GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

This is the third & final article on embracing digitization, transformation and innovation.

We are living in an era where that is defined by one continual exponential technology wave after another, called the Digital Age. It is transforming everything we do, from how we do business and especially in how we learn, lead and coach people. In fact, we have never seen a change of this scope and speed in human history, creating a seismic shift from an Industrial Age to the Digital Age.

After all, as we said in last month’s blog “Why mindsets matter in digital innovation and Transformation” that innovation is an organizations ability to stimulate and transform new ideas and knowledge into products, processes or services that tangibly increase value to customers, accelerate growth, enhance operational effectiveness and/or improve profitability. To do this, you have the best leaders and culture, digital architecture and mechanisms, flexible structure and systems in your organization to support and enable ongoing growth and innovation.

What is the Digital Age?

Some defining characteristics of the Digital Age, mentioned in the Digital Leadership EdEx course I am currently completing include:

• All information can be easily digitized, hence that data revolution.
• Digital devices that are fast, powerful, cheap, networked, and prevalent are in common use globally, hence radical changes in medical, biotech and fintech.
• The global network of people and devices enables anyone and anything to connect
• to anyone in the world, hence the need for teaming and networking across boundaries and geographies.
• Cheap storage (the cloud) and smart access tools connected by the broad-band, hence the internet of things.
• Internet enable rapid access to information by virtually anyone anywhere and the plethora of available information.

The Digital Age has unleashed three powerful forces:

1. Continuous change in customers’ needs, priorities, and preferences, especially about what is of value.
2. Ubiquitous (pervasive, expected to be everywhere, global) innovation: digitization tools enable an exponential increase in the speed of organizations’ ability to harness and apply new innovative technologies to bring products and services to market faster and align them with evolving customer needs. By quickly connecting on a global scale, people at any level can collaborate with colleagues, partners, or customers anywhere in the world to create better ways to do their work, or to co-create mutual value products and services that people value and cherish.
3. Global markets, customers and competition: the pace of communication and ability to share information globally across customers and organizations means that new customer needs, new technologies, and new competitors can appear at anytime from anywhere in the world.

Organizations are complex adaptive systems

To maximize both the constraints and the possibilities emerging in the Digital Age, it is important to acknowledge that organizations are complex systems, rather than merely a set of complicated processes. Organizations are influenced by their environments, and conversely have an effect on the environments in which they function through new or refined products, services processes, or structures that are offered through their innovation or transformation efforts.

“Organizations, as cognitive systems strive for ‘intelligent action’, meaning that they are ‘intelligent’ to the extent that they are to ‘act with relevance to the maintenance (and advancement of themselves)’”

Suggesting that there is a duality existing between the people working within the organization and the broader organizational system of which they are a part, which can be described as a cognitive system. This in turn, influences how leaders think, act and make decisions. Making organizations cognitive systems that posses a unique cognitive architecture, which is expressed through its cognitive style, which then shapes a leader’s actions.

Making people matter

As we move further into the Digital Age, it appears that there is a greater disparity between an organization’s members and the organization perceived as an independent entity. People (talent and customers) now want more of a voice in how they are treated and how they are incorporated into the organization as a whole.

Making both management and leadership less of an “inside out” process, pushing products and services out to customers, and more of a “outside in” process, of pulling people and customers needs, wants and desires into the organization.

This requires the development of a new set of capabilities, to shift the cognitive system, re-scaffold the cognitive architecture and a cognitive style that embraces;

• Deep & dynamic learning
• Collaboration & co-creation
• Adaptive change
• Revenue growth & long-term sustainability through innovation

The Digital Age requires new Leadership Capabilities

There is a symbiotic relationship between leaders and the organizational system of which leaders are a part; leaders shape their organizational culture and it in turn, shapes how leaders focus their attention, their operating mindsets, behaviours, how they solve problems and make decisions.

Especially in their willingness to adapt, grow, learn and innovate when for producing value for the customer and drive success within their ever-expanding areas of influence and responsibility.

In our last blog  “Why mindsets matter in digital innovation and Transformation” we  reinforced the need for organizations to focus on initiating a culture that supports digitization by strategically and systemically aligning the culture through the 4 OGI® mindsets; Imagine, Resolve, Analyse & Align ®Mindsets.

These represent the basis for understanding and describing an organization’s cognitive system, identifying its unique cognitive architecture, and measuring & contextualizing the impact of its operating cognitive style, as evidenced by how leaders currently thinking, acting and making decisions. This is illustrated in Figure 1.

Which of course, shapes the organizational culture both positively and negatively in terms of its ability to achieve intelligent actions to change, adapt, transform to achieve its strategic and revenue growth goals.

The OGI® measures organizational and employee mindsets, capturing the crucial emotional, intellective and volitional elements that other cultural tools overlook because it incorporates a multi factorial model within a holistic organizational assessment illustrated in Figure 2.

The 4 OGI® Organizational Mindsets also relate to eight specific factors, the OGI® Orientations, and the seven core Leadership Capabilities required to underpin success in the Digital Age.

Shifting leadership styles to adapt, grow and innovate

What is crucial to success is for the organization to develop the ability and the capacity to shift and target what is needed in each organizational context, to adapt and grow and deliver organizational strategic objectives. This is achieved by understanding the operating mindsets, and how they impact on the current organizational culture, as illustrated in the Figure 3 below, in our innovation culture case study introduced in last month’s blog.

Our Client Case Study Continued

For our client to achieve its strategic intent and growth objectives, at a high level, it needed to cultivate stronger;

• Participative & inspirational styles of leadership to engage and cultivate people’s collective genius.
• Pace setting style to develop a more connected customer centric element towards adding value through innovation.
• Analytical style to see and solve problems to ensure consistent delivery of high quality products to salvage the brands reputation.

The emerging digital leadership paradigm

Adding to this, entrepreneurs are emerging as new role models & engaging in the art of harnessing human energy towards creating better futures embodying and enacting these capabilities through cultivating the following key roles that integrate cognitive, emotional and visceral elements illustrated in Figure 4.

Integrating people, leaders, culture and the system

For an organization to succeed in the digital age it needs to intentionally and strategically ensure that the cognitive system, architecture & style get expressed by completing an initial cultural diagnostic incorporating the OGI® that;

1. Measures and contextualizes an integrated summary (picture) of the Cognitive System & Architecture.
2. Measures and contextualizes an integrated summary of the Cognitive Style (mindsets) & the 8 Specific Factors (orientations) that influence its ability to adapt & grow through the OGI®.
3. Diagnoses and analyses the initial OGI® results & defines the Cognitive Style and its impact of the operating mindsets & orientations on revenue business & growth strategies.
4. Aligns and describes the desired core cognitive, strategic & systemic changes & the gaps between the current and desired future states.
5. Develops & implements change, leadership & learning strategies to achieve the desired cognitive style and corporate culture.

Making the commitment

As the Digital Age continues to evolve at a dizzying pace, organizations that are not keeping up, will continue to be disrupted by digital attackers and will not survive in today’s fragile macroeconomic environment. In our current VUCA times political and economic uncertainty are continuing to increase whilst company life expectancies are on the decrease.

What about hitting your pause button, and retreating and reflecting, as to what all of this means to your long-term sustainability?

What if you could immerse yourself in a long-term vision as to what could be and make the commitment towards understanding your cognitive system and architecture and cultivating a cognitive style that intentionally achieves intelligent actions that deliver your revenue, strategic, business & growth strategies, and long-term sustainability?

 At ImagineNation™ we provide innovation coaching, education and culture consulting to help businesses achieve their innovation goals. Because we have done most of the learning and actioning of new hybrid mindsets, behaviors and skill-sets already, we can help your businesses also do this by opening people up to their innovation potential. 

