spend too much time switching between them. All of this context switching slows us down, but it also makes it harder to focus and, over time, increases our stress levels. 
There is a clear paradox here. The very tools that were supposed to make us more productive are doing the opposite. 
<h2>A failure to innovate </h2>
All of this points to why work often feels so broken. We&rsquo;re using a stack of generic tools, all patched together, to run entire companies. You might think this represents a failure of leadership or management. I believe it represents the abject failure of the technology industry to innovate, because businesses have been left without a viable alternative. 
We&rsquo;ve created thousands upon thousands of apps and tools developed to solve specific problems, with zero regard for the bigger picture and how all these disparate pieces join together. Instead, we have focused on making incremental improvements, whether it&rsquo;s a slightly better document editor, a task management tool with barely distinguishable feature set, a marginally more functional sheet, or a new take on messenger apps. Huge amounts of brain power, capital, and effort, but the net result is stagnation. 
To give customers what they deserve with the technology we have at our disposal, we need to think bigger. 
Qatalog 2.0 is launching on December 6. Follow our team on <a href="https://twitter.com/qatalog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Twitter</a> for the announcement.

We need to think bigger. Something new is coming.

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