The Myth of Happiness and the Death of the Innovative Organization

Here is an interesting piece of the puzzle with respect to building a more innovative you: There is a phenomenon in psychology called hedonic adaptation.  Essentially what it says is that we adapt to the fact that life does not give us all we might wish by re-creating stories that allow us to be comfortable with the reality that life is difficult and/or the reality that life has dealt us. This explains why, over time, we become pretty comfortable with the way things are and perhaps lose our passion for the change that is inherent in innovation.

A fundamental danger of all innovation efforts is the belief that once we become a more innovative organization we will be happy and life will be easy. This is not the case. What will happen is that life will continue to be challenging, new difficulties will arise that we do not initially understand how best to react to, and each time we begin to get comfortable something in the external environment will change. Likely, we will go through a period of difficulty in adapting to it – and once again reached some temporary moment of stasis. As we live in that stasis for a while, the process of hedonic adaptation sometimes called the hedonic treadmill, will cause us to define this new state as the right state and we will become comfortable with it once again. We are an adaptive species.

So, in a twisted crazy kind of way our desire for happiness both motivates us to seek innovation and inhibits us from seeking innovation. The myth that things will be better causes us to want to go there -- to innovate and create change. The reality that we adapt to what is and become comfortable causes us to want to stay there and resist change. We make a change, celebrate success, and get stuck.

But the world changes. Rapidly. We need to be conscious of our internal processes around this so we can be their master and not their unknowing slave. The goal is that we can live adaptively and successfully in an ever changing world. So that we can contribute to change in a direction that is good for us all in the long run.

So what are we to do?

We have written about how the gator brain can inhibit creativity and innovation. Now we're telling you that our pursuit of happiness because of hedonic adaptation can also inhibit innovation. What is the innovation Jedi apprentice to do?

One half of the solution: At a personal level, we have to work to be aware of the unconscious drivers and mental stories that create our experience of each and every day. You can read more about those kinds of things here and here. You have a choice about the mental stories bubbling in your mind, so make a choice that moves us all forward.

The second half of the solution: As a systems level, -- and this is incredibly crucial -- we need to create structures that drive and support that human behavior of constant improvement -- both incremental and discontinuous. When we create a new, evolutionarily selective pressure in our organizational environments that drives the adaptive behavior of constant improvement, we make it easier for our people to do the right things for innovation. We make it more comfortable for them (and us)  to adapt to constant change.

When we advise our clients to implement the complete set of 12 Strategies to Build an Innovation Culture, this is why we are doing so, because the natural order of human psychology will work against the effort over time. An environment with new pressures must be created to overcome that. We’re putting the final touches on a whitepaper regarding those 12 strategies, but in the meantime, we can send you a short document that lists them.  Simply click here to download or email njenkins@newandimproved.com for the document to be emailed to you.  Also, we have a webinar on this coming up on June 27th. Sign up for the webinar here.

If you want to read a little bit more about the research on happiness, you might enjoy a quick article on Daily Good called the Myths of Happiness.