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

This is the second of three articles on embracing digitization, transformation and innovation.

In our last blog “Taking the Path to Digital Transformation” we described how leading innovators, R&D and new-product development have become digital endeavors. How eleven of the fifty companies named in BCG’s 2018 ranking of the most innovative companies – including seven of the top ten – are digital natives and thus digital innovators by definition.

Described by Deloitte, in a recent article “Digital workplace and culture – How digital technologies are changing the workforce and how enterprises can adapt and evolve”:

“It is the job of the organization to create and support a singular vision that everyone is working towards, whether that is in an office or online. No matter where an organization is on the path to digital transformation, executives can take steps to create a supportive, adaptive workplace for the people who can help their organization grow to the next level”.

Acknowledging that most digitization efforts, no matter how intentional and well resourced, fail unless these crucial elements are at play and, the operating culture adapts, innovates and transforms to support their successful application.

Why do mindsets matter?

We outlined how to embrace digitization and innovation – how to do it, well, or better by understanding, quantifying and shifting mindsets by using The Organizational Growth Indicator® (OGI®). The OGI® describes an organization’s mindset as a “cognitive style” involving a psychological dimension that is generally viewed as a preferred approach to processing information, decision making, addressing tasks and solving problems.

In his book “Grow through Disruption” Dr Brett Richards explains that a mindset represents more how we think, it captures how we feel and how we act as individuals and as whole organizations.

• Mindset is an active and dynamic expression of an organization’s culture and collective consciousness, in that it taps into underlying values, beliefs and assumptions at play, with it.
• Mindsets shed light on an organization’s unique active cognitive stylistic preferences, which shapes strategy formulation, and the way in which resources and talent actively engage with the world and are harnessed and maximized.

These can be quantified within the OGI® by the extent to which it leverages each of the 4 principal mindsets which can be mapped by utilizing the OGI® described below.

Whose continuum’s represent the dynamic tensions that exist within most organizations as they strive to achieve intelligent action.

Organizations that successfully balance and leverage these dimensions, which is described as a Competing Values Framework, achieve long term viability and sustained success.

• Flexible organizations will be more open to changing processes and structures, valuing agility and responsiveness in meeting new and emerging needs of stakeholders, partners & consumers.
• Stable organizations will be more focussed in maintaining a consistent, routinized approach to meeting the needs of the business and its customers.
• Externally focussed organizations are more sensitive and responsive to shifts occurring in their external environment.
• Internally focussed organizations are more sensitive and responsive to their internal operating environment.

Mapping organizational mindsets

By integrating the 4 Principal Mindsets of the OGI® we are able to create an organizational mindset map, illustrated in Figure 1, which incorporates;

• The Imagine Mindset with its focus on the power of possibility to fuel the search for new discoveries combines challenging and disrupting the status quo, with flexibility and an external focus is essential to innovation and adaptive change to create the desired future.
• The Resolve Mindset with its focus on transforming and adapting new ideas into tangible value and innovative solutions and results combines stability with an internal focus toward establishing a high performance around making things work.
• The Analyse Mindset with its focus on information, knowledge and ideas helps combines stability with an external focus to ensure that research drives a more practical and robust search for ideas and practices that will improve the status quo and drive knowledge.
• The Align Mindset with its focus on integrating and aligning the organizations values, vision and purpose for change, engages people, inspires conviction and the flexibility required to interconnect internally to create unity and purpose around effecting positive change.

Doing this creates a common understanding and language, impact and score cards the often-competing differences between mindsets, and behaviours across organizational demographics (departments, divisions and business units).

This sheds light on the way mindsets reflect the impact of strategies, business challenges, leadership styles and sub cultures that exist within the organization.

Mapping Mindsets Case Study Example 

Our client, a global leader in its industry, sought our support to improve its innovation capability as a lever for achieving its organizational growth objectives. Initially, by    seeking our advice in the purchase of a digitized ideation platform and as to whether the current organizational culture would support, embrace and enable its implementation, or not.

Upon conducting the quantitative research, we discovered what mindsets would supporting and inhibiti the organizations ability to adopt and grow in line with its strategic objectives, and how they would potentially impact positively and negatively on the proposed acquisition of a digitized ideation platform.

We supported this online assessment with qualitative research and identified the results which are illustrated in Figure 2 .

Brief Summary of the Key Cultural Challenges

• People were focussing on ensuring that production meet the sales targets, and not on ensuring a happy customer experience and had deep unacknowledged issues with high levels of customer dissatisfaction – Resolve Mindset.
• People were “not allowed” to be creative and inventive, due to an underlying assumption and belief that only the founders had permission to innovate, who were being restricted by budget constraints and focussing on reworking the core products rather than inventing new ones – Imagine Mindset.
• There was confusion internally as a result of the lack of clarity, communication and understanding as the vision, BHAG and values as well as their lines of sight to individual job roles and to customers – Align Mindset.
• There was an unacknowledged issue around quality that created a negative legacy both internally (staff dissatisfaction & repetition of the same mistakes) and externally (delivery of faulty goods & cost of onsite rework) – Resolve Mindset.
• The organization was heavily Process and not People driven, it also has KPI’s creating internal competition rather than collaboration and lacked systems alignment to customer satisfaction and quality expectations – Analyze Mindset.

Finally, had the organization gone ahead, and invested the million dollars plus to purchase the proposed digitized ideation platform, the key cultural challenges, especially in the Align and Imagine Mindset results, would have prohibited its effective application and implementation.

Developing a culture that supports digitization, transformation and innovation

This reinforces the need for organizations to focus on initiating a culture that supports digitization by strategically and systemically aligning the culture through;

• Giving people permission to develop and cultivate new ideas and operate from discovery flexibly, combined with an external focus on competing by increasing value through improving the customer experience – Imagine Mindset
• Finding solutions to problems and delivering results, combined with an `creating an internal agility and stability, with an external focus on competing by increasing value through improving the customer experience – Resolve Mindset
• Providing information and proof through technology, systems and processes, to increase value, combines stability and agility with an internal focus – Analyse Mindset.
• Cultivating talents collective genius and maximizing their potential though values alignment and integration and learning, combines flexibility and agility with an internal focus on increasing value by improving people’s experience at work – Align Mindset.

After all, innovation is an organizations ability to stimulate and transform new ideas and knowledge into products, processes or services that tangibly increase value to customers, accelerate growth, enhance operational effectiveness and/or improve profitability.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

This is the first of three articles on embracing digitization, transformation and innovation.

It is becoming more and more apparent that we are living in a moment of profound possibility and enormous disruption. Where the old business paradigms are dying and innovative new ones are emerging, especially creating new ways of integrating people and technology through focusing digitization efforts.

What matters most in our VUCA landscape and business environment is how we pay attention, adapt and transform whatever roles we play and organizations we are in. To ensure that we survive, thrive and flourish, in purposeful and meaningful ways, that are valued, appreciated and cherished by the people, organizations, stakeholders and customers we serve and the world we inhabit.

Digitization is a genuine source of competitive advantage
The Boston Consulting Groups’ (BCG) Most Innovative Companies Report 2018, states that:

At leading innovators, R&D and new-product development have become digital endeavours. Eleven of the fifty companies named in BCG’s 2018 ranking of the most innovative companies – including seven of the top ten — are digital natives and thus digital innovators by definition.

Digitization is a pervasive trend across all industries
Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes is worried Australian businesses aren’t accepting they will soon almost universally be technology companies.

He states that the biggest mistake governments and businesses are making right now is thinking automation and technology are problem only the technology industry has to face, because we all have to face it!

“As every company becomes a software company, technology became a true source of advantage a genuine source of competitive advantage. It doesn’t matter if you’re a media company or a bank or an insurance company or a doctor, some form of technology’s going to be there.”

