If your innovation culture leaves something to be desired and its your job to make it better, then come join me online at Pipeline 2014 for my FREE keynote on June 6, 2014 and find out five actions you can take to change your innovation culture for the better.
Here is a description of the session:
When it comes to innovation, far too much emphasis is placed on creativity, ideas and products. Innovation requires more than ‘aha’ moments. Innovation is a team sport, not an individual one, and while it may be easier for our reptilian brain to understand a single innovation hero, the truth is that every innovation figurehead from Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison had a whole lab or team of people behind them making the real innovation happen. In this session we will investigate what it takes to build a successful team of capable innovation practitioners and contributors that will effectively form a strong and sustainable innovation culture to power success for the organization, not just for the moment, but for the lifetime of the organization.
And here is some information on this FREE virtual conference:
If you’re not familiar with the Pipeline Conference, it is a virtual conference with more than 4,000 participants from 95 countries over the past four years. PIPELINE offers product development practitioners access to experts as well as practical information they can use right away – all from the comfort of their desks. From idea to launch to end-of-life, the content will appeal to any professional involved in the end-to-end product development process. In addition, the newly designed PIPELINE virtual platform serves as a resource center for 12 months following the live event with new content each quarter.
People who register for the conference get a free access to the resource center. PIPELINE 2013 was named Event of the Year category in Best in Biz Awards for virtual conference on innovative product development. For more information and to register, visit:
http://www.pipelineconference.com
I hope to see you online on June 6th for my presentation and the Q&A session!
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I had the opportunity to sit down recently with fellow author Scott Berkun to talk with him about his new book The Year Without Pants, which catalogs his experience in two years with Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com.
Our conversation touched on many different topics including innovation, collaboration, and organizational behavior.
For those of you who haven’t read the book or who aren’t familiar with how Automattic runs as an organization, here are some of the highlights:
All of the staff used to report to Matt Mullenweg, the 29-year-old creator of WordPress and founder of Automattic
When they passed 50 or so employees, about the time Scott Berkun joined, they introduced team leads
Organizational changes happen organically in the company, primarily when the pain gets great enough to force change
Automattic now has about 200 employees
Email is not the company communications standard – instead they use IRC and Skype and WordPress
Employees can work wherever they want
They have a company headquarters in San Francisco, but very few people work there
All employees get together in person annually and teams get together maybe twice in person to recharge intangibles
Hiring decisions are made not with traditional in-person interviews, but instead primarily by evaluating test projects
All new employees spend a couple of weeks working in support before occupying their intended role
Scott during his two years at Automattic led the Social team for WordPress.com and one of the things that he focused on while he was there, and that the book focuses on, is experimentation. One of the things that was fascinating in his detailing of his experience was that there was little resistance in his team to all of the experimentation that they engaged in. His theory was that they were ‘makers’ (he led a team of developers) and so they didn’t feel that there was a need to justify their existence. We spoke a great deal about why the culture at Automattic might be so accepting of experimentation, where other organizations are not, and this led to a discussion of some of my theories about the effects of scarcity and lack of firm growth, and we arrived at some of Scott’s comments that focused on the fact that there is too much fear in most organization and most managers don’t invest much time or effort in actually managing. Most managers don’t work to impact the feelings or environment for employees in companies that aren’t growing and/or where job opportunities are scarce. We then dug more into the culture topic.
Changing Culture is Painful
When it comes to culture change, there are a lot of consultants out there that would have you believe that they can come in an change your culture in 30-90 days, and while this might be possible it wouldn’t come without a great deal more pain than most organizations would be willing to bear. The reason a great deal of pain is required to affect culture change is the fact that an organization’s culture is typically determined by:
The organizations cultural history and inertia
The prevalent culture comes from the things that the largest number of people reinforce
So, in most cases changing the culture will require you to stop reinforcing behaviors that are reinforcing the current culture and start reinforcing behaviors that will lead you in the direction of the culture change you desire. What will this mean for the organization? Half the organization might leave! Are you ready for that? Many people who felt comfortable in the old culture, or that derived their power source from their old behaviors will need to be asked to leave the organization, or hopefully, will leave by their own efforts. Add into this potential chaos the fact that in most organizations the culture problem is often being created by the person asking for the culture change consulting, and how many consultants will reveal and stand behind this fact if it occurs?
