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Innovation, Culture And Some Insights From Twitter

This article is more than 9 years old.

Back in February of this year I posted a piece here titled Stop Blaming, Start Innovating. The point of the article was (and is) that both leadership and the workforce share the responsibility when there is a failure to innovate. It does take two to tango, and it takes both management and employees to make innovation work. Mr. Steve Outing liked my piece enough that he Tweeted the link to the article and got a very insightful response from Ms. Madalina Rita. Ms. Rita Tweeted, adding to Drucker’s familiar phrase: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast. True for innovation, too."

Ms. Rita is right. A bad culture prevents strategies from being implemented and strangles innovation.   Nothing new and wonderful is going to happen in a company that treats its employees like the targets in a Whack-a-Mole game. Another way to describe this toxic culture is with the old adage, “the nail that sticks out gets hammered.” People in these bad work cultures learn quickly that no one cares what they think, and management will punish, not reward, their efforts to make changes.

Culture is a deeply held and widely shared set of beliefs, assumptions, and norms, working in concert to make certain human behaviors and business outcomes more probable. The Whack-a-Mole culture is destined to produce no innovation and undermine any strategy other than make employees as miserable and disengaged as possible while simultaneously increasing employee turnover.

Fortunately, not everyone works in a Whack-a-Mole culture. With 94% of business leaders identifying innovation as the number one priority in achieving sustainability and growth, I have to believe there is some serious effort being made to foster a culture of innovation. But as I pointed out in Stop Blaming, Start Innovating, those efforts are imperfect and have room to improve.

Here’s another Twitter response I got on this same topic.

Terence is accurately describing the calculations virtually everyone makes at work when considering whether to propose an innovation. It will make waves and upset some people to suggest changes. What will it cost you? Relationships? Time? Credibility? Terence also correctly identified that the outcome of this analysis is culture dependent. In a well-established culture of innovation, the cost to an employee who tries to innovate will be low. Unfortunately, in many organizational cultures, it is higher.

I saw a TV ad recently for Domino’s Pizza that caught my attention. You can see it here. The ad is entitled Failure is an Option and Domino’s is boasting that it welcomes failed innovation efforts (like the cookie pizza) because they recognize that innovation and change are vital to its success. (How did the cookie pizza fail? That sounds brilliant!) Rather than fear failure, they embrace it as an inevitability.  This healthy culture removes the inherent fear in sticking out because the hammer has been removed.

There are many successful companies that have yet to attain the Failure is an Option culture of innovation that is being embraced by Domino’s. Human nature being what it is, I suspect even Domino’s is finding some internal resistance to this idea. Most companies probably fall between Whack-a-Mole on the low end and Failure is an Option on the high end, so the majority of employees still have to weigh the pros and cons before trying to innovate.

The goal should be to create and nurture a culture where no such calculations need to be made, and employees are trained, equipped, and encouraged to fail or succeed with innovations--as a normal part of their jobs. Entrepreneurs are untethered by such internal political calculations and are free to experiment. For intrapreneurs, these considerations present an additional barrier to improvements and problem solving that can only be removed by brave leadership committed to a culture of innovation.

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