Kalle Ryan

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Create incentives for innovation and watch your team take bigger leaps

Another one of my recent pieces got picked up by Gurunet, where I talk about the ways to incentivise employees to innovate. They had a callout to talk about professional experiences where we fostered creativity in our team. You can read the excerpt here if you’re interested (and I have popped in a screengrab below as well)

Screengrab of a thought leadership piece about incentivising innovation in teams by Kalle Ryan, as seen on the AI Content Managers blog. Full text of article here: Create Incentives for Innovation The simple answer is incentivisation. In all of my roles at Google and Meta, I created an environment of possibility to innovate, suggest, create or change the way things are done. Everyone was given the opportunity to bring ideas to the table. Giving your team the permission to be awesome is a subtle but transformative thing. Of course, formal channels like innovation & creativity awards can be particularly effective, especially if there is a “prize” attached. That may not necessarily be monetary, but could be as simple as access and visibility in front of decision makers and senior leaders. In my time at Google I created the “Brave Penguin” award, which honoured the team member who took the biggest innovative plunge into the unknown (much like a penguin on an ice floe who dares to be the first to dive into the waters and seek out the firmer footing just beyond them). In many cases it led to greater things for those team members because their confidence grew and their ideas became bolder.

My firm belief is that you need to create conditions in a team or company that makes people feel like they can try new things. One ex-colleague at Google used to refer to it as having “permission to be awesome”. I drew similar parallels about creativity and innovation in my previous piece about how space matters. It has always held true for me.

The “Brave Penguin” award (that I mentioned briefly in the GuruNet post above) is something I am still very proud of. And as a wordsmith, I’m most happy about the name of the award. I wanted to find a metaphor that symbolised the willingness to be bold and take a leap. So I thought of a penguin teetering on the edge of an ice floe. And that penguin is eyeing up the situation and making calculations in her head. The rest of the colony of penguins staring at her. Surely she won’t dare to be the first to dive into the icy water and seek out the firmer footing over yonder. That penguin does make the leap (literally) and the others follow that leader. I’m sure some experts will let me know in the comments that I have misinterpreted the penguin situation and twisted it to fit my metaphor. But, to them I say, forgive me. I know more about the pen than the penguin.

On a related note, I remember reading some of Kierkegaard’s philosophy in college (pretentious, moi?) and one line always stuck with me – “The instant of decision is madness”. That feels connected to the idea of the brave penguin making the choice to jump, even though such a move seems foolhardy or mad. But that is just what innovation is at times. Making a bold choice to try something that has inherent risk but feels worth it because there may be a cool new outcome by simply trying it out.

Innovation requires bravery. And if the conditions are right, it can yield huge rewards.

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