Shock & Awe: Cultural Mindsets

Imagine, if you will, working with a client. As you work with the client, you learn about their frustrations, issues, and problems. You may even witness their successes & efficiencies. The more you work with the client, the more your awareness grows. Now imagine you have an idea that could help them and help your organization benefit from helping them.  

Or how about this… 

As you are going about your day to day, you have an idea or an aha moment. Perhaps that idea could help your department or organization achieve one of its strategic objectives sooner than planned.  

Or better yet…

You learn of an opportunity, technology, or business strategy that could help the company to gain a foothold in a market.  

• Regardless of how the idea arises: 
• What do you do?
• Do you know who to talk to?
• Would they even listen?
• Would your idea get lost in the climb to the top?

Now imagine a world where you see a need, a problem, or a pain-point. You know, deep in your core, that your observations, and any ideas you have, are deeply valued by your organization. In this world, you know your value. You know how your day to day efforts align with the strategic goals of the organization. The organization values innovation and the contributions of every single person. So, in this world:

• Do you know who to share your thoughts, observations, and ideas with? Yes.  
• Do you have a chance that the people leading the company might see those thoughts and ideas? Yes.
• And act on them? Yes.  

The world you are envisioning is one that values a Culture of Innovation. It is a world that recognizes that opportunities and ideas are not localized within the executive team, instead, ideas can come from anywhere within the organization. Such organizations know the value of their teams. They make sure to communicate the value of innovation, that processes for the management of innovation exist, and provide a mechanism for such ideas, thoughts, and observations to flow.

In the latest article in this series, we talked through the Four Truths and Six Practical Steps anyone can take to start building a Culture of Innovation. Today we cover the Four Mindsets that affect the success of building a Culture of Innovation.

Executive Mindset

This first mindset is the most critical to the success of any change within an organization. In the last article we talked about how anyone can start to seed a Culture of Innovation, but it cannot succeed unless it has support from the top. That is where the Executive Mindset comes in. This mindset needs to be the driving force behind the adoption of a Culture of Innovation.  

This mindset typically has a very high-level and long-term focus. Chances are that your company has a set of strategic objectives that it cares about. The executives are likely consumed and focused on those objectives, or at least they should be. Why? Because they are the ones steering the ship and you can’t steer a ship looking only 10 feet in front of you. You steer a ship by looking towards the horizon for impending dangers. By doing so, you give yourself and your crew to adjust course to avoid the danger. So, if they are so focused on the strategic objectives, they aren’t likely to care much about anything that could add the potential of risk to the course of the business. Every executive I have ever known has refused to invest in any change that did not clearly align with the strategic objectives.

Now that we know what the Executive Mindset cares about, let’s talk about how to align them to a Culture of Innovation. In order to align this mindset to any efforts to build a Culture of Innovation, you need to address how such a culture can help the organization achieve the strategic objectives that are so critical to its success. Innovation is a tool and a Culture of Innovation is about wiring that tool into the DNA of the entire organization. To keep the ship analogy, if the strategic goals are the direction the ship is heading then the ship is the business and the crew and officers on the bridge are the executives. There are two facts that this analogy exposes:

1. The crew cannot change the course of the ship
2. The bridge crew cannot move the ship by themselves

The only way a Culture of Innovation works is if the executives and the rest of the company all see the value. The fastest way to align all parties is to show how a Culture of Innovation is all about helping the organization achieve the strategic goals. This is done by leveraging the ideas and passions of every employee from the CEO down to the newest hire.

Leadership Mindset

You might be thinking, we just talked about the Executive Mindset, how is this any different. Leaders are not necessarily those people that oversee others, those are managers. Managers can be leaders but more importantly, anyone can be a leader. The definition of a leader is someone who leads by example. Someone that cares about others and aligns their actions accordingly. They build people up, not tear them down. They are not afraid to admit they made a mistake or that they don’t know something. There are many qualities that mark someone as a leader, none are exclusive to executives. Executives are expected to be leaders, but if we are honest, many may fall short of filling such shoes.  

The second mindset is just as critical as the first but by far the most versatile. Your organization with have leaders at every level. The leadership mindset is all about sowing the seeds of the direction that the executives have decided are critical to success. More than that, the leadership is about showing everyone the value they bring. They communicate how everyone’s efforts align with the strategic direction. This reminds of the movie Red October. In one of Sean Connery’s scenes, he gives his crew an order. As soon as he does, you can hear every member of the crew, from the First Officer down to those that pilot the sub, repeating the order until they perform the act. I’d say that is an example of a crew that knows exactly how their actions impact the strategic goals. This is done through leadership.

