Why a culture of innovation is essential – and how to build it

Here are two truths

1. Helping people perform at their creative, innovative best is essential for organisations to do well, but also for them to survive in the modern world.
2. Most organisations are terrible at it.

Most organisations are not good at innovation because for a very long time the world of work has been organised around the idea of process. Before the 21st century, workers were given tasks and had to finish them in an allotted time, with that time getting ever shorter. From an ideas and innovation perspective, they gave very little of themselves at work, because that wasn’t part of the deal. They gave their time, a small amount of their capacity and then they went home to do something more interesting. Too much of working life is still like that. It isn’t good for humanity and it’s not what the present or the future demand of us.

In the 21st century, innovative organisations are succeeding, while those who can’t or don’t innovate are failing. It’s that stark. In the past, it used to take years for large companies to decline. Now it can be a matter of months or even weeks. Smaller companies, that don’t make the headlines but make up a much larger proportion of the economy, can go to the wall in the blink of an eye. 

To stay in business, or to continue doing the things it does, every organisation must create new and excellent things. But it is the culture of the business, the way a business connects with people, and the different ways of doing things that will help them to innovate and grow. Famously creative outfits like Nike and Zappos know how to get the best from their people – and how to keep delivering outstanding commercial results despite threats to their competitiveness from every angle. Organisations in which people are constrained by systems and processes, lack autonomy, and in which truth is a stranger, can find themselves failing to innovate at the pace that the market demands, leading to dysfunction, crisis and demise.

1. Leaders must spot and deal with barriers to effective collaboration, as hidden and in unlikely places as they may be.
2. Everyone must be prepared to relate to others in a spirit of candour, collaboration and continuous improvement.
3. People need to be in the right jobs and able to develop their skills and experience in line with their natural strengths and preferences.
4. The organisation needs to be open – which is to say, it needs to enable talent to flow where it’s needed.
5. The organisation needs to be optimistic and purposeful.

Creating these conditions is first and foremost a question of leadership. The process begins with ruthless self-examination. What are you, the leader, not wanting to see about those barriers to effective collaboration?
Where are you failing to have difficult conversations and make difficult choices? How might you be inadvertently standing in the way of people performing at their best?

Then it’s a question of engaging your team – of understanding their perceptions of work and how they might differ from your own. Most people have considerable insight to offer about how culture can be improved. The problem is that no-one asks them the questions or listens carefully to their answers. Employee engagement and pulse surveys are no substitute for a direct, face-to-face exchange in which the dominant mode is listening.

Such conversations will often yield not only insight but a range of practical suggestions about how the organisation can be changed for good. So, the next stage is to start implementing these suggestions – one at a time. But this is not a question of setting up a ‘transformation project’: such top-down, boil-the-ocean style efforts often fail. Instead, find one thing – one project, one process, one interaction – and change it. Capture the lessons. Rinse, repeat. And keep doing this. Over time, you will see more progress than you imagined was possible.

Ultimately, although conversation is vital, you build a culture of innovation not by talking about it, but by doing things. Innovation is an act – an act of creation, of embracing the chaos to create the new. Make your people feel safe, in conversation and in action, to create the right kind of chaos – and watch your business soar.
  
This is Avalon Group (which owns Aurora Healthcare Communications) together with their partner Corporate Punk, won the Building A Culture of Innovation Award at the Business Culture Awards 2021.

‘Ultimately, although conversation is vital, you build a culture of innovation not by talking about it, but by doing things. Innovation is an act – an act of creation, of embracing the chaos to create the new’