Innovation Blog
Innovation in Football
It seems unlikely but this is actually an extract from a football manager’s programme notes:
Yes, the very same column which managers traditionally use to tell supporters “we were unlucky not to get a point from last week’s game” or “we’re looking to continue our current run of good form against today’s opponents” is now being used to involve fans in the bigger picture of the team’s direction – and along the way demonstrate some of the key elements of successful innovation.
The manager in question is Sean O’Driscoll who is currently overseeing a turn-around in Nottingham Forest’s footballing fortunes. This philosophy, together with investment from the Al Hasawi family, is slowly spreading a new attitude throughout the club which is also being embraced by the fans.
And it doesn’t just work for football, there are parallels for anyone involved in innovation, whatever the context. The first is culture. For innovation to thrive there must be a culture that nurtures it rather than stifling its growth. In business, as in the football club, it is rooted in the attitude towards failure. As O’Driscoll rightly points out, there will be “hiccups” along the way and it is vitally important for managers to treat them as inevitable outcomes of their teams trying to do new things. This allows these blips to be embraced as part of the process of taking controlled risks, rather than the knee-jerk reaction of chastising the individual(s) involved and focusing on safer developments to avoid the risk of failure. Of course setting the culture is also about communicating it widely and effectively, and this unexpected use of the programme notes is a good example of such communication for a key group of stakeholders, the fans.
The second ingredient for successful innovation that this highlights is responsibility. The players are made acutely aware that they are responsible for delivery of the vision on the field of play with each one knowing the role they have to play. In the business world this means creating empowered teams that bring as much variety as possible in terms of experience, skills and even demographics in order to generate the widest range of ideas and complement each other. It is then vitally important that the team is given freedom to operate within the parameters given (be that budget, timescales, product design, etc) in order to become “stronger than the sum of its parts” and deliver truly innovative products.
And finally it’s about recruiting the right individuals to make the vision real. O’Driscoll has brought in 12 new players since taking over at Forest to build a squad that he believes can “trust their own judgements” and “make consistently better decisions” and the search for such individuals should be at the heart of any manager’s hiring policy. People who show good judgement and decision-making, particularly when under pressure, are those with the greatest capacity for innovation.
So whether or not this culture of innovation proves successful remains to be seen but the early signs are encouraging with only two defeats in the first ten league games. What is for sure though is that Sean O’Driscoll is going about fostering innovation at Nottingham Forest in the right way.
By Brian Carrington, October 2012
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