One of the ways to ensure a healthy culture is constant experimentation driven by experiments that are instrumented for learning and dedicated to its pursuit. If an organization commits itself to a continuous practice of testing and learning within its management practices, in the same way that it hopefully dedicates itself to testing and learning with its products and services, then it has a much greater chance of maintaining a healthy, productive cultural environment. On the flip side, the way that we promote people in most organizations undermines the existence of a healthy, functional culture and so we need to rethink promotion. We need to ensure amongst other things that people with technical proficiency have a career path towards greater compensation that doesn’t have to include management responsibilities for those that don’t embrace the challenge and willingness to experiment in their management approaches. One of the reasons that Automattic’s culture is so strong, is because it was built to be entrepreneurial, collegial, and collaborative, and people are trusted to do what they do well (in their own way).
Of course I had to ask if people had left Automattic, and yes they have. In most cases the left to join other startups, and Scott believes that Automattic will probably stay in their minds one of the best places they worked.
Pressures From Outside
Another topic we touched on in our interview was whether or not Automattic felt pressure to make money faster after taking some VC rounds, but Scott said that while Automattic took some investment from VC’s, it was already profitable at the time and didn’t need the money but took the financing to gain other benefits and wasn’t under undue outside influence. As a result, Matt was able to purposely not assign a team or an individual to focus on growing revenue every quarter. he wanted to be careful not to turn up the monetization dial too fast because in doing so you often make bad decisions by doing so (product, etc.). There was no Store team when Scott joined, but there is now. Matt and team are very careful to maintain a long-term focus and they could easily monetize the 8th most popular web site more than they are (that’s a valuable asset), but are being careful in how they go about it.
Another thing I asked about was the impact on WordPress.com of things like Tumblr and Instagram and others, and Scott said that despite a lot of other companies and supposed competitors that have come along that have been hypothesized to supplant WordPress, they’ve never been super concerned. The reason?
WordPress itself is very flexible and so people are able to easily create themes that replicate the look and feel of a lot of the supposed competitors. The large WordPress community will build Tumblr like themes, etc. And the company itself is very resilient, and so when something new comes out, people will have a look at it and will either incorporate some of what they learn from it or ignore it if there doesn’t seem to be anything there. And, another point on the Automattic culture, if someone were to say “someone should…” in relation to something they see outside, then typically that person becomes the person to take it on.
There is a lot more I think we can learn from the Automattic experiment, and I may talk to Scott again to explore some of the learnings in the second half of the book, but wanted to rush these thoughts and nuggets from the conversation out to you. I hope they have been good for thought and you’ll think more if you’re a manager about what experiments you might run to see if you can make your group function even better.
Final Thoughts
Team size and how the organization grows up around its founder make a huge difference in how the culture evolves and reacts to its environment, and in Automattic Scott’s team was four when he started and nine when he left. The Theme team had 15 people on it, and the Happiness team (aka customer support) was the largest team at 25 people. One thing that happened along the way was when Scott’s Social team reached eight people it sort of naturally started to evolve into two separate sub-teams, which they called squads. Squad leadership was informal. There were no raises or title changes, and the squad leaders had naturally earned the most authority. They actually tried rotating leadership, but the results were mixed at best.
Another thing I asked Scott Berkun about team size was whether he thought the loose oversight and team structure would scale well as Automattic grows. He feels that it if they were to grow from say 200 to 1,000 employees they would probably insert another layer of management and break into groups of 100-150 people centered around product unit owners with teams underneath. This reinforces the thinking that they have at WL Gore, where they consciously spawn a new organization when it passes 60-70 people if my memory serves me correctly.
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Achieving innovation success is not easy. Sustaining innovation success is even harder. The list of innovative companies that no longer exist is long, and some of the biggest enemies of innovation are ultimately complacency and resistance to change.
So what is the key to innovation success?
What lies beneath the artifacts of innovation success that we could point to in individuals or companies that we hold up as innovation heroes?
Well, as I tell the audiences of my keynotes, workshops and masterclasses around the world, innovation success rises up from the intersection of invention (which includes creativity), collaboration, and entrepreneurship. This is why you see these topics covered so much here on Human-Centered Change & Innovation.
Invention
Invention and creativity are incredibly important to innovation, but invention is not innovation and creativity is not innovation. Invention and creativity are but one component to creating successful innovation. And so yes, teaching your employees new creativity tools like SCAMPER or SIT, engaging in brainstorming activities after teaching people how to brainstorm properly, or providing your employees the space and time in their work lives to innovate will help you achieve greater innovation success, but they are not the secret. They are but one part.
