Chapter 4

This culture values creativity, encourages experimentation, and supports learning from failures. It provides resources, role models, and a trusting community where people can challenge each other. It promotes meaningful work and hosts events like Fuck-up nights and hackathons.gpt

This culture I am imagining has organizational encouragement and recognizes and supports creative work. It has role models and people can trust their peers but at the same time be challenged  by them. It has sufficient resources and the freedom to use them. The work is challenging and meaningful. People share their praiseworthy failures and encourage each other to experiment. They analyze their failures to really learn from them. They have Fuck-up nights and hackathons.

• Changing organizational culture is difficult due to deep-rooted assumptions

• Failure-tolerant culture requires different consequences for different types of failures

• Correctly dealing with failures promotes a learning-oriented culture but has challenges:

  • Failures are often linked to the person and require teaching when to declare defeat without punishment

  • Examining failures is emotionally unpleasant

  • Requires openness, transparency, and patience that employees may not have

  • Employees tend to downplay their responsibilities and blame external factors

  • Optimal conditions during pilots may not convey valuable information from failures gpt

• Changing culture in an organization is hard -> basic assumptions are deep rooted and difficult to influence 

• A failure tolerant culture means that different types of failures have different consequences. The correct way of dealing with failures helps to establish a learning-oriented culture but comes with several problems:

  • failure is often times linked to the person and we need to teach when to declare defeat (and not punish)

  • Examining failures is emotionally unpleasant

  • Requires openness, transparency and patients which the employees often times don’t have

  • Employees tend to downplay their responsibilities and blame it on external factors

  • Every failure convey valuable information, but to often pilots are done in optimal conditions and can’t show the failures to learn from them

Hauschildt defines 7 elements of an innovation-supporting culture:

1. System Openness → Ready for innovation, dialogue, open-minded

2. Degree of organization → as free space for action, not as restriction of freedom to act

3. Information style → Informal information relationships e.g. coffee breaks 

4. Cooperation promotion → willingness to cooperate 

5. Conflict awareness → positive attitude towards conflicts 

6. Recruitment model & personal development → conflict-prone people, do they fit our norms? 

7. Competence and responsibility → flexible understanding of responsibility 

implementing these elements in the organization and therefore changing the culture is hard because values, norms and basic assumptions are deep rooted in the employees and difficult to influence

The organizational climate scale from Amabile can help shifting the organizational culture towards a more innovation-supporting one

The organizational climate scale by Amabile comprises 8 dimensions

1. Organizational encouragement → fair constructive judgment of ideas, reward and recognition for creative work, mechanisms for developing new ideas, shared vision

2. Supervisory encouragement → supervisor who serves as a good work model, appropriate goals, support, value contributions, shows confidence 

3. Work group supports → skilled group in which people communicate well, open to new ideas, challenge each other's work, trust and help each other

4. Sufficient resources → access to resources (funds, material, facilities, information)

5. Challenging work → work hard on challenging tasks 

6. Freedom → deciding what work to do and how to do it (control over one's work)

7. Organizational impediments → internal political problems, harsh criticism of new ideas, destructive internal competition, avoidance of risk

8. Workload pressure → time pressure, unrealistic expectations, distractions 

When the shift in the culture is done, artefacts can help strengthen the underlying assumptions of innovation culture like → Cemetary of ideas, Hackathons, Fuck-Up Nights, random lunch parties, etc… 

Problem → it doesn’t make sense to implement the artifacts before changing the underlying culture first 

The promoter model has some implications for improving the innovation culture because they are the key actors that drive the innovation

Problem → overcoming the barriers of will (investment and acceptance) and barriers of capabilities (development, implementation) 

Promoters are informal roles that are defined by the barriers they overcome, the power base they have and the contributions they make. They are beneficial for innovation processes and act out of their own motivation 

Recommendation → identify promoters in innovation projects, give promoters autonomy and provide them with resources, don’t sanction promoter behavior and reward them

The organizational climate scale by Amabile comprises 8 dimensions

1. +Organizational encouragement → fair constructive judgment of ideas, reward and recognition for creative work, mechanisms for developing new ideas, shared vision

2. +Supervisory encouragement → supervisor who serves as a good work model, appropriate goals, support, value contributions, shows confidence 

3. +Work group supports → skilled group in which people communicate well, open to new ideas, challenge each other's work, trust and help each other

4. +Sufficient resources → access to resources (funds, material, facilities, information)

5. +Challenging work → work hard on challenging tasks 

6. +Freedom → deciding what work to do and how to do it (control over one's work)

7. -Organizational impediments → internal political problems, harsh criticism of new ideas, destructive internal competition, avoidance of risk

8. -Workload pressure → time pressure, unrealistic expectations, distractions 

A strong innovation climate requires a comprehensive set of balanced, innovation-promoting factors.

Or other model from Kock → Not the model is important but the Factors

failure-tolerant culture means  different types of failures have different consequences 

Blameworthy

 Deviance → violate a process or practice

Inattention → unintentionally deviates from specification 

Lack of ability→ doesn’t have the skills

Middle 

Process Inadequacy → adheres to a incomplete process

Task Challenge → task too difficult to execute 

Process Complexity → process of many elements breaks down 

Praiseworthy 

Uncertainty → reasonable actions with undesired results 

Hypothesis  Testing → experiment to prove that idea succeed fails

Exploratory Testing → experiment to expand knowledge leads to an undesired result

Correctly dealing with failures helps establish a learning-oriented culture 

Promoters are people who actively and intensively support an innovation and start an innovation process. They sustain a high activity level and can terminate the decision process. 

Power Promoters: surmount barriers of will through their hierarchical potential → hierarchical power, access to material resources, investor, influences decisions, blocks oppositions

Expert promoters: surmount barriers of capability through their expert knowledge → know critical details, develops, evaluates, proposals, implements concepts, tests, solves problems

⇒ Problem they don't know each other, especially prevalent in large companies (PowerPromoter doesn’t know ExpertPromoter and ExpertPromoter is blocked by hierarchy)

Process Promoter: connects other promoters → some hierarchical influence, knows processes, social competence, good internal network, searches and promotes people with ideas, gives contacts to senior managers, supports flow of information, builds trust, solves conflicts

PowerPromoter ←—ProcessPromoter —->ExpertPromoter

→ This Troika is even better than the duo of Expert and Power.

Still there is improvement area especially when looking at open innovation and interaction w/ the environment outside of the firm

Relationship Promoter: connects internal promoters to the environment → market-based influence, social competence, external networks, contact to internal promoters, supports flow of information, builds trust, solves conflicts