Building an Innovation Culture
Leaders are urgently aware of the
need to do “something about the innovation culture”, to change the pace of
innovation to replace decaying products, services and business models and to raise
performance and generate new value. But just what is an "innovation culture" and what form should action take?
Organisations are currently underperforming
in terms of their real, potential innovation capacity. This is due to at least 4
dominant, interconnected issues: low levels of workforce engagement,
micromanagement, a tendency to only adopt ideas that fit the current business
model and a focus on doing things right, rather than trying to do the right
thing.
A culture is a
behavioural system that either helps or gets in the way as the market changes
and customer expectations shift. A culture can either enable or
block innovative behaviours.
The issue is how to create new
innovation capacity, to unlock potentially innovative behaviours within our
culture at a time when people are just too busy in the current business reality
to think about innovation, and at a time when workforces have developed powerful
defensive routines to block change, and innovation training and methods have
limited impact on the way people think.
Just as dependence upon decaying business models are reducing innovation potential, a similar adherence or misplaced loyalty to "push" change models which cultures have learnt how to "game" means it is necessary to move from “push” (outside-in) to “pull”
(inside-out) change strategies for innovation by focusing on the real point of
leverage for building an innovation culture: the behaviour of the individual
within the workforce.
Just like Wellington before Waterloo, when asked about the likelihood of victory, he drew the questioner's attention to a British soldier loitering in a public park in Brussels and said that it all depended upon "that article" (the individual soldier). We need to go back to engaging individuals and helping them to manage their own behavioural ecology in terms of whether it is productive and meaningful or locked into cycles of zombie negativity that reinforce themselves.
The way leaders behave legitimises
behaviours that constitute the culture of an organisation. It’s rare that
leaders are called to account for the messages they send through their everyday
behaviours. Research suggests that destructive,
negative behaviour between leaders and workers has five times more impact than
positive, constructive behaviours. A key
to building a culture that supports innovation is to reduce destructive
behaviours in the form of leaders’ personal current “Behavioural Waste” in
order to model positive, constructive behaviours that unlock capacity to support
innovation by removing systemic forms of waste that are locked into current, legacy ways
of working.
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