INTHEBLACK December - January 2022 - Magazine - Page 61
RISK OF FAILURE
Encouraging or reawakening creativity
among employees has become vital to a
company’s competitive advantage. Just take
a look at the Creativity Index measure,
developed by management consultants
McKinsey. Businesses that score highly
in the Creativity Index outperform their
competitors in two areas – an appetite and
aptitude for innovation and shareholder
return – in other words, growth and profit.
Despite this, there is a perception that
a culture of innovation is hard to instil in
traditional accounting and finance firms.
Bureaucracy and a methodical approach
conducive to compliance-based work are
sometimes seen as roadblocks to creativity.
At professional services firm EY, Darren Chua
leads innovation for the Oceania region. The
risk‑taking that accompanies experimentation can
be much harder to swallow in large organisations,
he says, exacerbated by the focus on short-term
performance and individuals’ fear of failure.
“In finance and accountancy, we are, by
nature, very precise individuals. So, being
allowed the ‘right to fail’ is typically incongruous
with the way business is organised and run.
If you are trying to hit your quarterly goal,
how lenient can you be about failure?”
Chua’s advice is to be smart and deliberate
in how companies frame innovation. “I can
afford to fail fast, if I have a clear vision, a
broad innovation portfolio and a mix of short,
medium and long-term goals. In that context,
if we fail fast and have some space to shoulder
occasional losses, we can then learn and
move on quickly to the next opportunity.”
SUPPORT FROM THE TOP
No enterprise is going to get creative
without buy-in and support from the CEO
– that is the consensus among experts.
“At a level or two removed from the
CEO, it never really gets any traction, and
organisations including EY and the big banks
have struggled with that,” says Chua.
Any budget and resources ring-fenced for
innovation should also have a clear agenda.
Chua recalls a major client who invested more
than A$2 million in a state-of-the-art innovation
hub that, within a couple of years, became a
place for good coffee meetings but little else.
“There wasn’t true ownership of why they
needed the space and how innovation would be
ingrained into the core business. The question –
about whether this was a place for brainstorming
or was it a fundamental way of changing the
business model and processes – wasn’t asked
or key leaders weren’t fully sold on it.”
61
DEC 2022
JAN 2023
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