The (Australian) Financial Review has a list of 12 things that kill innovation in your organization. For people that pay attention to this space, the entries should sound familiar. (Discovered via retweet on Twitter.)
- A culture of fear
- Lack of meaningful mission and vision
- Too much hierarchy
- Old-School HR practices
- The blame game
- Overly prescriptive job design
- Filtering
- Micromanagement
- Lone wolf thinking
- Silos
- Low autonomy
- Dissatisfaction
Reading through this list and the brief description of each, one can see some familiar conflicts, in particular the effects that happen when organizations swing between strong vs loose structure. And Blame and Fear are two big killers of just about any kind of organizational initiatives. They have very little place in organizations which are trying to understand how they tick and how to respond to the pressures they are under.
Two that made me wonder there the "old-school HR practices" and "filtering". For HR the list suggests that "new school" is more flexible and diverse in hiring and promotion decisions than in the past. I suspect there is more under the surface of that one. The "filtering" entry is about filtering and limiting the flow of information. Strongly connected to Silos - and to fear and blame and micromanagement for that matter.