The shift to digitization is difficult
The Boston Consulting Groups’ Most Innovative Companies Report 2018, suggests that we ask ourselves three key questions and they all relate to taking a strategic, systemic and human centred approach to innovation:

1. Strategy. How do we apply technologies that expand the horizons of the possible in terms of new products, services, and business models?
2. Operations and Processes. How do we apply digital technologies to drive innovation, leveraging new tools, platforms, and processes (such as agile) in order to turn insights into new products and services?
3. Organization. How do we transform ourselves into digitally capable organizations and cultures that can bring digital innovations to market and make them work?

Initiating the cultural transformation
At ImagineNation™ our research, experience and knowledge reinforce the fact that all digitization efforts, no matter how intentional and well resourced, will fail unless the operating culture transforms to support their successful application.

This is reinforced by Deloitte, in their recent article “Digital workplace and culture – How digital technologies are changing the workforce and how enterprises can adapt and evolve” where they state that there has never been more pressure on companies to develop a positive, productive digital culture:
• 87% of organizations cite culture and engagement as one of their top challenges,
• 50% call the problem “very important.”

“It is the job of the organization to create and support a singular vision that everyone is working towards, whether that is in an office or online. No matter where an organization is on the path to digital transformation, executives can take steps to create a supportive, adaptive workplace for the people who can help their organization grow to the next level”.

How to embrace digitization and innovation – how to do it, well, or better
The obvious first and yet uncomfortable step is to expose and challenge current operating beliefs and assumptions, to then shift mindsets and be open and receptive to letting go of what has worked in the past.

To know how to sense, perceive and embrace the enormous possibilities and opportunities digitization might bring to people, customers and organizations into the future.

a. Understanding the impact of mindsets
Mindsets influence the way people seek to fulfil their purpose & strategic mandate, and capture how we think, feel, decide & how we act as individuals & as whole organizations.
All organizational types demonstrate preferred mindsets which are expressed in behaviors, systems & artifacts, all of which then impact on their ability to grow and transform. An organization’s set of mindsets about innovation and digitization will significantly impact on its ability to embrace and apply them as positive, productive & competitive levers in the face of disruption and VUCA times.
This is illustrated in Figure 1 below.

b. Quantifying and shifting mindsets
The Organizational Growth Indicator® (OGI®) outlines the 4 principal mindsets that are essential for organizations and leaders to embrace in order to grow and sustain future success through disruption.

To understand, manage leverage the impact of these mindsets, it is important to take a strategic, systemic and human centered approach involving:

1. Diagnosing and understanding what mindsets leaders and the organization currently utilize the most.
2. Exploring where they need to shift – what mindsets leaders and organizations need to master if they are to adapt to & innovate with current and emergent changes.
3. “Unlearning” old assumptions, beliefs and attitudes in regards to how business usually operates and functions.
4. Actively rocking the boat and challenging the status quo by learning afresh how to be, think and do things differently to effectively transform and grow through disruption.

Initiating a culture that supports digitization
BCG’s data shows that:

“Support for a more radical approach to innovation is getting stronger. Moreover, by wide margins, strong innovators are much more likely to pursue disruptive or radical processes and cultures governing innovation projects. These companies understand that technological advances, like time, wait for no one- and that the need to transform their innovation functions, as well as their broader organizations, for the digital world is urgent”.

Taking the first steps, which may be considered as radical, for some leaders and organizations, includes:

• Be-ing flexible and creating a safe environment where people have permission to experiment with creative ideas and make mistakes without retribution so that they are trusted to learn by “failing fast.”
• Taking simple steps to make people matter by integrating human aspects into the digital workflow, by teaching people how to better interact, communicate, team & network seamlessly with each other, despite all of the technology available.
• Ensuring that people have room to grow and feel like they are part of the team, by curating and creating digital experiences for people, so that they feel connected and included even if they are spread out across the globe.

As Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, states:
“Most technology disruptions that come along generally create more jobs than they destroy,” “Almost always that they come with a huge amount of benefit for their achievements – the cheaper goods, faster deliveries, safer roads whatever it is.”

At ImagineNation™ we lead the way and help businesses achieve their innovation goals by challenging businesses to be, think and act differently to create a world where people matter and innovation is the norm.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

This is the third blog in our series of three blogs, on cultivating a fail fast culture.

In last month’s blog, Cultivating a Fail Fast Culture – as a manifestation of learning & exploration we explored what it means to take a reflective stance, to use the experience of failure to support ourselves and others we interact with, as a pivot point and a manifestation for learning and exploration. By stopping and taking a reflective stance and intentionally hitting our “pause buttons” we get to “work with” what is really going on (the story) when our own, and the mistakes and failures of other people, are involved.

Doing this creates coaching and teachable moments that help cultivate people’s self-awareness, self-regulation and ultimately the self-mastery to deal with making changes, taking risks and in making mistakes. All of which are fundamental toward building the foundations for developing ‘fail fast’ organizational cultures, where creativity, collaboration, innovation and change can thrive and flourish.

From Workspace to Playspace
Organizations wishing to compete and survive, in our challenging, fast moving VUCA times have the opportunity to compliment, enhance and push beyond their conventional perspectives on learning and change and invest in expanding people’s capacity to ‘learn by doing.’
By introducing play, playfulness and improvisation into the way things get done in the organization, they can potentially reframe work as a ‘PlaySpace’!
Described by Pamela Meyer, in her book, “From Workplace to Playspace” “Play Space” as;

“an invitation to shift from the static organization to dynamic processes of organizing, innovating, learning and changing”.

Play spaces offer new relational and transformative approaches that make room for and create permission, safety, trust and support for the risky experiences that learning and changes involve in creating ‘fail fast’ cultures.

Play spaces emerge and embrace a whole new field of ‘on the job’ learning
Involving judgement-free, improvisational and experimental, energizing and generative exercises, activities and games that generate new forms of behavior and modes of thought and are both;

• Free and structured,
• Focused and dynamic,
• Serious and fun.

Involving people with Play gives them permission to explore and experiment with new and novel ways of dealing with the environment, seizing opportunities and creating better solutions.

It creates a dynamic and engaging ‘on the job’ learning space for the development of new perspectives and new ways of being, thinking and doing things differently, in ways that people, groups, organizations, users and customers will value and cherish.

Developing new perspectives, mindset shifts and behavioral changes
It creates the space for new perspectives, mindset shifts and behavioral changes that;

• Emerge new possibilities and perspectives, that result in creative ideas.
• Explore new roles and developing new capacities.
• Allow more flexibility, improvisation and play in the system.
• Build shared commitment, responsibility and contribution to the desired innovation, learning and change goals.

Playfulness at work
“Playfulness”, described by Patrick Bateson, Paul Martin, in their book “Play, Playfulness Creativity and Innovation” is a broad term denoting any activity that is not ‘serious’ or ‘work’ where:

• The behavior is spontaneous and rewarding to the individual.
• It is intrinsically motivated and its performance is a goal within itself.
• The behaviour occurs in a protected context when the player is neither ill or stressed.
• The behaviour is incomplete nor exaggerated relative to non-playful behaviour in adults.
• It is performed repeatedly.

“Playfulness facilitates and accompanies ‘playful play’, a subset of broadly defined play, which is distinct from what happens in formal games, theatrical performances and so forth”.

The role of improvisation
Improvisation is a core dimension of play, and, according to Pamela Meyer, requires “capacity consisting of competence (the ability to respond to the unexpected and unplanned using the available resources), consciousness (a lively awareness of possibilities), and confidence (a belief in one’s own and others abilities)”.

