‘No Mental Surplus’: Workplace Innovation from Problem Solving to Problem Framing

Employees’ everyday problem solving is often mentioned as a crucial driver for innovation initiated at the workplace, referred to in the following as ‘workplace innovation’. Workplace innovation is here understood as long-lasting organizational change for the better contributed by employees owing to their experience, collaboration and learning through and for work. This chapter illustrates how this potential for workplace innovation was hard to realize in a new elderly care facility with a great amount of innovation in the form of new technology. Employees were busy solving problems, but this problem solving did not seem to provide grounds for long-lasting changes for the better – neither for themselves nor for the residents. Rather, problem solving tended to drain employees of what, using a Danish idiom for one’s inner reserves or spare capacity to address challenges, they referred to as a ‘mental surplus’. While highlighted in the literature as a driver for workplace innovation, employee problem solving seemed to be quite the opposite: tasks that merely added to their workload. On the basis of on this finding, we revisit the term ‘wicked problem’. When the term ‘wicked problem’ was first introduced by Rittel & Webber (1973), they pointed out that problem framing and problem solving are one intertwined process. While ‘wicked problem’ is a popular term often used to explain why innovation is needed, the problem-framing aspect is rarely addressed in depth. Accordingly, we suggest that, in order to contribute to workplace innovation, employees must be involved in problem framing and that problem framing should be given more attention in studies of workplace innovation as well as in the design of elderly care practices.