7 Ways to Support a Culture of Innovation

Whether we call it growth mindset, improv thinking, design thinking, failing forward, learning forward or any of the myriad other monikers that are being tossed around for being agile, adaptive, and innovative — there seems to be a disconnect about the reality of what an experimental, problem-solving and innovative process actually needs to be successful — and that includes failures, missteps, oopsies, f*uckups, and lots of “welp, that didn’t work”.

In my decades of supporting organizations, one of the complaints I often hear from leadership is some version of “we want them to be more comfortable taking risks, but they are just totally risk-averse”. Our culture loves to celebrate those heroic narratives of innovative change-maker thought leader organizations. We drink in all the times a now much-revered billionaire blew up a garage. We gobble up the numerous times a Bill Muskerberg cycled through failed businesses before becoming a household name. Many leaders tell me they want their teams to be those kinds of “out of the box” thinkers but then fail to differentiate between when someone is failing to do their job and the small failures that are part of the lifecycle of innovation & creative risk-taking.

However, for some reason, when real life is happening in real-time, there is an intense rejection of the need for failed hypotheses, things not working as expected, actual creative risk-taking, innovation, or unexpected turns of discovery. This push-pull contradiction thereby sets up employees for a frustrating catch-22 of being told to take risks while simultaneously being punished for the roller coaster inherent to that process.

You can’t have both perfection and innovation in the same room at the same time.

If you want to create an environment that allows for innovation, thought leadership, and mind-boggling creativity, you must create an environment steeped in psychological safety where the journey is at least as important (if not more important) than the destination. Folks must be able to trust that part of discovering includes making and learning from mistakes along the road. Most of our lives have been in school and then work where creative thinking is rarely rewarded, risk-taking is mostly punished, and binary ‘yes/no true/false’ rote alignment of thinking is preferred. So, in many ways, a culture that wants to thrive and create anew has to counteract some learned survival behaviors and help us relearn how to be the creative risk-takers of our youth. The leadership must establish a culture of and model growth mindset behaviors.

Growth mindset vs Fixed mindset

(This is a great place to make a plug for hiring neurodiverse folx who, in many cases, already think outside of the proverbial boxes. It is also a great reminder of why diversity on teams, and, therefore, a variety of perspectives & experiences is always advantageous.)

It is unreasonable, counterproductive, and bad business to ask for innovation and then punish the understood bumps inherent to innovating. It may help to change our language to some version of “celebrating risk” or “punishing risk”. If what we truly want is creative risk-taking, then we have to buy the whole package which includes, missteps, mistakes, and, yes, even possibly failure to meet the original goal — so any negative blowback as a reaction to those natural parts of the journey are really a punishment of the risk that was requested, approved, and then taken. Reframing it in the way we talk about risk in the process can shed new light on the culture you are creating or working within.

A Real World Fortune 500 Example

Let me give you an example from one of the Fortune 500 companies that I worked with for a full 12 months — offering leadership/executive coaching to one of their mid-level management teams. I was working with twelve folks, all at various levels of leadership in the same department — some of whom reported up to other members of the team. In our initial conversations, this client thought they wanted fairly standard support for this team of managers to be more agile, adapt through change, practice growth mindset and build their own style of healthy robust leadership tools, techniques, and processes infused with the best practices of DEIB. There was a belief the org was encouraging and empowering folx to take leaps, risks, but that those folx were inexplicably too risk averse.

The project I share is a specific example of encouraging risk and then punishing both risk & the process of innovation. It was a couple of months into our coaching, so we already had established a lot of trust and I was aware of the challenges to both individuals and the teams. Ultimately, the project was a disaster, the outcome was inefficient, and everybody passed the blame buck around. I witnessed very competent and excited leaders, willing to take creative risks, wanting to innovate solutions, truly practicing growth mindset & experimenting, wanting to share success slowly becoming fearful, risk-averse, paranoid leaders that questioned their own abilities, lived experience, and leadership skills. We made progress and all were grateful for the timing of my coaching — but instead of being able to focus on their thriving as leaders, we were constantly in triage mode, trying to help them survive the next challenge.

You can Learn From Their Mistakes

We want you to dream big, break stuff, take risks & experiment...