Wikipedia defines improvisation as “creating or performing something spontaneously or making something from whatever is available. Improvisation, in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of improvisation can apply to many different faculties, across all artistic, scientific, physical, cognitive, academic, and non-academic disciplines”.

Applied improvisation and learning
The Applied Improvisation Network states that applied improvisation promotes collaboration, confidence and creation through creating an atmosphere of positive purpose where everyone is encouraged to contribute. Allowing individuals, groups and organizations to release their creative potential and over time, increase their confidence by replacing fear, suspicion and anxiety with focus, with creativity and a sense of collaboration.

Applied improvisation uses the principles, tools, practices, skills and mind-sets developed in comedy, jazz and theatre and utilizes them for non-theatrical or performance purposes, which can be applied to a range of subjects including innovation. Exercises, activities and games are designed to encourage risk taking, playfulness and to be in the moment. Participants have fun whilst developing or challenging their existing mind-sets and enhancing their sensory acuity and increasing their behavioural flexibility.

Maximizing play and improvisation in cultivating fail fast culture
Outlined in our diagram below, using play and improvisation activities to disrupt, awaken, challenge and co-create new agile and improvisational capacities, ways of being, thinking, behaving and change. To introduce, integrate and assimilate new roles, structures, artefacts and processes across individuals, groups, the organization and the whole system.

“Playspace is at the core of innovating, learning, and challenging the sweet spot of their convergence”.

Embodying and enacting a fail fast culture
People become accepting and appreciative of their own, and others talents and perspectives, and foster the free flow of ideas, shifts mindsets, breaks boundaries and increases the possibilities for enacting the positive changes required in a fail fast culture. • Helps develop people’s tolerance to uncertainty to shift the way they think and feel about pushing the envelope, making changes and taking smart risks.

• Unleashes people’s potential for through the development of a generative discovery skill set that sees, responds to and solves problems as well as realize opportunities.
• Supports people to recover, renew and replenish their hearts and minds when they make mistakes and fail when playing, improvising and learning how to continually disrupt and shift their business game.

People learn how to be, think and act differently and experiment with, and apply new mindsets, behaviours and skills as they move through the stages of learning, innovating and changing, with speed and grace, to become consciously competent in the new “Fail Fast” world.

At ImagineNation™ we lead the way and help businesses achieve their innovation goals by challenging businesses to be, think and act differently to create a world where people matter and innovation is the norm.

Image credit: purrfectcatbreeds.com

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

This is the second blog in a series of 3 blogs, by Janet Sernack, on cultivating a fail fast culture.

In my previous blog “What does it mean to cultivate a fail fast organizational culture” I shared what typically happens when people experience failure, and how important it is to uncouple people’s fears about failure and to support and enable them to “normalize” it.

How organizations can better survive, flow and flourish by interpreting and applying failures as manifestations of learning and exploration rather than trying to out-think it!

I explained that when people fail, they unconsciously sink into a series of reactive responses, that engage them neurologically and emotionally resulting in a range of irrational cognitive (thinking and feeling) distortions, which usually involves disappointment, confusion and shame. People then move away from and avoid solving the problem because of these pervasive un-resourceful states and act defensively, which usually involves laying blame, making justifications, excuses, and operating from denial as illustrated below in Diagram 1.

Diagram 1 Typical Reactive Response to Failure

Taking a reflective stance
Alternately, we can use the experience of failure to support ourselves and others we interact with, as a manifestation of learning and exploration. By stopping and taking a reflective stance and intentionally hitting our “pause buttons.”

Doing this enables us to “work with” what is really going on (the story) when our own, and the mistakes and failures of other people, are involved. It also helps us to cultivate self-awareness, self-regulation and ultimately the self-mastery to deal with making changes, taking risks, making mistakes and failing consciously and constructively, and to innovate and learn.

Cultivating “Fail Fast” teachable and coachable moments
When someone experiences a failure, a more useful strategy could be to support them hit their “pause button” and to then teach them how to better self-regulate and work within it. This allows them the time and space to take a quick “reflective stance” and safely associate with their range of thoughts and feelings, and to connect with the results they caused. Illustrated in Diagram 2 below, working this way creates the safe and collective holding space allowing the person to move towards associating with, and acknowledging both the pain and the fear.

It also allows the creation of a new space where they have permission and trust be-come inquisitive and curious. To explore and apply specific questions to uncouple their fear, break their operating pattern and choose a more resourceful response to it next time.

Diagram 2 Choosing a constructive response to failure

Choosing a constructive response to failure
They can then hit the “pause button” a second time and create the safe holding space for mindfully generating a teachable and coachable moment by using the specific questions to generate a new, more resourceful operating pattern next time a failure occurs.

This enables the person to take responsibility, and acknowledge that their locus of control is within them and when they step into it, and own it, they can continually learn from mistakes and failures, and coach and teach their people to do so as well.

This way of working allows people, to apply mistakes and failures as “teachable and coachable moments” so that people become less risk adverse, defensive and avoidant. It can be used to empower people to be-come authentically courageous, creative and decisive smart risk takers and game changing agility shifters.

Driving our fear and normalizing failure
“If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we can make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. This is why I make appoint of being open about our meltdowns inside Pixar, because they teach us something important: being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them. My goal is not to drive our fear completely, because fear is inevitable in high stake situations. What I want is to loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.”

Cultivating trust in the workplace
One of the key points that Ed Catmull makes is about creating an environment where trust becomes an inherent part of the culture;
“Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it.”

It takes patience and acceptance, transparency and authenticity, and consistency and compassion. It requires a way of working that assumes people come from the best intention and want to see, respond to and solve problems creatively.

Using failures as pivot points, unleashes peoples’ potential for innovation, and enables organizations to build the foundations for out innovating their competitors.

Join the next free monthly webinar in our Making Innovation a Habit Series and “Be-Come an Agility Shifter” – the emerging role for innovation leadership and coaching. It’s on Thursday, 18th January 2018 at 8.00am Melbourne & Sydney time, at 9.00pm in London, 10.00pm in Amsterdam & on Wednesday, 17th January at 4.00pm New York & at 1.00pm in San Francisco.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of blogs, by Janet Sernack, on cultivating a fail fast culture.

I recently met with a client, who was seeking our ideas, information and input towards what might be involved in cultivating a “fail fast” organizational culture. It was an interesting discovery conversation, causing me to explore what needs to be in place to create permission, vulnerability, safety, courage and trust for the deep learning’s that mistakes and failure provide in advancing creativity, invention and innovation?

How could developing a “fail fast” culture help organizations unfreeze, survive, flow and flourish with the current levels of fear, ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility and instability in 21^st century organizations?

What does “fail fast” mean in its original context?

In software development, the intention is to discover and detect where a potential problem might occur in the overall process, to speed it up and minimise time and costs.  The focus is on iterating and steering the project to success as it develops, rather than creating a lot of software before showing it to the end user – to minimize the risks involved in their acceptance of it. This enables developers to test their products and get immediate customer feedback, to ensure that what is being developed is in tune, and aligned with what customer’s think they might want, or want.

It is a useful and important agile concept, that allows developer to reduce the time lag and costs in detecting the opportunity, problem or the failure, and relaying the detection back to the responsible developer to iterate and pivot the next phase of its development.

How can failure be perceived as feedback and learning?

Working this way teaches people the value of developing customer intimacy and an empathic understanding as to what constitutes value in their eyes. It is an ongoing learning process where feedback, whether positive or negative, enables people to adapt, respond and improve quickly.

Learning from this agile way of working, it is one way of taking the “emotional heat” out of “failure” as an emotional reaction, a visceral experience and perpetration against someone.  Because “Failure is always a demoralizing and upsetting experience”.

