The three elements of innovation

If it’s not already a value that your organisation has, then you can guarantee that at some stage over the next few weeks, someone will talk about the need to be more innovative, without articulating how it will happen within the current cultural context.

Rather than generate excitement about what’s possible, it will just annoy people who are already drowning in email and the seemingly never-ending days of back-to-back meetings.

When organisations take innovation seriously - by providing time and the environment in which to think - it changes everything. Yet most will just simply assume that by saying that they value innovation it will somehow magically happen, when in reality it’s only a priority when a crisis point is reached.

Innovation isn’t difficult to understand. There are broadly three elements to it.

Data

Not dashboards nobody reads, but information made genuinely accessible that can be used. In Culture Fix, I described data as the fuel that propels ideas forward. The point isn't just the collection. It's distribution. Cultures that share information widely create the conditions for people to spot what others miss. What makes this hard is the hoarding instinct. Data as power. Data as protection. Both are innovation killers.

Creativity

Not the forced kind that comes from team-building exercises involving spaghetti and marshmallows, but the slow, unglamorous kind that occurs when people are given time, trust, and the permission to think differently. Hackathons are a great way to create the conditions for creativity and for good (and bad!) ideas to emerge. When good ideas are found and have a solid value case, then a plan should be created to implement them. Which can often lead to…

Failure

This is the most avoided word in most organisations' vocabulary. Astro Teller, who runs Google's X, famously rewards teams for killing projects early - because failing fast and learning faster is the point. The organisations allergic to failure aren't being careful. They're stagnant. Of course, the goal isn’t to deliberately fail. It’s to recognise that not every great idea on paper will lead to a fail-proof implementation. The goal is to never make the same mistake twice.

Research on psychological safety consistently shows that when people feel safe to propose ideas without fear of ridicule, innovation follows. Fear of failure, blame or reprisal doesn't just slow innovation. It stops it. 

Innovation isn't a room with funky furniture, a working group or something to do once everything else is broken. It's what happens when time is deliberately set aside for data, creativity and failure. And that, as ever…is entirely a culture characteristic and not one that organisations take seriously enough.