Collaboration
There are a number of people traveling through the world of business and innovation literature spreading the myth that people are either innovative or they or not, that people either possess the innovator’s DNA or they don’t. To that I say “hogwash” (or sometimes something a little bit stronger). Innovation is a team sport and we all have a role to play. It is because of this belief that I created the Nine Innovation Roles and this framework for team-based innovation has resonated well with people all around the world. As a result, the Nine Innovation Roles from my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire have already been translated into Spanish, French, and Swedish, with Dutch and Chinese translations on the way soon. If you’re not familiar with the Nine Innovation Roles, they are:
Revolutionary
Artist
Connector
Magic Maker
Customer Champion
Judge
Troubleshooter
Conscript
Evangelist
But understanding which of the Nine Innovation Roles you play on effective innovation teams is just the beginning. At the same time, we must begin to train our employees in the basic principles that power collaboration and teach them how to become effective collaborators. But collaboration is also only one component.
Entrepreneurship
Other than leadership, no other topic probably occupies a greater percentage of the space for business books in an American book store than entrepreneurship. This topic captivates the minds of people in the United States and in many other countries, and everywhere you go cities, states, countries, universities, and private companies are setting up incubators or startup accelerators to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. This is important, but the importance of entrepreneurship is not limited only to the entrepreneur. At the same time, we must not forget the importance of intrapreneurship to the continuing health of our organizations. In some ways, intrapreneurship is MORE important to the innovation success of a country than entrepreneurship because collaborative, creative intrapreneurship is the flavor of entrepreneurship that keeps a country’s great companies alive (through this innovation intersection of course). Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are both important and we must consciously try to grow both in a successful society, and while intrapreneurs may not have the same tolerance for risk as an entrepreneur, they also need to understand how to make a business case and other core tenets of entrepreneurship.
The Need to Integrate and Educate
I can state in no uncertain terms the importance for companies that are serious about innovation, and yes even countries or states or cities that are serious about innovation, to educate their people in the core knowledge, skills and abilities that relate to invention, collaboration and entrepreneurship. Companies need to educate their employees. Governments AND parents need to collaborate to teach their children. If you do this, your employees or your future citizens will have a much better chance of helping you achieve innovation success for your company or for your society. But even actively encouraging the intersection of invention, collaboration and entrepreneurship knowledge, skills, abilities and practice are not enough. The reason is because the power of this intersection does not represent the secret of innovation success. This intersection is central to sustained innovation success, but the secret lies elsewhere.
So what is the key to innovation success?
In one word?
The answer is…
CURIOSITY
Dictionary.com defines curiosity as “the desire to learn or know about anything; inquisitiveness.”
Merriam-Webster defines curiosity as “Desire to know… Inquisitive interest in others’ concerns…Interest leading to inquiry “
The reason that curiosity is the secret to innovation success is that the absence of curiosity leads to acceptance and comfort in the status quo. The absence of curiosity leads to complacency (one of the enemies of innovation) and when organizations (or societies) become complacent or comfortable, they usually get run over from behind. When organizations or societies lack curiosity, they struggle to innovate. Curiosity causes people to ask ‘Why’ questions and ‘What if’ questions. Curiosity leads to inspiration. Inspiration leads to insight. Insights lead to ideas. And in a company or society where invention, collaboration and entrepreneurship knowledge, skills, abilities and practice are encouraged, ideas lead to action.
So, if you want to have innovation success in your company or in your society, you must work to create a culture that encourages curiosity instead of crushing it. Unfortunately technology and the educational system in the United States and the rallying cry of “More STEM!” are having the unintended consequence of crushing creativity and creating a generation of trivia experts and linear thinkers for our society. We as parents and educators and managers must as a result seek to undo some of this damage. If you haven’t already read it, I encourage you to check out my article ‘Stop Praying for Education Reform‘.
We must find ways to reawaken the curiosity of our employees, to keep them curious, and to keep the curiosity of our children alive. We must find a way to fight against the tyranny of linear thinking and the ‘right’ answer, and instead inspire our children to continue asking ‘why’ – despite the fact that sometimes it can be annoying. 😉
To close I will leave you with a bastardized quote from the most interesting man in the world:
“Stay curious my friend.”