There is an opportunity to potentially reframe failure as “feedback” and as a “learning process.” To enable people and organizations to iterate, pivot and continuously improve through intentional behaviour, system and artefact changes – in ways that provide increased value that people, and customers appreciate and cherish.

What is the scientific rationale for failure?

Scientists operate under the basic and rational principle that that get things right by analysing what went wrong.

Stuart Firestein, in his book “Failure: Why Science Is So Successful” states that:

“Virtually all of science is a failure that is an end in itself. This is because scientific discoveries and facts are provisional. Science is constantly being revised. It may be successful for a time; it may remain successful even after it has been shown to be wrong in some essential way. That may seem strange, but good science is rarely completely wrong, just as it is never really completely right. The process is iterative. We scientists hop from failure to failure, happy with the interim results because they work so well and often are pretty close to the real thing”.

What gets in the way of people applying this rationale?

Growing up in western civil societies and school systems, we learn to see failure as a mistake, as a shortcoming, stupidity or imperfection that we are responsible for and ashamed about.

We often feel that we must make excuses about it and apologise for it.  In fact, we live in world where governments fail, relationships fail, businesses fail – so none of these failures are a cause for celebration, they are merely signs of ideas in progress.

According to Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation; “Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are the inevitable consequence of doing something new (and as such, should be valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).”

• Visceral reactions to failure

When we fail, we unconsciously sink into a series of reactive responses, that engage us neurologically and emotionally resulting in a range of irrational cognitive (thinking and feeling) distortions, which usually involves disappointment, confusion and shame.

We then move away from and avoid solving the problem because of these pervasive un-resourceful states and act defensively, which usually involves laying blame, making justifications, excuses, and operating from denial.

The very opposite of what most scientists are programmed to do, which is to get things right by analysing what went wrong!

This is often a very useful iterative process, and according to Ed Catmull, who has failed more times than we can imagine, it’s important; “To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.”

• Be-ing wrong and judged

When we are made to feel (by our own internal processing or externally by others) “wrong” we know that we both self-judge and that others will make a judgement about us. Many of us are concerned about how others see and approve of us, and like to compare ourselves to, and please others.  When we find ourselves being judged in this way, especially for making any kind of mistake, that people make unfair and often generalized and distorted assessment of us and then delete all our other abilities.

Being judged questions and invalidates our competence “I/you screwed up” voids our confidence “I/you just don’t have it in me/ you” and minimizes our capacity to successfully complete the job or task at hand “I/you am/are a wimp”.

• Be-coming the failure

This affects us deeply and in effect, we “be-come” the failure, feel violated, disappointed ashamed and fearful of its punitive consequences; being fired, disregarded for promotions and special projects or being required to take the blame and “fall on your sword”.

How can we start to allow failure to be-come the “norm”?

As Ed Catmull says; “If you create a fearless culture (or as fearless as human nature will allow) people will be much less hesitant to explore new areas, identifying unchartered pathways and then charging down them. They will also begin to see the upside of decisiveness; The time they’ve saved by not gnashing their teeth about whether they’re on the right course comes in handy when they hit a dead end and need to reboot.”

• Be-ing strategic and systemic

Creating this type of culture requires boldness, courage, commitment and determination by the Board and the Executive Team to frame and lead the way forwards, and push the envelope towards the desired positive future state.

At Pixar, “failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration” in fact, “if you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: you are being driven by a desire to avoid it/ And for leaders, especially, this strategy-trying to avoid failure by outthinking it- dooms you to fail”.

• Be-ing purposeful and meaningful

It involves investing in a longer term, strategic and systemic perspective of the organization, that inspires, motivates and pulls people towards and creatively engages them in the possibility of making their, and their customers worlds a better place.

• Uncoupling failure

The focus is to then be willing to uncouple their own fears of failure and risk adversity, to develop self-awareness and self-mastery to confidently, empathically and authentically lead the desired changes and “create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror” into people’s hearts and minds.

• Learning, teaching and coaching people

It is then possible to teach and coach others how to uncouple their fears towards failure and its negative consequences, to support and enable people to “normalize” failure by;

• Developing tolerance to surprises and problems and shift the way people think and feel about pushing the envelope, making changes and taking smart risks.
• Cultivating the generative discovery skillset that sees, responds to and solves problems by being empowering and enabling people to be, think and act differently.
• Support them to recover, renew and replenish their hearts and minds when they make mistakes and fail.

Doing this builds people’s trust, receptivity, curiosity, participation towards taking responsibility for developing a “fail fast” culture and the innovation agility to birth it, operate and sustain it successfully.

 At ImagineNation™ we can help you unleash the innovation potential of your people by;

• Coaching leaders to cultivate innovation agility
• Designing customized blended learning solutions
• Creating the environment for innovation to flourish
• Implementing innovation in your context

Ultimately, we partner with you to ensure your people out innovate your competitors.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

One of the most challenging and thrilling aspects of reinvention, transformation and business game shifting is the opportunity it creates for continuous, experiential and deep learning and change.

This brings to life the new mantra that many organization, here in Australia, are sprouting around innovation, which is to “fail fast to learn quickly”.

Most of us know that organizational innovation involves making serious and significant change, yet what most of us are challenged by is how change impacts on, and disrupts four-core human structures: cognition, emotion, body and will.

There is a distinct opportunity for organizations to better accept, acknowledge, and learn how to adapt, flow and intentionally shift within these four structures. Doing this enables them to affect the deep, powerful and positive changes that innovation requires: because they will deliver successful organizational change or reinventions, develop innovative organizations and achieve a business transformation that result in increased competitiveness, growth and value.

Working on the People side of innovation

Our global innovation eco-system team met online recently to explore how these four structures impact and play out on the people side of Innovation. We discussed and agreed that most people are naturally wired to resist, rather than embrace change. We explored how the clues to accepting, flowing and shifting our auto-pilot and reactive responses to change, lies in these four-core human structures: because change catalyzes and ignites people’s differing range and depths of fears resulting in a painful physiological stressed state. People feel uncomfortable, out of control, insecure or unsafe, or a mixture of these painful stress states.

This suggests that when people are expected to change by “failing fast to learn quickly” all these painful stress factors, combine unconsciously with their old memories, perfectionism, and emotional anchors around making mistakes and failure, punishment and retribution, and implicitly come out to play in the form of resistance. This is what prevents them from seeing, adapting to, and realizing the benefits that change can bring.

We discussed how these factors impact significantly on how some organizations currently approach innovation and how resistance gets catalyzed, ignited and comes out to play with any inherent complacency, resulting in the “innovation permafrost” settling in. This manifests and festers with their already “fractured attention” in denying that real changes are needed, embeds risk adversity and justifies sustaining the status quo.They may even appoint an innovation manager and seek short term training solutions to tick off their innovation “to do” list.

The innovation disconnect

We explored how these factors cause not only resistance to change, but also how they inhibit and prevent organizations from adapting, competing, growing and innovating through discovering, design and delivering innovative solutions that add value to the quality of People’s lives.

This “disconnect” is most apparent between the approaches organizations take towards embracing innovation.

There is a difference betweena “true” fluid strategic, systemic and learning anchored approach, which truly enables and supports people to “fail fast to lean quickly”  AND  a short term, episodic “methodical” training and functional-based approaches to innovation where people don’t have permission and safety to “fail fast to learn quickly”.

