When we talk about innovation, it is easy to picture a particular kind of person or team within a company - the product designer. the technologist or the strategist. Perhaps the slightly mysterious label on a door stating: “Innovation Lab”. Yet innovative organisations are not built by a handful of people being 'innovative' on everyone else’s behalf.
That thought is shared by Coenraad Jonker, Founder and CEO of GoTyme Bank Group. As GoTyme has grown, Jonker has embarked on an extraordinary exercise: personally meeting the organisation’s 5,000 employees in groups of around 40.
And not just the senior people - cleaners, programmers, project managers and administrators sit together while Jonker tells stories about the organisation’s beginnings, mistakes, difficult moments and beliefs. Each receives a copy of It’s About TYME, Adrian Saville and Bruce Whitfield’s account of the company’s first decade.
Jonker’s explanation for this huge investment of time is striking:
“We were forgetting our own stories – what made this all possible.”
Perhaps that tells us something important about innovation.
Innovation is not simply the generation of clever ideas. Amabile (1988) described organisational innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas. Getting from idea to implementation requires an environment in which people notice problems, question assumptions, offer suggestions, experiment and challenge existing ways of working.
Those behaviours cannot realistically belong to one department.
Research into team innovation reaches a similar conclusion. Anderson and West (1998) identified factors including participation, support for innovation and shared objectives as important features of an innovative team climate. Edmondson’s (1999) research on psychological safety similarly showed why people need to feel able to take interpersonal risks if teams are to learn.
In other words, innovation depends partly upon what happens in the everyday spaces between people.
Does the administrator feel permitted to point out a broken process?
Can the programmer challenge an assumption made by somebody more senior?
Does the cleaner who sees the building differently from everyone else believe their observation is worth sharing?
And when somebody says, “Why do we do it this way?”, is the response curiosity—or “because that’s how we’ve always done it”?
As organisations grow, this becomes harder. New layers appear. Processes become formalised. People become further removed from the founders and from the stories that originally shaped how the organisation thought.
That may explain why Jonker’s storytelling matters.
He is not simply preserving GoTyme’s history. He is communicating what the organisation notices, values and believes. In cultural terms, he is helping new employees understand not merely what we do here, but how we think here.
Perhaps that is the real challenge of scaling innovation - not creating more innovators, but creating a culture in which everybody believes innovation is part of their job.