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

Chapter 14. Structures and Mechanisms for Dissent

The most important way an organization can encourage dissent and innovation is through its managers, but it can also put some structural and procedural mechanisms inplace that will up the chances that dissent and innovation will be both tolerated and heard.

Making Innovation Happen

How do you make innovation happen? Well, unless you have been asleep at the switch for the entire book, you already know you can't. Having said that, however, encouraging dissent and innovation is harder if you're swimming upstream against organizational processes that discourage it. Structures and processes make a difference. They don't make innovation happen, but they prepare the ground so that any innovative ideas that want to happen will have a soft landing. This is where executives have a special responsibility. They are usually the only ones who can make the structural and other changes needed to make it easier for innovation to flourish. This chapter will suggest ways senior managers can change the organizations so that it will be easier to promote innovation. The innovation manager could implement the recommendations in this chapter.

These mechanisms are grouped around ways to concretely encourage dissent, such as encouraging a greater capacity for risk, making tangible the belief that you're not always right, and avoiding punishing failure.

Encouraging a Greater Capacity for Risk

While we know people need to take risks to be innovative, organizations ...