Getting to the root of innovation culture’s 4 biggest obstacles

So, you’re ready to lead your organisation toward a more innovative culture, but you’ve encountered obstacles along the transformation journey? Let’s deep dive into the reasons why these obstacles emerge in the first place so you can overcome them to eventually cross your culture finish line.

Innovation culture, yes. But why?

When done right, an innovation culture encourages creativity, risk-taking and experimentation. It gives employees, teams and leaders the space to think outside of the box, come up with innovative ideas and make mistakes (as long as they learn from them). All of that helps a business grow – and more importantly, evolve so it stays ahead (or gets ahead) of the competition.

In our experience helping businesses from a range of industries foster innovation culture, we’ve seen four common obstacles that get in the way:

Lack of leadership support
Silos
Risk aversion
Resistance to change

Let’s get to the root of them!

Innovation culture obstacle #1: Lack of leadership support

Root cause: There is no common understanding of what should be achieved by innovation or [insert any other culture topic].

There are a variety of reasons why management isn’t promoting innovation. Maybe leaders talk about it, but don’t back up their words with action. Or they believe in it, but get distracted by the core business. A third version is that they analytically understand its importance and allocate time accordingly, but they don’t authentically promote the new culture.

In such a case, leadership needs to define what they truly want to achieve with innovation. This definition influences the direction innovation culture should evolve, and so exploring “innovation” in the frame of your organisation’s current culture, customers and products makes for a solid first step.

How Creaholic does it

We truly live our “play together to invent for better” vision, which is incorporated into the work we do with clients. We have also built our own intrapreneurship process that empowers employees to try new things. Together, these two elements form our unique business model which highlights how we want to live innovation and how our culture has to develop.

Innovation culture obstacle #2: Silos

Root causes: Cross-unit collaboration isn’t incentivised & cross-unit communication channels are not fully evolved.

Silos (in the sense of unit boundaries that are experienced in the workplace culture) can be a natural by-product of the structure of medium-sized or large organisations. Creating teams, departments and units is required for a business to be successful; otherwise, it won’t be efficient. In this way, silos themselves are not bad – it’s the lack of collaboration between silos that is an obstacle to innovation culture.

If employees or teams are celebrated for their individual achievements or departmental success, this becomes the focus. Cross-functional collaboration should be promoted and celebrated instead. Bring these cases of teamwork into the spotlight to show how innovative ideas are acted on.

How Creaholic does it

Every other Monday we have a Monday Morning Meeting where we cover topics like new projects that have been realised, inspirational inputs about new trends and signals, updates on IT policies as well as official invites to events such as the epic company ski weekend. Team rituals like these definitely work to strengthen our cross-company collaboration.

Innovation culture obstacle #3: Risk aversion

Root causes: Fear of being held accountable for a negative result or a “failure” & short-term opportunity costs.

By its very nature, innovation involves risk. There’s no way around it. When people fear trying new things or are wary of exploring a new area, they shut the door on opportunity. At the heart of this risk aversion could be a previous experience that involved taking a bet on innovation and losing – losing money, losing time, losing potential customers. If the fear of being punished for taking risks is present, then risk aversion grows even stronger.

Another hypothesis is that if employees dedicate resources to innovating, then their attention is drawn away from short-term results. The message employees mostly receive is: long-term success that could be achieved through an innovative approach isn’t as important. In this scenario, leaders are more focused on achieving immediate goals and meeting short-term targets rather than taking risks that could lead to long-term growth and success.

How Creaholic does it

Giving employees the space, resources and trust to try new ideas or experiment with different tools can help with introducing a culture of innovation. For us and for the clients we support, this takes the form of a Rapid Market Test, for example. An effective way to reduce the risk for exploring new areas and value propositions.

Innovation culture obstacle #4: Resistance to change

Root cause: Having difficult discussions is not easy.

Resistance to change is driven by a belief that change is not necessary. Does this sound familiar: “It’s worked this way for so long, why do it differently?”

Leaders need to think about resistance to change proactively. It’s not so much that sceptics are anti-change, perhaps they just need more time to get accustomed to the change or to ease into it. Resistance could come up because teams haven’t had enough time to process the change and see how innovation culture could benefit them.

Sometimes it’s not resistance of the employees, but it’s procrastination on the part of leadership. Change procrastination. This can look like waiting until the time is right to take on change initiatives, driven by the avoidance of negative emotions or tough talks. Daily business will always be urgent. So, change must be handled differently than deadlines.

With an Innovation Culture Checkpoint, we can help get to the bottom of where the resistance in your organisation is coming from.

How Creaholic does it

We send out a Pulse Feedback survey twice a year that gives employees a platform to share what they think is going well and what could be done better. As a team we then use the feedback and comments to get a sense of the workplace culture, resource allocation, team spirit and client activities. All of this is done in a completely transparent way, so pain points are visible to everyone; and everyone can contribute to positively changing the culture.

Obstacles as signs that it’s time for a culture redesign

These four obstacles are closely linked to 14 signs that your company culture might need some reshaping. Find out what signs you should look for and get more tips about what you can do to spark transformation toward a more innovation-friendly environment.

Tell us what you need help with

Are you facing these obstacles and need an outside perspective from our innovation culture experts? Or are you facing a different obstacle that you can’t get to the root of? Let us know about your company’s or team’s current challenge.

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