Recognise This! – Creativity and innovation must be actively encouraged and supported or complacency can easily set in.

My recent post, “Millennials Leading Change at Work,” led to an invitation to join the “IBM Wild Ducks” group on LinkedIn. The name alone is intriguing, so I had to do someresearch. Apparently, the name comes from former IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson, Jr., who said (emphasis mine):

“In IBM we frequently refer to our need for ‘wild ducks.’ The moral is drawn from a story by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who told of a man who fed the wild ducks flying south in great flocks each fall. After a while some of the ducks no longer bothered to fly south; they wintered in Denmark on what he fed them. In time they flew less and less. After three or four years they grew so lazy and fat that they found difficulty in flying at all. Kierkegaard drew his point: you can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again. One might also add that the duck who is tamed will never go anywhere any more. We are convinced that any business needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them.”

The line in bold is the crux of the story – “You can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again.”

How do you tame wild ducks in the workplace? There are several ways:

1) Punish failure – Failure is often the inspiration to success. Post-it Notes, WD-40 and many other popular consumer brands wouldn’t exist without investment in failures. Critical lessons are learned through failure. Winning organisations know they must allow room for their “wild ducks” to experiment and sometimes fail to come up with innovations that change the market. Punishing failure is one of the surest ways to tame your wild ducks and encourage them to never innovate again.

2) Recognise only the “big wins” and not important progress along the way – It takes time to arrive at a new, marketable product or service. In some industries (most notably, bio-pharmaceuticals or bio-technology), it can take years to bring a new product to market. To sustain motivation and keep the wild ducks flying, it’s important to recognise small successes along the way.

3) Permitting a stagnant culture – Complacency can sneak up on anyone. Success today does not necessarily herald success tomorrow. Creating a culture that encourages forward thinking and risk taking is critical to ongoing success. Recognising and rewarding those who take calculated risks helps avoid taming your best wild ducks.

For more on the IBM Wild Ducks culture, watch the video below (or available here). Created as part of the IBM Centennial celebration, the video shares insight from four IBM customers who are themselves Wild Ducks. I particularly appreciated these points:

• From Howard-Yana Shapiro, chief agricultural officer of Mars, Inc.: “Any movement begins with absurd gestures.”
• From Carolyn McGregor, PhD SMIEEE, Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics, University of Ontario Institute of Technology: “Any time you try and change the way something is done, you come against resistance.”

How does your organisation keep your Wild Ducks flying? What absurd gestures are you recognising? What resistance are you helping overcome?