Stand-up Meetings Inhibit Innovation

Andy Wu of Harvard Business School and his doctoral student Sourobh Ghosh embedded a field experiment in a Google hackathon to investigate the impact of stand-up meetings—a core component of agile management practices—on innovation. They found that the teams that engaged in them developed less-novel products. The conclusion: Stand-up meetings inhibit innovation. Professor Wu, defend your research. WU: More and more companies are adopting agile practices in product development, but it isn’t always clear why. There seems to be an assumption that agile is a cure-all for innovation. The study that Sourobh and I did, however, shows that one key element of the agile approach—regular stand-up meetings—is great for implementation but actually undermines idea generation. HBR: So frequent stand-up meetings make people less innovative? The literature defines innovation as the combination of two factors: value—or usefulness for a specific customer—and novelty. We found that frequent stand-up meetings at the hackathon resulted in products that were rated by judges as more valuable but less novel. To be innovative, products must be both. Why do you think that happened? Stand-up meetings encourage team members to coordinate their work at the cost of independently pursuing new ideas. Why? First, the meetings create a perception of deadlines—even if they aren’t spelled out—which makes people focus on delivering something by a certain time rather than exploring less-well-defined and thus riskier and more-time-consuming opportunities. Second, in the stand-up format the team explicitly states its goals, which refocuses the energy on those targets and doesn’t leave members feeling open to searching for other avenues. Third, novel ideas often bubble up when individuals think deeply about their particular areas of expertise, and stand-up meetings tend to keep people focused on work that is easier to integrate with the team’s, so they don’t leverage their specializations as much. What about other agile practices? Is it just stand-ups we need to worry about? I’d say stand-ups are fairly representative of other practices and frameworks that derive from the agile approach, like scrum and kanban. They all focus on coordination around shared goals, so I suspect that they’d have a similarly detrimental effect on new-idea generation. What should managers using agile do to encourage their teams to be more innovative? The short answer is: Have fewer meetings! Just let people work on their own and dig really deep into the problem at hand. Don’t be afraid they’ll fall down rabbit holes, because that’s where real innovation often comes from. Too many managers act as though company leadership is the main source of creativity. In my experience it’s the engineers and designers at the middle and the bottom that come up with the best ideas. Bill Gates had to be told by his subordinates that the internet was worth his attention, for example. But implementation is important too. How do you keep people on track without dampening their creativity? It’s not either/or. You just need to be intentional about which you want to emphasize now. To shift the focus of stand-up meetings, managers can pull two levers: frequency and content. If you want more novelty, have fewer meetings and keep them short. If your priority is implementing existing ideas, greater coordination from more-regular meetings can be helpful. As for meeting content, a discussion of goals focuses people on implementing old ideas rather than on coming up with new ones. So if you don’t talk about goals, you open the door to more creativity. Say you’re a tech company trying to develop a completely new category of product. A lot of agile meetings could get in your way; it would be better to just have your engineers follow their individual inclinations and explore randomly. On the other hand, you have companies like Microsoft or Facebook that frequently generate lots of new ideas at internal hackathons, but it’s tough to turn them into products that make it to market. That’s where agile can really help. Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell has told me that reorganizing his company around agile management really paid off. My view is that it worked because the firm had clear goals to achieve. For example, when it wanted to improve its presentation clicker to make it easier to see the laser pointer on large screens, it came up with the idea of adding motion tracking to the clicker and combining it with software to render a virtual “spotlight” on the screen. For that kind of bounded, straightforward problem, bringing in agile practices to get your engineers and designers to execute is effective. You studied a software hackathon. How is that different from a real work environment? The hackathon setup is actually very similar to how a lot of real-world engineering work gets done. In fact, a number of successful start-ups have come out of hackathons just like the one we studied. The teams were similar in size to engineering or product design teams in real companies, and they built real software applications. The main difference was that the hackathon teams didn’t have to worry about integrating their products with other functions like compliance, billing, marketing, and customer support. Another advantage of doing the experiment at a hackathon was that we were able to observe the development process at an incredibly granular level. Instead of just rating the end products, we could see how teams coordinated and came up with new ideas in real time by tracking their activity in GitHub. We saw exactly when individuals leveraged specialized skills by adding advanced artificial intelligence or cloud-based tools. We also saw that after each stand-up, engineers would start merging their code, indicating a focus on integration rather than on new ideas. How do your findings apply to other industries, like hardware, or to creative projects, like music or art? Agile practices have been less common with hardware because it tends to take a lot longer to develop, which makes the constant check-ins and adjustments associated with agile more costly. In hardware, “waterfall” practices—a hierarchical, linear approach—traditionally make sense. But a lot of recent advances in hardware have actually been software-based, as we saw with Logitech’s clicker. So agile is worth thinking about even if your business has offered only hardware products. As far as creative projects go, the research suggests that agile practices aren’t your best bet. If you’re working with a group to develop a screenplay or a song, it’s better to let people go at it independently. Of course, it also depends on the nature of the project. If you’re working on a complex production with lots of moving parts, stand-up meetings might be very effective for coordinating sound engineers, writers, artists, and so on. Does culture matter? You studied a tech environment in the United States. Would your findings be different in other countries or in nontech workplaces? Local culture is absolutely an important factor. American culture can be more individualistic and put less emphasis on authority and following rules. In more-collectivist cultures, agile might inhibit innovation more, since people would probably feel greater pressure to adhere to the group goals discussed in stand-up meetings. Another dimension of national and organizational culture is the extent to which employees are trusted to work hard without supervision. The coordination provided by agile is one way to monitor employees, but that might not be necessary for all organizations. That’s especially relevant now, since so many people are working remotely in the pandemic. Definitely. The shift away from offices has led to less constant coordination and more independent work. The employees that gained time and autonomy from going remote can focus more on their own ideas (with the major caveat that many may have less time now because of child care and other needs). Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey noticed in 2018 that he was more focused and creative when working at home, and he just allowed Twitter employees to work from home indefinitely. In my recent research it appears that virtual meetings, adopted during the pandemic, generate less accountability toward shared goals than in-person meetings do, suggesting that they may not have as much of a negative impact on creativity. Ultimately, what we’re all seeing is that you can’t plan out novelty. All these companies are looking at Google, Facebook, and hip tech start-ups and saying, “They’re innovative, and they use agile, so we should too.” But that’s not what agile actually delivers.

Stand-up Meetings Inhibit Innovation

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