Building Cultures of Innovation

We went along to the Project Connect event at GridAKL on Monday night, with Aithan Shapira, founder of Making To Think, who works with organisations to help them create cultures of innovation for a rapidly changing future.

As always, it was an excellent event with plenty of stimulating takeaways. Nice work to the team behind it - AUT's Martin Bell, Hal Josephson, and the US Embassy's Mike Cousins. MC duties for the evening went to Anthem's Vincent Heeringa who ably corralled a healthy Monday night crowd.

Content-wise, Aithan hit home on a tonne of points.

First off, uncertainty, unpredictability, and vulnerability are the new literacy. And even if you're doing all the right things, but not looking around you with a culture of curiosity, you can still get it wrong.

Aithan spoke also to the fact that 'soft skills', not coding skills, are now the biggest skill gap that employers are grappling with (supported just this month by new survey data announced by LinkedIn).

These soft skills include:

Cultural intelligence
Curiosity
Customer Focus
Willingness to Learn
Emotional Intelligence

What really resonated for me though was Aithan's approach using artist-centric frameworks to evaluate the process, structure and human potential of organisations.

First off, Aithan referenced a number of studies that linked improved performance in a number of different fields to incorporating some form of arts practice into your life, eg the more accomplished a scientist or engineer is (such as Nobel Prize winner), the more likely they are to have an artistic hobby.

The research argues that science as it is typically studied, practiced and taught focuses more on linear and logical thinking. Art, on the other hand, thrives on other systems -- kinetic and associative thinking.

The data here suggests that artistic engagement develops talents necessary to being a more creative scientist, and Aithan extends that argument further to business and innovation more broadly, again in my mind right on the money.

Next, Aithan then looked at how businesses can apply culture learnings from the way artist communities approach creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

The example used here was the community of artists surrounding Jackson Pollack in the late 1940s with his transition during 1948-49 from his earlier style of painting to his now iconic abstract works.

Aithan looked at examples of works not just from Pollock himself, but also the artists in the collective around him, and examined common elements and themes as the artists made a step change in their styles and approaches.

The key insight here was that Pollock's art community gave its members permission to have their style, but also to evolve and change freely.

The lesson for organisations looking to create cultures of innovation is that you have to give your people permission to be who they are AND the permission to change.

Not only that, be willing to throw it all away in order to create something new, as Jackson Pollock did.

This was a key take-away from Aithan when discussing how we can tackle the culture prevalent in many organisations today, where often we are afraid to make mistakes when trying to innovate.

The question of how to deal with backlash or resistance to innovation, or worse to failure when attempting to innovate, was something that came up both during the session Q&A, and in social media comments afterwards.

Here, Aithan's advice was again solid, suggesting that in the long term, the best approach to changing the culture is to start with changing our own practices and attitudes first.

Innovation is not about changing what others see. It's about changing how you see - not how you see the world, but how you see yourself.

Excellent evening all round with Aithan, and it reaffirmed my view that the success principles around innovation cultures are the same regardless of scale.

These principles - a healthy diversity of thinking and perspectives, the intersection of arts and tech/science as a key enabler to drive creativity, the need for an insatiable curiosity, and the requirement to have freedom to safely experiment and tinker - are essential whether you are trying to drive change as an individual, or as a large corporate. And equally as important whether you're looking to create a vibrant coworking community, or a larger scale innovation ecosystem.

It's all the same principles, the only change is the scale at which you apply it.