Are You Having Fun?

Innovation Should Be Fun, Joyful, and About Playing With Concepts

The One Question Innovation Culture Assessment

A lot of fuss is made over innovation culture. I get it — it’s probably the most important fundamental to put in place if you actually want innovation to happen. Organizations spend a great deal of time and energy investing in training, speakers, communications, systems, frameworks, and assessments. All this is fine.

And…

I have a simple one question assessment leaders and managers can use to take the pulse of their innovation culture. Ready?

“Are you having fun?”

If the immediate answer isn’t “yes” — you’ve got a culture problem. If you were planning on doing an 80 question quantitative survey to thousands of employees, maybe save the money and ask this simple question to eight people instead.

Define fun broadly. Even difficult, complicated, high-pressure work can be, at some level, fun and/or interesting. As a leader, it’s your job to make everyone else’s job, seriously fun. If your people are not having fun, you’re not doing it right.

If the answer isn’t Yes, then the next question is Why Not? That’s going to lead to lengthy discussions. If you listen, without judgment, you’ll learn. Solving an innovation culture problem isn’t easy, but your solution had better include interesting, compelling, and fun, Projects. Projects are how cultures actually change.

Innovation happens when people combine existing factors or concepts to create something new. They apply it to a job to be done, or a challenge. The combinational part of that is about play. Playing around with concepts in your mind is how innovation happens (for more about deliberate concept blending, see MoshPit Innovation). That can be like 3D chess, because combining concepts isn’t a simple matter. But that kind of mental work might be the most satisfying thing a human can do.

I’d call that fun.

If you want to learn more about your innovation culture, look for evidence of a culture of humor. Do people laugh? Even at serious meetings? Do people make good natured jokes? Cutting or belittling jokes are actually not humor at all, they’re a form of bullying — if you see that, you’re in trouble. If humor is around, if people are laughing, what you are seeing is people being free to be self-expressed. Self-expression is the faucet of creative thinking, and without creative thinking you won’t have much innovation.

Improv For Business — Serious Fun

Believe it or not, you can train people to have more fun. Better yet, it’s not just fun and games, it’s fun with a purpose. You can train people to do a better job of, literally, playing around with concepts for innovation. Improv To Innovate is a training offering that gets teams doing productive play together. In the various types of innovation training that GFi (Gregg Fraley Innovation) does, it’s interesting that stop-action Improv scenes lead to amazingly effective brainstorming. Role plays can be a great way to assist with problem framing, and, solution development.

Improv works for innovation, if you know how to apply it — and you don’t have to be funny. But you will have fun. Is that what your culture needs?