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We speak too much in our society about the lone innovator, but the truth is that innovation is a team sport.
Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Steve Jobs all had teams of people behind them making the innovations happen that they often get credited with.
So if innovation doesn’t come from the lone genius, then where does it come from?
In a couple of weeks I will participate in an ExecuNet webinar on July 25, 2013 at 1PM EDT, and we will explore my nine innovation roles that must be filled for innovation efforts to succeed in today’s organizations. During this exclusive ExecuNet webinar, I will also highlight several other innovation principles that impact business growth and performance during this event that will be free for ExecuNet members and only $99.95 for guests.
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As organizations become more mature in their process excellence efforts, an increasing number of organizations are turning their attention to try and achieve innovation excellence.
So where should your journey of a thousand innovation steps begin?
As your organization begins its innovation journey it is helpful to know where you are starting from in terms of your innovation maturity level and where the strengths and weaknesses of your innovation culture lie.
In my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, that many organizations are buying in bulk and using to help establish their organization’s common language of innovation, I promised to share my 50 question innovation audit on this web site, and so here it is.
The audit is designed to examine many different areas of your innovation culture and help you identify both what your level of innovation maturity is, but also the areas where you have a strong base to build from and where you need to invest more effort.
To properly use my innovation audit, you should have large sections of your employee population fill out the survey (both in management and operational roles) across several different business specialties and office locations. The data can then be looked at by department, business specialty, office location and other groupings that make sense to identify both commonalities and differences.
If you would like assistance interpreting the results, please contact me to see the different options for engaging my services. Many companies combine this with an innovation speaker engagement or some innovation training for their employees.
I hope you find this innovation audit of use, and I thank you for buying the book (or considering doing it now)!
A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an innovation speaker at an event, I noticed a large building by the side of the freeway advertising Indoor Sky Diving. The sign peaked my curiosity to investigate what indoor sky diving could possibly mean and so I set up a visit with iFly Seattle co-founder Lysa Adams.
My visit surfaced three key innovation-related concepts I would like to discuss:
Challenging Orthodoxies
Changing Perspectives
Tunnel Vision
1. Challenging Orthodoxies
Rowan and I talk a lot here on Innovation Excellence about how challenging orthodoxies is one way to identify insights to drive innovation efforts, and it made me wonder:
Have they successfully challenged the skydiving orthodoxies that you need the following to experience the thrill of skydiving or ‘flying’?
To jump out of an airplane
To carry and deploy a parachute
To learn several parachuting skills before progressing to sky diving
What if you could experience experience sky diving without the parachute and the airplane and the training?
Well, after my visit it was clear that iFly and SkyVenture have successfully challenged these orthodoxies with the indoor flying centers they’ve built here in Seattle and 22 other locations around the world including Hollywood, Dubai, and Singapore.
The facility itself seemed to be well-designed, recycling the air through two fan-driven intersecting circles of air that are accelerated from about 30mph through the basement up to 100-160 mph through the chamber up and back around again. Integrated into the space around the necessary apparatus are meeting rooms for corporate team-building events and party rooms for private functions. Organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Boeing, and the military have used the facility. It’s a pretty a cool facility and it was even a fair amount of fun just to watch others fly from the integrated viewing area.
So what is indoor skydiving and how can you experience the thrill of skydiving and ‘flying’ without the plane or the parachute? Well here is a video that shows an amateur learning the basic skills in their first session:
In a vertical wind tunnel people are able to fly in any of the four different skydiving positions – stomach, back, sitting, and head down (after mastering the previous one) – supported by wind speeds typically of 100 miles per hour or higher (an indoor hurricane). The vertical wind tunnel at iFly Seattle is state of the art, allowing wind speeds of up to 160 miles per hour.
I had the opportunity to learn how to fly and try it out for a couple of minutes, and I looked pretty much like the novices in the video above. I was flying successfully by my second minute, floating up beyond the reach of the instructor temporarily, and never felt any of the fear I might have felt if I had done my ‘flying’ by jumping out of an airplane. It was an amazing experience, and I could see how it could be very addictive.
So other than challenging orthodoxies, what does any of this have to do with innovation?
2. Changing Perspectives
Innovation often comes from looking at things from a different perspective, or from observing something potentially valuable to your target customers in another context that you can adapt and bring to them as a new solution offering.
