Co-Creating Culture Innovation Playbook

Asking questions often become the starting point of innovation. There is no way you are going to innovate when you start with answers. When you ask the right questions, you gain insight. Insights are the building blocks of innovation. Since our desire is to find a way to innovate the organization's culture, we have to embrace the power of curiosity or questioning.

The question that we ask will determine the answers and directions we take in the design process. We want to embrace the power of questioning to design a process for culture innovation. How can we have a culture of innovation when we cannot innovate the culture itself?

1. Questions inspire us to think more

2. Questions uncover potential

3. Questions lead to more questions

4. Questions point you in the direction you should go

5. Questions challenge us to stretch and learn more

6. Questions change your perspective and make you open-minded

We started designing the Culture Playbook with questions because questions start the discovery process.?Great questions uncover potential and set hypotheses that need to be tested to be validated. The ability to ask the right question at the start of a design process set the tone for the entire project.

So, we asked ourselves these questions to start with:

1. Why can’t culture be innovated like you innovate business models?

2. Why should culture change with leadership changes?

3. What’s the value chain of culture and if there is a way to innovate along the value chain?

4. What do organizations do when they have a challenge with their culture? Can they use system analysis to decode where the problem lies?

Apple Inc’s Experience

Is culture adaptive, flexible, or fixed? This one question stayed with us as we studied Apple’s culture for years. Why will the culture suddenly change when Steve Jobs passed on and Tim Cook took over? Why didn’t Apple continue to innovate in exactly the same way as it did during the time of Steve Jobs?

Answering these questions will help us uncover some latent side of culture that most of us know nothing about. It’s actually strange that people attribute almost anything in a business to culture. Culture is not the way people work but rather the way people interact in the workplace. It is the glue that keeps people together based on how the employer relates with them.

If Steve Jobs was able to make his people innovative, why did Apple depart from being innovative under Tim Cook? To understand this, we need to understand the pillars of a Truly Human Company and why Steve Jobs was able to make Apple an innovative company while Tim Cook made it the most valuable company.

Steve Jobs’ why for Apple was the people, while Tim Cook’s why is the value chain. While Steve Jobs focused on the culture to drive the business model, Tim Cook focused on the business model to drive the company. While Steve Jobs built relationships with his people, Tim Cook executed strategies to make Apple valuable in the market.

The relationship leadership has with people is what culture is all about. The why of the organization has to be based on the people. Companies that focus on executing strategies will hardly stay innovative. However. Those that build meaningful relationships with their people are more innovative.

What kind of relationship do you have with your people? Is your relationship transactional or transformational? Steve Jobs had a transformational relationship with his people, while Tim Cook has a transactional one. Steve Jobs challenged his people to become all they can be. He created an environment that empowers them to enrich each other’s lives. He pushed them to do and create much more than they could create.

When leadership has a transactional relationship with people, the business will only exist to extract value and make a profit. The people become a means to an end: the end is profit. However, if like Steve Jobs, leadership relates to transforming and adding value to people, people become the product and the end. The workplace environment become so charged with innovation. The rate of innovation within the company becomes much more than the innovation in the industry. The company rules and dominates the industry.

Co-Creation Opportunity Invitation

When companies fail, in many cases it’s the business model that knocks. And that is because they have the wrong culture fueling the business model engine. You need the right fuel for your business model engine. We are providing companies with a tool to design their own fuel. Culture is the fuel.

We want to co-create a Culture Playbook that will allow any organization in the world to design and innovate its culture to drive its business model. Companies need the tool to design a Culture that will serve them well. When something is wrong, they can still identify what part of their culture is wrong and change it.

We are creating an exclusive hub to work with people within an organization to design the playbook. We want to give companies the tools they need to design a culture and then continually innovate it. Truly Human Culture is adaptable and flexible because it is based on human connections, human relations, human behavior, and human fulfillment. It makes an organization truly human.

Will you join us and be part of creating the tools that will help organizations stay human and innovative? Get in touch to be part. Contact [email protected]