At August’s Innovation Day, we welcomed Mark Neild, doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Making new things that change the way we work and live is difficult. When looking at data from start-ups, 50% of them fail within the first five years. There are many contributing factors, but the main reason is that they are not innovating correctly. They are not making things that customers will buy into at a sustainable price. This is because change is hard. For a customer (or an employee) to take advantage of innovation, they need to embrace the new and change what they do. Getting that change to happen can be a challenge.
It is often said that culture is key to all success. Drucker’s famous ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ quote is often trotted out but, in reality, only 20% of London-based Directors devote any time to culture. But what is culture? It can be thought of as the sum of all stakeholder motivations – this means that it is intangible. So, we cannot see culture, but it exists behind all the strategies you wish to employ. Therefore, if you want to innovate through your processes or through the technological solutions, you need to have the underlying culture in place to drive those changes.
So, what can we do to drive successful innovation?
Understand the physiological consequences of presenting. On an individual level, culture forms part of the interlocking connections between language and thought that colour our individual understanding of the world. We use our language to describe the world but also to understand the world. That changes the way we think about the world, how we think about the world affects our culture and, finally, culture affects how language is formed. This is a unique cycle for each person.
When people come together in groups, either socially or at work, their experiences become similar and their cultures start to align. These are the communities of practice. We start to think and speak alike. The short-cuts in thinking, those base assumptions that speed your own thoughts, spread out into the wider group. More and more knowledge become unwritten or tacit and the focus of the group become inward-looking. This gives rise to the embedded cultures that we need to overcome to drive innovation.
Learn a new culture. In order to change behaviour and to drive innovation, we need to move beyond these communities of practice. The end goal is to become so familiar with the new concept or practice that we can do it without thinking – to learn something so well that it becomes a new behaviour. The learning journey can be characterised as a move from unconscious incompetence (we don’t know what we don’t know) to unconscious competence (the skill is second nature, like driving or writing). The hardest step is to cross conscious incompetence. When driving innovation, it is at this stage at that people give up. This is when they say that they prefer the old way because they cannot yet do it in the new way.
Transcend your preconceptions. In order to get your team or your customer base to embrace innovation, you need to move them beyond the stage of conscious incompetence. For this, you need to give them the vision of where they will be once they have embraced the innovation. This vision needs to be more than just the nuts and bolts of how the innovation will work and be more enticing. This is how we transcend our preconceptions and embrace the new.
Create innovation through collaboration. Collaboration is the key to transcending the restrictions of our previous cultural assumptions. Collaboration itself can be conceived of as a pyramid of ever-increasing mutual support. At the highest level of collaboration each person has an equal role in creating new ideas. Listening and understanding allow for all parties to have a hand in creation, which means that the vision is clear between all collaborators. With a shared vision and understanding, innovation and change are built into the culture of the group and the move towards innovation is made smoother.
These are just some key highlights taken from August’s Innovation Day. Each month, clients of the Innovation Programmes receive a full ACT report, capturing the guest expert’s research, the implications and next steps for leaders to apply back in their team and organisation.
Sources: Neild, M. (2019) ‘Thinking Differently to Achieve Better Outcomes’, KnowledgeBrief Innovation Day Presentation, 14 August.