How Reciprocity Can Fuel Innovation

We are all part of social groups: students enrolled in a class together, co-workers in the same department, supporters of a given soccer team, Russian literature aficionados, and so on. For each group, there are unspoken rules that represent desired behaviors. And even though there may not exist any explicit punishment for those who do not comply with them, voluntary adherence makes you part of that group.

These rules are called social norms, and they can influence people by indicating expected attitudes and behaviors in different contexts. Moreover, they “also constitute perhaps one of the most important elements of what recently has been termed ‘social capital’—the informal cooperative infrastructure of our societies.”⁵

One of the most powerful norms is dictated by reciprocity, meaning that “in response to friendly actions, people are frequently much nicer and much more cooperative than predicted by the self-interest model.”⁵ Examples are abundant and widely investigated in behavioral sciences:

• Waiters and waitresses who smile get tipped much more than ones who don’t⁶
• It is difficult for people to accept free samples without buying the product⁷
• Solicitation letters from charities are often followed with small gifts⁸
• Hospitals often ask former patients for donations⁹
• Adults readily agree when a co-worker who helped them move last month asks for some assistance with his or her own move this coming weekend¹⁰
• People typically make a point to send birthday presents to those who remembered their birthday¹⁰

It’s clear that the norm of reciprocity can have a powerful effect on our behavior. But it may still come as a surprise that reciprocity could also play an important role in boosting creativity.

Here we turn to an unorthodox method to stimulate innovation, created within the walls of Adobe.

Back in 2013, Mark Randall, then-Chief Strategist and VP of Creativity at Adobe, developed an enterprise framework to support the experimentation journey and involve employees in the company’s innovation process.

The idea was represented by a toolkit named “Kickbox.”11 The kit, which was distributed to any employee who asked for it (managers could not veto the request), came in the form of a red cardboard box that featured a picture of a fire alarm, reading “Pull in case of idea.” It contained:

• Instruction cards;
• A pen;
• A timer;
• Two sets of Post-it notes;
• Two notebooks;
• A Starbucks gift card;
• A bar of chocolate; and
• A US$ 1,000 prepaid card.

Yes, you read it right: $1,000 that employees could spend on whatever they wanted to develop their project. No expense reports, no justification required.

Creativity is built on trust

Adobe describes the Kickbox as an initiative “designed to increase innovator effectiveness, accelerate innovation velocity, and measurably improve innovation outcomes.”¹¹ Its instruction manual guides employees from the ideation stage all the way through testing sessions, encouraging them to beat all 6 levels of the exercise and come up with something that could be readily launched.

At the heart of this clever strategy: trust. By offering everyone the opportunity to engage in and design the future of the business, Adobe executives demonstrate a high level of trust in people’s engagement and commitment to their experimentation.

From a behavioral perspective, it creates the perfect scenario for reciprocity, where collaborators find themselves “in debt” to the organization, while still feeling comfortable enough to explore unorthodox ways to solve problems or create products and services. It is also a process where employees are expected to take initiative without needing any prior management approval.¹²

The whole idea for Kickbox came from Randall’s desire to mix Silicon Valley-style iterations with more tangible and scalable processes and incorporate both into Adobe’s innovation programs. It offered an alternative to a problem many other companies faced: the fact that most ideas are left unspoken because convincing management represents a huge source of friction for employees.¹³ Furthermore, it transformed the innovation budget by splitting resources into hundreds of “little bets,” instead of just a few (therefore riskier) big ones.

Because the Kickbox method is open source and available for any company to emulate,⁵ I wanted to highlight the potential of relationships that are founded on reciprocity. As business leaders, we must develop an environment where people not only trust their colleagues at different organizational levels, but feel psychologically safe to take risks. If we can achieve this, many unique and valuable proposals might be unboxed, too.