12 essentials to successfully embed innovation in large and complex organisations...and have fun doing it

12 essential ingredients in the perfect innovation recipe

After 40 years as a practitioner leading and supporting creative thinking and successful innovation in large and complex organisations across the world, I find myself pondering what makes innovation effective.??

Virulent antibodies undermine innovation at many large companies.

Cautious governance processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT, and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals.?

Too often, companies simply get in the way of their attempts to innovate.

I have had to be tenacious and use all the communication skills I could muster.

It has often not been easy – it has often been very hard – emotionally, intellectually, and physically – overcoming objections and negative people, thinking through the solutions to barriers and challenges and hours and hours of work.??

However, as challenging as embedding innovation is I know that the prize is always worth the effort.??Unlocking and enabling creative thinking in individuals leads to positive cultures that are essential to enable innovation and enabling innovation leads to the world being a better place for everyone forever – greener, kinder, safer, better

So, with insights into my work embedding innovation and concerning great work from great thinkers and experts here are 12 essential elements essential for innovation to be successfully embedded in large and complex organisations: This is brought to you using Ri not Ai – (Ri) Real intelligence not artificial??

The innovation essentials

They are not what you think!

They are not easy! And…

They are essential

How would your organisation score on these 12 criteria?

1 is poor and 10 is world class?

The solution to your unlocking innovation is to first consider these 12 essential elements – consider your scores and then work positively with others to do what you can, where you can to make the changes necessary.??

You will find that where you have created pockets of success, where innovation works – you will have created a positive micro-culture and the creation of enough of those – celebrated and communicated well,??will create more and those positive micro-cultures joined together will eventually lead to innovation success and a more positive culture across your whole organisation where people are happy safe and well, ideas are respected and flow and innovation thrives.??

But don’t wait until you have all the essential elements in place do what you can where you can and you should start today!

Stop and Think….do you have…..

1.?????Psychological Safety?

Thanks, Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson,?a professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how?companies with a trusting workplace perform better.?

Psychological safety isn’t about being nice, she says. It’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other. And she argues that kind of organizational culture is increasingly important in the modern economy.

https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/01/creating-psychological-safety-in-the-workplace

2.?????Perceptual Acuity?

Thanks, Ram Charan

Many business leaders need to improve their perceptual acuity. Here’s how you can develop the ability to look around corners — and become a catalyst for change.

Of the skills required to thrive as a catalyst, the first — and perhaps most important — is perceptual acuity. Although the phrase rarely appears in accounts of business breakthroughs, perceptual acuity often turns out to mean the difference between success and failure. Perceptual acuity is the psychological and mental preparedness to “see around corners” and spot potentially significant anomalies, contradictions, and oddities in the external landscape before others do. It is your human radar for seeing through the fog of uncertainty so you can act first.

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/00351

3.?????Trust?

Thanks, Mohamed Hammound

Building trust takes effort, but the rewards are immeasurable. Trust empowers your team, increases their engagement, and ultimately leads to greater productivity and collaboration. By leveraging emotional intelligence and implementing these TRUST strategies, you will create a team that thrives on trust. You will also be more likely to boost their performance and overall success. The key is to remember that trust is built over time, so be patient and persistent in applying these strategies consistently.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/trust-emotionally-intelligent-leader-mohamed-hammoud

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4.?????Curiosity

Thanks Francesca Gino

In most organisations, leaders and employees alike receive the implicit message that asking questions is an unwanted challenge to authority. They are trained to focus on their work without looking closely at the process or their overall goals. But maintaining a sense of wonder is crucial to creativity and innovation. The most effective leaders look for ways to nurture their employees’ curiosity to fuel learning and discovery.

https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-business-case-for-curiosity

5.?????Playfulness

Thanks Amy Jo Dowd

How can we tangibly promote creativity and play in the workplace, particularly when today’s office is most likely your living room, kitchen table, or even bedroom? For starters, creativity cannot exist without uncertainty. It requires us to let go of inevitability and open ourselves up to the possibility of messiness and discomfort, but also to the prospect of something new and exciting.

Creativity—and play, by extension—embraces this uncertainty. Many of us live and die by “to-do” lists, and it’s easy to create a false narrative in our brain that if we don’t cross everything off our list in a given day, we’ve fallen short or even failed. This is a difficult cycle to break. But diluting ourselves down to a list of chores is not an ideal method to engage in our creative potential.

