How do you foster innovation in your organization? Most organizations are more worried about making mistakes than the potential upside benefit. So the key is in taking the initiative, and managing your mistakes.

Rita McGrath, Professor, Columbia Business School gives this advice: Recognize that you can’t measure the rate of failure, but you can manage the cost, so manage the cost of your mistakes and benefit from them. You can have a lot of failures if they are cheap. In short: fail cheaply.

And these days you can fail more cheaply than ever before, so it’s a good time to push the boundaries and explore new ground, whether it’s developing new services, finding new funding methods, launching new fundraising events, exploring partnerships or collaborations or getting your feet wet in social media.

And if you fail in your pursuit of progress, take note of the lessons. You paid the tuition, so benefit from it. Recognize the things that you have learned that can make you more competitive in your core mission or that can be used by someone else.

WAKE UP CALL: Are you willing to create a new measurement of success for your organization – one that can take on new challenges, fail fast, cheap and move on? Set a new standard by judging your success by the amount of learning, willingness to grow, progress toward a goal and ability to stop and move on to something else when it’s not working.

RESOURCE: www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-91LvoyAZo&feature=channel

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While most nonprofits nurture cultures protecting the status quo, designers are inclined to push the limits. I was struck by the lessons in risk-taking and pushing limits when I witnessed my friend Matthew McNerney, donned in a skeleton costume no less, display daring moves of acrobatic bravado in a bubble off the West Side Highway. The occasion was the culmination of eight weeks at the Trapeze School New York, a post-Halloween celebration of flipping, flying and finesse. Watching this performance, I realized how personal risk-taking translates to nonprofits:

WAKE UP CALL: The success of organizations lies in their abilities to think creatively in solving problems – or more specifically in providing an organizational culture that not only allows, but rewards creative thinking (for example, in tolerating the inevitable mistakes).

Businesss guru, Tom Peters has written about the need for ensuring that a small group of people in each organization push the organization’s limits. He calls this the Lunatic Fringe, those people who ask “why?” and who ultimately lead to breakthroughs and necessary changes. He asks, “how lunatic is your fringe?”, a good question for nonprofits to ask themselves.

As we steel for a recession, we need to be aware of the tendencies to become more conservative and to squelch the innovative thinking needed to spur solutions. Ensure that your nonprofit retains a culture that fosters creative thinking.

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