This change in perspective can come from using creativity tools like Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ or other tools like mind mapping, brainstorming, brainwriting, SCAMPER, SIT, or from building and tapping into a Global Sensing Network.
Or it can come from physically changing your orientation. In the case of sky diving, sometimes sky diving teams have to get down on their bellies on wheelie boards on the concrete to show each other the tricks they plan to do in the air or in the vertical wind tunnel. It’s hard for the brain to imagine in a vertical orientation what is going to take place in a horizontal orientation, and this simple physical shift makes all the difference.
If it doesn’t come natural to our brains to imagine the horizontal from the vertical, imagine the trouble our brains have imagining different business contexts without being immersed in them. We often have to go see the other context for ourselves as a result, but a Global Sensing Network can help avoid this need to some extent. But this requirement to see things for ourselves highlights something very important. Because changing perspectives presents a challenge for our human brains, it presents an opportunity for us to work to achieve competitive separation.
Imagine the competitive advantage your organization could build over the other organizations in your context if you could build up your perception shifting muscles to recognize the relevant challenges and opportunities in other geographies and contexts faster than the competition?
3. Tunnel Vision
Do you remember what is like the first time you learned to drive a car? Do you remember how much you had to focus on every little detail from how hard you were pushing the accelerator to how fast you were moving the steering wheel left or right? But how much attention do you pay to these things now?
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.
When it comes to innovation, most organizations suffer from innovation tunnel vision because as they look to involve more employees in their innovation efforts, they don’t give their employees the opportunity to learn and practice new innovation skills. Instead in many organizations we expect employees to just be innovative.
When it comes to creativity skills that tap into our right brain capacity, it is important to remember that as we master right brain skills they move to the left brain. And, when your left brain is occupied, then the right brain can go into a more creative mode. This is why you have many of your most creative ideas in the shower, or while you are driving, etc.
When the left brain is occupied it is less likely to intervene and criticize the ideas your right brain comes up with while they are embryonic and partially formed and kill them before you develop them further. When the left brain is not jumping in and trying to determine whether the ideas are logical or not, the right brain can focus on pure creativity.
This is why it is so important to create things like a common language of innovation, a shared innovation vision/strategy/goals, and to have a structured innovation process. If these things are all very clearly understood across the organization, then your innovation tunnel vision opens up a bit wider to allow you to identify more relevant insights and come up with better ideas. But you can’t stop there. If you want to engage all employees in innovation in your organization (or even a subset), and you want to open up the innovation tunnel vision in your organization even wider, then you must provide innovation training to every employee in the organization (or your chosen subset).
The faster you can get your employees to a level of comfort with your innovation language, vision/strategy/goals, process, and tools, the sooner they will be driving innovation with their knees, eating a Big Mac, and changing your innovation soundtrack – all with the windows down letting in new stimulus and fresh air into your innovation efforts.
Every organization has innovation tunnel vision, the question is how wide or narrow your field of vision is and how much you’re doing to pry the blinders farther apart.
Conclusion
We all are innovative in our own way, which is why I created the Nine Innovation Roles. But at the same time, we all have a certain level of innovation capacity, and if we develop that capacity we can achieve much more. If you want to get better at innovation as an individual or as an organization, you must learn new skills and you must practice them. Otherwise you will be an innovation belly flier forever. Thanks to Darren (my instructor at iFly Seattle – who used to be involved with Cirque du Soleil) and to Lysa Adams I was able to fly for the first time, but if I want to progress to back flying or sit flying on the way to head down flying and doing tricks, I must practice – in the same way that you must practice innovation in your organization. To conclude, I’ll leave you with this video of one of the instructors showing off and some team flying:
If you ever get the chance to try out indoor skydiving or ‘flying’, I highly recommend it as an amazing, fun experience. The cost runs about $60 for some basic instruction and a couple of instructor monitored flights (without the whole parachute or jumping out of the plane part). Happy innovating (or flying)!
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In support of my crowdfunding project over on IndieGoGo I am offering an incredible deal to the first TEN (10) individuals to grab this perk:
In exchange for each $500 investment, the first TEN (10) people anywhere in the world will get:
One of only TEN (10) spots in an online seminar where I will personally train you on how to facilitate a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or public seminar
A share of any Nine Innovation Roles Workshop leads that I can’t fulfill myself
A Nine Innovation Roles Seminar Pack – which includes TEN (10) Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tools to use with your first set of workshop participants (a $199.99 value)
This is a great opportunity to add the Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop to your roster of innovation services that you offer to clients. You should be able to charge between $2,000-$5,000 + expenses for each of the sessions you facilitate depending on the length and amount of custom content, so you should recoup your $500 investment after running your first workshop or public seminar.
The Nine Innovation Roles diagnostic workshop will create a fun, interactive experience for innovation teams or organizations to use to help people better understand what roles they fill on innovation projects, why the team’s or organization’s innovation efforts are failing, and how they can together improve the innovation performance of their teams or organization.
So, grab this Amazing Innovation Keynote and Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Deal and help your innovation teams be more successful in the future. Don’t wait. Be one of only TEN (10) people worldwide to get this perk, or pre-order the seminar kit and run run workshops or seminars on your own.
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How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?
When it comes to creating an innovation culture, often people make it far too complicated. If you’re part of the senior leadership team and you’re serious about innovation then your job is simple – reduce friction.
If you’re serious about innovation and you’re not a senior leader, then your job is to do what you can to convince senior leadership that innovation is important. Then, gently help your execs see the areas of greatest friction in your organization so they can do something about it.
When it comes to creating a culture of innovation, the most frequently cited area of friction in organizations is the acquisition of resources for innovation projects (the infamous time and money). Senior leaders serious about innovation must eliminate the friction that makes it difficult for financial and personnel resources to move across the organization to the innovation projects that need them (amongst other things).
But this particular impediment is just a part of a much larger barrier to innovation – the lack of an innovation strategy. When senior leadership commits to innovation and sets a strong and clear innovation strategy then policies and processes get changed and resources move.
A couple of years ago I ran a poll on LinkedIn asking people to identify their organization’s biggest barrier to entry. 566 people responded and 58% of respondents identified either the absence of an innovation strategy or the psychology of the organization as the biggest barrier. ‘Organizational psychology’ came out on top with 32% of the vote, with ‘Absence of an innovation strategy’ a close second (26%). Other choices in the poll included – ‘Organizational structure’, ‘Information sharing’, and ‘Level of trust and respect’.
(poll results timed out on LinkedIn)
A second major area of innovation friction is the movement of information. Too often there is information in disparate parts of our organizations that remains separated and unknown to the people who need it. Organizations that reduce the friction holding back the free flow of relevant information to where it is needed will experience a quantum leap in not only their product or service development opportunities, but in many other parts of their organization including sales, marketing, and operations.
So, what are the areas of friction that are holding your organization back from reaching its full innovation potential?
What are the barriers to innovation that have risen in your organization as you struggle to maintain a healthy balance between your exploration and exploitation opportunities?
I’ve explored the idea of barriers to innovation further in my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons. It’s been called “accessible and comprehensive” and companies have been acquiring it in bulk to both identify and knock down barriers to innovation, but also to build a common language of innovation.
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I came across Yougme Moon’s “Anti-Creativity Checklist” over at the Harvard Business Review after a tweet from @lindegaard and it got me thinking…
In order to build a culture capable of encouraging innovation or creativity (or both), you must first do an inventory of the psychology and mental models in play in your organization.
One great way to do this would be to build an ‘anti-innovation checklist’ or an ‘anti-creativity checklist’. If you start watching the vocabulary that people use in meetings where ideas are being discussed, the behavior of senior leadership as it relates to these areas, and most importantly – how people respond – you’ll get a better sense of where your organizational challenges lie with respect to innovation and creativity. Wouldn’t that make such an exercise of great value to an organization?
Anyways, as an example, I’ve pulled out the fourteen items on Yougme Moon’s checklist from the video above, which you may just want to watch:
Play it safe. Listen to that inner voice.
Know your limitations. Don’t be afraid to pigeonhole yourself.
Remind yourself: It’s just a job.
Show you’re the smartest guy in the room. Make skepticism your middle name.
Be the tough guy. Demand to see the data.
Respect history. Always give the past the benefit of the doubt.
Stop the madness before it can get started. Crush early-stage ideas with your business savvy.
Been there, done that. Use experience as weapon.
Keep your eyes closed. Your mind too.
Assume there is no problem.
Underestimate your customers.
Be a mentor. Give sound advice to the people who work for you.
Be suspicious of the “creatives” in your organization.
