9 Steps to Cultivate a Culture of Innovation by Mitch Ditkoff
There's a lot of talk these days in most organizations about this concept called culture of innovation -- the environment, the mood, the tonality of the workplace, that would be a fertile environment for the natural expression of people's creativity. Sounds good, but for most people, when they hear that phrase, it's too vague, it's too generic, it means almost nothing to people. Like motherhood, apple pie, democracy, freedom -- what is it really? What is a culture of innovation and how do we help each and every person in our organization actually own it, get their arms around it and commit to it? If you were trying to invoke innovation in others, obviously it's your task to understand this concept as well.
One way that I've discovered to help people make sense of this potentially vague concept is to give them a very, very simple metaphor, and the metaphor is gardening. The exact same thing that it takes to grow a tomato or a zucchini, to get a yield, to get a harvest, is the same thing that's required of anyone who is a change agent or a manager or a business leader to create a culture of innovation.
Peter Senge from the Fifth Discipline fame said, "Companies are living organisms, not machines. We need gardeners, not mechanics." So in the next few minutes, I'm just going to break this down for you and explain these nine phases of what a culture of innovation is, and then you can reflect on what you can do within your sphere of influence to do something about it.
The very first thing is to whet the appetite. If you're going to garden, there has to be hunger. You have to have some motivation for the yield; otherwise, why roll up your sleeves and make all that effort. So anyone who is driving the train or leading the charge on a culture of innovation needs to first think about how they're going to whet the appetite of their workforce, make people encouraged to feel the innate, the intrinsic motivation to do something different. That's number one. No appetite, no motivation, no culture of innovation.
Once that's established, the second phase is to stake and prepare the ground. Now, just keep thinking of the gardening metaphor visually as I'm speaking. If you want to plant something, you have to know where to plant it. Is it going to be a large garden or a small garden? Is it going to be an acre or ten by ten? You will need to decide where in your organization you're going to stake your territory. Is it cost-cutting? Is it customer service? Is it technology? Once that area has been staked, you need to prepare the ground. The simplest way to think about that is to remove the obstacles. If you're gardening, you're going to be removing the old tires, the hard rocks, the boulders, the tough ground. If you're going to be cultivating a climate or a culture of innovation, you're going to be looking through bureaucratic obstacles to be removed. That's the second phase.
The third phase is to find the seeds. Obviously, if you're hungry and you have a place to plant something, you need something to plant. In the realm of innovation, what's planted are ideas. Where are you going to find those ideas? How are you going to encourage your people to surface or source those ideas? Brainstorming sessions, customer visits, trend tracking, staff meetings, idea management software, these are all ways of sourcing a seed of innovation, and that seed of innovation is the idea.
The fourth phase is to fence the garden. So you've got something growing, but just like in the realm of gardening, the night varmints comes, the moles, the raccoons, and they eat the little sprouts, the deer, in the same way in an organization the naysayers come and they find that first shoot of possibility and they look for what's wrong, and before you know it, it's gone. So you've got to protect your aspiring innovators. You've got to find a way to buffer them against the naysayers so they have the space and the safety to create, think and develop.
The fifth thing you need to do, if you want a culture of innovation, is to plant the seeds. You need to actually articulate and declare, find a way to make simple and actionable the moment where people can come forward and pitch their ideas to others. In some organizations it's catch-as-catch-can. How are ideas communicated in your organization? What can you do to make it more elegant and more seamless? Planting the seeds.
The sixth phase of a garden of innovation is tending new growth. Let's imagine the seeds have been planted and they're growing. These new possibilities have a life. They have roots, but they're fragile. You as a manager, you as a leader need to tend those baby seedlings. How do you do that? Listening, mentoring, giving and receiving feedback, and the expression of your own curiosity. Otherwise, the ideas will shrivel on the vine. So you need to be able to be present to paying attention to the new growth and giving it some energy.
The seventh phase of a garden of innovation is thinning and transplanting. In most amateur gardeners, they'll throw the seeds on the ground and they'll leave and they'll be happy when lots grow quickly -- and they will -- but usually they're too close together. There's too much planted in too small a space and they're fighting for nutrients. In an organization, this looks like projects that are fighting for resources. Too many projects, not enough resources. You need to know how to decide to choose and evaluate which projects get developed and which ones don't, and you need to make that clear to people so they understand what the process is of ideas going forward or not.
The eighth phase of a garden of innovation is what I call looking for unexpected growth. Just like in gardening or in farming, you can show up in your garden one day and see something growing that you didn't plant. What is that? It may not be a weed. It may have been a seed carried by the wind. It may have been a seed on the pelt or the hide of a night animal and, poof, something extraordinary is happening. Research has shown that 75% of all product breakthroughs are not the result of strategic planning but the result of serendipity and surprise, unexpected. The Post-It note, penicillin, the literature is full of these examples. No one was expecting it, it just happened; but the aspiring innovator was paying attention and they saw something unexpected and they applied their curiously and developed it and then great things happened. So be aware of what you're not anticipating and notice it.
The last phase of a garden of innovation is to celebrate the harvest. That's what happens at the end of the growing season, we call Thanksgiving in this country. People need to feel appreciated. They need to be thankful. They need to express their gratitude for the effort they made and it needs to be acknowledged. You as a leader, as a change agent, as a manager can make this public. You can have events, you can have showcases. You can communicate the successes, even the smallest of wins so that people feel their efforts are noticed and those efforts have some staying power in the organization.
Those are the nine phases of a garden of innovation. Be attentive to each one of them. They're all important.