Fluid Strategic and Systemic Innovation

We described “true” fluid innovation as passionately purpose driven, strategic, leader led, systemic & human centered approach involving:
• Being empathic and compassionate as to where people are at, being accepting and acknowledging of their fears and resistance, allowing them and giving them permission to be vulnerable and express their concerns, and listen carefully and acknowledge these as being true for them. (cognition, emotion, body and will)
• Igniting one’s intrinsic motivation to pull them towards the possibility of a more compelling and desirable future (when the change has been implemented), that is meaningful and purposeful to them (aligned to their needs & values) and worth the discomfort of pursuing.(cognition, emotion, body and will)
• Enhancing emotional capacity including resilience and determination. (cognition, emotion, body and will)
• Effecting deep mindset & behavior changes that enable them to take smart risks, improvise, experiment and learn from failing. (cognition, emotion, body and will)
• Coaching people through the discovery, design and delivery phases of innovation enabling them to learn by doing; inventing, iterating, getting user feedback (positive and negative) and pivoting creative ideas with a minimal viable product, process or service. (cognition, emotion, body and will)
• Developing capabilities through developing their generative discovery skill set to enhance and embed curiosity, collaboration and creativity into the workplace(cognition, emotion, body and will). Ultimately resulting in initiating a culture of innovation where People deliver system and process improvements, and disruptive and radical products and services that customers value and cherish, as well as secure organizational growth, competitiveness and deliver an authentic business transformation.

Episodic Methodical Innovation

We described episodic “methodical” innovation as functional or training programs based incorporating specific subjects including: innovation management, design thinking, agile and SCRUM programs. These train people in the crucial “how to” skills that are required to effect system and process improvements, which are also important to overall innovation success.

Ultimately resulting in people delivering mostly incremental and differentiated products and services that customers value and cherish, and deliver improved efficiencies and productivity within the sphere of continuous improvement.

The innovation solution

We saw that taking an “either/or” approach, in other words, just taking “either” a fluid, “or” just a methodical approach is a serious waste of an organizations time, investment and efforts.

We agreed that organizations that courageously commit to embrace a “both/and” approach will generate its adaptiveness and agility, as well embed deep and continuous learning that enables and empowers people to innovate by “failing fast to learn quickly”. By integrating the “fluid strategic and systemic approach” with the “episodic methodical “approach, organizations can flow and flourish in delivering the outcomes and achieving the business performance they want.

It all depends on the change or breakthrough an organization wants

A recent article “Digital-Era Change Runs on People Power” from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) states that; “putting People first can lead to innovative thinking and dynamic results”.

This suggests that organizations have a fundamental choice to make – they can take the safe and less disruptive surface based change approach and improve efficiencies and productivity and possibly embed a culture of continuous improvement.

Alternately, they can invest their valuable resources, time and efforts in a “both/and” integrated, courageous, risky and continuous learning journey along the “road less travelled” and intentionally disrupt complacency and resistance by:
• Safely taking them outside of their comfort zones and working with, and across their four-core human structures.
• Adopting a fluid, culturally anchored, strategic and systemic approach that will develop People’s capacity to be adaptive.
• Designing and delivering a deep blended learning journey that builds People’s capability to innovate by enabling and empowering them to safely be, think and do things differently.

As many know, journeying along “the road less travelled” is never the easier or quicker path, to take. In this case, it requires investing in building people’s and organizational capabilities through emphasizing and embedding a culture of robust continuous learning that maximizes people’s collective genius by integrating their four-core structures; cognition, emotion, body and will.

This ensures that innovation becomes a collective, creative and collaborative challenge that results in making innovation part of everyone’s job, every day.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™ then join the next free monthly webinar in our Making Innovation a Habit Series and “Be-Come an Agility Shifter” – the emerging role for innovation leadership. Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/ It’s on Thursday, 22nd November 2017 at 11.00pm London, 12.00pm Amsterdam, 6.00am New York, 3.30pm New Delhi, 6.00pm Singapore, 7.00pm Perth and at 9.00pm in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Having failed to successfully engage, train and retain a few millennials in my global innovation culture consulting, education and coaching business, I hit the proverbial pause button, and asked myself, why isn’t it working out?

As a seasoned corporate educator and coach, upon retreat and reflection, three things stood out to me and these might even be common across all corporate demographics;

1. The “instant learning” hook, seduces some people into believing that, for example, a 5-minute video, or an 18-minute TED talk can give them the content they need to master a subject.
2. The “fast paced, reactive environment” prohibits some people from being fully present, from suspending judgement, from sensing and perceiving systemically “what is really going on” in the current situation or business problem.
3. The “inner self management” disciplines and practices are absent, inhibiting people from investing time, paying attention and being intentional in retreating and reflecting, indwelling and illuminating to see the current situation or problem with the “fresh eyes” needed to discover and emerge creative ideas, or hidden solutions.

Finally, as soon as things got a bit “tough” or “rough” or problematic or conflictual, as they do in the innovation space, I noticed that people habitually either sunk into their aggressive defensive reactive responses and “shot the messenger” in this instance, me, or sunk into their passive defensive responses and avoided taking any responsibility for their role in causing the uncomfortable situation, and ran fast away!

We all lost an incredible opportunity to learn what and how to change, to be more effective and resourceful, in this and future situations!

Indicating an absence of any real or deep learning, which then made me ask – why is it that we have forgotten to value change and learning, how can we learn to take responsibility for manifesting the kind of future we all want and would all love to have?

The learning curve is the earning curve

In the Deloitte Report on Corporate Learning in 2016 – Ten Trends Shaping the Future, Josh Bersin reinforces and validates my findings, stating that the Modern Learner is “overwhelmed” and that today’s employees are largely “overwhelmed, distracted and impatient.”

He also introduces us to the “new world of work, with learning at the centre” telling us that “the learning curve is the earning curve.”

Why aren’t we listening and co-creating this new world of work?

It’s been 27 years since Peter Senge published The Fifth Discipline – The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization where he outlined five approaches (theories and methods) for developing three core learning capabilities: fostering aspiration, developing reflective conversation, and understanding complexity.

“Deep learning, the embodiment of new capabilities for effective action… (is) a developmental process that occurs over (considerable) time…”(ibid), yet we face problems that demand fast action. It requires ongoing cycles of action and reflection, in contexts that place little value on reflection. It depends upon trust and collaboration, in settings where people are increasingly distrustful and have little opportunity to build different relationships. Almost twenty years ago, we called this the “core leadership paradox of our time: action is critical, but the action we need can spring only from a reflective stance… that can transform and ultimately integrate our four human structures: cognition, emotion, body and will.” (ibid)    – Peter Senge

Taking action – developing a reflective stance

One of my goals as a leadership coach and corporate educator, is to know how to fast track a leader’s consciousness, realising that the key clue lay in, what Senge describes as transforming and integrating our motivational, cognitive, emotive, visceral structures.  I discovered another clue in Otto Scharmer’s “Theory U” where he provides us with a dense yet cohesive construct for leading from the future as it emerges, a process called “Presencing”.

Considering, and being willing to work with, peoples overwhelm, distractedness and impatience, at ImagineNation™ we adapted these core structures, as the overall learning structures for our global innovation education and coaching programs, to ensure that deep learning occurs.

Having authentic conversations that create the space for deep and meaningful change

We are all enjoying the shift in both macro and micro agile learning channels towards the use and adaptation of Story and Conversations, to facilitate learning and change.

As part of a collaborative event, held here in Melbourne between the Organizational Development Association (ODA) and the International Coach Federation (ICF), my colleague and I co-created an evolutionary model, to enable people to have authentic conversations that create the space for deep and meaningful change.

