Open innovation, creative thinking, collaboration and exchanging ideas are great buzz words, but how do you enable it in a corporate environment? It doesn’t matter how cool or startup your company is, or what ‘values’ it pastes on the walls, the moment it has over 50 people (usually way before that), things get complicated and barriers go up that block all of these things.
It’s not usually intentional, but the moment there are increased structures, lines of reporting, communications channels and a lack of personal contact (due to scale), it becomes difficult to enable open collaboration and participation, especially when everyone has a busy task list — anything over and above day to day work is seen as an added chore.
Think about your company:
Can the office cleaner walk up to the CEO and provide some advice without any fear of judgement?
Can the most junior team member in one team participate, collaborate and provide insight into a project being undertaken by a different and more senior team?
Is taking time to think, collaborate and create seen as a luxury, or worse still, a complete waste of time?
If any of these applies to your place, don’t sweat it, it’s just the way things are. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at organizations of all sizes, shapes and approaches, working out how to unpick them in a way that enables open participation, removes judgement and unleashes creativity and perspectives from across the entire organization.
Here are 3 places for you to start:
- De-Chore Creativity/ Innovation
Everyone is busy, taking a full day out to put sticky notes aimlessly on a wall with no ongoing workflow probably means you’ll have to work the weekend to catch up on your day-to-day work, annoy your family and generally wear yourself out. Find a way that people can contribute without adding to their to do list. Enable enjoyable participation. - Open Up Communication
Hierarchical judgement (or fear thereof), barriers to communication and distance between people means that it’s virtually impossible for information and ideas to flow openly between any two points in your organization. Even more so if those two points don’t know that the other even exists. Remove the barriers to the flow of information, insight and communication, while allowing people to discover and participate in their own way. Create a community. - Stand Back and Let It Happen
Our Founder @AndySwann talks about the art of the organization being more important than the science in his book The Human Workplace and sometimes you just need to let things flow. Create the platform for people to contribute and keep tweaking it to make it a better enabler, then stand back and let it happen. Build a platform.
So that’s your starting point. Enable enjoyable participation, create a community, build a platform and then good things will happen.
Here at Sparklr, we spend our lives to working out how best to make that happen. We know it’s a lot more than a morning’s work, but it is possible and every day we meet great organizations doing great things. The key is to work out your own way.
If you want any advice and support along the road, we’re always happy to share ideas. Just tweet us anytime @HeySparklr.
Good luck out there!
We’re enabling open creativity, collaboration and innovation for everyone with Sparklr. Waitlist is open now, join us at https://get.sparklr.io
Twitter: @HeySparklr
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