by Shaun McCarthy

Innovation – the word that’s on everyone’s lips right now as organisations grapple with the realities of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in today’s somewhat turbulent world. But innovation doesn’t just happen by “being more innovative” or hiring creative types and putting them in special “innovation” teams. For innovation to happen, a considerable body of research shows that there are certain organisational conditions that must be tackled.

Through Human Synergistics’ work with clients, which is based on research into the organisational factors that influence organisational performance by our chief executive, Dr Robert A. Cooke, we’ve discovered there are 12 key innovation killers in organisations.

1. A culture of fear

Your culture either works for you or against you in your search for innovation. If your organisation’s culture causes people to be concerned with keeping themselves safe (e.g. make sure you follow the process), then innovation will never happen.

2. Lack of a meaningful mission and vision

For people to think in an innovative manner, they must see that the organisation is striving to achieve a higher purpose, not just aiming to be good at making money.

3. Too much hierarchy

Structures that create hierarchical and centralised decision making limit opportunities for people to have influence and innovate.

4. Old-school HR practices

Diversity and flexibility in hiring, promoting, training, developing and performance appraisal (and not just in gender terms) promotes non-traditional thinking.

5. The blame game

Not rewarding effort but focusing on blame and “punishment” for errors is guaranteed to kill innovation.

6. Overly prescriptive job design

Specialisation, standardisation and compartmentalization reduces autonomy, variety and meaning in jobs, causing people to focus on “just doing the job”, not

“thinking outside the box”.

7. Filtering

For organisations to innovate there has to be a free flow of information up and down the organisation that stimulates discussion. Information that is filtered on the way up and meaningless on the way down makes innovation very difficult.

8.Micromanagement

An emphasis on control and micromanagement, rather than seeing managers as facilitators and coaches is a great way to kill off innovation.

9. Lone wolf thinking

Very few ideas come from just one person. They come from people building on one another’s ideas. Teams that find fault, criticise ideas and compete rather than cooperate will almost certainly limit innovation.

10. Silos

It’s hard to innovate when people work in silos. There are several examples of organisations that have created seemingly innovative products only to have to recall them, create fixes or repair bugs, because inside the organisation the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing.

11. Low autonomy

People working in jobs with low autonomy and few opportunities for development leads to boring, unchallenging, unfulfilling jobs. And little, if any, innovation.

12. Dissatisfaction

Disengaged people become disinterested in the organisation’s future and lack willingness to think creatively.

Put it into practice

Whilst this all sounds quite straightforward and the research has been around for years, many organisations still let these 12 innovation killers thrive. A recent analysis of 740 Australian organisations in Human Synergistics’ database shows that 62 per cent of businesses rate below the global average for innovation and only 14 per cent rate at a level of global excellence.

Shaun McCarthy is chairman of performance and business consultancy Human Synergistics Australia and New Zealand.