Blackcomb Mountain, Whistler, January 2024
Connecting Dots is the monthly newsletter for global professionals leading innovation.
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Tips for an Innovation-Tolerant Culture
An impressive leader in a hugely respected tech innovator once confided that most of the frameworks and organizational structures they use are to quell anxiety.
This creation of processes to quell anxiety is common and necessary—to a point—giving a common bounding of how work progresses in a complex organization. However, when overly elaborate or inflexible it can work against the work.
If creating and following frameworks is more effort than learning and validating assumptions there may be too much repressed anxiety in the system.
It’s not that anxiety is a problem, as it’s to be expected when doing something new for the first time. Anxiety is the exhaust of innovation and change that is beneficial when it compels us to progress or signals an intuitive risk or opportunity to explore.
Logically, innovation and change trigger anxiety even in the most confident and optimistic professional. After all, your innovation program might not work or be accepted by stakeholders and customers. You won’t know for certain until you show it, share it or ship it.
As a senior leader, whatever type of culture you have if you want innovation to make a commercial difference you need the culture to include a tolerance for innovation. Just because you invest and do a lot of innovation activities or frameworks doesn’t mean the organization is tolerant of innovation.
By tolerant I don’t mean love or enjoy innovation and its associated anxiety. Some might but most don’t. To tolerate something means you don’t agree or like it but can respect or accept it. Tolerance is important for those around innovation not just those doing it as culture is collective.
To create an innovation-tolerant culture here are a few tips:
Acknowledge anxiety is normal - make reassurance and direction your primary leadership mission. Thus the technical and social processes of innovation are de-merged to be more practically navigated.
Hopes and fears - add experiential or qualitative data to evaluate how programs are structured or progressing. By asking emotional or experiential inputs you can more effectively surface hidden blockers or compassionately ease an individual overwhelmed by personal anxiety unrelated to the task at hand.
Counter questions - asking contrary questions like "Why shouldn’t we do this?" rather than promotional questions of "Why should do this? can safely surface important viewpoints perceived as socially unacceptable or unformed. NASA used the counter-question approach up until the disastrous Columbia mission.
These tips foster an enacted culture of innovation that fuels the designed processes and tools of innovation. These practices can be threatened when time, pressure or expectations work against you.
That’s why I appreciate Mark Sandys, the Chief Innovation Officer at Diageo, sharing these stories on how their culture supported the long turbulent journey to the blockbuster success of Guinness 0.0.
Most leaders already think a lot about processes, frameworks and tools. Evidence tells us that investing equally in the cultural and behavioural aspects of innovation pays off.
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Learn more about Brett’s leadership development practice for global executives with innovation responsibilities.
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