Unleashing the power of a fear-free culture to increase innovation

Companies look forward to increasing innovation, though usually three main factors are neglected: a fear-free environment to allow ideas to flourish, smart risk-taking and agility to take advantage of the innovation before some else does it first. 

I was recently in a coaching session, and my client asked me “what if” she was doing something wrong in her strategy, what If she failed. What if she was rejected? Then I remembered when I used to work for a company, how I felt under stress almost all the time, especially during meetings. I remembered that I was afraid to be judged, to make a mistake. In that particular culture, mistakes were more “important” than great ideas. If you would make a mistake or say something not as appropriate, they would remember to use it for your annual performance evaluation or would use it as an excuse for not inviting you to the next meeting. While new ideas, if you even had the courage to talk about them, or someone had the time to listen to them, would likely be forgotten, or left aside until further notice.

Managers want good ideas to flourish, but ideas are usually stuck somewhere, and never get to the right hands. Usually, employees have lots of ideas on how to improve their processes, how to use different tools or how to improve customer satisfaction and mention them to the middle manager. What happens next?

What happens next is a common story. There are no processes to capture those ideas. Middle managers are afraid to take a risk, to be seen as weaker than the employee, or too liberal. Ideas are seen as proof that something is incorrect now, so they are not welcome. Some think that ideas are only for marketing or R&D. More urgent tasks arise, and ideas are, to say the least, forgotten. Sometimes employees are even punished, especially if ideas come after a mistake. Employees learn that ideas are for no good.

It’s a matter of culture

What we are seeing is a culture where learned behaviors don’t help ideas to work. companies are based on scarcity. There aren’t enough managerial positions for everyone, there are rankings where the first positions win and all the others lose, there is not enough time or money for all the ideas. So employees learn to keep the status quo, and avoid showing what is wrong. Fear is a means to keep everything under control.

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Still, ideas never really disappear. They are always there, everywhere in the organization from top to bottom and bottom to top, and from HR to engineering. We just have to build the behaviors that promote them. Clayton Christensen in his book “The Innovator’s DNA” urges companies to build a culture where innovation is everybody’s job.

Building a fear-free environment

We can see mistakes and ideas as problems we fear. Or we can see problems as opportunities, we accept them, and learn from them. There will be there anyway, so it is all about how we deal with them.

Innovative companies learn to think in terms of abundance. Innovation is a profitable application of creativity to improve products and services, processes, or business models. The first step to build a fear-free environment is to see mistakes as opportunities for improvement. We Organizations find problems and make frequent adjustments all the time along the way. This adjustment is shared, meaning growth for the individual, the team and the whole company. Employees don’t want to make mistakes, but if they see something wrong, they are not afraid of it. If there is a mistake, they correct it right away. Citing Deming, we need to “drive out fear”. The fear to fail makes people slower in decision making, less creative and less team-oriented, it hurts their “Psychological safety” and paralyzes them.

 “What replaces fear? A capacity to trust the abundance of life. We come to believe that even if something unexpected happens or if we make mistakes, things will turn out all right, and when they don’t, life will have given us an opportunity to learn and grow”

Frederic Laloux

Smart Risk-taking

Traditional teams usually avoid risk-taking by moving decision making to the upper levels. On the contrary, the We Culture companies promote pushing decision making to whoever is closest to the problem. In a team, we should all be capable of making decisions in our areas of expertise. This unlocks everyone’s ideas and therefore also generates more innovation. Innovative companies usually “take more risks in the pursuit of innovation”, test products that may not work, but also take actions to mitigate those risks. Clayton Christensen calls this “smart risk-taking”. The most essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

“Take more risks in the pursuit of innovation”

Clayton Christensen

They may try products in pilot settings, do quick turnarounds and get quick feedback from the customer. Sometimes being slow is also a risk. Ideo’s slogan, for example, is “fail often to succeed sooner”.

COURSES WE RECOMMEND: Agile innovation in the workplace

An agile response

We each respond to stress differently. But the problem comes when our responses hurt our productivity or effectiveness on and off the job. Some level of stress and anxiety can actually improve our performance. Good stress could be starting new project, moving to a new team, taking new responsibilities or working hard to meet a deadline. But: When anxiety becomes severe, our performance will almost always suffer. It usually happens when people don’t feel psychologically safe and fear the consequences of making a mistake.

An agile we culture, where work is done in small, multidisciplinary and psychologically safe teams is best suited to innovation. Issues don’t necessarily go to managers to get solved, issues get solved immediately, when and where they happen because the experts are within the team, and are empowered to make decisions.

Let’s start today!

When we do 5S implementations, a tool we use a lot to initiate agile cultural change, we start with an action plan. It’s a document where employees write down their ideas for improvement. This document makes them accountable for their workspace, makes them see their ideas and invites them to have a plan to implement them. It helps them confront a large, complex problem, like a slow, disorganized and dirty line of products, into modules, and develop feasible solutions to each component. Everyone is welcome to add items to the document. Then the teams agree on the completion date and resources needed. What could be a problem unresolved for years, becomes a starting point for a new innovation journey. When we perform audits, the more items in the action plan the better. The action plan becomes our success tracker. When team members and leaders see ideas this way, it’s when cultural change is starting to stick.

If we focus less on what team members are doing wrong or what’s missing, and more and what is available and what is its potential, we realize that everyone helps to the company purpose in their own way. We shift from a deficit to a strength-based paradigm, where stress unleashes innovation.

Lu Paulise

luciana@biztorming.com

@lupaulise

Biztorming Training & Consulting