From Chaos to Creativity: How to Build an Innovation Culture (And Enjoy Doing It!)

Let’s be honest — “innovation” is one of those buzzwords that’s thrown around so much it’s started to lose its meaning. You know what I’m talking about. Every company wants to be the next Tesla, Google, or Apple, disrupting industries and rewriting the rules of the game. But creating a culture of innovation? That’s not as simple as putting a ping-pong table in the breakroom, encouraging “blue sky thinking” during meetings, or hiring a “Chief Innovation Officer” (who’s usually left wondering what they’re supposed to actually do).

The truth is, fostering innovation in an organisation requires intention, strategy, and — here’s the kicker — a willingness to fail. A lot.

Why Innovating Feels Like Herding Cats

First off, let’s get real about why many organisations struggle with innovation: it’s like herding cats. You’ve got brilliant ideas flying in all directions, but if you don’t corral them with the right systems and culture, you end up with chaos. Or, even worse, you get no ideas because people are too afraid to suggest something that might fail.

In one organisation I worked with, they proudly told me about their “open-door” policy for ideas. Anyone could pop in and share a groundbreaking idea with leadership. Great, right? Well, after a month, I asked how many ideas had been shared. The answer? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Not one single cat had wandered through that open doorway.

So what went wrong? Simple. No one felt safe enough to step up and share. The company’s culture wasn’t primed for real innovation. Instead, people were worried their “crazy” ideas might be judged. And that’s lesson number one: innovation doesn’t happen when people are afraid to look silly.

Creating a Safe Space for Ideas (Even the Wild Ones)

Let’s clear up a major misconception: not every idea will be a game-changer. In fact, a lot of them are going to be downright weird or impractical. Scratch that—not just a lot, most of them. But if you want a culture of innovation, you need to embrace the weirdness and let people feel comfortable sharing.

Take the example of Post-it Notes. Back in the 1980s, a 3M scientist named Spencer Silver came up with a glue that… well, barely stuck. Sounds useless, right? Yet, instead of dismissing it as a failure, his colleague Art Fry found a clever use for it as a sticky bookmark for his choir hymnal. Boom! A billion-dollar product was born out of something that could have easily been laughed off as a failed experiment.

The key takeaway? You never know which “bad” idea might turn into the next big thing.

Fail Fast, Fail Often (But Learn)

Another thing about innovation is that failure isn’t just part of the process—it’s essential. If your organisation punishes failure, you’re not going to get much innovation, period. You’ve got to create an environment where trying and failing is just part of the job description.

I’ll never forget the time I had what I thought was a brilliant idea to improve team collaboration. I'd designed this incredibly complex brainstorming workshop, complete with colour-coded sticky notes, intricate ideation canvases, and a playlist I was rock-solid-certain would spark creativity. I walked in, feeling like I’d cracked the code on innovation. Five minutes in, the sticky notes were falling off the walls, people were more confused by my canvases than inspired, and “Eye of the Tiger” wasn't exactly screaming “collaborative genius.” The workshop flopped, but the feedback I got led me to simplify the process. The next session was a huge success—and it turns out that innovation thrives when things are less complicated. Sometimes, less really is more, and it taught me a hugely valuable lesson about learning from failure.

A company I later worked with had a brilliant little idea that I just loved—they held quarterly “Failure Celebrations.” Every quarter, they’d gather their team and celebrate the biggest flops. I’m talking the ideas that went up in flames. And they’d all laugh about it, give out funny awards (like “The Titanic Award for Most Spectacular Sinking”), and—here’s where the magic happened—they’d talk about what they learned from each failure.

The result? Not only did they foster a sense of psychological safety, but they also created a culture where failure became a learning tool, not a black mark. And from that, real innovation started to flourish.

Get Comfortable with Discomfort

If you’re serious about creating a culture of innovation, buckle up because it’s going to get uncomfortable. You’ll have moments where everything feels up in the air, where you’re testing new ideas that don’t quite fit into the current way of doing things. That’s normal.

One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is trying to innovate without disrupting their status quo. That’s like trying to rearrange your furniture without moving the couch. To make space for new ideas, some old habits, behaviours, systems, and ways of thinking need to go. That’s going to create friction, and that’s absolutely okay. Lean into it.

I once worked with a team that embraced the idea of a “Discomfort Zone” challenge. Each week, employees were encouraged to work on projects outside their regular comfort zone. One team member, who’d never touched a piece of code in her life, tried her hand at writing a basic script for a process the team had been struggling with for months. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. But what happened next was amazing—a seasoned developer took her idea, refined it, and, together, they found a solution that saved hours of manual work.

Lesson number four? Innovation happens at the edges of what feels familiar.

Collaboration Is the Secret Sauce

Lastly, and I can’t stress this enough: innovation is a team sport. If people are working in silos, you can kiss your innovation dreams goodbye. The magic happens when you get diverse minds in the room, collaborating and bouncing ideas off each other.

The best example of this I’ve seen was a company that had a monthly “Innovation Swap.” They paired up people from different departments to spend a day shadowing each other’s roles and brainstorming how they could improve each other’s workflows. Not only did they build bridges between teams that rarely interacted, but they also ended up with some out-of-the-box solutions that would never have come from a single department.

And so, lesson number five: Get different perspectives in the room. Great ideas often come from unexpected places.

Wrapping Up

Creating a culture of innovation isn’t about lightning-bolt moments of brilliance or forcing people to think outside the box. It’s about building an environment where people feel safe to try, fail, learn, and collaborate. It’s about embracing the discomfort of change and allowing innovation to emerge from the messiness of creative thought.

So, if you’re ready to break out of the ordinary and cultivate a culture of innovation, here’s your starting point: embrace the cats (if you can catch them), celebrate the failures, and don’t be afraid to rearrange the furniture. The future of your organisation depends on it—and it’s going to be a wild (and fun) ride.

Feel like your team could use a little help fostering that innovative spark? Drop me a line. I’ll bring the strategies, the insights, and maybe even a metaphorical cat herd or two to get things moving!