When all else fails, act like a grown-up.
What is on your “anti-innovation checklist” or your “anti-creativity checklist”?
Please feel free to share yours in the comments below.
In this economic downturn there is more pressure than ever on executives to find new sources of growth, and as a result leaders are increasingly talking about innovation. In some organizations the leader may say “we need to be more innovative” or “we need to think out of the box” and stop there. While for other organizations it may become part of the year’s goals or even the organization’s mission statement. Only in a small number of cases will there be any kind of sustained effort to enhance, or create, a culture of continuous innovation.
By now everyone has probably heard of six sigma and continuous improvement, and maybe your organization has even managed to embed its principles into its culture, but very few organizations have managed to transform their cultures to support innovation in a sustainable way. For most organizations, innovation tends to be something that is left to the R&D department or that is thought of on a project basis. Some organizations create new innovation teams, but it is rare for an organization to invest in transforming their entire culture. There are many reasons for this:
Support from top leadership is required
Challenge: Most executive teams are focused on short-term results and transforming organizational culture is a long-term investment of financial and leadership resources.
Clear goals and guidance are needed
Challenge: This is a bigger barrier than you might think. Most organizations struggle to understand how to set innovation goals and to provide a vision for employees on how they might get there. Goals to ‘be innovative’ or ‘think outside the box’ are not specific enough to be successful.
Every organization is different
Challenge: The starting place, needs and barriers to creating a culture of continuous innovation are different for every organization – making easy implementation of best practices impossible
Most companies lack a shared vocabulary for innovation
Challenge: People in different parts of the organization use different terminology, methodologies, frameworks, and have different understandings of what innovation is. The lack of a shared vocabulary prevents organizations from achieving shared success.
Change is painful
Challenge: Creating a culture of continuous innovation threatens the power base of a critical few, and disrupts the way people think about their jobs and the organization. Even if change is for the better, people tend to want to avoid change.
Change needs to be managed
Challenge: This means pulling employees off of their day jobs or hiring consultants to commit to the leadership and communications surrounding the change effort. This investment may prove challenging in the current economic climate.
Change takes time
Challenge: Organizations seeking to create a culture of continuous innovation must realize that the transformation will not happen overnight. People can only absorb so much change at once. The transformation will likely have to be broken up into separate phases with discreet goals (don’t try to do it all at once).
Make sure to stop and share the successes of each phase, and also to identify what you’ve learned that can be implemented in the next phase.
Visualize the outcomes of participation
Challenge: Often people withdraw and choose not to participate in organizational transformations because they don’t believe that their participation will positively impact their daily lives. If those who choose to participate don’t see an impact from their early efforts, might choose to disengage as the process continues.
You must celebrate participation and highlight the impact of individual contributors throughout the process.
New systems and processes may be required
Challenge: To innovate continuously, you need to be open to receiving great ideas from anywhere in the company, and must have systems and processes to manage idea gathering, evaluation, and development. Often this requires a financial and personnel investment.
Change efforts require lots of communication and storytelling
Challenge: You have to bring the change to life for employees. This requires involvement of employees early and often in the communications surrounding the goals and outcomes of the cultural transformation
Create a story that is easy and fun to tell – this will make it easier to cascade the change downwards through the organization
This should give you a better idea of why very few organizations embark upon the difficult work to enhance or create a culture of continuous innovation. It may not be an easy or a short journey, but creating a culture of continuous innovation is the only way to increase your chances of avoiding organizational mortality.
Successfully creating a strong culture of continuous innovation also represents a huge opportunity for an organization to attract the best talent, to lower costs, to continuously add new revenue streams, and to better achieve competitive separation.
Is your organization ready to invest the hard work towards achieving the rewards of a culture of continuous innovation?
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Interview with Scott Berkun
Achieving innovation success is not easy. Sustaining innovation success is even harder. The list of innovative companies that no longer exist is long, and some of the biggest enemies of innovation are ultimately complacency and resistance to change.
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How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?
In this economic downturn there is more pressure than ever on executives to find new sources of growth, and as a result leaders are increasingly talking about innovation. In some organizations the leader may say “we need to be more innovative” or “we need to think out of the box” and stop there. While for other organizations it may become part of the year’s goals or even the organization’s mission statement. Only in a small number of cases will there be any kind of sustained effort to enhance, or create, a culture of continuous innovation.