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There's a lot of talk these days in most organizations about this concept called culture of innovation -- the environment, the mood, the tonality of the workplace, that would be a fertile environment for the natural expression of people's creativity. Sounds good, but for most people, when they hear that phrase, it's too vague, it's too generic, it means almost nothing to people. Like motherhood, apple pie, democracy, freedom -- what is it really? What is a culture of innovation and how do we help each and every person in our organization actually own it, get their arms around it and commit to it? If you were trying to invoke innovation in others, obviously it's your task to understand this concept as well.
One way that I've discovered to help people make sense of this potentially vague concept is to give them a very, very simple metaphor, and the metaphor is gardening. The exact same thing that it takes to grow a tomato or a zucchini, to get a yield, to get a harvest, is the same thing that's required of anyone who is a change agent or a manager or a business leader to create a culture of innovation.
Peter Senge from the Fifth Discipline fame said, "Companies are living organisms, not machines. We need gardeners, not mechanics." So in the next few minutes, I'm just going to break this down for you and explain these nine phases of what a culture of innovation is, and then you can reflect on what you can do within your sphere of influence to do something about it.
The very first thing is to whet the appetite. If you're going to garden, there has to be hunger. You have to have some motivation for the yield; otherwise, why roll up your sleeves and make all that effort. So anyone who is driving the train or leading the charge on a culture of innovation needs to first think about how they're going to whet the appetite of their workforce, make people encouraged to feel the innate, the intrinsic motivation to do something different. That's number one. No appetite, no motivation, no culture of innovation.
Once that's established, the second phase is to stake and prepare the ground. Now, just keep thinking of the gardening metaphor visually as I'm speaking. If you want to plant something, you have to know where to plant it. Is it going to be a large garden or a small garden? Is it going to be an acre or ten by ten? You will need to decide where in your organization you're going to stake your territory. Is it cost-cutting? Is it customer service? Is it technology? Once that area has been staked, you need to prepare the ground. The simplest way to think about that is to remove the obstacles. If you're gardening, you're going to be removing the old tires, the hard rocks, the boulders, the tough ground. If you're going to be cultivating a climate or a culture of innovation, you're going to be looking through bureaucratic obstacles to be removed. That's the second phase.
The third phase is to find the seeds. Obviously, if you're hungry and you have a place to plant something, you need something to plant. In the realm of innovation, what's planted are ideas. Where are you going to find those ideas? How are you going to encourage your people to surface or source those ideas? Brainstorming sessions, customer visits, trend tracking, staff meetings, idea management software, these are all ways of sourcing a seed of innovation, and that seed of innovation is the idea.
The fourth phase is to fence the garden. So you've got something growing, but just like in the realm of gardening, the night varmints comes, the moles, the raccoons, and they eat the little sprouts, the deer, in the same way in an organization the naysayers come and they find that first shoot of possibility and they look for what's wrong, and before you know it, it's gone. So you've got to protect your aspiring innovators. You've got to find a way to buffer them against the naysayers so they have the space and the safety to create, think and develop.
The fifth thing you need to do, if you want a culture of innovation, is to plant the seeds. You need to actually articulate and declare, find a way to make simple and actionable the moment where people can come forward and pitch their ideas to others. In some organizations it's catch-as-catch-can. How are ideas communicated in your organization? What can you do to make it more elegant and more seamless? Planting the seeds.
The sixth phase of a garden of innovation is tending new growth. Let's imagine the seeds have been planted and they're growing. These new possibilities have a life. They have roots, but they're fragile. You as a manager, you as a leader need to tend those baby seedlings. How do you do that? Listening, mentoring, giving and receiving feedback, and the expression of your own curiosity. Otherwise, the ideas will shrivel on the vine. So you need to be able to be present to paying attention to the new growth and giving it some energy.
The seventh phase of a garden of innovation is thinning and transplanting. In most amateur gardeners, they'll throw the seeds on the ground and they'll leave and they'll be happy when lots grow quickly -- and they will -- but usually they're too close together. There's too much planted in too small a space and they're fighting for nutrients. In an organization, this looks like projects that are fighting for resources. Too many projects, not enough resources. You need to know how to decide to choose and evaluate which projects get developed and which ones don't, and you need to make that clear to people so they understand what the process is of ideas going forward or not.
The eighth phase of a garden of innovation is what I call looking for unexpected growth. Just like in gardening or in farming, you can show up in your garden one day and see something growing that you didn't plant. What is that? It may not be a weed. It may have been a seed carried by the wind. It may have been a seed on the pelt or the hide of a night animal and, poof, something extraordinary is happening. Research has shown that 75% of all product breakthroughs are not the result of strategic planning but the result of serendipity and surprise, unexpected. The Post-It note, penicillin, the literature is full of these examples. No one was expecting it, it just happened; but the aspiring innovator was paying attention and they saw something unexpected and they applied their curiously and developed it and then great things happened. So be aware of what you're not anticipating and notice it.
The last phase of a garden of innovation is to celebrate the harvest. That's what happens at the end of the growing season, we call Thanksgiving in this country. People need to feel appreciated. They need to be thankful. They need to express their gratitude for the effort they made and it needs to be acknowledged. You as a leader, as a change agent, as a manager can make this public. You can have events, you can have showcases. You can communicate the successes, even the smallest of wins so that people feel their efforts are noticed and those efforts have some staying power in the organization.
Those are the nine phases of a garden of innovation. Be attentive to each one of them. They're all important.
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