Is it Comfort or Fear That Keeps Us in the Box?
By Rohan Rodney
Leaders often cite the need for their teams to innovate and push the corners of the envelope when it comes to product and service development. Through corporate memos, department off-sites, wall placards and quarterly reviews, leaders often thump their tables decreeing the need to push past competition at lightning speed. So why is it that we do not see more great products and services coming from every company whose leadership states that innovators will be rewarded handsomely?
Is it the fear culture where everyone feels fearful of sticking out his or her neck for fear of being ridiculed? Are there repercussions for those who do not play it safe in the corporate environment? When times get tough, why do people fear for their reputation and hunker down in their cubicles unwilling to “think or act outside of the box”?
Pervasive throughout many corporate environments is the underlying “fear culture”. The economic climate has not rebounded to the point where everyone feels willing to attempt potential value creation which may or may not be the next big thing. This, of course, heavily weighs in on why employees feel the need to stay in a “safe zone”. Leadership will always state they wish their teams would be more innovative and they find it a struggle to spur risk-taking. Often the truth that most leaders need to realize is they need to be the lead innovator and figure out the ideal way to destroy the box, which contains that fear culture.
An innovative leader encourages every individual to constantly be looking to institute creative ideas and values experimentation where failures are seen as learning opportunities. An exciting and brave new world awaits companies that truly buy into the fail-fast-and-then-iterate-quickly approach. The brave new company culture needs to learn from their mistakes and then celebrate. Learned failures become prizes in that they allow the next product or service approach to be refined. Future services, products and features can be debugged with increased efficiencies. Projects of any size will blossom.
In its truest form, digital marketing embodies this innovative approach. It burns the box of the traditional annual twelve-month marketing plan based on the previous year’s market research. A culture centered on customer innovation utilizes digital channels to experiment, measure, tweak and improve. These improvements do not always come in leaps and bounds, just as changing corporate culture does not always occur in leaps and bounds. What happens most often is minor movements are done that steadily move towards a major ROI event. This is done by closely monitoring feedback from your customer facing campaigns. It is essential to let consumer feedback guide you to the path of increased sales and customer service. This often leads to a greater understanding of how your customers think.
Can leadership take this same approach with developing the ideal innovation culture? Perhaps it can but maybe not quite along the same path. Small refinements in digital marketing demonstrate how to learn to best serve your customers and to continuously develop a real, sustainable relationship. In order to build a successful culture of innovation, a leader must continuously move the culture in the optimal direction, making slight adjustments as it goes along. There is no one declarative statement to “Innovate or die!”. There must be continual affirmation to the team that it is okay to fail and learn. Continuously tearing down any semblance of the dreaded box must be one of the highest priorities.
For a team to truly believe it is allowed to be innovative, there must be trust established with leadership, which can take some time. From a leadership perspective, it must be understood that burning the box will most likely not happen overnight. Preventing that box from sprouting back up is a long-term endeavor, necessary for long-term success. Burn the box, stomp on it and sprinkle “box-away” growth killer on top of the soil so roots cannot take hold. Let the decomposition of that box provide the fertilization of innovation.
