The Third Time, Nobody Says Anything - The SPRIITE Series/Article 6 of 9

A maintenance technician told me about a change he had suggested twice, years apart, to two different supervisors. It would have cut about forty minutes off a changeover his crew ran several times a week. The first time he suggested it, he was told it would get looked at. The second time, he was told the same thing by someone else.

He had not suggested it a third time. He had also, at some point, stopped suggesting anything else, and he was not angry about it. He described it the way you would describe the weather. That is how you know a company has been failing this condition for a long time.

We tried his idea. It worked, roughly as well as he had said it would. Forty minutes, several times a week, for seven or eight years, and the only reason we had not been doing it was that nobody had built a path for the idea to travel.

What innovation means here

Innovation is the fifth of the seven conditions. It covers whether the company can find novel solutions, adapt to changing circumstances, and stay ahead of its competition, which includes new and better offerings. Growth by innovation is one of the four ways a company grows at all, so the pillar has to carry that meaning.

It also has a smaller daily version, and that is the one that fails most often and gets scored least honestly. When somebody close to the work sees a better way, is there a path for that idea to be heard, evaluated, and tried?

Most owners score this condition against the wrong standard. They think about whether their company is inventive, decide it is a manufacturer or a distributor rather than a technology business, and give themselves a two while assuming a two is appropriate for their industry. Then they miss the question every company can answer well: whether the improvements already sitting in their own building ever reach a decision.

The people closest to the work know things you do not. That is not a compliment to them, it is a structural fact about how information is distributed in an organization. The person who runs the changeover several times a week knows more about the changeover than anyone else in the building. Whether that knowledge ever reaches a decision is a design choice leadership makes.

What actually kills the offering

Very few companies reject good ideas outright. Almost all of them lose ideas the same way, and it is worth naming the mechanism precisely.

An idea gets offered to a supervisor who has eleven other things on their list. It is a reasonable idea and it would take real work to evaluate, so it goes on a list, and the list is long. No decision ever gets made. Nobody ever says no. The idea simply never comes back, and the person who offered it draws the only available conclusion, which is that offering ideas here does not lead anywhere.

Notice that nobody in this sequence behaves badly. The supervisor is busy, the idea is real, and the outcome is still that a company teaches its people not to bother. Silence is the answer people remember, and it is the answer most companies give.

The second killer is the one that follows a yes. An idea gets approved, the person who suggested it gets asked to implement it on top of a full workload with no time or budget attached, and it fails. Now the company has evidence that employee ideas do not work, and the person who suggested it has learned that being right is expensive.

What the path looks like

It does not need to be a program. In the companies where this works, it comes down to three things.

There is a known place to put an idea. A standing item on a weekly team meeting is enough for most companies. What matters is that it is a place rather than a person's inbox.

Every idea gets an answer with a reason, including the ones that get declined. A no with a reason keeps the channel open. Silence closes it, and it closes it for the person's other ideas too.

And a small number of ideas each quarter get real resources. Not a budget line. Someone's hours, protected, and a date to report back. Once the company has visibly funded three employee ideas, the flow of ideas changes without anybody announcing a program.

Scoring innovation honestly

A two looks like this. You cannot name an improvement in the last year that originated below the leadership team. Suggestions go to individual managers and disappear. When people are asked for ideas in a meeting, the room is polite and quiet.

A four looks like this. There is a routine place ideas go. People who offer them get an answer either way and can tell you what happened to the last one they raised. Several improvements in the past year came from people who do the work, and the company can name them and who suggested them.

The score to watch here is the gap between leadership and the team. Leaders tend to score innovation on their own openness, which is usually real. Their teams score it on what happened to the last idea they offered, which is usually nothing.

I have been the busy supervisor in that story more than once, in companies where I was responsible for the culture I was creating. If your people have gone quiet, the ideas did not stop arriving in their heads. Ask three people who do the work what they would change, and then be prepared to do something about at least one answer, because you only get to ask that question credibly once. And if you want another set of eyes on it, my door is open.