Why the joy of tinkering is important

Everyone imagines that big engineering companies are filled with intellectuals in lab coats who are super serious all the time. But if you take a closer look at the successful ones, you'll see that a lot of the innovation and creativity are fueled by people who are only too happy to not be 'serious'. Research and development may sound like important work done in sterile laboratory environments, but many good researchers are ultimately just people at play in their professional playgrounds. An idea will catch their attention, pique their curiosity, and the next thing you know, they are off to toy with the problem and approach it with creativity. Just like how a child wants to stretch the limits of possibility for a new toy they've got, so do engineers try to see all the different ways they can tackle an idea.

Take our CEO's word for it 

Sound a bit far-fetched? Well, our co-founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu certainly doesn't think so. The importance of playing and tinkering with ideas is something he believes in strongly enough that he made a post on Connect about it (let's just say it's our organization's town square.) What prompted him to write the post was a Github passion project he had found online.

Here's what he said:

"Why do people do these things? Even if you spend millions or tens of millions of dollars on R&D, this kind of project is difficult. Yet, people spend their free time doing it! That is love of tinkering.

That spirit is vitally needed to get anything 'serious' done. You may think a project like the above is pointless, but everything is pointless until we discover a point. There are some ideas that I have toyed with for decades, and am executing only now.

I want to spark that tinkering culture in our company. R&D is not always about 'serious' things done in formalized ways. R&D is about having fun tinkering!"

How to ingrain this attitude across an organization

So, tinkering is good. That's great. But how do you create a conducive environment for a culture of tinkering and innovation? How do you encourage an atmosphere where playing around with ideas is encouraged when it seems to be counter-intuitive to the idea of productivity?

Encourage risk-taking 

Make it understood that it's okay to go for long shots sometimes. Good things don't come easy, and it's okay to attempt something and fail as long as the chance of failure is not 100%. Companies that encourage a mindset of risk-taking in R&D will end up with more innovation and creativity over time, resulting in competitive advantages that less ambitious companies cannot easily overcome.

It's important to remember that risk-taking doesn't necessarily mean operating at the cutting edge. If the example of Gunpei Yokoi and Nintendo from the previous blog has anything to teach, it's that invention doesn't always have to be sought at the limits of technology. There are plenty of exciting discoveries to be made within the technological frontier.

Let's take the example of Zoho Writer. It wasn't a cutting-edge solution when it was conceived. After all, word processing software had already existed for some time. But we decided to develop a word processing software product betting on the potential of cloud technology.

Not measuring too much 

This is connected to the previous point. If everything in your organization is obsessively measured and tracked, it becomes difficult to encourage risk-taking. After all, risky projects can end up as failures. If the metrics of one's failures are held against an employee, then they are guaranteed to work on safe, bland work that does not challenge or disrupt anything. Like the saying goes, good is the enemy of great.

Also read: the capitalist urge to measure everything (and why it hurts business)

Encourage internal mobility 

Sure, true blue inventors and innovators demonstrate remarkable grit and the ability to work on difficult challenges over a long period of time with determination. But at the same time, one has the best chance of bringing out this side of them when they are working on a challenge they are genuinely interested in. To quote psychologist Todd Ross, "If you get someone into a context that suits them, they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside."

This is why, in an engineering-first company, it helps to be open to the idea of internal mobility. If a researcher has truly lost their passion for the domain they are in and/or they find a different domain appealing, it makes sense to have them switch. If the person in question is a talented individual, the alternative might be to lose them to a different organization. Why would you want that when you can have their brain power at work on a different problem in your organization? Read more on this topic here.

Reducing marketing spends 

Okay, how could this possibly have any impact on a culture of tinkering, we hear you ask.

Well, at Zoho, we spend less on marketing so that we can pour more money into what actually matters to us and excites us — R&D!

Having lower marketing costs means there is less pressure to recoup said costs, and more room to keep experimenting and failing. That, of course, means more engineering excellence and better products for our customers.

Good things take time 

It's a maxim we take to heart at Zoho, and it's an approach that has worked well for us. It's not easy to create an ethos of tinkering and experimentation in a culture of urgency. It's easy to be mistaken that good engineering output is just about the technical and scientific parts, but it depends a lot on an organization's culture too. It's incredible to see how when one gets culture right, so many other pieces of the puzzle start falling into place.