Monthly Archives: June 2015

5 Keys to Developing an Innovation Culture

5 Keys to Developing an Innovation CultureThe Interview

Listen to the interview on The Everyday Innovator Podcast

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Chad McAllister recently for the Everyday Innovator Podcast on the topic of how an organization can become more innovative. Below you will find Chad’s summary of the Five Keys to Developing an Innovation Culture that I shared with him:

  1. Learn the basics of culture change, such as the 8-step Kotter change model or the Leading Change Formula. Braden is developing a Change Planning Toolkit™ based on his experience and research helping organizations change their culture to support innovation. We’ll discuss this in detail in a future interview when the Toolkit is available.
  2. Build a common language of innovation. Define what innovation means for the organization. Braden’s definition is that innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative. Then build vision, strategy, and goals for innovation. Finally, consider what infrastructure is needed to support innovation.
  3. Create a connected organization. Design the organization to apply the additional talents and skills employees have but are not used in their primary role. This “overhang” of capabilities can be applied for innovation by connecting people with the work that needs to be done. One model, used at Cisco, is to create internal internships to contribute to other projects. Another is Intuit’s innovation vacations (my term) that allows employees to take a scheduled break from the regular work to work on a short-term basis for another project.
  4. Identify those who care about innovation. Recognize that some employees are most comfortable in day-to-day operational roles and maintaining the status quo while others are constantly looking to change things for the better. Those that are seeking to make improvements, especially from the customer’s perspective, should be identified to contribute to product development. This also involves unlocking employees’ initiative, creativity, and passion.
  5. Make innovation a team sport. There is no such thing as a lone innovator. All innovators have a team around them. Braden created The Nine Innovation Roles™ for effective innovation teams: revolutionary, conscript, connector, artist, customer champion, troubleshooter, judge, magic maker, and evangelist. See details in the blog post he wrote for Innovation Excellence.

Listen to the interview on The Everyday Innovator Podcast

Image credit: EverythingZoomer.com


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Drowning in a Sea of Content

Drowning in Content

In #MyIndustry, content creation (I’m an author, keynote speaker and publisher), there is already a flood of content and the flood waters will not recede anytime soon. In fact, the rate of content creation is increasing as more companies launch content marketing and inbound marketing campaigns to pull customers to them.

Before the Internet came along, content was naturally limited by the potential throughput possible through a relatively fixed number of available channels:

  • Handful of TV stations
  • Radio stations
  • 1 or 2 local newspapers
  • A few dozen magazines
  • A handful of book publishers

Things remained relatively stable for several decades, then beginning in about 1980 this began to change. Cable and satellite television began to arrive taking television from a handful of stations to hundreds. The number of magazines began to grow, doubling between 1980-2000 according to Pew Research, online services and eventually the Internet emerged to provide a plethora of alternatives to traditional newspapers, and satellite and internet radio arrived. At the same time Amazon, Lulu and others launched the self-publishing revolution.

The amount of content available to people has exploded over the last 35 years. I saw a statistic recently that more than 1 TRILLION photos will be taken in 2015, compared to 2.7 Trillion photos cumulatively stored through the end of 2014.

With the rate of the content deluge increasing and with none of it draining out the bottom of the Internet bathtub, it will become harder and harder for a content creator like myself to capture people’s attention and to afford to continue to deliver quality insights from research, collaboration, and connection.

Being a content creator is a lot like being a space object, there are lots of asteroids in space, and it is easy to float around as an asteroid, but to carefully tend and cultivate an ecosystem that helps you attract enough mass and an atmosphere capable of generating and growing life is much harder.

Creating unique and differentiated insights to power content that educates, informs, or entertains (or potentially all three) is hard enough, but if you want to create something with its own source of gravity, you need to collect and harness many more skills, while also looking for potential collaborators with complimentary skills.

This will always be true for artists, musicians, authors, and any other kind of content creator. There is no going back?

So, what’s your center of gravity?

And how can you make it stronger?