Try taking projects from your to-do list and reimagining them from a different point of view or by using a new approach. For example, you could pick one slide from a presentation, and ask your pairs of your team to build summaries of the slide using items around their work areas; afterwards, have them upload a photo of their work. You may be surprised to find how tinkering with alternatives to slide deck presentations, can spark creativity and engage your audience through a more meaningful and memorable message.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90593529/in-times-of-uncertainty-our-most-creative-thoughts-can-happen-through-play

6.?????Courage

Thanks Edward d Hess

Innovators are people who can unlock the cognitive and emotional “chains” that hem most of us into the familiar: our mental models (existing beliefs, assumptions, and views of the world), ego, and fears. Unlocking those chains liberates innovators to let go of the comfortable and familiar and journey into the land of uncertainty and the unknown—the land of innovation. Making that journey requires humility and personal courage.

Highly innovative and consistently successful businesses like IDEO, Google, Intuit, Bridgewater Associates, W.L. Gore & Associates, and Pixar Animated Studios have cultures and processes that encourage and enable people to unlock their chains so they can imagine, explore, experiment, and think critically. These companies encourage childlike curiosity and taking ownership of challenges with the mindset of a scientist who is good at not knowing. All are idea meritocracies that devalue hierarchy and value candor.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/darden/2014/11/19/innovation-requires-humility-and-courage/?sh=5aaef396697f

7.?????Recognition?

Thanks Braden Kelly and Adrian Gostick

Do you feel that companies should incentivise innovation?

Absolutely. We studied 200,000-people for The Carrot Principle, and a simple truth we found in that data is that people do more of that which is rewarded. If you want great customer service, you find, reward and publicize people who go above and beyond in serving your customers. If you want innovative products, service and solutions, you reward that behavior. It’s a no-brainer, but rare is the organization that actually puts this in place in a formal way.

How do you recommend that companies think about incentivizing innovation?

Xcel Energy is a great example. This energy company in the West has 10,000 employees. They tried the old suggestion boxes, which got stuffed with gum wrappers and suggestions such as “why don’t you pay me more.” Instead, they used recognition to drive great ideas. The year we studied the program, they saw 7,500 ideas come into the recognition-based innovation program, and more than two thirds were implemented for a $17 million savings to the organization. They recognized every idea that came in with a very small token. If the idea was accepted, it received a slightly larger recognition award. But if the idea was implemented and saved the company money, the innovation received a third, much more substantial recognition award (from a selection of merchandise awards), that was commensurate with the achievement. So they used recognition three times on great ideas, and the results speak for themselves.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/20140710164249-649711-importance-of-recognition-to-innovation-success/

8.?????Collaboration

Thanks Greg Satell

Collaboration Is The New Competitive Advantage

When we look back to the great innovations of the past, it hard not to wonder how it could've gone differently. What if chemists had picked up on Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in weeks rather than years? How many lives could have been saved? Was there really no one who could have helped develop Engelbart’s vision of the personal computer outside of Northern California?

And now, the problems we seek to solve are significantly more complex than in earlier generations. That’s one reason why the journal?Nature?recently noted?that the average scientific paper today has four times as many authors as one did in 1950. At the same time, knowledge has been democratized. A teenager with a smartphone today has more access to information than a highly trained specialist a generation ago.

That’s why now?collaboration itself is becoming a competitive advantage.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2016/02/28/if-you-want-to-innovate-learn-these-9-rules/

9.?????Humility

Thanks Sean Flaherty

This is one of my favourites and often over looked?

When you have humility about the work that your team is doing, shared respect is obvious. When the alternative is at play, you have what appears to be a collection of superheroes doing heroic work and seeking out individual recognition in ways that undermine collective respect.

