The delight in reinventing the wheel
Just got a good little video from a dear friend, revealing the last insight into innovation success: It’s all about culture!!
It amazes me how we reinvent the wheel with the greatest of enthusiasm… around every 15 years the great revelation regarding the secret success of innovation is revealed: Culture, Hurrah :-)
A shame so little seems to happen about it. Well, a shame perhaps, but also understandable! Just trying to find a picture for ‘culture’ proves to be a challenge. It is a right slippery topic! We can all sense the culture of an organisation, often within seconds of entering the environment, yet when it comes to describing it, to explaining why it is the way it is can be quite tricky; changing it is even more so.
So how do you change culture? I guess, as with innovation, the challenge needs to be tackled in a holistic, in a systemic way, and we need to know what kind of behaviours we want, and why. ON top of that it helps to be clear what the consequences of certain behaviours are (more likely than not, if you want to create an environment where innovation thrives you need to give up control…) That we need a holistic approach if we want to change culture goes a long way in explaining why it is to difficult to achieve, and why so many senior leaders are reluctant to go there. That, and the fact that a culture change needs to be lead and lived by the top (at what ever level that ‘top’ happens to be) to be taken seriously…
