The rise of the culture brokers – the employees helping to bridge diversity gaps

Let me tell you a secret about innovation: If you’re an executive in a normal, contemporary corporation, the fact of the matter is that neither you nor your company really needs any more innovators. Sure, you might think you do, and you may even be quite busy trying to find the disruptors, the Mavericks, and the mad creatives that you think will take your company or project to the next level. It’s understandable, but still quite likely to be wrong. The fact is that unless you have a very small team, the person you need most isn’t an innovator, but a culture broker.

In all corporations, I’ve ever known, and there have been many, there has never been one that lacked ideas. In fact, they were often teeming with them. The only problem is that companies have a plethora of silos and subcultures that while aligned with the general aims of the company may well be quite convinced that they are neither seen nor listened to by the top executive team. As a result, ideas get locked in, barricaded, siloed. In fact, you too may well work in an organization where key potential innovators feel quite divorced from executive decisions, i.e. sense that there is only a limited range of responses and ideas that will be accepted by the company.

As a result, an organization can be both desperately in need of new, innovative ideas, and have enormous amounts of them locked up within its layers. It is here that culture brokers come into their own. It is quite common that innovative ideas arise out of specialized contexts, yet find it difficult to travel outside of these professional “ghettos”. Culture brokers act as an antidote to this, by being the kind of agents that are respected in several subcultures at once, and that can also speak the language of all of these.

Imagine a culture broker, one everyone knows as Dobby. She is a well-regarded IT person, yet is also quite astute when it comes to strategic issues and has gained the respect of the management team. It might be a bit of a caricature, but we could say that she is fluent in both nerd-speak and managementese.

To some, Dobby is the odd one out, someone who doesn’t really fit in the neat boxes of the corporate hierarchy. To others, she doesn’t have the kind of deep knowledge that makes her an innovator. I say, and the research backs me up, that your organization needs many more like Dobby – cultural brokers who are able to translate ideas and feedback between groups and subcultures.

Truly powerful business ideas never arise out of just one professional competency. On the contrary, the real magic of innovation usually requires a distinct cross-pollination of inputs – between engineering and design, or design and marketing, or marketing and engineering, or for that matter between operations and accounting (two critically important functions that never seem to get the respect they deserve). On a superficial level we all know this, and who could forget the magic that came to be when the business mind of Jobs gelled with the design genius of Ive? Yet far too often we think that these magic moments of productive cross-pollination occur on their own, or as if by magic.

The reality of the matter is that this magic is often the product of the pedestrian footwork of culture brokers such as the aforementioned Dobby. They carry ideas from one part of the organization to the next, see them develop, translate these developments from nerdspeak to managementese and back again, making sure that there’s a translation for marketers as well. Like a bee pollinating flowers, a culture broker takes ideas and spreads them, making sure that the ideas grow from insulated notions to something that can start to bloom.

In most contemporary organizations, most ideas flounder or wilt. They arise in the wrong part of the organization or are too odd, too different, or just a hint too female. This is why we need culture brokers, the kind of people who can break ideas out of their silos and/or ghettos. Your organization already has all the ideas it could ever need, and really doesn’t even need any more. Now, just make sure you have people on board who can communicate and develop the same – the ideas, and your organization will thank you for it. As your culture brokers rise, your organization will rise with them.

By Alf Rehn. Alf is a professor of innovation at the University of Southern Denmark and a leading keynote speaker. His new book Innovation for the Fatigued is out now, priced £14.99. Visit alfrehn.com to find out more