The two biggest Innovation blockers

When we are able to think deeply about business innovation, or any type of innovation, there are a certain number of characteristics that lead to innovation, such as learning mentality, collaboration, point of view inclusiveness, and I could go on and on…

But, as the title of this post refers, there are two big blockers of the innovation culture, and those are very global and cross-cultural. The first one is a strong hierarchy, and the other one is guilt culture. Both have a big weight on pushing back innovation, and, at the same time, they are very complementary, in such a way that most of the time they are the perfect combination for disaster.

A Strong Hierarchy is probably the biggest barrier not only to innovation but also to a full range of business/social/political decisions, where the leaders( if we may call them) use their rank, their beliefs and sometimes their academic degree to make decisions that do not take account of the people, the HUMANS, they affect, leading to major flaws on innovation and, on the long haul, on the sustainability of the organizations.

When I started working, 30 years ago, it was very common hearing bosses saying “ I pay you to work, not to think”, as if this sentence was a foundation stone of the leadership. This kind of attitude and this kind of belief that all the ideas and the decisions must be done by the management, via hierarchy ranking, makes innovation difficult if not impossible, and with the time, it turns out to be bi-directional: the bosses don’t want workers to think and the workers feel that the bosses are the ones that should think.

Guilt Culture is like a religion! When a problem happens, when something fails, the immediate response in most organizations is to find a guilty person, to push the problem towards someone in order to discard responsibility and move on. So, in this case, solutions emerge from a guilty perspective, or in other words, no innovation whatsoever, only the same old deeply ideological solutions that are kind of risk free. This also leads to a big flaw which is: when shit hits the fan and you need to find someone to blame on, then the solution is to remove the “guilty” person and doing so, encourage others to not fail to not experiment, meaning, again, no innovation.

So, what is the antidote for those two innovation blockers? Well, there is no vaccine to immunize people against those blockers, unless, if you want to create a culture of innovation, start to open up the ideation of solutions to all involved people, independently of their rank, and also encourage experimentation and testing ideas, responding to failure with responsibility, which means learning from the failures to improve the solutions in a constant wheel of innovation. All this takes time, but if you start immediately and start small ( in a way to bulletproof guilt and hierarchy responses) and then innovation will emerge like magic.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.