Culture of Innovation

Culture of Innovation (return to index)

• Connect the Dots, U. of Mich. video by Dr Jeff DeGraff, 8 minutes. EXCELLENT

• Jeff DeGraff shares with you some tricks of the trade to help innovation happen in your organization. Master the art of SODOTO—See One, Do One, Teach One—the apprenticeship of future innovation leaders in your organization. Fail early, fail often, fail off Broadway. Show; don’t tell. Leave room for the stuff you don’t know now.
• Use Trojan horses
• The cavalry isn’t coming
• Scroll down on the linked page for the other 13 “Leading Innovation” videos by Dr DeGraff about leading innovation in your organization

• The Foundations of Innovation – 7 Part Series
  • This series provides an overview of Lt Col Dave Lyle's series on the Foundations of Innovation. The first part of the series examines why innovation is necessary and important, especially in the context of the Department of Defense and the Department of the Air Force.
  • Part 1 – The Foundations of Innovation
  • Part 2 – The Foundations of Innovation – A Model of Innovative Change
  • Part 3 – The Foundations of Innovation: Ideas
  • Part 4 – The Foundations of Innovation: Groups
  • Part 5 – The Foundations of Innovation: Tools
  • Part 6 – The Foundations of Innovation: Synthesis of the IGT Model Insights
  • Part 7 – The Foundations of Innovation: Current Applications of the IGT Model

• Defense Innovation Board
  • Three subcommittees
    • Science & Technology (S&T);
    • Workforce, Behavior, and Culture (WBC); and
    • Space Advisory Committee (SAC)
• Defense Innovation Board (DIB) reports and recommendations 

• Adam Grant (former DIB member) testimony to Senate Armed Services Committee, 27 Apr, 2021 – starting at 34:30
  • “DoD’s culture is a threat to national security.”
  • “DoD’s culture stifles innovation.”
  • Three causes
    • Lack of psychological safety
    • Cognitive entrenchment
    • Organizational uniqueness bias
  • DoD is full of subcultures and there are bright spots
    • Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)
    • National Security Innovation Network (NSIN)
    • Kessel Run
    • AFWERX
    • NavalX
    • Army Software Factory
  • Senior leaders may need leadership coaches (like many industry leaders)
  • When group problem solving, get everyone’s thoughts BEFORE revealing the commander’s views
  • Make it unsafe to not speak up 

• The defense innovation machine: why the U.S. will remain on the cutting edge, by Gholz and Sapolsky, 25 June 2021 

• The Hard Truth about Innovative Cultures, by Pisano, Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2019
  • The easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors.
    • Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence
    • Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined
    • Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid
    • Collaboration but with Individual Accountability
    • Flat but Strong Leadership

• Liberating Structures Handbook, from Army’s UFMCS
  • Liberating structures are frameworks that make it possible for people and organizations to create, to do new things, to be innovative. These are processes or rules that can be put in place to encourage people to be free, creative, and get results, rather than find themselves oppressed, constrained, confined, or powerless. For things to really change, structural elements need to change, too. Otherwise change is short-lived. Liberating structures are the forms that make it easy for people to be generative together and make a significant impact with their
    creativity.

• Liberating Structures website
  • This website offers an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. It provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices.

• Innovation at DARPA, 2016
  • The most important factors that define the DARPA creative culture and explain its long and continuing history of innovation are:
    • Limited tenure and the urgency it promotes
    • A sense of mission
    • Trust and autonomy
    • Risk-taking and tolerance of failure

• Creating a Culture of Innovation: Eight Ideas that Work at Google, at Google Workspace

1. Think 10x, not 10 percent improvement
   1. A 10x goal forces you to rethink an idea entirely. It pushes you beyond existing models and forces you to totally reimagine how to approach it.
2. Launch, then keep listening
   1. The beauty of this approach is that you get real-world user feedback and never get too far from what the market wants.
3. Share everything you can
   1. At Google we believe that collaboration is essential to innovation and that it happens best when you share information openly.
4. Hire the right people
   1. Google has worked hard to attract people who want to tackle big problems that matter.
5. Use the 70/20/10 employee time model
   1. 70 percent dedicated to the core business
   2. 20 percent related to the core business
   3. 10 percent unrelated to the core business
6. Look for ideas everywhere
   1. For instance, we crowdsource innovation to improve the quality of Google Maps…. That led to Google Map Maker, a tool that lets anyone make changes to Google Maps. Today, thousands of citizen cartographers around the world are literally putting their communities on the map.
7. Use data, not opinions
   1. We also take this data-driven approach with what we call “People Operations,” our human resources department. Googlegeist is a perfect example of this approach. Googlegeist is an anonymous survey that goes out every year to all of our global employees. The response rate is very high: around 90% of Googlers worldwide. The survey asks employees for their views on a broad range of issues
8. Focus on users, not the competition
   1. We believe that if we focus on users, everything else will follow. If you can build a robust and loyal base of people who love what you do, you’ll have something rare and valuable. For us, that always starts with the desire to improve the lives of users.

