5 Bold Moves
How to kick-start a culture of innovation
The world has changed - and keeps changing - dramatically. The message for all of us is we need to fasten our seatbelts and get ready.
This change is full of opportunity, so in order to capitalize on it, we need to look at creating the systems and mindset within our own organisations that allow for always-on innovation.  Embracing a culture of innovation will enable you to adapt, evolve and see and grab the big opportunities that exist.
5 Bold Moves is a set of practical strategies you can try right now with your teams. It gives actions to focus on, the skills and mindsets to work on, and questions to ask to help you make progress and create more value, faster.
Move Like Starlings.
Nature, specifically a murmuration of Starlings, can teach us a lot about simplifying organisational structures to help make innovation happen.
Each starling is in direct contact with the 6 or 7 birds around them. This enables tens of thousands of birds to move in unison with no need for one “leader” or hierarchy.
By placing trust in small teams, empowered to make decisions and being supported by a network, you can avoid getting stuck in large-scale, slow, bureaucratic programmes and decision-making.
This gives teams the ability to move quickly and adapt rapidly to new learnings and situations.
Learn how to simplify structures
Build Playgrounds.
Being innovative requires teams and individuals to experiment and play. To do this you need a ‘safe playground’ where people are able to try things out, fail and learn, without fear of failure or negative consequences if things don’t go to plan.
Every single one of us must take responsibility for co-creating the conditions needed to do our best work, by building psychological safety into our culture.
Learn how to create a safe playground
Learn Through Experimentation.
Jumping into solutions is comfortable and often necessary. But it also happens to be bad for developing an innovation culture.
Real innovation happens when we experiment and test our existing knowledge and assumptions by trying out new things. By embracing curiosity, we can counter the natural discomfort we feel when faced with uncertainty.
We must move past our assumptions and learn about our audiences’ needs and the real problems they face. Only then can we provide solutions that truly add value to their lives.
Learn how to embrace curiosity
Rebalance ‘Managing’ & ‘Making’.
Managing is the essential work we all have to do to keep things moving in organisations - communicating, updating, connecting.
Making is the work that creates direct business value - learning, ideating, experimenting and building.Our working lives are often so bogged down with “managing” that we don’t have time or energy to “make”.
We need to redress this rebalance, and free up more time for the activities that create the most value.
Learn how to rebalance time for making
Create “Good Trouble”.
If you want people to think differently, you have to create the conditions for them to overturn the status quo.“That’s just the way it is” is a common phrase heard time and time again.
Refusing to accept things as they are in the pursuit of better requires a willingness and energy to challenge the rules. It requires us to be unconstrained by what should be and open up possibilities to what could be, by being brave enough to create new rules and new ways of doing things.
This is not about being needlessly disruptive, but challenging with good intent, and owning and driving an alternative plan forward.
Learn how to create good trouble