In my own content creation sphere, I continue to work to strengthen the center of gravity in the innovation arena by working on a site redesign with my great Innovation Excellence co-Founders and the digital professionals at Juice Interactive, and growing a new center of gravity in the change arena with some new partners as we seek contributing authors for an upcoming launch of Charting-Change.com.

Helping to make innovation and change insights accessible for the greater good is what drives me, and I’ll keep doing it as long as I possibly can!

Image credit: Bunchcast


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Measuring Organizational Agility – The Triple T Metric v1.0

Measuring Organizational Agility - The Triple T MetricThere is an increasing amount of chatter and confusion out there around what organizational agility is and feeling that it must be important to organizational success.

But, before we discuss organizational agility, it is important to define what we mean by the term.

BusinessDictionary.com has a decent definition:

“The capability of a company to rapidly change or adapt in response to changes in the market. A high degree of organizational agility can help a company to react successfully to the emergence of new competitors, the development of new industry-changing technologies, or sudden shifts in overall market conditions.”

Usually people begin speaking about organizational agility and its importance to the success of the organization when they speak about the increasing pace of change, and the challenge the organization faces in keeping up.

Because of this, one of the key measures of organizational agility you may want to consider using, I like to call the Triple T Metric:

Time
to
Transform

The Triple T Metric is a measure of how long it takes an organization to make a transformation. But to measure your progress on the Triple T Metric over time, you must define it and measure it in a consistent manner. So, if a transformation is like a trip from Point A to Point B, we must define Point A and Point B.

  • Point A = the point in time at which the organization recognizes a change is needed away from the steady state
  • Point B = the point in time at which the organization successfully arrives at the new steady state

You’ll notice that Point A doesn’t start at the point at which people AGREE that a change is needed and AGREE to make it, but at the point the organization RECOGNIZES a change is needed. This is because there is great opportunity to increase your organizational agility by increasing the speed at which the organization moves from recognizing the need for change, to agreeing to change, to planning the change, to executing the change.

This is just v1.0 of our discussion of the Triple T Metric, to introduce the concept. We’ll get into more detail in a future post.

All of these transitions must be included because organizational agility is ultimately about how quickly the organization can successfully plan, lead, and execute (manage and maintain) a change effort, increasing your organizational agility requires that you increase both your change capability and your change capacity.

How fast can your organization change?

If you want to learn how to change faster, and make your organization more agile, grab a copy of Charting Change and the supporting materials for book buyers!


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Using Boredom to Help Students Learn

Bored Game TeacherWhat do you get when you take the technology away from a group of 10 and 11 year olds and ask them to be creative with a handful of household objects?

Well, Thomas Fraser, a teacher at Crestwood Elementary School in Edmonton, Canada, troubled by the short attention spans of today’s youngsters endeavored to find out by creating what he calls the Bored Game, which involves giving students a handful of common household objects with the only instruction being to do something interesting with them.

The reaction at first from his group of always on youngsters were perplexed looks of how can I create something without an iPad, smartphone or a computer?

Then they started to get into it, and were sad when they didn’t get to play the Bored Game.

CTV recorded an interview about the Bored Game that you can watch here:

(sorry, video is no longer available)

My favorite part of the story is that they’re finding that the performance of the children in a range of subjects is increasing as the children have this periodic time to play and engage their creative problem solving skills.

So, maybe we need less technology in the classroom if we want to teach kids how to learn?

In my opinion, we focus too much on teaching kids to repeat activities, facts, and figures, focusing and what they’re able to memorize and regurgitate and not enough on actually teaching kids creative problem solving and how to learn. We don’t need a new generation of trivia experts, we need a new generation of problem solvers that can help repair the world.

We’ve all heard the saying “If you give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, if you teach a man to finish he’ll never go hungry.”

If you want your child to be more successful, you have to do the same thing…

“Good teachers teach kids how to do well on the test, great teachers teach kids how to learn so they do well in life.”

For more, I encourage you to check out the Edmonton Journal Article (link expired)

Image credit: Edmonton Journal


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.