The Essential Ingredient for an Innovation Culture in International Organizations is Already There, so Why Aren’t We Better at it?
At the start of international organizations there was a big dream. The dream to solve pressing societal issues like maintaining global peace, reducing the pace of climate change, reaching gender equality, or reducing global poverty. These ambitious goals are the reasons why many people aspire to join our organizations, and it was certainly the reason that inspired me.
Something in common that I’ve found in most of the organizations/teams I’ve worked with is the passion that most employees have for their work. Particularly those ones in direct contact with the communities. There is a sense of wholeness that comes with working for a cause going beyond our individual wellbeing.
However, it seems that somewhere in the path between fighting for the big dream and getting the work done both people inside of organizations, and organizations between them are taking distance from one another.
There are several elements cited in the literature as ingredients for successful innovation cultures. However, I would go as to say that the essential ingredient for an innovation culture is having purpose-driven people eager to improve things, having challenges to solve. For most international organizations this seems to be already there, so what is happening ?
What is happening is that big dreamers grow apart because of the lack of incentives to grow together.
There are no incentives to trully collaborate.
We imagine that working for a social cause with people that think alike would naturally create collaborative environments in an organization.
What happens is that organizational constraints shape how employees behave. Under resource constraints, employees enter protectionism mode and want to ensure their survival in the organization. Same happens at the organizational level.
Our organizations rely mostly on public funding. Either states’ fixed allocations or project-based contributions responding to annually established priorities. This means that as priorities get defined, the work of organizations takes a certain direction.
In theory this is what we want, to be united towards a goal, however, since funding is not unlimited, it ends up creating competition between organizations.
There are no incentives to try to do things differently
Structures have been in place already for decades to ensure that our organizations remain accountable and implement according to plans established and agreed with donor governments.
Is not bad to have structures, but these should be flexible to allow for changes in the way, as the needs from communities evolve. This is not what is happening.
Instead, budgets are approved based on fixed plans and indicators that can’t change. In some cases, for large non-profits, the life cycle of a project can last from some months to years only to get off the ground, so by the time project actions start the needs might look different locally. Is like if you had a recipe that you cook over and over again. After a while, you could almost cook with your eyes closed, but you are missing the opportunity to explore new ingredients that could enhance it, or even worse, you might realize that some of the ingredients you planned to use have rotten and are useless.
Experimentation is a word that we use only within innovation teams, because it seems too risky or it sounds too unprofessional, without realizing that is even riskier in the long-term not to embrace it and loose relevance. In this context, innovation teams are lowering their ambitions in terms of reimagining the role that our organizations can play in the face of the big challenges we have.
Innovation teams are prioritizing to work on specific projects where tangible results can be reached and highlighted to donor countries, because working to nourish innovation cultures inside of organizations is hard, is still seen as a nice to have instead of a big opportunity enabler, and therefore, there is no investment for it.
How to flip things around when the issues seem deeply embedded in organizational cultures?
That’s a good question, with many probable but not certain answers. I invite you to explore these together.
I’d like to know what you think, especially if you are working (or have worked) in international organizations, non-profits, public sector entities. Why aren’t we better at having innovation cultures?
*This is an opinion piece. The views expressed here do not reflect the official views of my employer.
