Mention the word "innovation" in a room full of business leaders, and the conversation tends to get big very quickly. Artificial intelligence. Autonomous equipment. New business models. Breakthrough technology. Entirely new approaches to work.
In other words, everyone starts trying to reinvent the snowplow. But what if we have set the bar for innovation far too high?
We tend to celebrate innovation when someone creates something the world has never seen. That kind of innovation matters, but it represents only a fraction of the opportunities available to most organizations. For a snow and ice operation, meaningful innovation might be changing how crews receive assignments, redesigning pre-storm meetings, using an existing technology differently, eliminating an unnecessary approval, or finding a better way to communicate with clients during an event.
I think about innovation through two lenses: macro and micro. Macro innovation is something no one has ever done. It changes an industry, creates a category or introduces a genuinely new solution to the world.
Micro innovation is something you have never done. That distinction matters. Most organizations do not need to invent something the world has never seen. They need to become better at noticing what is not working, imagining a different way and giving themselves permission to try it.
An obsession with originality can actually make organizations less innovative. If every idea must be groundbreaking, people become hesitant to suggest anything. An employee may notice a better way to organize equipment or communicate route changes but assumes the idea is too simple to matter. A manager may encounter a practice at another company and dismiss it because someone else is already doing it.
But innovation should be measured against the problem you are trying to solve, not against the industry's history.
If your company has always held a 45-minute pre-storm meeting and someone finds a way to communicate the same information more effectively in 15 minutes, that is innovation. If another contractor has used a scheduling practice for years but your organization adopts it and dramatically reduces confusion, that is innovation, too.
There is no prize for being the first organization to solve a problem that somebody else has already solved.
Borrow. Adapt. Improve. Combine ideas. Look outside the industry. Pay attention to what your clients, vendors, and employees are doing differently. Micro innovation gives people permission to stop worrying about whether an idea is impressive and start asking whether it is useful. That is a much more productive question.
One of the richest sources of micro innovation is friction. Every operation has it. It is the repeated annoyance everyone has learned to tolerate. The spreadsheet that requires the same information to be entered twice. The phone call everyone knows is coming. The piece of equipment stored in an inconvenient location. The client question that has to be answered after every event. The handoff between shifts that routinely creates confusion.
None of those issues alone may seem significant enough to command leadership attention. Collectively, however, they can consume hundreds of hours, frustrate employees and create unnecessary opportunities for mistakes.
The problem is that familiarity makes friction invisible. When people work around the same problem long enough, the workaround eventually becomes the process. Nobody asks why because everybody already knows how to navigate it. What began as a temporary accommodation becomes "the way we do things here."
That is precisely where leaders should become curious. Ask your team: Where do we consistently lose time? What do we have to explain over and over? What requires more effort than it should? Where are people creating their own workarounds? If we were building this operation from scratch today, what would we never design this way?
Those questions can uncover more useful innovation than simply asking people to "be innovative."
This is where many brainstorming sessions fail. A room fills with ideas, the walls fill with sticky notes, everybody leaves energized and three months later nothing has changed. A whiteboard full of ideas is not innovation. Something has to happen differently.
The easiest way to move from conversation to action is to shrink the experiment. Rather than redesigning the entire operation, choose one route. Instead of changing communication for every client, test a new approach with five. Rather than purchasing a new platform companywide, determine whether one team can pilot it first. Then decide what you want to learn.
Did the change save time? Did it reduce mistakes? Did employees prefer it? Did clients notice a difference? Did it solve the original problem without creating three new ones?
Micro innovation lends itself especially well to experimentation because the stakes can remain relatively low. If an idea fails, the organization learns something without betting the business on it. If it works, expand it. The objective is not to eliminate failure. It is to make experimentation safe enough that people are willing to try.
There is one important caution. An innovation mindset does not mean constantly changing everything. Some processes work extremely well. Some traditions have value. Some "old" approaches remain better than the alternatives. Employees can also become exhausted when leaders continually introduce new tools, meetings, systems and initiatives without removing anything.
Innovation for innovation's sake is just another form of organizational clutter. The question should never simply be, "What can we change?" The better question is, "What can we make better?"
Sometimes the answer will involve new technology. Sometimes it will involve removing technology. Sometimes it will require adding a process. Sometimes the most innovative thing an organization can do is stop doing something altogether. The discipline is connecting innovation to a real problem or opportunity.
The organizations that innovate consistently are not necessarily populated by unusually creative people. They have developed habits that make improvement normal.
They notice friction. They question assumptions. They borrow good ideas without embarrassment. They create opportunities for people to think together. They test ideas at a manageable scale. And when something works, they incorporate the lesson into the operation. Over time, those improvements compound.
Ten minutes removed from a recurring process does not sound transformational. Neither does one clearer client communication, one better equipment handoff or one unnecessary approval removed from the system. Multiply those improvements across dozens of employees, hundreds of sites and an entire season, and small changes stop looking very small.
Macro innovation may change an industry, and once in a while someone really does reinvent the snowplow. Most organizations do not need to. Micro innovation asks a more useful question: What have we never done that might make us better?
Create enough space for your people to answer that question, give them permission to experiment with the answers, and you may be surprised by how much innovation was already sitting inside your organization.
Your team needs space to think
There is another obstacle to innovation that has nothing to do with creativity, technology or budget. People are busy.
During the season, urgency naturally crowds out reflection. Crews are focused on execution. Managers are juggling schedules, clients, equipment, weather and staffing. Owners are solving the problem immediately in front of them. Even when someone notices a better way of doing something, there is rarely time to explore it.
That is why innovation needs protected space. This might take the form of a staff retreat, a supervisor planning day, a team workshop or a dedicated brainstorming session. It does not need to be elaborate, expensive or off-site. What matters is creating a different kind of conversation from the one the team has every day.
And there is an important distinction here. A retreat should not simply be a regular staff meeting with better food. The value comes from creating enough distance from daily work to see the work differently. Instead of reviewing what needs to happen next week, ask what should happen differently next year. Instead of solving the latest operational problem, look for patterns across the last dozen problems.
What are we doing today that no longer makes sense? Where are our people compensating for a weak process? What would make us dramatically easier to work for? What would make us dramatically easier to work with? If we had to eliminate 20 percent of the steps in one process, which ones would go?
Sometimes the most important outcome of getting a team away from the daily operation is simply giving people permission to ask questions they do not normally have time to ask.
Run a micro-innovation session with your team
You do not need a major strategic retreat to start innovating. Set aside 45 to 60 minutes, bring together people with different perspectives and work through these six steps.
Put the people closest to the work in the room
Innovation can't belong exclusively to senior leadership. The person plowing a route sees things the owner cannot. The dispatcher hears communication patterns that may never reach an executive. The mechanic knows which equipment issue keeps returning. The account manager knows which client request repeatedly creates headaches for operations. Each person sees a different piece of the system.
That makes innovation especially powerful when organizations bring those perspectives together. An operations employee may identify a problem that someone in administration can solve. A salesperson may finally understand why a seemingly simple client promise creates enormous complexity in the field. Someone who has never worked directly with a process may ask the obvious question that everyone else stopped asking years ago.
Leaders do not need to enter these conversations with the answers. In fact, arriving with predetermined answers can defeat the purpose. Their role is to create the conditions in which better answers can emerge, and then to make sure promising ideas have somewhere to go.
Because collecting ideas without acting on them is worse than never asking for them at all.
Avi S. Olitzky is the president and principal consultant of Olitzky Consulting Group, based in Minneapolis, MN. Contact him at avi@olitzkyconsulting.com.