Overview
Our client was a leading African bank with a rich 50-year history. As the industry was being disrupted by a high number of mergers, rising competition from non-bank players and heavy regulation, they had set an innovation goal to ensure they stayed on top.
They also had their own internal challenges. Operating costs were high, and some assets weren’t performing well, all while cultural gaps had led to low employee engagement and productivity among staff and issues with operational efficiency.
The new CEO, while coming from a 20-year career spanning local and global banking, was relatively young for the industry and wanted to take a more contemporary approach. The plan was to put innovation at the heart of the bank to renew the institution in the face of continued threat.
Building on our track record in innovation consulting, we helped the CEO along with several other key stakeholders create an innovation-led renewal programme, mapping a journey for cultural change, innovation and enhanced productivity of the bank.
Using the framework from the bestselling book Building a Culture of Innovation, the programme was designed around a deeper understanding of what it takes to build innovation capability, scale it across an organisation and lead for it on a day-to-day basis.
Our approach
Utilising the Innovation Culture Framework below, we helped the team map out their current state and then, through a series of challenge sessions, build a picture of the required ‘future state’. From this we built a set of bolder, more ambitious questions and a set of hypotheses to be tested around how the bank could shape its future culture around innovation.
The Innovation Culture Framework
What we discovered was a gap in understanding about the what, why and how of innovation at the non-executive, governance and oversight level. To bridge that gap and make innovation capability a core part of the bank’s organisational culture, we needed to develop contemporary leadership skills, mindset and behaviours.
The initial ambitious engagement of the board helped to create buy-in for the level of organisation-wide transformation required, as well as ‘leading for innovation’ on a day-to-day basis.
The new leadership framework followed our core belief that purpose plus creativity makes people curious, and curiosity breeds exploration and a willingness to experiment. As a result, the focus on leadership development used a combination of human-centred design, growth mindset and our ODC (Own-Drive-Contribute) framework.
The ODC framework centres around the cascaded and interconnected nature of an innovation culture and the differing ‘look and feel’ of innovation at different levels of an organisations. The leadership component focuses on ‘owning’ innovation and what that means in terms of the physical and psychological components required.
With the physical components – strategy, practice, tactics, etc. – being rapidly introduced, the focus for fully enabling leaders to own the innovation agenda needed to be balanced with the relevant psychological components.
Some of these components include accountability, collaboration, creativity, purpose, empathy – all key pillars of a growth mindset and innovation-led business.
As a result of the programme, the team successfully mapped out the core goals required to focus on building a culture of innovation anchored mainly on the following areas:
As a result of the programme, the CEO, board and senior team were also better prepared to deliver a bolder, more ambitious vision anchored on the following areas:
What the clients said
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