Building a Culture that Supports Innovation

Five elements to focus on

B. Kim Barnes

Organizational culture, like national, ethnic, and regional cultures, involves values, norms, taboos, rituals, and mythology. All of these elements of culture are found in any organization that has existed for some time, though they may not be obvious or explicit. They are persistent and self-reinforcing.

Here are some questions that can help you determine how your existing culture promotes, supports, or resists innovation:

• •On what basis do you make important decisions?
• •What are the "rules of the road" for success in this organization?
• •What happens to decisions or actions that are not aligned with the organization's goals?
• •What decisions or actions do you celebrate together? How?
• •What stories do you tell that help new people understand and integrate?

Review your responses and ask yourself (and others): What is the implication of this for innovation? For example, if you base your decisions entirely on precedent, new ideas won't have a chance of adoption. If you have a norm that keeps people inside their team's boundaries and discourages stepping into one another's territory, you lose the potential of "beginner's mind" providing a fresh outlook. If you ignore behaviors and processes that are different from the norm, you will not learn from them. If you celebrate only final success, you lose the opportunity to support curiosity and intelligent risk-taking. If you only tell stories about success, you will limit what the organization can learn from a "good failure" and discourage people from trying anything new.

If you want to have a culture that encourages innovation, consider each element:

• •Values: Make innovation a genuine company value. Just claiming or advertising it as a value isn't enough. Values are not aspirations. They are criteria for making important decisions. Make sure everyone in the organization is clear about the definition of innovation (creating value from an idea that is new to you) and then use that definition to test ideas before you invest in them.
• •Norms: Communicate explicit norms that encourage crossing boundaries, constructive debate, free flow of information, feedback, diversity of thinking, and collaboration. Norms or ground rules help define what is fostered and promoted in the culture. They need to be clear, discussable, and modeled by key leaders.
• •Taboos: Don't allow leaders or teams to discourage new ideas, to avoid critique, or to over-focus internally (not-invented-here syndrome). Breaking a taboo should set off the "organizational immune reaction" and shouldn't be tolerated. The "meeting after the meeting" where people share what they really think about ideas is an innovation killer. Open discussion, unencumbered by political considerations, leads to more, better, and more robust ideas.
• •Rituals: Celebrate intelligent risk-taking[1] and the best failures as well as successes. Celebrate intelligent risk-taking decisions at the time they're made, not after the outcome is known. Failure and success are celebrated after they happen. The best failures are the ones you learn the most from. They are likely to result from intelligent risk decisions and well-executed implementation that didn't work out because of other factors. By celebrating them, you support continuous learning and improved risk decision-making.
• •Mythology: Circulate and retell stories about innovators in the organization who failed their way to success. Provide structures or processes that facilitate purposeful storytelling. Encourage admired senior leaders or contributors to share their innovation stories, especially stories that feature breaking boundaries, failure, recovery from failure, and positive innovation lessons learned.

No matter how ingrained the current culture, engaged and inspiring leaders help their organizations to rethink and redefine these cultural elements. By bringing the current cultural assumptions and supporting infrastructure to awareness, change is possible, and innovation vitality can be restored or enhanced.

[1] The concept of 'intelligent risk" is explored and developed in Barnes & Conti's Intelligent Risk-taking program.