Creating a Culture of Innovation

Who hasn’t wanted a Culture of Innovation in their organization? After all, we are constantly inundated with articles, video interviews and books telling us we must have one; that we can’t be successful without it.

Countless organizations have tried wholesale “change management” or “organizational transformations” to get one, which take a long time, require commitment from both management and the work force and in the majority of cases, fail.

Scanning through The New Yorker over the New Year’s holiday, I came across an article by Joshua Rothman entitled The Meaning of “Culture”  in his blog on books and ideas. It seems that Merriam-Webster announced last December that “culture” was their 2014 Word of the Year. The post immediately caused me to think about why we choose not to emphasize “culture” or “organization culture” when working with clients.

From his blog post:

“…The word “culture,” they explain, was simply the word that saw the biggest spike in look-ups on their Web site. Confusion about culture was just part of the culture this year. People were desperate to know what “culture” meant..."

The confusion of the very meaning of the word culture, how it evolves and what influences it, especially when it is applied to the organization is why we focus on the concept of establishing a Climate of Innovation within the organization when working with clients.

We see that when many use the term Innovation Culture, the examples used are really dealing with the Climate in the organization. When we review assessment tools for measuring innovation capacity, we see climate as a main focus, even when called culture.

When we have been a part of organizational changes or transformations that were effective, efforts were concentrated on changing the climate of the organization as the critical part of the change process; as the climate changed, the culture then began to change, evolving in a desired direction. While climate change did not happen overnight, efforts began to pay immediate dividends, and accelerated as the climate began to permeate the organization.

So what is it about climate that is so important, and why do we see organizational culture as a trailing indicator of climate? Let’s look at some key distinctions between the two:

Organizational Culture evolves as beliefs, customs and attitudes emerge, develop, are understood and accepted, and coalesces into a shared system – usually over a period of many years or even decades.

Organizational Climate on the other hand, refers to the prevailing influences or environmental conditions within the organization. As such, and unlike culture, a desired climate can be defined, e.g., a climate of innovation, and be immediately actionable through a focus on management actions and practices, expectations, recognition and rewards – 3M is a great example.

We think one of the main reasons many organizational change efforts fail to deliver is that these differences are not considered, and not enough (or any) emphasis is placed on the climate of the organization.

In practical terms then, the climate that management creates and fosters in the organization directly influences the basis of culture, and the culture you get is what your climate is set up to deliver – you get the culture you deserve through your management actions and practices, expectations, recognition and rewards.

So if an organization wants a culture of innovation (back to our example), it should ask some interesting and revealing questions, including:

1. What are the management actions and practices that foster and sustain innovation we see in successful innovating organizations?
2. How do we ensure we are aligned about what these actions and practices should be?
3. What actions and practices are we doing now that place barriers to or inhibit innovation that should be dropped or changed?
4. What expectations should we set that tells our workforce that we need to be innovative, that we expect them to contribute to generating ideas and that innovation is a key success factor for us?
5. How do we let our work force know which innovation areas we need to focus on, either in the marketplace or for internal improvements?
6. In what ways should we recognize our work force for their contributions to innovation, and how do we create innovation metrics that allow us to include innovation in our rewards programs?
7. Accepting that innovation is needed and desired, what do we need to change or add to our hiring process? To our training processes?

There are other questions that need to be asked depending on the current state of an organization, but these basic questions are good enough to get started on establishing a climate that fosters and sustains innovation.  And we know enough about what successful innovators do to have good starting points for all of the questions – here’s a taste:

1. Successful innovators promote collaboration within the workforce, they provide space and time for teams to generate and develop innovative ideas; people know ideas are welcome and know how they are developed in a defined and open process. They support failure as a learning process, yet are able to stop work on ideas that clearly will not be successful in the marketplace or generate internal improvements.
2. There are no mixed signals about innovation. Climate is understood to be influenced directly by management and innovation is not an on again/off again flavor of the month – there is constant effort to create and sustain the climate of innovation over time.
3. There are any number of barriers to innovation, and successful innovators understand what actions and practices create these barriers and have changed their climate to prevent them from emerging – some barriers are all too familiar, and interestingly enough, are also barriers to a healthy organization, growth, employee retention/job satisfaction, hiring/training, and more:
   1. Management actions not aligned with expectations
   2. Too “loose” a definition of innovation
   3. Uncertainty of innovation focus
   4. Social systems not supportive of innovation
   5. Innovation ideas not willing to be heard
   6. No real way to move ideas from concept to product/adoption
   7. Trust is missing in the organization
4. Successful innovators treat innovation as “something we do here” – it’s embedded in everyone’s day to day job, and is part of the commitment to innovation. Employees at all levels are encouraged to present innovative ideas, and their ideas are not swallowed up in the all too familiar “black hole”
5. The organization must know its innovation focus areas – creative constraints are necessary to provide innovation with intentionality – when the work force and staff know what the organization will do and what it won’t or cannot do, ideas are not “all over the map”, and are actually more creative within the focus areas
6. People like to be recognized for their contributions, nothing new here. Successful innovators have any number of ways to recognize ideas, innovation development and launch or adoption, from simple organizational awareness of individuals and teams up to a reward system based on innovation metrics and tied to the formal year end or quarterly review programs. If you want innovation, do not leave it out as a component to any recognition or rewards program!
7. Hire and train for the traits of creative and innovative individuals, remembering that everyone can be innovative – we do it all the time as individuals outside the workplace. Provide and facilitate the social opportunities for idea sharing, establish a set of innovation metrics, for individuals, teams and the company, and include an innovation/ideas component in the review process

So successful innovators hire and train for creativity and innovation, include an innovation component in quarterly and yearly reviews, align recognition and reward systems to support innovation matched to innovation metrics, create and facilitate social opportunities for idea sharing & transfer and focused idea generation, and perhaps most importantly, set and state clear expectations for good ideas and innovation. You get the idea.

All of these actions and practices are directly and immediately actionable within any organization that makes a commitment to innovation, and understands that innovation success begins with creating a climate that fosters and sustains innovation.

While we used innovation as our example, it’s no stretch to see that the broader culture of any organization can be influenced by the climate within the organization. Just ask the same questions and substitute any area of the organization for “innovation”. When you do, it's important to make sure that there are not actions and practices in one area that have a negative influence on another – those must be seen, understood and reconciled. But that’s for a future post.

This article is also published at GO Productivity's Blog.