Both Crystal and I have been asked in our professional careers “What’s the secret to your success?” and “How are you able to consistently build innovative teams and deliver innovative ideas?” This series is where we will share some of the secrets we’ve gathered along the way. If you’ve read anything else we’ve written, you won’t be surprised that it all starts with culture, though we will talk about experience (and cognitive diversity), challenging the status quo, technology, execution, and many others.
A question I’m frequently asked is
“Where does Innovation come from?”
Innovation can feel fleeting, like a desert mirage or rainbow that appears as an optical illusion but quickly disappears. Professor Costas Markides from the London School of Business has a fun phrase
“Innovation is not the goal — it’s a byproduct of something else.”
There are some excellent videos of his online where he talks about his views about positive/healthy organizational culture.
I’ve worked in a lot of different environments and organizations. Some had a positive organizational culture, and some were negative. There were traditional hierarchical structures and non-traditional structures — though few of these elements were predictive of how innovative the team I was working with would be.
Being innovative is not a permanent attribute or reward that a person or organization can obtain and then place in their trophy case. It’s an accomplishment that’s both rewarding and fleeting because it can easily be lost, and takes a great amount of directed energy to obtain and sustain.
Thinking about how you can foster a culture of innovation is the first way to start. Imagine planting a seed and then setting up the right environment for that seed to grow into a plant and then bloom into a flower. You have to control for a variety of variables: air temperature, humidity, soil alkalinity, nitrogen levels, water, and sunlight. Depending on where you planted the seed you may get some of those items for free, but they are still there to affect the outcome of your experiment.
Innovation is the same way: it always starts with a seed that you would like for a team to do more thinking “outside the box” and challenging the status quo. But you have to pay attention to your environment to ensure you are cultivating and growing innovation at the pace that your organization can handle.
Well, let’s start with a favorite of mine — Failure. It’s the “F word” I wrote an earlier blog post about, and it’s really important to confront how your organization/group/team treats it.
Let’s start with some questions:
Well, let’s start with a favorite of mine — Failure. It’s the “F word” I wrote an earlier blog post about, and it’s really important to confront how your organization/group/team treats it. Let’s start with some questions:
- What is the reaction/response to something that doesn’t go as planned?
- How are experiments, projects, programs tracked? Is there a complete history of everything that’s been attempted?
- How are failed projects and experiments talked about?
(or are they buried from view and obscured from history?) - When something new is being pitched/proposed/green-lit/planned how is failure discussed?
- When thinking of risks, is the focus on mitigating that the risk doesn’t happen or understanding why the risk would happen?
- Has a risk ever been turned into an opportunity?
- Has anyone ever been rewarded for taking a risk on something that didn’t work?
- How often is the phrase “thank you” used to truly compliment people or teams for their cross-functional efforts?
Ask yourself these questions and you might be surprised at what you will discover. Changing the culture of an organization starts with one person, then one team. Positive attitudes and creativity can be infectious and talking about what when wrong is sometimes more important than focusing on what went right.
We want this series to reveal some things we’ve learned about how to understand, cultivate and drive innovation in your organization. We thrive on examining what we’ve learned about innovation to improve the work we do, and we look forward to sharing some of our experiences with you. Thanks for coming along with us on this journey, where we think you will see that the secrets of innovation really aren’t that secret.
