Strategy, culture, rhythm: the three things you need to understand when it comes to innovation

Matt Locke is Director of Storythings – a content studio who design and make stories for their clients and themselves. He has spent over 15 years at the forefront of digital media and here talks about how organisational rhythms have a fundamental effect on how we innovate and develop new ideas.

This case study was sourced by Culture24 as a resource for our conference, The art of leadership.

The saying goes that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The implicit values your team believes in will decide whether your explicit plans are successful. When organisations want to be more innovative, they will focus on developing innovation strategies, or developing an innovation culture.

I was Head of Innovation at BBC New Media for seven years, and I lost count of the number of innovation strategy and culture documents I wrote. But I missed the most important thing of all. If you want innovation to really make a difference to your organisation, there is something more important than culture or strategy – rhythm.

Rhythm is also known as tradition, the business cycle, or just deadlines. Rhythm is not something defined by your company – it’s defined by the sector or industry in which you work. It can take years or decades to get established, and it can take even longer to change. Rhythm is the thing that ideas crash up against when they’ve got the potential to really change an organisation.

Do you have an innovation ‘lab’ where people can think differently? Do you have an innovation process that is entirely separate from your day-to-day working patterns? Do you have great innovation awaydays, workshops or ‘sprints’, but struggle to take the ideas and scale them up? The reason why these innovative ideas aren’t going anywhere is simple – they don’t work with your existing rhythms.

Rhythm is what we do after the awayday. It’s what we default to when we get back to our desks. Rhythm is the path of least resistance, like when you realise that the only actionable item at the end of a meeting is that someone needs to organise another meeting.

If you work at a newspaper, your rhythm is the daily edition. If you’re an advertiser, it’s a campaign. If you work in an art gallery or museum, it’s the calendar of exhibitions. If you’re a publisher, it’s the big marketing moments before summer and Christmas. For advocacy groups, it’s the cycle of policy decisions and elections.

When I worked at the BBC, there were different rhythms in different departments. In the news department, it was all about producing the day’s TV news stories for the one o’clock, the six o’clock or the ten o’clock. The Natural History Unit had a much longer rhythm to their storytelling, as making a show like Blue Planet could take five years from beginning to end. I ran a team that had to try and help these different departments deliver new ways to tell stories, and one of the hardest problems we faced was working with these wildly different rhythms. It meant we had to develop specific tactics and ways of working, as no two departments had the same storytelling rhythms.

But rhythms have a purpose – they help organisations grow, and they help competing organisations develop sectors and markets together. But they make it hard to respond to changes in audience behaviour or understand changes in the wider world outside your sector.

Your audience might want to engage with your stories in an on-demand stream rather than a scheduled programme. They might want to dig into stories from your history, or collect and curate stories to publish themselves. These new behaviours will challenge the way you tell stories. Meanwhile, startups without these traditional rhythms will respond faster and get all the attention. This is how Netflix and Amazon are changing the way traditional broadcasters tell their stories.

Rhythms also make it hard to collaborate or bring in new skills from outside your sector. New staff won’t understand why a project manager has set a deadline. A collaboration with a partner outside your sector will fail when you can’t both hit the same deadline. Does this sound familiar?

So what can you do to change your rhythm?

First of all, discover and define the rhythms in your organisation. Ask teams to talk through their year, showing the points where they are most busy and pressured. Ask a project manager to walk you through a project, explaining why the milestones and deadlines are set the way they are.

If you’re collaborating on a project with someone outside your sector, ask your partner to walk you through their last project. Ask where the pressure points were, and what caused them. Look for the points where your rhythms will likely be in sync, and where they might clash.

Look for rhythms in the behaviour of your audience. Look for unexpected spikes of traffic, conversations or activity around your stories. Reward your team for being curious about these new patterns of audience behaviour, and encourage experimentation in the rhythms of your storytelling.

This will be hard. Rhythms are deeply embedded in our organisations, and we don’t spend enough time thinking about them. But they have a fundamental effect on how we tell our stories, and they are one of the biggest blocks to change.

So, culture might eat strategy for breakfast, but perhaps rhythm is the clock that wakes us up in the first place.

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