When we talk about innovation, we tend to think of lightbulb moments — the original, game-changing ideas of a single genius or a small team of highly-skilled, highly-intelligent thinkers with the confidence to challenge the status quo and imagine something better.
It’s a compelling (if slightly romantic) picture. But in reality, innovation is so much more. It isn’t just the lightbulb moment — it’s the entire journey required to reach it. It’s the discovery, testing, continuous learning and adjustment required to arrive at that winning idea.
Unlike highly convenient lightbulb moments, those things don’t just happen by accident. Learning, testing, and experimentation all need to be enabled by environments and cultures that people feel safe and comfortable within. They all require freedom to think and explore without fear of failure, or pressure to move faster than what feels natural.
Whether the new waters you want to explore are fresh concepts for products, new processes, or different markets that you’d like to move into, the best way to help teams venture into them is by constructing a safe harbor. And that begins by ensuring the psychological safety of your people.
Inside the innovation factory
As organizations have recognized the value of continuous innovation, many have committed more resources to it. What that looks like varies from small teams iterating on existing products to entire lines of business that function as innovation factories, generating a continuous stream of new ideas.
The theory behind creating those teams is simple. To innovate, people need the time and space to think, test, and generate ideas. So removing other responsibilities to make room for innovation makes sense. But when continuous innovation becomes a mandated output that a team must deliver at speed, it starts to come at the cost of that team’s psychological safety.
Without meaning to, businesses can introduce huge fear of failure, create conditions where teams cut corners in testing to accelerate outputs, and disconnect teams from the products, processes, or customers they’re trying to innovate for. And suddenly, the team you established to drive innovation has become shaped by issues that constrain innovation. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for business.
Refocusing on the principles of true innovation
To recognize where innovation may be coming at the cost of psychological safety, organizations and product leaders need to refocus on what it really takes to enable innovation:
- Valuable ideas can originate anywhere, not just within dedicated innovation or development teams. Everyone needs a voice and should be empowered to share their ideas freely.
- Learning is an enabler of iterative innovation — so environments, budgets, processes and tools to test, learn and adapt can’t be overestimated.
- Learning, however, is based on current insights, usually observed directly by the people behind any innovation to come. If teams are isolated from the conditions they’re trying to change — such as having insufficient interaction with customers or no time or capabilities to conduct market and user research — their ideas won’t be valuable.
- Ideas need to be tested thoroughly to determine whether they’re likely to deliver their intended value. Without that testing, even the strongest ideas can end up negatively impacting businesses when applied at scale.
- All innovation is iterative, occurring through small, well-targeted steps rather than explosions of change. For teams to do that, they need to be able to observe and learn from the impact of their previous ideas and iterations.
Those prerequisites for innovation show us what can be done to ensure the psychological safety of those tasked with delivering it.
Innovators need to work free from the fear of failure, in an environment that encourages learning and embraces risk as a necessity. They should be empowered to observe and interact with customers directly, instead of relying on assumptions and metrics alone to guide their decisions. They need the time and capabilities to test their ideas robustly and iterate on them as necessary. And they need to see the impacts of their efforts in action, to create a continuous flow of iterative improvements.
With greater psychological safety comes more innovation
We live in a world of complexities. To tackle those complexities through innovation, you need to be confident in the outputs of those responsible for innovative idea generation. And the only way you can be truly confident in those outputs is by prioritizing your people’s psychological safety.
That begins with leadership. To support and enable psychologically safe innovation, leaders themselves need to be transparent, authentic, and reliable. That in turn requires them to look inwards at how they lead. It isn’t enough to say ‘it doesn’t matter if you fail’. Leaders need to demonstrate through their actions that that’s the case. Only then can they create the kind of supportive culture where innovation thrives.
A team that works in those kinds of psychologically safe conditions can generate more ideas, develop stronger concepts, and test, learn and adapt thoroughly, creating an innovation pipeline you can trust.
Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks.
