The Culture of Innovation III

In the examples of the Horton 229 ‘flying wing’, the ‘bouncing bomb or the ‘Pathfinder’ force, we saw how opening the minds of the senior decision-makers and ‘short-circuiting’ the insights from the frontline into the decision making led to great leaps forward in innovation.

Today we can explore the birthplace of modern computing and how the culture of innovation there led to significant breakthroughs, and we can consider how that could be
useful today – during the COVID19 crisis.

Computers were an answer to a question that needed answering urgently during World War Two. The coding machines that were used to relay messages around the Third Reich were
very sophisticated, changed every day, and bright people with paper and pencil
could not crack their codes. A step-change in the quantity of data handled was
required. This was achieved by building electromechanical Bombe computers that
could crack codes quickly enough for encoded information to be used to win on
the battlefield.

So what was the culture in Bletchley Park – the location where the breakthroughs were made?:

1. The people on the team were selected to be diverse and capable of looking at the world through different perspectives.

2. The people on the team were encouraged to remain diverse in their views, and their idiosyncrasies were cherished and nurtured.

3. There was clarity on the ‘common end’ that the team were striving to achieve.

What can we learn from this? Modern companies tend to be made up of similar people and
bureaucracy. In a stable time, this enables well organised methodical working
to deliver a pipeline of incremental innovations. In a crisis, this approach
may not generate a big enough quantity and quality of breakthroughs. Indeed it
is unlikely to do so. So, empowering good, trusted business leaders with a team
and toolkit to accelerate the rate of innovation makes sense. What sort of team
and toolkit? The in house team can be supplemented with an experienced external
project team with diverse backgrounds and very different perspectives. The
toolkit required enables the in-house and external teams to blend seamlessly
and to generate previously unheard of possibilities to be generated and
explored. From these ingredients, giant leaps forward become possible, and innovation
can accelerate. 

Learning from previous crises and deploying proven approaches and processes can remove invisible constraints and can set innovation free. History shows us that
innovators are always around. It is bringing them together and providing them
with a toolkit that enables innovation to accelerate and new possibilities to
emerge.