Leaders can be anywhere in your organization; you know who they are. They often stand out like a light in the darkness. They tend to infect, in a positive way, the people around them. What you might not realize is their influence often goes up, not just down and around.  

That is why this mindset is so impactful to the efforts of building a Culture of Innovation. If you involve them early, they tend to become a “super spreader”, to borrow a term from the pandemic. This means that they can not only spread your efforts to those around them, but they are likely to influence those above them. When engaged by executives, they pass down the importance of a Culture of Innovation and generate excitement and buzz for the initiative and innovation in general. The leadership mindset is critical in the early phases to gain traction. I would argue they are even more critical in the later stages of altering the DNA of the organization by cementing the direction and keeping a pulse on the mood within.

One final thought… 

Those of you that are trying to sow the seeds of a Culture of Innovation within your organizations are leaders. You might find it hard to believe, but if you look at how I defined a leader, above, you should see it. Never doubt it.

Tinkerer Mindset

I’ll be honest, this is one of my favorite mindsets. I consider myself a tinkerer. If you aren’t a tinkerer, you should become one.

The Tinkerer Mindset has a very special place in the process of building a Culture of Innovation. To put it simply, they are the many hands that it takes to generate ideas, explore their potential, and bring them to life. Without this mindset, there is no culture to foster, period. This is the foundation of the entire culture.

A tinkerer is the truest practitioner of innovation. Why? They like to tinker. They experiment. They are the masters of the “What if…” scenario. The tinkerer mindset is one that the leadership, within a Culture of Innovation, should be encouraging everyone to have. As we have pointed out in previous articles, a Culture of Innovation is one that challenges the status quo, takes risks, and isn’t afraid to fail. Being a tinkerer, I would say that perfectly describes the Tinkerer Mindset.  

Not everything a tinkerer tries succeeds. When they fail, they try something else. They keep trying until something succeeds. All we ever hear about innovation are the successes. You can bet they had failures along the way. Those failures informed the next attempt…all the way through to success. If we allowed ourselves to quit when we fail at the first attempt, very little would have been accomplished in history.

Thomas Edison tried and failed nearly 2,000 times to develop the carbonized cotton-thread filament for the incandescent light bulb. ... And when asked about it, he said "I didn't fail; I found 2,000 ways how not to make a light bulb," but he only needed one way to make it work.

This quote is from the movie National Treasure. The quote from Edison is one whose actual wording is hotly debated, but I believe the spirit of it holds true for the Tinkerer’s Mindset. Edison could have stopped at his first failure and said, “oh well”. He could have persisted to 1000, succumbed to his frustrations, and quit. If he had, the world might have been a lot darker because of it. But that isn’t what a tinkerer does. They don’t quit, they don’t let their frustrations get the best of them. It is part of their DNA to toy with things, take them apart, try to put them back together, and question everything.

There is a downside to this mindset, however. The refusal to quit. In the business world, this can lead to “beating a dead horse” or falling into the trap of feeling “so close you can taste it”. This is particularly bad if you are still a long way off.  

Why is this bad? Because businesses have finite resources and a business needs to be a responsible steward of its resources. That is where the Leadership and Executive Mindsets come into play again. It is their role, in the innovation process, to define the limits that make sense for the organization. This could be in the form of a time limit, a budget limit, or check-point gates in a process, just to name a few. I would caution you, however, to be sure not to crush the tinkerer as you reign in their efforts. Putting limits, to conserve resources, makes sense and they will often respond well to such guidance. Never sacrifice encouraging the tinkerers as part of that process.

The relationship tinkerers have with the leadership and executives should be a symbiotic one. Tinkerers should be encouraged, and their efforts nudged in the direction of the strategic objectives, never crushed. Crushing them is the fastest way to kill a Culture of Innovation.

To all my fellow tinkerer’s, take pride in who you are. From my perspective, and many others, you are the lifeblood of innovation and execution.

Sustainable Mindset

Finally, we have the Sustainable Mindset. This mindset is one that needs to be organizational. Having a sustainable mindset can mean the difference between short-term and long-term growth and resilience.  

