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.

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.

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.