Creating the Innovation Culture: Leveraging Visionaries, Dissenters and Other Useful Troublemakers

Chapter 11. Surfacing Dissent in and around You

Even if the manager identifies underground dissent, it's not easy to surface. Managers need to help employees and colleagues be more open and also to question their own motives. This chapter shows how.

Changing the Culture

In the last chapter, you used a quiz to identify the sources of underground dissent in your organization. This is an important first step since companies that don't know they have the problem attribute phenomena like missed deadlines and failed projects to other causes when underground dissent may be at the root.

To address this issue, you have to change the culture. Whenever I say that, managers throw up their hands. "I can't change the culture," they protest. "I'm just a cog in a big machine."

Changing the culture is such a big, amorphous, and vague thing. Everybody agrees it needs to be done, few people know how to do it and everybody thinks it's somebody else's job. Middle managers wish senior managers would do it and senior managers say, "if only those managers would sit up and fly right." Thus we have a perfect system to maintain the status quo, with each side waiting for the other to act. And, in fact, feeling helpless in the face of the other's inaction. And yet wise men (see the sidebar) have always known that change, no matter how big, begins with the individual.

Changing the Culture Begins with You

No change, however large or small, can succeed unless each individual decides to begin. Structure and processes ...