A quick recipe for enabling innovation
Published in
2 min readOct 30, 2022
- Psychological Safety
People need to feel welcome to contribute and explore, without fearing for their standing within the team and organisation. Sometimes this comes from fearlessness. Oftentimes this requires setting an example of ‘this is ok’. Show your own thinking, especially on things that don’t work. Own it when things don’t work. And reward/recognise others when they show desired behaviours. - Clear on North Star (but open on details)
What are you ultimately hoping to achieve? In most innovation settings, it’s important to have a filter for ideas: does this fit the big picture. But don’t get bogged down on things that can be flexible. - Safe to fail
Innovation needs room for “this might not work” without terrible downside. This involves safety on a personal level. As a whole, human beings choose the option without the potential for catastrophic personal downside over the option with the greatest possible potential upside. Limit the perceived potential downside for individuals (see: psychological safety). The same goes for businesses. You need to figure out how to try things that might not work without creating tremendous business damage.
There is a reason why early stage startups can often be more innovative. If the business fails as a whole, there is only a relatively small group of people who really care. (Even VCs don’t really care; they expect most ventures to not realy succeed.) Plus, there is a personal selection bias: people with more individual appetite for failure tend to found startups. - Room for quiet
Innovation often requires getting away from the day-to-day details. Allow the sediment in the proverbial glass to sink. - Hands-on
Insights get fed by engaging. Get your hands on what needs to change. And learn from others who’ve got their hands on the tool. - Idea Sex
Idea x Idea => Idea2 [squared]. Combine ideas and resources, and see what comes out. - Transparent documentation / No good ideas lost #1
A not-so-useful idea or piece of data now might be useful later or to someone else. See: Idea Sex. Document and keep it accessible, for you and others. - Transparent documentation / No good ideas lost #1
Not everyone involved in the conversation might now how to make something useful out of ideas or data generated. But others might. Maybe because they have different hands-on experience. Or maybe because they have greater distance from the day to day, - Serendipity
Often innovation (and discoveries) are unplanned. Value unintended potential innovation. This brings together many of the points above. Create (1) the room for quiet and the hands on experiences to generate insights, and (2) the psychological safety for people to welcome innovation-related thoughts and share them. Create (3) the transparency for people to wander into things their ideas can have idea sex with, while they (4) have a North Star to judge things against. And (5) make sure you can try things in a way that is safe to fail and then learn from those.
