 Today on the Agilentia podcast, Sean Dunn and myself are going to be talking about innovation. What makes companies innovative? What prevents people from being innovative in their jobs? Yeah, and what spurred this conversation? I've got a friend who posed a question recently asked what causes some companies to be innovative and what prevents other companies from being innovative. It's one of those things where we all like to think we're innovative and our companies are innovative, but that's not necessarily the case, is it? I guess what do we mean by innovation? We're talking about product innovation, technology innovation, practices, that type of thing, or all the above? I think all of the above. I think we are including, we're talking about transformational innovation, so those like generational leaps like the first smartphone, cloud technologies, but we're also talking about the incremental innovations that happen on a daily basis in our products and ways of doing things. I think we've got the aperture quite wide as to talk to both those types of innovation. One that comes to mind is just the simple act of developers and team members continuously developing and improving their skills. So do they have the time and space to be trying new technologies, learning new skills, this type of thing, and what kind of environment promotes that type of behavior? Yeah, I agree. Innovation can occur at the team level outside of a product just in terms of, okay, so what kind of frameworks are we using? What kind of tools are we, tooling are we using? How do we have our integration set up, what are our methods of working, and there's new things going on in industry all the time, and how can we be aware of those and experiment with them and learn with them, and then maybe find out how they might actually help us solve our problems or make us better at doing things on a daily basis. To me, that is a large part of innovation, I think. Something I think about a lot with this stuff is Hunter Industries who originated the practice of mob programming, and I find it very fascinating what is it about this organization that created the space such that people could experiment to discover something new like this, and the guys there, they talk a lot about safety and psychological safety, and on the teams I'm thinking, what does that mean psychological safety, it's the safety to try things, an environment where risk taking is encouraged and failure is not discouraged? So I think one of these assumptions or these basic principles is you can't have innovation without risk of some kind, and you can't have risk without some acceptance of failure. So what is it about companies like Hunter Industries? What is it about their culture that communicates to the individuals that it's okay to do things that might not work, and simply by the act of doing that they now have the freedom to try things. Mob programming was never guaranteed to be successful, and in many ways they've gone through many iterations of trying to discover what is going to work, but what is it that allows them to explore and discover? And as you say, the recurring thing we hear is this concept of psychological safety. Yeah, and I look at another place like Menlo Innovations which I don't necessarily look at them as being product innovative, but they have an innovative way of working. And talking to guys there too, you hear things like when I go talk to someone, there's an expectation about how that person will respond to me. There's a cultural expectations of kindness and treating other people well, such that people feel more comfortable to go outside of their comfort zone. They should say they feel safe to move outside of their comfort zone. Yeah, and I remember the statement made to be before from one of the leaders I've had which is I trust you and will support whatever decision you make. And the fundamental idea that comes with that is that you don't need to be making the right decision. You're supported regardless of the decision and kind of regardless of the outcome of it. So that's why I think it depends underwriting that risk for you and the role of leadership in underwriting that risk and creating that environment where they're burdening the risk so that you have the opportunity to try and explore. Yeah, and so with that leader, if you had screwed up in some way and something bad had happened, how would that particular leader have responded? It was fairly clearly communicated that as long as we learn from things and I don't think he perceived it as his job to make sure that we learned from things because you got the sense that he trusted you and we all had the intention of wanting to do a good job. We didn't want to make mistakes. I'm trying to teach us a lesson with something went wrong, wasn't really adding anything, wasn't being of any value. So there is the tacit acknowledgement or explicit acknowledgement that we own up to things when they don't go wrong but that's not a reason to not do them, that's just a reason to learn from them. So what happened? How do we react when things go poorly? How do we react in the face of failure? What are our reactions and responses as leaders, as an organization? I think that has a really powerful message in setting the tone and culture of a company and then how that company will or organization will innovate. Something I think about too is that not everyone's in an organization that necessarily is going to enable this. In fact, there's a lot of cultures that have a more of a like a justice seeking or when something goes wrong they're looking for someone to blame but I'm thinking about this leader you're talking about and leaders like that who can shield people from that and create a pocket of safety for the people they're in allowing that innovative risk-taking behavior to exist even in cultures that aren't like men, lower hunter. I believe that that's the responsibility of leaders and it is possible. I think that's something we don't talk enough about. We throw around the word accountability quite a bit but what does it mean to be accountable as a leader? It's my job to be accountable for the actions of my team, of the people below me, whether it was a personal decision or not or something I personally did is irrelevant. I as a leader am owning everything that my organization does and I am accountable for it and what that actually empowers me to do is take that burden on their behalf and be a leader in service of them to give them that freedom and time of space to be able to do their jobs and that's not the same thing as abdication of responsibility by any means but it's a view on leadership that I personally have and I think in industry we could be doing a better job of teaching upcoming leaders that is actually a job of leadership to take on that responsibility and that accountability and that risk. When that leader is saying I will trust and support whatever you do that comes with the implicit and I will take responsibility for the outcomes whatever they may be and to me it's an increased level of accountability and responsibility it's not an abdication at all. I'm trying to think from my perspective what impact did that have on me and it was this much more powerful personal connection. My leaders got my back I don't want to let them down. I thought that I want to get yelled at because that's not that's not really on the table here it's like I feel this personal desire to do well by them because they are standing up for me and I think that's a much more powerful motivator reason for doing things. It's much more inspiring than the fear of getting yelled at if you do wrong. Thanks for joining us today on the Agile India podcast. We're hosts Chris Edwards and Sean Dunn and we hope to see you again next time.