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The late, great Peter Drucker said “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”. Of his many insights, this might be the most important for Innovation. However, just as a fish doesn’t see the water, culture is often invisible to those that operate inside of it, and can therefore be difficult to influence or even evaluate. Unlike strategy, which can be mapped out in a memo, or innovation processes, which can be taught at an offsite, culture needs to be grown and nurtured over time. When it is, it can be both powerful and resilient, even if it isn’t always obvious.
Via Kenneth Mikkelsen
Worth the read!
Excerpt from the article:
So what is a great Innovation culture, and where can I buy one? There is no one size fits all, but there are some components that are almost universally important for Innovation.
1. Autonomy and Purpose: There is a significant body of evidence that suggests for creative tasks, as long as people receive enough compensation to be comfortable, it is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic motivation that drives performance. That is, autonomy, alignment with purpose, and respect are all more likely than money to have a team ordering pizza at 9pm because they cannot put a problem down. If you want to dig deeper into this, Dan Ariely has done a lot of work in this area, and Dan Pink has an excellent video/TED talk where he discusses the power of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose in driving intrinsic motivation.
2. Mastery and T-Shaped Innovators: Mastery is critical. We need to be very lucky to create something innovative without knowing what’s gone before. The more established the field, the more mastery is typically needed, and acquiring it should be a life long process that evolves with the field, something that a learning culture should encourage. A culture that values mastery can also value a fresh perspective, but without mastery, nine times out of ten, this will simply reinvent the wheel. Interestingly, mastery comes in at least two flavors. Deep knowledge of a subject is of course crucial, but emergent innovation usually comes from the integration of ideas from different areas. This is where T-shaped innovators, or expert generalists become crucial to the process. A culture therefore needs to reward both experts in a single field, and these more diversified experts who know a lot about a lot of different stuff, and who can bridge between experts.
3. Failure as learning and Respect. It’s now quite fashionable to embrace fast failure, but in many cases there remains a knowing-doing gap. It’s easy to thoughtfully build it into a strategy, but still freak out when bad data comes in just ahead of an important stage gate in the process! Also related to this is the productive pause, and taking time out to define a problem. It is easy for a culture to become action orientated, and reward energetic ‘doers’. However, taking time out to really define a problem, and think before acting can be at least as important. Respect lies at the heart of these cultural concepts, as few people will willfully fail, or sit around doing nothing. A culture of respect assumes this.