Why monitoring and innovation make poor bed fellows

People always act surprised when I shiver at the word 'monitoring' (aka 'scrutiny'). I would like to take the opportunity to explain this phenomena.

When you unpick the word and activity called 'monitoring', you will uncover a number of unwritten principles, ambiguous meanings and perceptions. They include:

- Distrust: when you feel the need to monitor, it usually means you are not trusting of the source and will seek out weaknesses in the detail to prove the activity of monitoring helps to make improvements. In truth, it doesn't help improve things, it drags decision back into the past.

- Past-driven: monitoring is the activity of checking afterwards what you could have influenced earlier and made better by getting involved at the start. When 'errors' or 'weaknesses' are uncovered, the expectation is that decisions are taken back to the 'drawing board', often stopping an organization to move forward into the future.

- Expecting perfection: monitoring suggests that perfection exists and is expected. No matter how many people contribute, there is no such thing as perfection. However, the expectation of perfection in turn ...

- Installs anxiety, stress and fear: not acknowledging perfection is a myth can lead to a lot of anxiety, stress and fear, which in turn leads to poorer decision-making, more complaints, higher distrust and interestingly increased monitoring (and bureaucracy) ...

- One size must fit all: looking for perfection really is a search for a one size fits all solution, and as we know one size fits no one, leading to increased negative customer feedback which is often met by increased monitoring ...

This shows how one 'innocent' word and activity can have such a significant implication on the culture of your organisation.

If you are committed to creating a culture of innovation, start by rebalancing 'energy-draining' activities such as monitoring with 'motivating' activities such as:
- trust others for increased trustworthiness, commitment and accountability
- change your focus from past to present and future
- get involved and influence early (or get out of the way and empowering others)
- be humble
- personalise
- co-create
- experiment
- learn from mistakes

... and watch how innovation (aka higher performance) will blossom in your organisation.

So am I saying that organisations should stop monitoring? Not exactly. As with everything, it's about finding the right balance. In many organisations I have worked in and with, monitoring is the order of the day and has set a culture of distrust and high bureaucracy. The best way to think about it is the 80:20 rule. If organisations prioritise monitoring as the 80% activity, it will struggle to innovate and survive. If it prioritises innovation as 80%, the organisation is more likely to continuously improve and survive.