Meetings

Stand-up Meetings Inhibit Innovation

by Dagny Dukach
From the Magazine (January–February 2021)

Paul Linse/Getty Images

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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.
Professor Wu, defend your research.
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.

HBR: So frequent stand-up meetings make people less

innovative?
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. That’s
where agile can really help. Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell has told me
that reorganizing his company around agile management really paid
off. My view is that it worked because the firm had clear goals to
achieve. For example, when it wanted to improve its presentation
clicker to make it easier to see the laser pointer on large screens, it
came up with the idea of adding motion tracking to the clicker and
combining it with software to render a virtual “spotlight” on the
screen. For that kind of bounded, straightforward problem, bringing
in agile practices to get your engineers and designers to execute is
effective.
You studied a software hackathon. How is that different
from a real work environment?
The hackathon setup is actually very similar to how a lot of real-world
engineering work gets done. In fact, a number of successful start-ups
have come out of hackathons just like the one we studied. The teams
were similar in size to engineering or product design teams in real
companies, and they built real software applications. The main
difference was that the hackathon teams didn’t have to worry about
integrating their products with other functions like compliance,
billing, marketing, and customer support.
Another advantage of doing the experiment at a hackathon was that
we were able to observe the development process at an incredibly
granular level. Instead of just rating the end products, we could see
how teams coordinated and came up with new ideas in real time by
tracking their activity in GitHub. We saw exactly when individuals
leveraged specialized skills by adding advanced artificial intelligence
or cloud-based tools. We also saw that after each stand-up, engineers
would start merging their code, indicating a focus on integration
rather than on new ideas.

How do your findings apply to other industries, like

hardware, or to creative projects, like music or art?
Agile practices have been less common with hardware because it
tends to take a lot longer to develop, which makes the constant check-
ins and adjustments associated with agile more costly. In hardware,
“waterfall” practices—a hierarchical, linear approach—traditionally
make sense. But a lot of recent advances in hardware have actually
been software-based, as we saw with Logitech’s clicker. So agile is
worth thinking about even if your business has offered only hardware
products.
As far as creative projects go, the research suggests that agile
practices aren’t your best bet. If you’re working with a group to
develop a screenplay or a song, it’s better to let people go at it
independently. Of course, it also depends on the nature of the project.
If you’re working on a complex production with lots of moving parts,
stand-up meetings might be very effective for coordinating sound
engineers, writers, artists, and so on.
Does culture matter? You studied a tech environment in
the United States. Would your findings be different in other
countries or in nontech workplaces?
Local culture is absolutely an important factor. American culture can
be more individualistic and put less emphasis on authority and
following rules. In more-collectivist cultures, agile might inhibit
innovation more, since people would probably feel greater pressure to
adhere to the group goals discussed in stand-up meetings. Another
dimension of national and organizational culture is the extent to
which employees are trusted to work hard without supervision. The
coordination provided by agile is one way to monitor employees, but
that might not be necessary for all organizations.

That’s especially relevant now, since so many people are

working remotely in the pandemic.
Definitely. The shift away from offices has led to less constant
coordination and more independent work. The employees that gained
time and autonomy from going remote can focus more on their own
ideas (with the major caveat that many may have less time now
because of child care and other needs). Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
noticed in 2018 that he was more focused and creative when working
at home, and he just allowed Twitter employees to work from home
indefinitely. In my recent research it appears that virtual meetings,
adopted during the pandemic, generate less accountability toward
shared goals than in-person meetings do, suggesting that they may
not have as much of a negative impact on creativity.
Ultimately, what we’re all seeing is that you can’t plan out novelty. All
these companies are looking at Google, Facebook, and hip tech start-
ups and saying, “They’re innovative, and they use agile, so we should
too.” But that’s not what agile actually delivers.

DD
Dagny Dukach is an editorial coordinator at
Harvard Business Review.