Organizational Culture

0.4 Organizational Culture That Sparks Innovation

To create a high-performing organizational culture, trust is key, but it’s not the whole picture. Spark is also critical to creating a light speed organizational culture.

Spark means people are having fun, being creative, and giving their best selves to the work. It is what makes coming to work a joy, not a burden. Spark occurs when you tap people’s creative energies. It means providing people the freedom to explore new ideas without fear. Innovation happens when there’s a big vision, clearly communicated, and the entire team is focused on achieving that vision. It exists when there are clear performance measures tied to the things that matter, and performance is evaluated fairly and consistently.

In light speed organizations, trust and spark feed off one another. One catalyzes the other. By creating trust, you enable people to be open to change. By energizing spark, you unleash the innovation that makes an organizational culture vibrate with new ideas and real purpose.

Organizational Culture Examples

3M is a good example of a company that focuses on trust and spark. Its “15 percent rule” enables employees to spend 15 percent of their work time exploring and conducting experiments. Technical employees can apply for internal corporate grants to fund innovative projects they want to pursue. It’s this careful nurturing of innovation that has resulted in products like ScotchGard™ and Thinsulate™.

Fred Smith, the founder and CEO of Federal Express, has a similar strategy for his company: “We hammer home that not to change is to be in the process of dying, of not meeting the market as it is. We applaud people who instigate change. We don’t hang people who try something new that doesn’t work out, because that’s the easiest way to ossify an organization – to crucify the people who are trying to innovate.”

By now, nearly everyone is familiar with the story of how two young men named Steve – Wozniak and Jobs – pretty much created the personal computer industry. Today Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer, still puts a premium on fun, creativity, learning, and exploring new ideas: “Learning about new technologies and markets is what makes this fun for me,” Jobs says. “You just gotta go learn this stuff. If you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”

The Innovative Organizational Culture at Disney

Spark thrives in an environment of freedom, where the unexpected is invited, embraced, and encouraged to evolve into value. Walt Disney understood it. Long before Mickey Mouse came along, he injected creativity into his team of animators. He wasn’t content to have silent cartoons: he wanted to produce the first cartoons with sound. He wasn’t content with black and white: he wanted color. The people who worked with Disney often remarked on the freedom he gave them to try new things – and they drew on the culture he built to come up with their own dazzling creations.

I admire Walt Disney’s creativity, so bear with me while I recount a story. In 1932, while making his masterpiece of animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney became dissatisfied with the limitations of two-dimensional backgrounds. He wanted to convey depth realistically, yet all he had to work with was animation cells on photographic plates. So Disney challenged his team to find a better way.

The result was the invention of the multi-plane camera, an elaborate, one-story-tall device with a dozen moving glass panels on which his animators could superimpose different backdrops. By subtly shifting the positions of the glass panels with each shot, Disney’s animators successfully conveyed the illusion of three dimensions in Snow White.

Through his constant quest for creative quality, Disney sparked his teams of animators and producers to think freely and create great things. Walt Disney Studios innovated, learned from its mistakes, and blossomed into one of the most successful companies in the world.

Spark isn’t limited to the private sector. Ted Gaebler, co-author of “Reinventing Government,” sees innovation as one of government’s most important missions: “We need to start engaging public employees’ whole brains,” he says, “not just the expenditure control half. We need to engage the entrepreneurial brain as well.”

It’s easy to spot an organizational culture that has high levels of spark:

• People feel free to challenge the status quo.
• People go way beyond what you would normally expect.
• People feel their work is fun.
• People feel unconstrained by rank or hierarchy to suggest improvements.
• People share their ideas openly about how to improve things.

One of the best examples of spark is Google. Here’s a company that ten years ago barely registered a ripple. Today, its innovations influence everything from advertising and media to geo-science, disease control, and climate prediction.

In the next several years, I predict that Google’s innovations will enable your refrigerator to communicate your shopping list directly to the grocery store; guide your car as it navigates down the highway; and convert your home into a mini-generating plant. Google has created a new kind of company, one that blends the best of a non-profit with the best of a for-profit. By operating at light speed, it has rearranged and reshaped much of what we do.

When you build trust and spark together, amazing things happen. You attract and retain the most talented employees. You innovate constantly. You surprise and delight your customers. You out-perform your peers. When trust and spark work together, it doesn’t ensure calm quiet. Because people feel free, they feel free to engage in asking questions and airing conflicting opinions. The organizational culture shifts to one in which people focus on the performance of the entire organization. When you’re operating at light speed, everyone “runs it like they own it.”