Creating an innovative culture
Considering our times, the shared belief around me is: If you want to survive and have a business in 3-5 years, you need to innovate. The one who learns the fastest to succeed and create new ways of serving the people will stay relevant and everyone else will be out of business.
Inspired by the cultures of Google who created Gmail by giving their employees 20% time to choose on what to work on with whom-ever or Atlassian who develops 95% of all their product in their quarterly fedex days, we also went down that path.
We are using the SAFe framework for organising our product development unit. This includes our 6.th iteration every PI, which is an Innovation and Planning sprint. We are empowered to take this time for innovation, however we could observe this chance was never taken.
Our retrospectives surfaced that people wanted to take to learn, but the majority didn’t despite of trying to set frames to kick it off as small hackathons.
One of our root causes was, that the releasing is so heavy in the last sprint that we cant find the time. Move the releasing was out of our hands as it was depending on other trains and units.
How can we learn and innovate more?
We started with the hypothesis:
By having creative Fridays instead of one sprint, we will have more time to innovate as releases never happen on Friday.
We imagined us spending every Friday learning, sharing our innovations and learning, which would trigger inspiration and even more innovation. We would practice and play with different ways of innovating. People would enjoy it and grow.
We would know by the time spent and the sharing’s.
What happened was to some of us a surprise.
Loads of innovation, learnings, everyone was storming to be creative and couldn’t wait to Friday, was unfortunately not the result.
People responsible worked off the backlog, despite of several small experiments to set frames, give inspiration or to outright facilitate the process. A few took the chance for learning and some build some supportive tooling which made our life tremendously easier.
The biggest surprise was that the planned Friday capacity helped our flow of work. The first time since the creation of this train, the work flew through the PI with meeting all the milestones and key objectives.
Hence the experiment was a success but due to totally different reasons. The retrospective in the end of this 12-week period ended in questions as:
How can we actually spend the time?
The main pointers were in helping to set a frame for coming out of the common patterns.
We all want it, we all believe it is the way, it is common sense but to make it a common practice is much more complicated endeavour!
What is needed to unleash the creative power within us?
Let’s see how this goes in the next 12 weeks!
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