• Does Your Culture Encourage Innovation? by Whittinghill et al, Defense Acquisition University (DAU) journal, April 2015, 25 pages
  • “The data suggest that organizations can improve innovativeness through culture modification.”
  • 5 most effective actions in changing culture to encourage innovation
    1. Communicate and demonstrate the importance of creative innovative thinking
    2. Give members time to think innovatively
    3. Allow and encourage members to collaborate
    4. Allow members flexibility to approach problems as they see fit, free from group-think
    5. Assign motivating work and trust members to perform without being micromanaged

• What Characteristics Do Organizations That Successfully Innovate Possess and Are They Transferrable to the Military? by Walker, School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), 2019, 45 pages
  • This paper uses a literature review to select four determinants of innovation organizational culture, the effective use of knowledge, experimentation, and acceptance of risk when combined with an absence of constraints. 
  • Includes case studies of Google and Apple
  • Cites military advantages of teamwork as second nature, and a history as a learning organization

• Distribution, Disruption and Failure: Building a Culture of Innovation in the Canadian Armed Forces, by McHardy, Canadian Forces College, 2013, 68 pages

• • videos can be watched for free online, but can be combined with a for-fee 12-week program of study/projects/coaching to get a Certified Professional Innovator certificate
  • 14 educational videos by Dr Jeff DeGraff, at the University of Michigan
    1. Practice Prismatic Thinking
       • This model consists of four different methods of innovation—Create [green], Control [red], Collaborate [yellow], and Compete [blue]—each with their own pros and cons. Every person and every organization has a dominant logic that determines the way they see the world and approach innovation.
    2. How to Think about Growth
    3. Sources of Innovation
    4. Set High-Quality Targets
    5. Enlist Deep & Diverse Domain Expertise
    6. Take Multiple Shots on Goal
    7. Learn from Experience and Experiments
    8. Creative Thinking
    9. Gaining Buy-in
    10. Assess to Progress
    11. Innovation Processes
    12. Evaluating and Measuring Innovation
    13. Connect the Dots
    14. Case Study
  • Skills advertised for the Certified Professional Innovator Certificate program - "Hone the skills that will prepare you for leading innovation in your organization"
• Leading Innovation: How to Make Innovation Happen in Your Organization - a free video series from the University of Michigan, by Dr Jeff DeGraff
  • • Selecting and assessing high potential innovation leaders
    • Diagnosing an organization’s innovation culture and competency
    • Developing an innovation strategy
    • Building a high performing innovation team
    • Launching innovation projects and teams
    • Jumpstarting processes
    • Gaining buy-in for solutions
    • Synchronizing growth opportunities and organizational practices
    • Community of Practice – sharing and communicating with other participants
• The Innovation Code: The Creative Power, by Jeff DeGraff & Staney DeGraff, at Talks at Google, May 16, 2018 - one hour 17 minutes
  • In The Innovation Code, Jeff DeGraff (the “Dean of Innovation”), and Staney DeGraff introduce a simple framework to explain the ways different kinds of thinkers and leaders can create constructive conflict. They show you the four steps to normalize conflict, channel it, and develop something completely new, using tools, methods, examples, exercises, and assessments.
  •  
  • Notion of "dominant logic"
  • Innovation, by definition, is a form of deviance
  • Uber's innovation is a social innovation - young people will get in the car with a stranger
  •  
  • The latitude and longitude of innovation
  • Innovation has to eliminate (kill) something
  • Innovation is a form of useful novelty
  •  
  • Breakthrough innovation pays in the future
  • There is a shelf life, only an innovation for a moment in time
  • Challenge of maintenance vs growth
  • Innovative organizations have very little in common
  • Money is almost never a barrier to innovation
  • Competitors often innovate in opposite ways (for example, Google is open, Apple is closed)
  • Incumbents are seldom first movers
  • Breakthroughs occur at the edges of the bell curve
  • Diversity is the only known key to success

Mindset – Feedback that encourages, and positivity

• The power of believing that you can improve, Carol Dweck, TEDx talk, 2014, 10 minutes
  To encourage “growth mindset” (vice “fixed mindset”), praise the process (you must have tried really hard), not the talent (you’re so smart). And rather than “you failed” say “you haven’t got it yet.”
• The Power of belief -- mindset and success, Eduardo Briceno, TEDx talk, 2012, 11 minutes
  An international chess champ said the best thing to happen to him was losing his first championship.
• Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck), Alison Ledgerwood, TEDx talk, 2013, 10 minutes
• “70% successful” and “30% failures” have different impact on individual opinions and choices, based on the order you present them, even though logically they say the same thing
  Why does a failure seem to stick in our minds so much longer than a success? According to social psychologist Alison Ledgerwood, our perception of the world tends to lean negative, and reframing how we communicate could be the key to unlocking a more positive outlook. In this sharp talk, Ledgerwood shares a simple trick for kicking negative thinking to the curb so we can start focusing on the upside.

Physical Design

• These 7 Innovative Offices Were Designed to Spark Creativity, by Hill, Apr 24, 2018
• 20 super-cool design offices to stir the senses, by Creative Bloq Staff, Feb 01, 2021