Culture of innovation

carynvanstone October 24th, 2007

Been developing the conversation with my client in New York - slowly but surely moving forward with the Appreciative Inquiry and Complexity thinking based project to develop a culture more conducive to innovation and high human engagement.

This organisation, like many others, has been implementing processes and policies for innovation, whilst maintaining their normal, rather risk averse approaches to the general day to day cultural experience. Following a number of teleconf calls, and more recently another meeting in New York in October, we have started to explore some new ideas about innovation and engagement.

The first connection we were drawing on, is the link that Barbara Fredrickson of the University of South Carolina makes between certain positive emotional states and the capacity and tendency to innovate.

Her substantial research, over several longitudinal studies, makes direct links between:

Joy and Innovation and play
Interest and Exploration, curiosity and gaining new knowledge
Optimism and Achievement and recovery from set-backs
Contentment and Deeper insight, integration and adoption
Love and Co-operation, collaboration and social connectedness and relating

Just looking at these tells us that increased structure, policies and procedures are unlikely to have a substantial impact on the overall capacity for innovation.

The second link we explored is the link that Marty Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania advocates between high level performance, and “happiness”. This is no “pink and fluffy” notion of happiness. He breaks this down into three very specific experiences which have a direct impact on engagement, performance and innovation:

Pleasure and joy - connectedness, human relationships, enjoying what you do, having fun together (nb - this is the least correlated, least impactful and least long-lasting aspect of the three elements of “happiness” with long term superior performance, and yet it is often the only area where businesses spend money, on fun events and jollies!).
Engagement - feeling that you are deploying your true, unique strengths to do something that you feel valued for doing. Having a real influence and voice and being accountable for finding worthwhile work that uses your best talents (rather than being fitted “cog-like” into a pre-determined place in the “machine” and constantly appraising yourself against competency models.
Meaning - believing and experiencing that what you are doing has a higher purpose and contributes to something bigger than just yourself.

Sadly, in the last five years, according to a massive, global survey by Gallop[1] covering hundreds of thousands of people in a wide range of roles and organisations around the world, less than 17% in 2005 said that their work is organised “so that they can play to their strengths most of the time“. By 2007 this number had dropped to 12%. Unfortunately, in Europe, this number dips to nearer 8%.

Shockingly, when the sub-group of the youngest workers (the Generation Y folks as they are sometimes called) is analysed on its own, only 2% feel that they are working to their strengths most of the time.

What does this mean? It means that whilst many organisations are investing in routines, policies and procedures to “drive up” innovation, they are failing to pay attention at the most basic level of human experience - that it is joy, freedom, connection, playfulness, contentment, optimism and love (yes, that strange word in organisational settings) that stimulate innovation behaviours. It also means that the money being spent on team-built events, nights out, jollies and big bang events is also largely being invested in the wrong things for high levels of long term investment and engagement - another pre-requisite of a culture of innovation.

Watch this space - let’s see where this client is going to go next with all this…..

[1] Drs J Harter and F Schmidt of the Gallup Organisation’s four year research into the difference underpinning high performance teams, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2002

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