If you work with people who amaze you every day with their level of expertise and competence, it is important to pay close attention to humility.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/humility-innovation-sean-flaherty/

10.??Diversity

???????Thanks Professor Katherine Phillips and Stuart R Levine

Diversity Confirmed To Boost Innovation And Financial Results

Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not”, wrote Columbia Business School Professor, Katherine Phillips as she described hers and other research for Scientific American in “How Diversity Makes Us Smarter”. Diverse teams become better prepared for decision-making and accomplishing the task at hand. A sense of complacency and sameness in thinking is more likely in homogeneous teams than in diverse teams. Differences among team members force each person to anticipate that there will be alternative and unexpected viewpoints to consider and evaluate. Reaching a consensus will take more e?ort. People must work harder to communicate their own thinking, and they need to broaden their own views to consider the unexpected perspectives of others. This takes more work and preparation, but it’s significantly valuable.?

When members of diverse teams see things in a variety of ways, they are poised to recognize new and different market opportunities, and they can better appreciate unmet market needs. Expanded market awareness produces results. HBR reported that diverse companies enjoyed better overall ?nancial performance. EBIT margins for companies with diverse management teams were nearly 10% higher than for companies with below-average management diversity. Diverse teams are more capable of addressing market segments with demographics similar to some of the team members. A 2013 Harvard Business Review affirms that when at least one team member shares a client’s ethnicity, the team is more than twice as likely to understand that client’s needs than teams where no member shares that trait.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2020/01/15/diversity-confirmed-to-boost-innovation-and-financial-results/?sh=1dc44e89c4a6

11.??Thinking skills

I remember once someone saying to me that asking people in large organisations to innovate and giving them no training in creative thinking and decision-making was like asking all the people to play golf – giving them a full set of Ping Golf clubs each and delivering them to their desks – then the leaders say – now go and play golf.

When leaders ask for ideas – because they want innovation, they have to first be clear what the challenge is or teach people the skills to identify and shape a challenge and then they should ensure that their teams are offered training in how to think in new and different ways and how to make excellent decisions.???Creative thinking can be taught and everyone can become more creative and flexible in their thinking given the time the tools, the autonomy and the right training.?

12.?Environment -?Provide a stimulating atmosphere

Thank you ‘We Work”

When thinking about how to improve your office space to encourage creativity, consider the following elements:

• Sound
• Colour
• Temperature
• Lighting

Sound

Your employees will benefit from environments with varying noise levels. Quiet environments are good for staying focused but having ambient noise at a moderate level works best for encouraging creativity. Overhearing other people’s conversations is a major distraction that can hinder?the creative process. Through private workspaces, collaborative table setups, and comfortable places to think, your physical?office spaces can stimulate innovation.??

Colour

The colors and?vibes established in the office?can also impact the energy of the space. Humans don’t respond well to typical office colors or vast areas of white and gray, beige, tan, and brown. These colors appear sterile and oppressive, and they’re ultimately uninspiring. White walls are hard for eyes to adjust to after looking at screens, and the constant contrast of stark white with gray cubicles, dark desks, and dark carpeting fosters more eye strain than creativity.

Instead, give employees some color. Pastel blue and green shades make for settings that are easier on the eyes, and they can create feelings of relaxation. Shades of green work well in spaces where employees need to focus and complete tasks. Green makes people feel relaxed and happy because it’s the color of nature, and humans are still wired to respond to it.?Indoor plants can enrich a space, increasing productivity, feelings of happiness, and—yes—creativity. (Dead plants, however, aren’t helpful, so invest in a plant care service if you don’t have a knack for keeping plants healthy.)

In spaces where you want to stimulate thinking, such as in a?conference room, use a bold warm color like red or orange. This color will help wake up your employees’ brains and could lead to some lively discussions. Use red or orange anywhere that you want to create an energized atmosphere.

Temperature

The temperature of a room can have an impact on your employees’ brainstorming abilities, too. Employees will be able to think better and come up with new ideas when the workplace temperature is comfortable. A temperature in the low 70s is ideal. Cozy employees come up with more creative ideas. It might cost a little more to keep the temperature in the right range, but the benefits could easily offset the expense.

Light

Light also plays a role in fostering creativity. Bright light is great for work that requires focus, while lower lighting lends itself better to creative thought processes. Natural light is ideal, if it’s available. Otherwise, choose lighting that best simulates the look of natural daylight.

https://www.wework.com/ideas/professional-development/creativity-culture/foster-creative-culture

and a foot note from me - when leading innovation 'put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others' - make sure you are healthy, safe and well and mentally strong. Embedding innovation can be very tough and if you are strong you will be able to make a positive difference and have fun doing it!