There are many ways to nurture an innovation culture. I say nurture because a culture of innovation is not something you can demand of your employees. You'll need to create an environment that allows innovation to organically happen. Central to this organic evolution of culture is the garage or innovation mindset. So let's examine a few best practices from Google's success over the years that have helped to organically promote this innovation mindset. For each practice, I'll point out specific examples that you can adopt or apply directly to your own journey in the upcoming modules and beyond. Here are the three best practices to help organically nurture a culture of innovation. First, define a mission that matters, your why. Next, promote continuous learning. Finally, enable innovation through psychological safety. Let's look at defining a mission that matters more closely. You learned in an earlier lesson about the importance of focusing on the why, and the danger of focusing on the how. The why is your mission. Nintendo's an example of a company that never lost sight of its why. In contrast, encyclopedia companies focused on the how, not the why, and have now vanished. A good why or a mission that matters is independent of the how. Meaning, the mission guides and provides purpose, while the how, provides the tactics. The how can include technology or tools that you'd use to achieve the mission. For encyclopedias, the how was book making and distribution. For some grocery stores today, their how is operating large, densely stocked spaces. In the age of food delivery, some grocery providers are evolving their how to include a fleet of delivery trucks. Even better, they are evolving to include an app for customers to make a shopping list and schedule an order from anywhere. This is a great example of the how that's upgraded to include technologies, which brings me to an important point about a good mission. If new or better technology emerges, it shouldn't threaten existing business. Instead, it should enable the business to leap forward. When crafting or determining your why, ask yourself, "What new technologies help or hinder this?" This will help you ensure that your why is grounded in purpose, not tactics. At Google, our mission has been to organize the world's information, and to make it universally accessible and useful. This was a lofty mission, set nearly 20 years ago with no obvious solution and it gave employees a purpose. Built-in though are two success metrics; universally accessible and useful. Because the mission is a purpose statement not a tactic, it means that Google welcomes innovation. New technologies are not a threat to existing business, they're an opportunity to improve the way the mission, the why, is accomplished. In fact, new technologies will only help Google achieve the mission because information is constantly generated. A great example of this is the power of machine learning. When machine learning took off in the early 2010's, Google redesigned and reinvented all of its products. Given Google's scale at the time, this was a significant undertaking. But reinventing or rebuilding its products to maximize the use of machine learning capabilities better enabled Google to achieve its mission and better serve its users. In the future, when even better technology appears, Google will find a way to incorporate that in its products too. Let's move on to promoting continuous learning. You or your organization's ability to continuously learn is determined by many factors. This might include your efforts to upskill yourself and your staff while also taking advantage of experiences shared by third-party contractors and practitioners. This two-pronged approach ensures that you're continuously applying best practices to various fields. In this case, data science and Cloud computing tailored to your business needs without having to climb the steep learning curve of doing things for the first time. Another factor that supports continuous learning might be about flow of information or how knowledge is shared. Ways to promote continuous learning include defaulting to open communication, sharing relevant user data or customer feedback, and encouraging peer-to-peer learning. At Google, for instance, employees are constantly encouraged to share knowledge through templates, documents, presentations, and most importantly, Googler to Googler or g2g talks or presentations. In these sessions, Googlers can train to become facilitators for existing courses or to create their own courses, and run them at specific intervals within their regions. Finally, the design of the physical spaces is another factor that can determine how often, and how well you and your peers are knowledge-sharing. Reinventing the physical space comes down to the idea that environment beats method every time. Think about trying to get healthy. You can try to follow a method like counting calories or exercising three times a week. It's a difficult process and most people find it hard to sustain. There's another method, using the environment. Don't keep ice cream and soda in the fridge. Put a workout mat on the floor in your living room, where there's sunshine and plants and good vibes. Create a physical space that encourages behaviors that will help you achieve your goals. The same is true for your office space. Google for example, uses spaces such as meeting rooms and shared kitchens to promote knowledge sharing, collaboration, and experimentation. From post-its to whiteboards, to full walls, for writing or drawing, employees are encouraged by their physical environment to practice the garage mindset. Let's talk about the third and probably most important best practice: enabling innovation through psychological safety. To turn the garage mindset into an innovation culture at scale, is through creating a space where everyone feels psychologically safe. Think about yourselves in your garage. It's your own space. You can test out ideas without fear of failure or judgment. No one is looking over your shoulder or assessing every action you make. You have complete psychological safety. Organizational behavioral scientist, Amy Edmondson of Harvard, first introduced the construct of team psychological safety and defined it as a shared belief held by members of a team, that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Taking a risk around your team members may sound simple. But asking a basic question like, "What's the goal of this project?", may make you sound you're out of the loop. It might feel easier to continue without getting clarification in order to avoid being perceived as ignorant, incompetent, or disruptive. But the reality is, innovative teams also have high psychological safety rates. Teammates feel safe to ask questions, take risks, challenge each other, and to build on each other's ideas. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea. Examining the role of managers is a good way to encourage psychological safety within teams. Over the past few centuries, management reflected the Industrial Era. Workers were largely low-skilled and required clear direction. However, today's knowledge workers have different expectations and working styles. So why would you apply the same management practice that companies used a 100 years ago? Giving employees freedom to try new ideas and iterate is a core principle for success in the new Cloud paradigm. In the last ten years, Google has run a research project twice called Project Oxygen, once in 2008 and again in 2018, that explored the factors that make for a good manager in a successful modern company. The research highlights an important result. Great managers are great coaches. They fully acknowledge that their teams are the superstars. They are the athletes at the Olympics. It is the manager's role to encourage the team and help them thrive, to support from the sidelines, bring water, and give advice. A great coach doesn't jump on the track and run themselves. Great managers do not micromanage. They cultivate the space and relationship with their teams to get the best out of each person. They encourage questions and feedback, and often even facilitate tough conversations. To create psychological safety for employees, leaders need to be seen modelling psychologically safe behavior. Google's founders Larry and Sergei are good examples of this. Every week at an all company meeting, they share what they're learning and discovering. In addition to sharing exciting discoveries, sometimes they share their doubts or fears, or what they found most challenging. They openly welcome questions from the audience, and answer them as transparently as possible where it relates to them. This behavior cascades down to every level of management and within teams too. To recap, some of the ways to organically promote a culture of innovation with people in the forefront of the practices are: first, defining a mission that matters by focusing on the why. Second, promote continuous learning where possible. Thirdly, support psychological safety starting with a shift in management style.