By embodying and enacting these stages and steps, people learn how to co-sense, co-presence and co-create the space for deep and meaningful change through;

• Creating a Container: that gives people permission to be their authentic selves, to take responsibility for their actions and outcomes, because they feel connected and trusted and are motivated, open minded (curious) and hearted (compassionate) in their willingness and desire to collaborate.
• Sensing and Perceiving the Whole System: in ways that allow people to see with “fresh eyes” (not knowing) “what is really going on” to gather information, associate the key patterns and trends, diverging and converging within the social field, with discernment and detachment (open mind, open heart and open will).
• Generating Discovery: deep diving through generative listening, inquiry and debate to safely challenge the status quo, provocate and disrupt conventional ways of seeing, perceiving and responding to people’s internal and external worlds. Creating cracks, openings and thresholds for possibilities and opportunities, not previously imagined, for change, to emerge (open mind, open heart and open will).
• Emerging Creative Ideas for Change and Innovative Solutions: through facilitating options, making choices, co-creating the desired future, solution and a collaborative outcome. Being tolerant and willing to experiment, adapt and grow by sharing reflections to learn, by knowing how to advance the transformation and integration of our four human structures – cognition, emotion, body and will.

Choosing the authentic learning pathway

This is truly an immersive and emergent process, which, with experimentation and practice can be adapted to meet short and longer time frames.

It is an enormously powerful change because it potentially reduces peoples overwhelm as it involves learning how to emerge creative ideas and innovative solutions for change. It holds people’s attention as a crucial part of the overall process, and because is it a deeply iterative, generative and co-creative process, it potentially reduces people’s impatience.

This is because they are deeply engaged in a trusted and collaborative, inspiring and purposeful, meaningful learning and change process that is open to alternate world views, operates from the highest source of human possibility, and taps into the whole (Source).

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™ then join the next free monthly webinar in our Making Innovation a Habit Series and “Be-Come an Agility Shifter” – the emerging role for innovation leadership. Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/

It’s on Thursday, 26th October 2017 at 11.00pm London, 12.00pm Amsterdam, 6.00am New York, 3.30pm New Delhi, 6.00pm Singapore, 7.00pm Perth and at 9.00pm in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I attended a fabulous organizational culture conference recently in Melbourne that took the audience right back to culture, climate and engagement measurement basics; and reinforced their importance as critical success factors in any organizational change or development process, and their role in leadership capability building and innovation programs.

It was powerful to see how the links and connections between Organizational Culture Audits & Diagnostics, Climate and Engagement Surveys were expertly made.

Which, as many of us know, cause confusion globally among organizational development practitioners about what really matters when effecting an overall change or business transformation process. This seems to be the case when innovation is involved as the desired strategic & systemic change, or business transformation lever to improve organizational performance, competitiveness and growth, or to increase business value and sustainability.

What are the core keys to achieving successful outcomes?

People and organizations all have the Potential (the latent qualities or abilities that may be developed and lead to future success or usefulness) to change, adapt, innovate and succeed. What matters most are the Behaviours and Actions we enact to deliver the Results and the Outcomes we want to achieve.

The most significant impacting factor on our behaviours and actions are our “in the box” internal interpretations; which are indicative of our how our Needs, Values and Beliefs drive the mindsets we embody that generate the Meaning and Context we ascribe, unconsciously, to the world surrounding us.

This means that our Behaviours and Actions are the result of our habitual mindsets and of the meaning and context we apply when we also formulate critical business activities such as developing strategies, managing time, solving problems and making decisions.

We then apply our internal interpretation to the Results we achieve, as well our awareness of the core Beliefs that underlie them, which will impact as to how we “see” the world, in positive or negative frames. These factors impact significantly on our Potential to be, think and do things differently, or not, in the future.

Taking the key steps to achieve successful organizational outcomes

For organizations to maximize their Potential to succeed, they first need to clarify their organizational aspiration, or their ideal or desired future state. This involves qualifying and quantifying What it wants to achieve, and Why it wants to achieve it. It is also important to develop a vivid and compelling picture that illustrates what the Desired Organizational Culture might look, sound and feel like, and how Success could be described and measured.

1. Clarifying the organizational aspiration

In the case of an innovation intervention, an organizational aspiration includes articulating;

An inspiring and inclusive Vision for Innovation, supported by a description of their organization when this vision is achieved.

Some of the language might include – being adaptive, collaborative, creatively confident, curious, courageous and experimental.

They might focus on creating a cultural environment where people have “permission” to be safely disruptive and provocative, to challenge the status quo, to fail fast to learn quickly, be vulnerable and bold in taking smart risks, be empathic and compassionate, and know how to maximize differences and diversity.

They might also create a BHAG for innovation, that is numeric and can be easily cascaded across the organization as a way of driving accountability.

A Passionate Purpose for Innovation, a compelling reason (necessity and possibility) as to why innovation is the most powerful and critical lever to pull for the positive changes they are seeking.

They might also focus on leveraging the culture to improve their people’s and customer’s experience, add value to the quality of people’s lives, be sustainable, and /or adopt a responsible corporate stance.

The Values for Innovation, supported by a set of clearly defined and desired mindsets and behaviours to guide people to co-create, enact and embody the vision, passionate purpose and strategies.

2. Setting the organizational strategies

What matters next are the Strategies and Systems people are encouraged, rewarded and enabled to take, or not take, to deliver the Results and the Outcomes the organization wants to achieve.

In the case of an innovation intervention, people’s actions need to be guided by a very clear set of organizational Strategies, incorporating a Systemic perspective that embraces the people, process and technology factors in an innovative organization.

3.  Making the innovation culture diagnostic links

Conducting the culture diagnostic enables an organization to assess “what is really going on” in their organization. This includes their levels of readiness and maturity for an innovation initiative. It creates the context for innovation and a common understanding of what it means.

It measures, quantifies and benchmarks an organizations ability to adapt and grown within that context.

It embraces qualitative research processes to identify, analyse and assess the supporting, inhibiting and causal factors in the operating and underlying needs, values, beliefs and mindsets on the change initiatives’ ability to be successful, or not.

In the innovation context, it can also incorporate and integrate human centred design thinking processes to identify the core people, process, artefact and technology problems that also impact on success.

An Organizational Cultural Diagnostic identifies the gaps between the ideal and current cultures; between what “should happen” in the future, and what needs to be done differently now to close the gap in terms of the current and desired needs, beliefs, values, mindsets and behaviours.

3. Making the climate survey links

Conducting an organizational climate survey enables an organization to describe and measure people’s reactions to their experience of the current organizational culture, and it’s impact on them.

An Organizational Climate Survey is a representation of how people’s (and especially leaders) current operating behaviours and actions effect people.  It is an “effect” of the operating culture and does not indicate, or reveal the real, underlying root causes as to why people react in these ways.

It is a great and effective barometer of the organizational “mood” and of people’s behaviours and actions impact on overall performance, and not of the core drivers; needs, beliefs and values, driving people’s behaviours and actions.

4. Making the engagement survey links

Conducting an engagement survey enables an organization to asses how people think, act and feel about how “things are getting done” in the organization, and how this impacts on their effectiveness and productivity in their roles. These typically encapsulate their range of reactive responses, or their experience of their employers Organizational Climate which is driven by the Organizational Culture and expresses this as an overall people engagement score.

An engagement survey score is also effected by people’s levels of personal alignment to the organizational aspiration; vision, purpose and values (cultural). It is also influenced by the level of permission they have to challenge convention, without punishment and retribution (climate) and by their intrinsic motivation; autonomy in their roles and their ability to learn and master new skills.

Here’s the point – culture, climate and engagement are symbiotic

• How people are thinking, acting and feeling either inhibits or enhances an organizations ability to achieve its aspiration.
• How people are thinking, acting and feeling cannot be influenced, or changed, without knowing what exact mindsets and behaviours they are demonstrating.
• How people are thinking, acting and feeling cannot be influenced, or changed, without knowing exactly how these are impacting positively or negatively on people’s performance.
• How people are thinking, acting and feeling cannot be influenced, or changed, without knowing exactly how these are impacting on an organizations abilities to achieve its aspiration.

