Seven dimensions of culture in an innovative organisation
Note: This content is taken, with permission from the
NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement
, from ‘ Creating the Culture for Innovation' , by Lynne Maher, Paul Plesk and Helen Bevan.
The culture for innovation framework
The characteristics of highly innovative organisations have been widely studied. While the bulk of the literature comes from outside the public sector and health, the few studies that do cover this context are consistent with the larger findings from other industries. This is not surprising. People are people and the organisational cultural factors that they experience as enabling or disempowering with regards to innovative thinking are characteristic of a social system, regardless of industry. We have captured the common themes across these studies as 27 constructs organised under seven dimensions (see diagram below).
Image copyright: NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement
Risk taking
Risk Taking is about establishing an organisational climate where people feel free to try out new ideas. While it is obviously important to avoid taking inappropriate risk, a healthy organisational culture seeks a balanced assessment that avoids prematurely rejecting ideas due to over-estimation of risk. It also requires leaders who show they are quick to provide emotional support to those willing to try something new, regardless of whether the idea is eventually judged a success or ‘failure’. Leaders in innovative organisations demonstrate that they are more interested in learning from failure than in punishing it.
Resources
The Resources dimension considers the broadest sense of the word. The climate for innovation is enhanced if people know that they have the ‘resource’ of authority and autonomy to act on innovative ideas. While innovative ideas do not necessarily need a lot of money or time to develop, staff can become demoralised if these traditional resources are not available and can feel that there is no point in putting forward a new idea. The presence of concrete resources signal that the organisation is taking innovation seriously.
Knowledge
Broad-based Knowledge is the fuel for innovation. We create better conditions for innovation when information, both from within and outside the organisation or system, is widely gathered, easily accessible, rapidly transmitted, and honestly communicated. Since we cannot know in advance what knowledge might stimulate an innovative idea, censoring, filtering or over-summarising information detracts from this dimension.
Goals
Organisational and system leaders – whether team leads, managers, directors, executives, or commissioners – signal that innovation is highly desirable by setting aspirational Goals in specific areas and challenging others to find ways to realise the vision. Linking these to strategic priorities and being able to articulate a clear, multi-faceted case of need, further signals the importance of the call for innovation. However there is a caution. Innovative thinking is stifled when leaders go beyond statements of what needs to be achieved and also become prescriptive as to how it must be achieved.
Rewards
Rewards for innovation are symbols and rituals whose main purpose is to recognise innovative behaviour. They signal how much value is given, or not, to the efforts of individuals and teams who come up with new ways to help the organisation or system achieve its strategic goals. Because it is all about encouraging more of this sort of behaviour, the best recognition is that which appeals to people’s intrinsic and individualised motivation. The most successful recognition schemes avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and are instead based on a deeper understanding of what makes people do what they do. For example, frequent personal expression of appreciation is often more important to people than financial reward.
Tools
In high-performing organisations, innovation is the product of the deliberate use of practical Tools. Imagining that innovation will happen on its own if we just have the right culture would be as naive and irresponsible as imagining that financial controls would naturally emerge without some deliberate structures. While everyone is capable of innovative thinking, most of us have been socialised to be more conservative in our thinking in the work environment, especially in health care where there are legitimate risks that must be managed. Leaders, therefore, need to consider how they build capability and capacity in deliberate methods for creative thinking.
Relationships
The Relationships dimension refers to the patterns of interaction between people in the organisation or system. Innovative ideas are rarely the product of a lone genius. Even when they might appear to be, delving further into the story nearly always reveals that the idea was formed over time and through multiple interactions with others that fuelled the process. Therefore, environments where staff are routinely exposed to a wide range of different thinking, from a wide-range of people, with a wide range of backgrounds and points of view, provide rich soil for the growth of innovation. Of course, it is more than just exposure; one can be ‘exposed’ to a diverse group of people while riding on a train and not be stimulated to innovate. There must be a sense of common purpose; of being in a ‘team’ with others. This
team environment must also enable those with different thinking to trust that their input will be honoured and explored, rather than immediately argued against.
