Building a Culture of Innovation: Dave Martin, Digital Director & Product Strategist [MindTheProduct]

Dave Martin, Digital Director & Product Strategist, talks to ProductTank London about how to build  Culture of Innovation in Enterprise Organisations. Product Managers are well placed to share learning from failure and to drive a culture of innovation.

Learning fuels innovation

If you’re looking to use innovation to drive growth, then you have to be able to take an idea then translate it into a product or service that creates value. This process of translation is often overlooked and underestimated . Rarely is it possible to make an idea a reality first time. This means that we have to be comfortable with trying something, getting it wrong and learning from the process. These lessons will be what drives you towards an eventually successful product.

To learn you need to fail

Many people know that you need to fail in order to learn. However if you want to consider the process as seriously as you should, then you need to start measuring it. How many times are you failing and what are the sizes of the lessons you’re achieving through them should be metrics you track in your operation. This let’s you understand your learning velocity.

Why do you need a culture of innovation?

In the world of business, culture describes the environment in which you are operating. It has a huge impact in the likelihood of a team feeling like they are empowered to fail and learn. Successful start-ups find this easier than most other companies, often paying particular attention to sharing the failures they encounter across the whole business. No one blames anybody, fingers aren’t pointed and nobody gets fired because ‘it didn’t work’. All that happens is they reflect, learn the lessons and try again.

Within larger Enterprises there is often a desire to be agile and work in a way that embraces failure, but rarely is it put into practice. Usually this is excused by saying that they are too complex and large to operate at that pace and the risk is too high. Underneath that though is usually that the culture is not able to give the allowances people need to to work in an innovative why.

Enterprises reward success which make a learning culture difficult. When you focus only on successes, you make it very difficult for an individual to share the failures they have as they’re seen as negatives. When stories of success (or ‘best practice’) are shared they are rarely able to help drive a new idea in other areas. Even the most innovative people in these types of organisations will often end up hiding their failures until they get it right – further fuelling the poor learning culture.

If you can’t see your outcomes then you can’t learn

If a golfer hits a shot and isn’t able to see where the ball ends up, then they will not know how they need to refine their technique. The same is true for the way we work – if we can’t see the outcomes, we’ve no idea whether we’re improving or not. Too often in business, we aren’t able to effectively measure or communicate the outcomes we see so we aren’t able to learn as efficiently as possible.

Culture beats process every time

When digital transformation projects are run in organisations, they almost always forget to focus on the culture, into which they are implementing new processes. If they aren’t trying lots of different ways to drive a learning culture, then they’re more likely than not to fail. Product Managers are well placed in this situation, to work across their organisation and share lessons to help drive the cultural change that’s needed.

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