Mindsets and behaviours seldom change without an understanding of the underlying root causes; people’s core and underlying needs, their implicit values and beliefs and how these result in “cultural norms” and send “messages” that impact on how people think, act and feel the way they do.

This is all illustrated in the diagram below – Success Spirals Culture, Climate and Engagement

So how can you successfully interconnect culture, climate and engagement?

• To change the organizational culture its crucial to promote an understanding and acceptance of these key factors, to identify, make explicit and operationalize the core values and desired behaviours through leader’s role modelling and coaching people to embody and enact them.
• To initiate and sustain the desired change and deliver the organizational aspiration, by “bringing to life” the positive beliefs, mindsets and behaviours as desired “cultural norms” as to the “way we do things around here”, and to acknowledge and reward people when they demonstrate them.
• To ultimately transform the current “cultural norms” into the desired ones to close the gaps between the current and ideal organizational states to ensure that change gets successfully implemented.

Changing culture by changing climate

It is often easier to focus initially on changing the organizational culture (needs, values and beliefs) by changing the organizational climate (behaviours and actions) first. This initiates an initial and evidential step change, that needs to be supported by embedding the desired mindset changes.

Taking the first steps

1. Clarify and share your organizational aspirations with your people; vision, purpose & values grounded in desired mindsets and behaviours.
2. Assess, measure and diagnose your current culture, to identify the operating needs, values and beliefs and how these operate as “cultural norms” and get sent as “messages” in the organization, and identify and qualify their impact on overall performance.
3. Identify the gap between the current or actual culture and ideal culture and build and implement a culture development plan to close them including how to lead and role model the desired changes.
4. Monitor how these changes make people think, act and feel by regular engagement surveys/dashboards (as a scorecard, not as the solution).

It is not an easy journey, and it is a worthwhile and sustainable one, if we want to engage, empower, enable and ennoble people to be the best they can be, to make the difference we want to make in the world, in ways that are valued and cherished.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™ then join the next free monthly webinar in our Making Innovation a Habit Series and “Be-Come an Agility Shifter” – the emerging role for innovation leadership. Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/

It’s on Thursday, 26th October 2017 at 11.00pm London, 12.00pm Amsterdam, 6.00am New York, 3.30pm New Delhi, 6.00pm Singapore, 7.00pm Perth and at 9.00pm in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

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

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Coping with disruptive technological change

A recent article The global forces inspiring a new narrative of progress in McKinsey Quarterly, it states that “Corporate leaders today need to rethink where and how they compete, and must cooperate in the crafting of a new societal deal that helps individuals cope with disruptive technological change”.

The article outlines a broad narrative of intensifying competition, as well as the growing need for cooperation, contains challenges, but also great opportunities and poses three key questions:

• How long can the traditional sources of competitive advantage survive in the face of technological shifts?
• How will changing consumer and societal expectations affect their business models?
• What does it mean to be a global company when the benefits of international integration are under intense scrutiny?

This reinforces what Daniel Pink outlines in his book The Conceptual Age where he states that the future “belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind”.

These include leaders who know how to be, think and act differently, to both co-create new sources of competitive advantage, deliver great people and customer experiences, within a globalized and digitized world, and achieve high performance outcomes.

This creates an exciting opportunity and a new context and role for corporate leaders which at ImagineNation™ we describe as “agility shifters”: people who have the speed and grace to respond to the unexpected, who provocate and disrupt to create changes, and shift their way of being, thinking, to co-create new ways of doing things that add value to the quality of peoples lives in ways that they value and cherish.

Depending less on new skills and knowledge and much more on clarifying the context, and creating the safe space for people co-create ideas, breakthrough and inflection points, together within a safe and collective holding space to;

• Emerge creative ideas,
• Explore new roles,
• Allow more flexibility, improvisation and play in the system.

Exploring the leadership realm of “both” “and”

At ImagineNation™ we encourage and enable our clients to work with “both” – What is already in existence, whether it works, or not, “and” with the possibilities as to what could or might exist in the future.

In the context of innovation leadership, it is crucial to build upon “both” the leadership basics “and” the possibilities of developing a fresh set of agile capacities and competences, and the confidence to embody and enact them to;

• Know how to be deeply present to, see, be connected to and responsive to complex adaptive systems, the unexpected and the unplanned.
• Build networks of relationships that act as frameworks for making and preserving meaning, to respond to, regroup and reframe the current reality and find a new way forward.

Five dynamics of the agility shifting leader –  in the realm of “both/and”

In her ground-breaking book “The Agility Shift”, Pamela Meyer, outlines the five dynamics; qualities and characteristics that come to life through consistent, intentional practice.  Building upon and expanding these from our research obtained from our five years of teaching The Coach for Innovators Certified Program include the following descriptions:

1. Relevant: Have “both” a clear reason as to “why” they are in business, a clear sense of passionate purpose that resonates, engages “and” guides and compels people to contribute and align to, the way things get done in the organization.

Involves an inspirational and emotionally connected idea of the future, one that engages people at the head, heart and gut levels to commit to a bigger contribution beyond profit and towards the possibility of something better, for themselves, customers, society and the common good.

2.Responsive: The ability to “both” respond quickly “and” effectively to the unexpected and unplanned, as well as to emerging opportunities through timely decision rights and processes.

Involves taking the path of inner self management and discipline, knowing how to see the world with fresh eyes, suspending judgment, being attentional and observing the whole system and immersing oneself in ‘what is’ and with ‘what could be’

3. Resilient: The ability to “both” regroup, reorganize “and” renew in response to significant disruption by adapting and transforming.

Involves developing new mindsets and resourceful be-ing states; courage, compassion, curiosity, confidence and connectedness to cultivate self-efficacy and use adversity as a stimulus for change.  To let go of old mental models, mindsets and world views to allow time and space to incubate ‘what could be’ by colliding necessity with possibility to create cracks, openings and thresholds for creative ideas and change.

4.Resourceful: The ability to “both” be aware of, use “and” improve with all the available resources- human, technical and environmental as provocation for creativity & innovation under pressure.

Involves generating discovery through attending, questioning and listening at the generative level to emerge creative ideas and innovative solutions. Developing permission and safety for intelligent risk taking, improvisation, failure and iteration. Developing networks and teaming across barriers and boundaries to create innovation eco-systems of aligned players. Being able to crystallize, prototype, test and verify new ideas until they work.

5.Reflective: The ability to be “both” open and willing to learn by doing, and from experience “and” by expanding their capacity for reflection, by intentionally and continuously asking provocative and disruptive questions to generate discovery and learning.

Involves knowing how to indwell and be attuned to the present moment, being willing surrender control and power, be-in absorbed in the experience, retreating into stillness and silence as portals to learning and new knowledge. The perception of a new reality and discovery of a hidden solution, and willingness to embody and enact the new way forwards.  

Becoming an agility shifter – what will you do?

Taking the path less travelled seems to be simple, yet it requires leaders to really stretch themselves to see, own and be accountable for empowering and enabling themselves and others to be the best they can be, in line with what Mc Kinsey Quarterly Review describes as;

“Growth shifts. Accelerating disruption. A new societal deal. These are powerful forces that demand thoughtful responses and contain the seeds of extraordinary opportunity. Leaders reaching for these opportunities will need to question their own assumptions and imagine new possibilities. Those who do will compete more effectively; they also will be better able to contribute to broader solutions, and ultimately to a new and more inclusive narrative of progress”.

To find out more about our work at ImagineNation,  join our next free monthly webinar in our Making Innovation a Habit Series “The Agile Innovator.” It’s on Thursday, 17^th in the northern hemisphere and Friday, 18^th August down here in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane at 7.00am -7.45am. Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/

image credit: inteliwise.com

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