5 Ways to Create a Culture of Experimentation
It seems that most organisations these days are talking about being more innovative. But when it comes to it, how many of those organisations actually know what they mean by that? When you are blinded by the ‘innovation theatre’ of glass-walled rooms, bean bags and post-its, it’s perhaps easy to forget that true innovation is disruptive and disruption can cause all kinds of problems if the right frameworks aren’t in place to manage it properly. Perhaps the question that organisations should be asking themselves is how to create a culture of experimentation that allows them to innovate in a safe way and mitigate the risk of that disruption having a negative impact on the day to day business.
Creating a culture from scratch is difficult. Cultures are organic and appear over time. Tim Malbon Co-founder of Made by Many talks about culture as a patina. The risk of trying to force culture is that you end up with a gloss finish and gloss is superficial. In my experience, the way to build a culture of experimentation is to look at the culture you already have and build upon it, celebrating your patina rather than trying to gloss over it.
Central to everything is creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up and confident to have a go in the knowledge that if things go wrong they will be able to learn openly from the failure rather than be reprimanded and forced to sweep their ‘mistake’ under the corporate carpet. If you start with tame ideas you’ll just end up with more of the same, so being able to think radically different is important. There’s a difference between catastrophic failure and failing safely in a controlled way; embracing small cheap and safe failure is good risk management and a way of avoiding catastrophic failure further down the line. By sharing our failure stories with others we can build learning networks which ultimately lead to better outcomes in the future and by starting from a point of customer need we can build ecosystems rather than look for silver bullets, because contrary to widely held corporate belief, one size actually fits no one.
So, how can we build upon our organisational patinas in order to build a culture of experimentation? Here are five ways I believe can help organisations nurture a culture of experimentation:
1. Build your patina, don’t gloss over it.
Help colleagues spot opportunities and work with them to find the best ways to exploit them. Not every improvement needs to be innovative so know where to place your flags in the ground and only spend time on the things that really matter.
2. Start with problems not solutions and create ecosystems, not silver bullets.
Most organisations have a cultural bias for execution over thorough problem definition. Innovation is all about getting better at being wrong. Spending time properly understanding the problem you are trying to solve trumps implementing 10 poorly thought out solutions every time. Focus on human stories to get to the bottom of what your customers really need, but understand that this is sometimes different from what they want, so be careful how you go about finding out.
3. Link into strategy and inform the strategy.
It might feel like you’re getting caught in the bureaucracy you desperately want to avoid, but the truth is solutions simply cannot scale if they don’t have a place within organisational strategy. Don’t push against the corporate pipeline of work but also set aside time for speculative design challenges that help you to spot trends and inform future strategy. Doing both is an important part of our role as innovators.
4. Measure and communicate success and failure.
Fast failure is good risk management. Think more in terms of prototypes and tests than jumping straight to pilots, but be ruthless by pulling the plug at any stage of the design process. Not every idea or project is destined for success, but you need good quality insight to know when to pull the plug in order to avoid spending large sums of money on vanity projects.
5. Creating a network is better than trying to save the world on your own.
More and more of the problems we are seeking to address are wicked by nature, and because wicked problems transcend organisations and sectors, no single organisation can solve a given problem on their own. The solution lies in creating effective networks that work together to transcend silos. Organisations need to get better at celebrating their failures, turning them into opportunities to learn, share and ultimately provide products and services which really work for people.
True innovation is disruptive and disruption is hard. Scaling innovation involves tenacity and resilience. If we can’t change the world on our own, let’s build networks.
Originally published at simonpenny.wordpress.com on May 1, 2018.
