Culture of Innovation

I believe that innovating is a key part of your culture for any growing, thriving organization. Innovation itself is important. I’ve been a part of organizations that say they innovate only to have systemic processes that put “innovation” in a part of the organization responsible to “innovate.” Making innovation a part of the culture means everyone is responsible for innovation. Mass innovation. Everyone innovates. I believe this culture of innovation is required to have a world-class development team.

There are tons of organizations that do not have innovation at the center of what they do. They’ve still been successful. Many are larger, more traditional organizations. Some organizations don’t have this issue; they’ve grown up with innovation and freedom as a part of the culture. Examples that get mentioned commonly in the press are Google, Facebook, smaller start-ups, companies where innovation was required to survive/grow/dominate. Many of us find ourselves in organizations not on the cover of magazines about how innovative they are; these tactics are for us.

I spearheaded the transition of a fairly large team (75 people or so across many teams) to take on a culture of innovation between 2012 and 2014. The firm I worked for was highly successful, growing at a rapid clip and taking on new technology and new products very quickly. The process required new product ideas to come through a central part of the organization and the rest of the organization helped develop, sell and deliver those new products. We had an untapped potential of very smart development and delivery folks who didn’t feel they were a part of the innovation process. I had a problem because the individuals on my development team didn’t embody a culture of innovation.

What we could be?

We needed to push beyond the label “innovation” and look at the behaviors that yield the feeling of innovation. Translating that feeling into specific behaviors makes the next steps actionable. So I took a look at the actions I saw that I liked, or didn’t like - and worked to figure out how to create incentives for the innovative behaviors.

Do you have it?

Here are some of the telltale traits I’ve come to believe reflect that we missed the culture of innovation. Our teams didn’t spend time on ideas that generated within the team. Our teams didn’t tackle things that were outside of what they had done before. Our people were stressed about delivering on existing commitments. We rarely changed course from one iteration to the next based on new information we learned. The team wasn’t celebrating the impact on the users of what they were delivering. Our people were focused on titles, position, winning and losing.

Not all of these traits are just about innovation, but I believe without this foundation were unable to innovate fully. We weren’t going to have each individual on all teams be willing to propose an idea, share new learning, inform the creation of a better product and suggest disruptive new technologies that would change our capability as a product development team.

Spoiler Alert: We Succeeded

We succeeded in creating a culture of innovation across many teams, in many office locations, in many different product areas. I’m going to dedicate a series of posts on some of the key learning and activities we employed to make the change effective.