Our organisations are generally bad at innovation. That’s because they are designed that way. Just as your body is designed to fight a common cold, most of our cultures protect the organisational DNA from any foreign antibodies. Add something new and it can get rejected.
“Organisations design pipelines of exploration to get narrower and narrower. They want to dismiss ideas quickly that don’t fit the norm. Working in this way means your organisation is being slowly disabled and will become less skilled at handling different, more challenging thinking.
Most of us have grown up at work with the belief that we shouldn’t share things.
- Don’t share things as someone will steal your ideas.
- What if we want to sell this?
- That’s not been approved — it isn’t ready to share
- Sharing things will just worry people unnecessarily
- Don’t tell people — we don’t wash our dirty linen in public”