A few months into our coaching, an initiative came down from on high for the"Tech Team". They were tasked with coming up with a new fix for something that hadn’t been working like the org wanted for a long time. The directive came from the tippy top of the org structure. Tech Team was given a reasonable three-month deadline. They were all told in writing & in person multiple times to "dream big", "break stuff", "take risks", and experiment until they came up with a fix or two to try. They were told it was ok if a hypothesis didn’t work out and some attempts were dead-ends. The Tech Team Leads (whom I was coaching) were told they were trusted to figure it out and collaborate with each other, with the expectation they would report back the good, bad, & ugly every two weeks or so when they had their regular meetings - no need to share every detail or day-to-day. The Tech Team Leads told their teams the same thing. Everyone was so freaking excited and raring to get started. The Tech Team leads had all sorts of ideas. They were coming to meetings with me energized, brainstorming about how to get their teams into this mindset of playful experimenting and truly saying “what if” to each other’s ideas”. We set up some milestones along the three-month timeline and looked for opportunities to celebrate moments of creative risk-taking, small wins, and discoveries along the road to build in that psychological safety and trust needed for this kind of working style. They implemented the tools I'd already given them into practice and were coming to me asking for additional support on specific areas where they were feeling stretched as leaders and seeing opportunities for their own growth.

In the early stages of the project, the team was discovering broken stones along the pathway, noting them, fixing them, and celebrating the finds rather than trying to point a finger at how/who broke it. They were excitedly deconstructing and repairing things nobody even realized were broken and feeling great about it.

We are SO annoyed you’re doing exactly what we asked.

This excitement lasted a few weeks, but slowly at each 1:1 meeting with the Tech Team Leads they were slowly coming in more frustrated, more stuck, and more disillusioned. Despite the 3-month timeline being on track, the higher-ups were annoyed that the project was taking so long. Those higher-ups were frustrated by what they called the lack of communication, again despite the earlier explicit instruction to only report every two weeks. The higher-ups were admonishing the Tech Team Leads and even leap-frogging past them to criticize or critique team members when an idea or experiment didn’t magically work right the first time. The behaviors and culture were in direct contradiction to the well-articulated and clear expectations laid out at the beginning of the project flow.

The result of that upstream behavior was that downstream folx started to feel that they couldn’t trust their Tech Team Leads, that they were be set up to fail, and that they couldn’t do anything right. Frustration was the word I kept hearing over and over from everyone at every level. The Tech Team Leads felt like they were getting it from all sides. Rather than coming into our sessions with specific needs, they were needing to vent, feel validated, and asking for help surviving. Gone was the excitement and learning of earlier weeks, gone was the sense of growth and opportunity, gone was the sense of ownership & desire to problem-solve.

Even though it wasn't directly aligned with my contracted work, it was tangential and impacting every aspect of the work I was contracted to do - so, in an effort to support the folx I felt responsible for I asked for clarity from those higher-ups. Reaching out to them directly and citing the original call to action & expectations and what I saw as contradictory messaging now. I framed it as wanting to be sure my coaching was not contradictory to their expectations for this group. After some back-and-forth those higher-ups 1) insisted they wanted creative risk-taking and 2) understood the nuances & twists of the process and 3) assured us all they did not want a quick fix as that had not worked previously, and 4) wanted to themselves be better about allowing the process to hit the milestones & reframe what success of this work looks like.

However within days in some cases, it was as if that clarity never happened and they slipped back into the status quo.

It’s working like it’s supposed to, but let’s ‘fix’ it anyway.

At about 6 weeks into this project, some awesome progress had been made. They found a few bugs they didn't even know existed and were able to fix, they pre-empted what could have been a major security breach, and they were - to the best of their ability with the challenges coming from above - working across teams and sharing practices and solutions. They were reporting more satisfaction in the actual work and on the teams, while still feeling frustrated by the mixed messages coming from above. Then, suddenly, those same higher-ups decided that the perceived problems of this project would be solved by reorganization of the Tech Team Leads, cross-team collaborations, and team members. The Tech Team Leads, the Tech Team members, or me about what the actual folx doing the work needed, wanted, saw as challenging, or thought would benefit the process — this was the first of several times this reorg happened on this project.

The original 3-month deadline was pushed to 6 months to make allowances for the re-orged folx to settle into their new roles. There were suddenly new members to get up to speed, half-finished work that someone who was technically no longer on the team still needed to pass off to someone, and a lack of cohesiveness that fed their already fearful experiences at this company. The Tech Team Leads felt stuck between a rock and a hard place as their bosses were expressing nothing but annoyance, disappointment, and negativity about what was working exactly like they all agreed it would work. While at the same time their direct reports were constantly dissatisfied, critical, and blaming them for their failure in leadership. It was a mess. Without any rhyme or reason, the project was consistently undermined by the very people who were tasked with overseeing it, the people doing the work were ignored, and in the end, the original goal of the project was deemed too time-consuming and tossed out in lieu of other projects. What a waste of time, talent, and energy.

