My favourite presentation at the Institute of Water Annual Conference 2022 was delivered by Tony Conway (Director, Conway Strategic Water Consulting) on how to ensure innovation does NOT happen! These are some of the top tips on how best to NOT enable innovation that I learned from his talk.
1. Culture of Innovation Across a Business
- Be consistently unclear on why the innovation project is being pursued.
- Don’t involve the operational end user for as long as you can get away with it! Make sure that the innovation initiative is a total surprise.
- Raise the expectations of people about their ability to contribute to innovation and make sure these expectations are not met.
- Focus on developing a blame culture which creates a sense of fear, and in particular at a personal level.
2. Leadership and Team Communication
- Build a team that is more focussed on the present than the future, that think similarly, and have not bought into the concept of collaboration.
- Adopt a leadership style which leaves team members feeling uncomfortable to voice their opinion and vulnerable or embarrassed to raise difficult issues.
- Take every opportunity to diminish trust between team members.
- Ensure there are no opportunities for informal conversations to happen and relationships to develop.
- From a leadership perspective remember to say one thing and do another.
- Ensure that who is doing what across the team, and their mutual dependencies, are kept unclear, and remain confused at all times.
- Make sure that the people involved in innovation do not have enough time to fulfil their innovation role.
- Establish team communication and information flows which are never timely, are convoluted and universally regarded as being of little-no value.
3. Progress from Trial to Implementation
- Ensure decision making processes are opaque, that decision making criteria remain undefined and that there is no clarity on who the decision makers are.
- If a decision request sneaks through keep on asking for more analysis backed up by more data.
- Deploy insufficient resource to enable innovation to move forward.
- Create comprehensive risk registers but never take any action to actually manage and control risks.
- Create governance and project management processes which are far more burdensome than they need to be. Value adherence to these processes more than achieving the innovation outcome.
