Leslie Whittington's List: Culture & Innovation in Schools

• In this work, I have realized how truly important the role of principal is in building, not only in creating a positive culture, but an innovative one.  These schools continuously strive to understand the changes happening in our world to not only catch up, but to lead the way in providing amazing learning opportunities for our students.  Often times, as the principal goes, so does the culture of the school.  This is not to say that individual teachers can not be leading the way within the school themselves, but this goes back to the notion of “pockets of innovation” as opposed to a “culture of innovation”.  It is unlikely for an entire school to be “pushing the edge” if the principal or administrative team is not helping to pave the way for their community as they learn alongside of them.

• In an era of ubiquitous information technology and open access content, we believe that the primary purpose of education is changing. It’s now more about the environment we provide than the content we deliver. Similarly, we believe that the primary purpose of professional development is changing. Just as a classroom requires engaged, self-directed and passionate learners, so does professional development. The course will motivate and equip individuals to develop a culture of innovation and excellence in education through self-directed professional growth.

• A culture of innovation is an environment that supports creative thinking and advances efforts to extract economic and social value from knowledge, and, in doing so, generates new or improved products, services or processes.
• From 2003 to 2011, Ontario made notable strides toward developing a culture of innovation. Intermediary organizations like MaRS and the Ontario Centres of Excellence were set up to provide local entrepreneurs with support to advance their innovative ideas and ventures.
• But here’s what’s missing in Ontario: the qualitative tools necessary to evaluate our success in actually establishing a culture of innovation. Without these measures, how will Ontario identify the full range of its shortcomings, learn from past mistakes and truly build on its strengths?

1 more annotation...

• The most innovative companies pull the right levers to create a culture that leads to exploration, experimentation, and the innovations that positively surprise the market, create competitive differentiation, and drive growth.
• Leadership
• Processes
• customer engagement
• information sharing,
• Structure
• enable (or inhibit) collaboration and guide mindsets & behavior
• People
• Metrics, Rewards & Recognition –
• The mindsets and skillsets of employees, leaders, external partners and even customers tied to creative thinking, prototyping, and execution of new ideas and opportunities
• Technology – Capabilities and tools that allow employees, external partners and customers to connect, share knowledge, and innovate
• Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, recently said, “There’s no formula. If there was a formula, a lot of companies would have bought their ability to innovate.”  When it comes down to it, every leader and every company has an opportunity to create their own unique formula for innovation.  That’s the source of real innovation.

10 more annotations...

• That’s because innovation is cultural.
• An article in Sloan MIT Management Review identifies a series of “building blocks” for an innovative culture, including hard-to-measure characteristics such as values, behavior, and climate. “An innovative climate,” the authors write, “cultivates engagement and enthusiasm, challenges people to take risks within a safe environment, fosters learning, and encourages independent thinking.”
• I think, has to have a few things in place. One is-and perhaps the most important thing is-methods for having an open mind. A sense of inquiry, of curiosity is essential for innovation
• the quickest way for removing curiosity in my opinion is to have organizations that are too inward-facing, that don’t spend enough time out in the world,
• A second thing that’s important is an ability to create spaces where trust can happen, where risks can get taken
• f people get penalized for failure, particularly the kind of failure that’s most useful which is where you learn a lot, then they’re not going to do it, in which case you’re not going to get any innovation.

• My job is is to try and help and encourage us to do some pattern recognition across all of that stuff and try and imagine where the places where we might focus more of our resources.

   

  But I suppose the thing that I most try and do is to encourage people to remember to ask all the same creative questions about our own process as we do about our clients-easily said, not always easy to do. And you have to give some time for that. You have to remember that like any organization, if you get into an operational mindset where we we’re just doing the job, then it’s easy to forget about innovation.

5 more annotations...

• The key to unlocking the door to innovation is to develop a Culture of Innovation. Without the right culture, no set of tools, methods, or people will be successful. Why is culture the determining factor? There is nothing more fragile, and at the same time, more threatening as a radical new idea that does not fit in the current culture. Most of the cultural characteristics that enable companies to be successful are the same characteristics that extinguish new ideas. Most companies value predictability, control, reliability, repeatability, and continuity above innovation and creativity.
• For example, we heard of a situation where a new “social community for innovation” was established with much fanfare and anticipation. But it failed to meet its expectations because on one wanted to post his/her ideas to the site. The managers did some rapid and early interventions to see what was wrong. They found, to their amazement, that most of the managers they interviewed would never post because there was no upside to sharing their ideas; and even worse, they felt that if they said the wrong things, they might get castigated or even get fired.

• What is the culture of innovation?

   

  • A culture that invests in its people;

   

  • A culture that tolerates risk, and failure;

   

  • A culture that supports inquiry and the scientific method;

   

  • A culture of trust;

   

  • A culture that encourages opposing points of view;

   

  • A culture that bans politics;

   

  • A culture that embraces the individual.

   
• Unlike financial performance or customer satisfaction, the Culture of Innovation is hard to measure unless you look at its outputs. Nevertheless, there are predictive indicators.
• explicit earmarking of budgets for innovation
• explicit time guidelines for percent of time
• tolerance for unique people, unique positions, and unique titles
• behavior in meetings. Do good ideas prevail regardless the size of the business card?
• One of the strongest indicators is trust: The trust that management places in teams and the degree in which the organization supports delegation. This form of trust is not abdication, but rather agreeing with explicit roles and setting up clear boundary conditions so that if the teams stay within the boundaries, they are left alone. Along with this enlightened view of teams, we also find that Innovative Cultures have explicit processes for harvesting, elevating, and sanctioning great ideas.

7 more annotations...