If you set folx up to fail, don’t be surprised when they do.

In this particular example, what I believe was missed beyond the obvious failures in leadership, clarity, and transparency are many. It is easy, with 20/20 hindsight to see all the mistakes that were made along the way. But, y’all, this ain’t rocket science, this is people science and you can’t set folks up to fail and then be surprised when they do. I admit it is the most helpless I have ever felt in my role as a coach, consultant, and/or outside third party — watching this train wreck happen in slow motion and feeling unable to convince anyone with the power to switch tracks, wake up the conductor, or even warn the passengers a catastrophic collision was taking place. It became constant triage of trying to guess what the highest higher-ups really wanted, versus what they said they want. While this is an extreme example, if any parts of it sound familiar you and your organization may be in need of a culture overhaul.

7 Steps to building a culture of innovation, creative risk-taking, and a thriving growth mindset

1. Have a company culture that can differentiate between failing to do your job and the failures that are part of the lifecycle of innovation: breaking, discoveries through failings, and moving through the unknown on the road to solutions. Your culture must be one that values people, diversity of experience & ideas, and practices a growth mindset intentionally.
2. Your imperfect leadership must model and live by the same rules & standards of imperfection and risk being asked of their employees.
3. Be clear about what you actually need at this moment. Innovation isn’t always what’s needed or wanted. If you need a quick, easy, obvious solution ask for that. If you need a reinvention of a wheel, you must also be resolved to the different kinds of time, energy, and process that will take. Transparency and clarity of expectations are key to success.
4. Focus on what IS working and acknowledge even the small wins. One of my favorite exercises I created and teach is called “I Don’t Have a Toothache”, it helps you identify what is working, what is going well, and what isn’t wrong. If we can make a list of all the things we have accomplished or solved for a project, it helps us put into perspective the scale of what is still to be solved or not working. It can be a humbling exercise to realize how much energy we’re putting into the worry of what isn’t working or still needs to be solved when we realize how much we’ve already done is worth celebrating. Our brains have evolved to over-emphasize problems to keep us alive and may not realize that the website button not working is not life or death.
5. Know thyself. For realsies, it is important we know what scares us in a process of risk-taking and innovation. Some of us feel super uncomfortable when we aren’t in control of every aspect. Others feel uncomfortable with unknowns and what-ifs. Still, others feel uncomfortable if they think they are rocking the boat or upsetting someone. This is why I believe tools and guidelines for how we take creative risks, brainstorm, and collaborate can be a relief. Having some rules of engagement to frame how we experiment & take risks sets us on the road to success and removes some of the roadblocks and human pitfalls.
6. A sense of accountability and checks & balances. (This helps us with #1 differentiate when we are failing to do our job versus expected failures that are part of the lifecycle of innovation). What are the built-in scales that can ensure the work is being done? What are the built-in ways that I can safely and respectfully remind someone with power if they start to backslide or contradict the innovative process? If you need to know what we’re doing and accomplishing let’s figure that out so you feel in the loop & confident. And, if we are mid-process and you start to exhibit behaviors that are counterproductive to that process, how do we safely discuss that in a way that I can trust I won’t be reprimanded or punished? Psychological safety babeeey.
7. Everyone gets to be equally participating in the work, innovation, brainstorming, imagining, and blue sky dreaming. For true creative risk-taking to thrive, the culture must be one of equal opportunity to dream. However, there is many a tale of a boss that claims they are “only big picture thinkers”. What this usually translates into is a dude sharing his preordained agenda of ideas, shutting down others’ ideas, acting like a brainstorm just happened, and then not wanting to do any of the work that he deems as beneath his big picture only brain. (Sorry not sorry white cis guys, there are literal books on how you are usually the culprits of this problematic behavior.) This is a manipulation of collaborative innovation. There is likely punishment and retaliation for anyone that challenges them questions the manipulated process or expects them to contribute to the work beyond ideation.

In summary

I am so glad more organizations are embracing the need for creative risk-taking. I love that improv thinking is being seen and studied as a legitimate skill set worth incorporating into our practices. I appreciate that a growth mindset is becoming more commonplace in discussions about who we are and how we move through the world. However, we cannot have any of these skills and practices without also embracing that part of culture must also get to be more ok with failing, getting things wrong, and being wholly imperfect beings that can learn a lot more by stretching our boundaries than from playing it safely with the status quo.