The sustainable mindset is all about turning innovation into a self-sustaining process. A Culture of Innovation only works if it infects the DNA of everyone in the organization. This would be ideal if the organization never hired new employees or saw current employees leave. Unfortunately, the reality is that organizations lose people all the time and hire others on a regular basis. So, how do you deal with new people coming in that may not have innovation in their DNA and don’t come from an organization that fosters a Culture of Innovation? That is where the sustainable mindset comes in. An organization has two choices, they can only hire people that come from a Culture of Innovation, which isn’t realistic, or they can extend a Culture of Innovation to every process in the business, starting with their onboarding process.

One of the chinks in the armor of a Culture of Innovation is often the onboarding process. Many articles have been written about the importance of starting the onboarding process before an employee’s first day. For a Culture of Innovation to be sustainable, seeding this culture in new hires needs to start from day one and, if possible, before they start. Why?  

1. Many of these new hires will not have any experience with a Culture of Innovation. It is likely a new concept for most of them.  
2. During their on-boarding, training, and first few months, they are likely to see and hear things that are foreign to them.  

To those that already have this type of culture in their DNA, it all makes sense and is commonplace. New hires tend to be afraid to ask too many questions early on. This is bad. As they are exposed to aspects of a business they don’t understand or aren’t familiar with, they tend to internalize and that leads to stress. Eventually that stress can lead to an early departure. Aside from being costly to the business, it isn’t what a Culture of Innovation is about.

A sustainable mindset is all about making sure that every process feeds into the next in an endless loop. New hires coming in should be learning about your culture and what a Culture of Innovation is, how they fit into this culture, what the expectations of the culture are, and how this culture feeds into the strategic objectives. If a Culture of Innovation can only succeed if it is coming from the top and involves everyone, a Sustainable Culture of Innovation only succeeds if the processes are built to involve everyone from day one through to their very last day. This process still involves everyone but, at its heart, doesn’t take anything for granted. This ensures a consistent message from day one to all employees.

Innovation matters and is everyone’s responsibility.

Now, more than ever, organizations need innovation to survive, compete, and thrive. Gone are the days when new, transformative ideas or events occur centuries or decades apart. These days, time seems to be flowing all too fast. Far too fast for many businesses to keep pace with. While time may be relative, at present, technology and global events that impact our lives seem to be happening every year or two. That is why we need a Culture of Innovation. It will help us compete, keep pace with change, and pivot when necessary.

Choosing to cultivate a Culture of Innovation itself may cause the business to have to shift certain priorities, maybe even their business model. Many businesses look at their executives as being the most important part of their business. For that reason, they build their processes to support such a structure and philosophy. A Culture of Innovation is different. It needs the core to be about the ideas and resulting innovation. This means shifting your business model to place executives and leaders in a supporting role. This can be a significant shift for most businesses.

A Culture of Innovation is many things to many organizations. Everyone puts their own stamp on what it means to them. One thing is certain, a Culture of Innovation is about balance, equilibrium, and a symbiotic relationship between parties with these mindsets. A Culture of Innovation is about everyone and at the heart is a passion for the businesses we are part of.  

One final thought about the impact of a Culture of Innovation that many overlook; it impacts not just the company that adopted it. Such a culture impacts the businesses that employ those that leave us for their next great opportunity. It can infect the company’s partners, clients, vendors, and even its customers. In a sense, it has its own infection rate relative to the rate of turnover within an organization. This is not something we should fear.

Shock & Awe is a series of articles written by Nick Rich and Don Brown on change and innovation. In this article we heard about the Mindsets that are important to and impact a Culture of Innovation. In the final article in the Shock & Awe series, we will take these mindsets one step further and give you a practical approach to building a sustainable Culture of Innovation.

About the Authors:

Nick Rich: As Chief Strategy Officer at EEI (Enrich Enterprises, Inc.), Nick Rich helps drive change and corporate strategic initiatives for both clients and partners. In addition, he is a writer & speaker on Innovation Strategies, Digital Transformation, Data and the future of Scalable Workforce. 

Don Brown: Currently the Director of Software Engineering at Premier International. Passionate about technology, innovation, software development, and sci-fi, he believes that technology can be a force for change within any organization. He also advocates that partnerships between technology departments and leadership are a growth multiplier.