Encouraging innovation in the workplace

Do I sense that my innovations (as a supporter of learning) have been valued, encouraged, supported in my workplace?

Not always!

Factors that discourage innovation - balancing the financial cost with the perceived value of the innovation

I’ve mainly worked in highly profit-driven organisations.

Innovation gets supported if it confers a clear benefit and doesn’t cost much.

Resistance to innovation grows if the benefit isn’t clear or if the cost is too expensive.


Factors that discourage innovation - wider systemic issues

The larger and more complex the organisation, the more resistant to change.

Organisations comprise individuals interacting with systems (and the systems may be formal and evident, or informal and hidden). If your innovation goes against the grain of an existing system, then you may encounter resistance.

So you need to try and understand some of the wider systemic issues if you are to introduce change.


What evidence do I have to support this view?

Trish’s example of the attempt to introduce smartphones in the police force is a case in point. The value of the technology was self-evident to the IT team. But they met resistance due to a number of different systemic issues that needed to be understood - e.g. status issues (only senior officers should get smartphones) - nothing to do with technology, but deeply important for the organisation.

Another example from my experience is to do with Knowledge-Sharing Platforms. I think I’ve seen these introduced and fail about 7 times now, in different organisations.

Typically, the senior management deems it valuable for people across a diverse organisation to have an internet forum to share best practice, ask questions to people with the right experience etc.
The IT team build a great system.
It gets used for about 3 months and then everyone drops it.
These initiatives usually fail because of the wider systemic issues surrounding them. A common issue is that many senior people don’t like posting questions in public as they don’t want to broadcast that they don’t know something. Because the junior people tend to copy what the senior people do, they also won’t post questions.
Another common problem is that many people jealously guard what they know, as they think this helps them maintain their position in a company, so they don’t like to share information.
It’s all these sort of factors that block the adoption of innovation.

Implications - how to encourage and manage innovation
On one level we can all recognise the value of innovation, and yet it is normal (and understandable) for most people to resist it unless it is self-evidently of value.

In an organisational context I think it helps to acknowledge this default resistance.

I think it also helps to realise that there will be many subtle systemic factors that will have an impact on any desired innovation - and that will tend to stifle innovation, as established systemic routines tend to predominate in the face of innovation.

There is no easy solution, but for me one very important starting point is to think through which people in your organisation will be affected by the innovation  you are proposing, and going and talking to them - not a superficial ‘consultation’, but a genuine, free-ranging chat to get their views and thoughts.

Having such conversations is enormously beneficial - you start to understand some of the systemic issues you may have been unaware of; and the very fact that you engaged in a proper conversation with the other person goes a long way to relaxing their (often unconscious) natural resistance to change.