Innovation

How innovative would you say you are at work? How innovative is your team? How innovative is your organisation?

Let’s first make sure we’re on the same page. What do I mean by innovation?

Innovation as in doing things differently, in a way it hasn’t been done before. Thinking critically and coming up with new and genius ways to get spectacular results.

Read more: Innovation

Many people, teams and organisation are not very innovative, they may say they want to be but in fact their structure, rituals and culture actually hinder innovation. Their behaviours show that what they really value is conformity and predictability.

I once worked on a team that was undertaking a groundbreaking initiative to transform business processes. It was an opportunity to reflect on the way we were doing things and truly design a new way of working that would produce measureable outcomes in ways of working. Althought the programme had potential its execution was anything but. It ended up being a programme where old ways of thinking prevailed over the opportunity and potential of doing something that had never been done before.

This is because people relied too heavily on past experiences in a way that was detrimental.

To innovate you have to be willing to challenge the status quo. You have to be willing to challenge everything.

Past experiences are a wonderful gift that can enable innovation if used critically but if it is simply relied on as gospel without critical interogation, then it can turn into a limiting factor to innovation. That is to say, you’ll just end up doing things the way you’ve always done them because you haven’t taken the time to critically reflect on your experience.

To innovate you have to be willing to challenge the status quo. In fact I would say you have to be willing to challenge everything. Challenge norms, challenge pre-conceived ideas, challenge peoples experiences, challenge your own biases and tendencies. For innovation to flourish you have to have a culture where peole aren’t afriad to speak up and challenge each other regardless of their role, status or years of experience. You must have a culture of open and free debate about ideas and the way things should be done.

You have to have an understanding that the best ideas usually come from open, trusting, vigourous debate. No one person has a monopoly on brilliant ideas. Brilliant ideas emerge from collective refinement where people don’t relinquish their views easily through groupthink, peer pressure or a culture of conformity and false harmony. They rather put forward their ideas and are encouraged to fight for them till they are chiseled and refined through collective reasoning. This kind of culture takes openness, trust and has to be cultivated intentionally.

How do you cultivate such a culture?

Some thoughts below.

Values

We actualise what we value. So to adopt this type of culture, an organisation must make open debate a value. And values are to be communicated often. Just as we communicate our mission, goals, forecasts, and performance figures openly and often, we must communicate the value of open debate in this same way to show our teams how much we value it.

Communications

Communications can be at the group level but also needs to happen on the individual level. How are leaders and senior management relaying the value of open debate? Are they encouraging their teams to communicate their ideas fearlessly? Do they foster that approach in their own management style or do they dominate discussions without giving room and space to be challenged. Do senior leaders always try to have the best or right answers?

People must know that being challenged and challenging the ideas of others is part of the way things are done and the way in which brilliant ideas are born so they must be encouraged to do so.

Reward

Rather than only rewarding performance, reward contributions. Simply engaging and contributing ideas fearlessly should be rewarded. People gravitate towards things that they can be recognised for so our recognition program should include recognition for simply engaging and contribution to ideas.