Is there an Anti-Innovation Society where you work? Maybe so if you’re hearing things like this:
“We don’t do things that way around here.”
“I don’t think management will go for it.”
“Someone tried that before.”
“No, that would be too hard.”
“That’s a completely untested idea.”
“Things are fine as they are; they don’t need to be changed.”
Anti-innovation organizations are painful to work in. No matter how good your idea is, no matter how beneficial it would be, someone, somehow, finds a way not to make use of it.
This is not necessarily a management issue. Of course, a blaming culture, or one where any failure, no matter how small, is punished, discourages innovation and risk taking. Similarly, when your workmates are disparaging about any advance or new idea, it sucks the life out of your creative thinking. Any change or improvement is resisted, even when the change would be beneficial to the resistors.
In short, any fresh thinking whatsoever breaks the unspoken rule:
