Thoughts on Innovation: Shawna Miller, Affinity Credit Union

I’m still trying to decide how to share my thoughts, as they rumble around in my head, but hey, maybe that’s a point in itself – there’s no right or wrong, just a desire to share some ideas. 

Innovation is one of those ‘fuzzy’ words that can be defined many ways and will definitely mean different things ‘in the eyes of the beholder’.  In my mind, a very powerful first step in the pursuit of innovation is to assign accountability somewhere.  Not an unreasonable concept in the business world!  Once you do that, it will likely enable someone to take this somewhat abstract concept and define it, try to manage it and probably even want to measure it.

Organizations that can define their direction, strategies, and objectives have an advantage; and better yet, if they can communicate those effectively internally and externally, those organizations are already on the road to success when it comes to innovation.  Clarity of purpose within an organization helps staff to define the scope for the innovation.

When I think of examples of defining a strategy, I reflect on our recent merger process at Affinity Credit Union.  Talk about one massive project plan!  In some ways, it’s been one extensive exercise in innovation.  Hundreds of staff have had to think about what they do each day and most have seen changes to their daily routine.  It was more than just a question of how well the existing processes and models were working, it was a question of changing the culture in the face of a changing environment.  Staff didn’t always just take the ‘best practice’, they took the opportunity to get creative and find a completely new way to succeed.

In most cases, all of us are smarter than one of us!  Why wouldn’t we want to take advantage of the individual and combined creativity of every staff in our organization who are willing to share?  One compelling reason for asking staff to participate is to demonstrate that credit unions are sincerely interested in their ideas to the point where they are listening and reacting. In fact, if staff can be empowered to lead and help make decisions on implementation then I’d say it’s a win-win situation.

You don’t get the big ideas by watching from the sidelines. You’ve got to be in the game, working for those ideas. So what’s a game without some rules?  Besides I’m a fan of process and believe it facilitates success.  I feel there are three important enablers to innovation within any organization: corporate culture, communication and compensation. By culture I refer to factors that enable innovators to work and give them the ability to take risks and fail without consequence.

The two remaining factors are equally important – communication and compensation. If you want ideas from staff, unless you can read minds, you’re going to have to actually ask for their help!  Maybe you’ll even have to ask several times because if you haven’t been engaging them prior to now, they might need a few reminders that you are really interested in what they’re thinking!  Finally, from a compensation standpoint, we need to reinforce what we say is important with some sort of reward. You know the saying … no risk, no reward.