Building a Culture of Innovation
Ideas Don't Hang Out In Singles' Bars
Great leaders not only keep pace with change, they stay slightly ahead of change.
To stay ahead, which is where the real influence is to be found, we need to have innovation at the core of our corporate or organizational cultures.
In the aftermath of the information revolution, influence is no longer a product of how much we know. Influence and impact in any market or sector of industry or society is about how much we can innovate with what we know.
The future is not simply about accruing more knowledge, but adding value to that knowledge.
How do we create a culture of innovation in our teams and enterprises?
Here are a few pointers. I think I can promise you that they will help your team respond faster to challenges, as well as multiplying their productivity.
1. Celebrate Divergence
In tough times, or seasons of rapid change and upheaval, leaders feel the pressure to reach convergence, fast.
Here’s the thinking: let’s skip through all that options-identification stuff and the careful screening of new approaches. Let’s not worry about staying at the edge, where the innovation is. Let’s just make the deal, sign the contract and move on. Time is precious. We need to make a decision and make it yesterday.
The only problem with convergent thinking – which is an important part of leadership in other ways – is that it can shut down great opportunities for fresh ideas.
A study in Europe a few years back asked the question ‘What makes some people luckier than others?’ To try to provide answers, researchers set up a series of experiments involving two test groups.
The first group was comprised of people who thought themselves quite lucky. The second consisted of folks who felt that nothing particularly fortunate ever happened for them.
In one of the many tests applied to these groups, researchers pasted a 100 Euro note to the pavement outside a small shopping centre – right near the door.
Without knowing this, each member of the programme was then asked to enter the shopping centre, one at a time.
More than 80 percent of the people in the ‘lucky’ group noticed the money and picked it up. Around the same percentage of people in the ‘unlucky’ group didn’t even notice the bill and walked on by.
This reminds us that while fortuitous situations often present themselves to everyone and anyone, only those who have a wide field of vision will spot them.
Divergent thinking rescues us from becoming myopic and missing the next big, transformative idea. Because it concentrates on uncommon practice, on approaches that haven’t yet becoming boring benchmarks, it lets in new light.
Divergence, or open-plan thinking, allows new associations to form – and associations, as we’ll see next, are the seedbed of great ideas.
Some companies now are trying to make up for their lack of divergent thinking by instituting ‘right brain meetings’. These are supposedly sessions where people leave behind the left half of their craniums, to allow their intuitive and less analytical side free flow.
You can’t structure a truly creative culture. Consciously trying to break your thinking into two partitions will quickly produce a splitting headache.
Yes, the concept of the right and left brain is helpful at some levels, but it certainly doesn’t provide a definitive picture of how the human brain works. Your brain simply doesn’t work in two distinct halves, which you can turn on and off at will: it works as a complex and wonderful whole.
Besides, the best ideas often spring into being when we least expect them – if we’ve made room to accommodate them.
Giving birth to great ideas is a lot like bringing babies into the world. If you’re pregnant, you’ve given up the right to set a time limit or to totally control the agenda.
Babies tend to mess up your schedule and change your lifestyle patterns – both before and after they’re born.
Ideas are much the same. Once you commit to turning your enterprise into an ideas factory, you’ve surrendered the right to control where and when those ideas emerge.
So forget about ‘right brain meetings’ – get on with making innovation a central part of your overall culture, not just an afterthought in your weekly structure.
2. Make space for Associations
Ideas don’t hang out in singles' bars. They work together.
Great ideas never emerge in isolation; they’re always the result of connections or associations between existing ideas. New ideas emerge only as we push the boundaries on what is already possible.
Great ideas emerge from what some have called ‘the adjacent possible’.
In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson illustrates this concept with the story of an interesting book published in the eighteenth century. Indirectly, it led to one of the truly big breakthroughs of the late twentieth century.
In the age of the Enlightenment, men of learning often maintained what they called a ‘commonplace book’. It was a twitter-like collection of quotes, anecdotes and sometimes book excerpts they had encountered in daily life. It was also a repository for new ideas, both vague and well-formed.
Over time, they were able to look back over the development of their own thinking – and new ideas often sprang from those past associations.
One such book was actually published, under the rather imposing title Enquire Within Upon Everything. Released in 1865, it became so popular that it was reprinted in 100 editions.
British families still had this book at home well into the 1960s. One copy sat on the bookshelf of a couple of mathematicians who had a son that loved leafing through it.
The title stuck in the boy’s mind as he grew up, as did the concept of connecting in one place a huge number of ideas on a wide range of subjects.
As an adult, he started working for a Swiss research lab. As a hobby, in his spare time, he began working on an application that would allow him to keep track of the flow of people and information in the organisation.
The application stored information in nodes across a connected network. He called it ‘Enquire’, with a nod to the book that fascinated him as a boy.
Ten years later, he started tinkering with a tinkering with a much more powerful application, which would allow him to access documents stored on remote computers, using hyptext links.
He called this application the ‘World Wide Web’. The man’s name, of course, was Tim Berners Lee.
The point is this: even ideas as audacious and world-shifting as the Web are not pulled out of thin air. They brew slowly, emerging over time out of the ‘cosmic soup’ of other ideas and associations.
To have a culture of innovation, you need to ensure that people have the time to play with ideas in this way. Google has incorporated into its culture a concept popularly known as ‘20 Percent Time’. For every four hours an employee puts in on an official company project, they must invest another hour on a pet project of their own.
AdSense, which generated thirty percent of Google’s revenue in 2009, was born partly out of this practice. So was Gmail.
As a leader, you also need to ensure that your people can connect. Ideas won’t connect unless people do.
A study at MIT found that communication is 400 percent more likely if people are seated six feet apart than if they are sixty feet apart. If you add another twenty feet, communication falls away to almost zero.
We hardly need studies to show us what common sense already suggests. But it’s such a basic fact that we trip over it.
Your physical space must allow the free flow of people, if you’re to see the free flow of ideas. You may not be able to knock down walls, or reconfigure your workspace completely, but you can make changes to the way people associate with each other.
One simple way to do this is to slightly de-gadgetize the space. Devote one area of the workspace, perhaps in a relaxed zone around the coffee machine, as a gadget-free zone. No PDAs allowed: this space is for eyeball time.
Or try buying your team some notebooks. Not the cheap variety; books with some tactile quality that invite interaction. Then have your team take notes in meetings the old fashioned way.
Some studies are showing that we retain better what we read when we encounter it on paper than on screens. I believe the case could also be made for better retention when we write on paper than when we type into a device.
Because paper doesn’t glimmer, glow or beep at us, it doesn’t demand attention and divert us from looking our fellow workers in the eye.
Nothing fosters humane ideas like human contact.
Creative culture demands spaces that are designed to leak ideas from one person to another and from one project to another.
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