Category Archives: Innovation

Do you ever admit you don’t know?

Do you ever admit you don't know?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you are asked a question and you don’t know the answer, what do you say? What does that say about you?

What happens to people in your organization who say “I don’t know.”? Are they lauded or laughed at? Are they promoted, overlooked, or demoted? How many people do you know that have said: “I don’t know.”? And what does that say about your company?

When you know someone doesn’t know, what do you do? Do you ask them a pointed question in public to make everyone aware that the person doesn’t know? Do you ask oblique questions to raise doubt about the person’s knowing? Do you ask them a question in private to help them know they don’t know? Do you engage in an informal discussion where you plant the seeds of knowing? And how do you feel about your actions?

When you say “I don’t know.” you make it safe for others to say it. So, do you say it? And how do you feel about that?

When you don’t know and you say otherwise, decision quality suffers and so does the company. Yet, some companies make it difficult for people to say “I don’t know.” Why is that? Do you know?

I think it’s unreasonable to expect people to know the answer to know the answers to all questions at all times. And when you say “I don’t know.” it doesn’t mean you’ll never know; it means you don’t know at this moment. And, yet, it’s difficult to say it. Why is that? Do you know?

Just because someone asks a question doesn’t mean the answer must be known right now. It’s often premature to know the answer, and progress is not hindered by the not knowing. Why not make progress and figure out the answer when it’s time for the answer to be known? And sometimes the answer is unknowable at the moment. And that says nothing about the person that doesn’t know the answer and everything about the moment.

It’s okay if you don’t know the answer. What’s not okay is saying you know when you don’t. And it’s not okay if your company makes it difficult for you to say you don’t know. Not only does that create a demoralized workforce, but it’s also bad for business.

Why do companies make it so difficult to say “I don’t know.”? You guessed it – I don’t know.

Image credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Scale Your Innovation by Mapping Your Value Network

2 Replies

How understanding the players in your game can help you scale successfully

Scale Your Innovation by Mapping Your Value Network

GUEST POST from John Bessant

There comes a time in innovation when you realize you might have taken on something a bit too big. No matter how hard you throw yourself into the challenge, creating value from your idea is going to need a little help. Changing the world, or even a small piece of it, takes a lot of push. That’s the moment when you realize you need ‘complementary assets’ – the ‘who else?’ and ‘what else?’ pieces of your innovation jigsaw puzzle.

It’s a challenge at the very beginning – how to put together a network of people and resources to bring your idea to life? But it’s an even bigger challenge when it comes to scaling innovation – how to get widespread adoption of your ‘best thing since sliced bread’ innovation.

Something which Otto Rohrwedder, the inventor of sliced bread (or more precisely the machine which enabled it) came to understand. He spent fifteen years working to develop and scale his invention and set up the Mac-Roh Company to launch his great idea. Only to see it arrive with more of a whimper than a bang. The bakers to whom he tried to sell it were underwhelmed. They thought the machine too complex for everyday production, it was bulky and took up precious space – and they weren’t convinced of the need anyway. Teetering close to the edge of bankruptcy he persuaded a local baker, Frank Bench, to invest and install the first machine.

On July 7, 1928, the first loaf of commercially sliced bread was produced by the Chillico the Baking Company of Missouri and sold under the brand name Kleen Maid. And while bakers had been skeptical of the benefits local families in the mid-West were much more enthusiastic. As a review in the local newspaper (the Constitution Tribune) put it:

“So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife that one realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome.

Within two weeks bread sales from the bakery had increased by 2000%! The idea began to take off across the country and two years later the New York-based Continental Baking Company began using Rohwedder’s machines to build an entire business around sliced bread. Their product – Wonder Bread – (and the accompanying marketing campaign) helped lift awareness to a high level. By 1933 almost every bakery in the USA had a slicing machine and 80% of the bread produced in America was sliced

Otto isn’t alone; many innovations which ultimately scaled successfully spent a long time in the doldrums, great ideas which drifted because of the lack of partners to give the required momentum. J. Murray Spangler’s invention of the electric vacuum suction sweeper nearly wheezed its last before it could make it into everyday home use. It was only when he connected with William Hoover that the venture took off. Mark Twain’s enthusiasm for the typewriter was that of an early adopter but the only way Christopher Sholes and his colleagues could get their machine to a widespread market was by teaming up with the experience of the Remington company who understood mass production, marketing, logistics and all the other ‘complementary assets’ they needed to scale their innovation.

And Earl Tupper’s brilliant bit of alchemy in turning black sludge waste from oil wells into brightly colored polypropylene storage vessels signally failed to impress American families until the link-up with Brownie Wise who brought her social marketing skills literally to the party. Home demonstrations via a social get-together not only accelerated sales but also laid the foundation for a powerful new addition to the marketing repertoire.

So scaling innovation is a multi-player game. We’ve learned that to create value at scale needs a network – but importantly one which goes beyond the sum of its parts. Systems have ‘emergent properties but these only emerge if there is an organizing energy to enable the process. And they need to share a common purpose, reflected in the current discussion of innovation ‘ecosystems’ , a concept which comes originally from biological science and refers to “the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit”

It’s been applied in many branches of natural science with the same focus on an interdependent collection of elements with a shared goal or purpose, for example in geography:

An ecosystem is a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscape, work together to form a bubble of life… Every factor in an ecosystem depends on every other factor, either directly or indirectly. (National Geographic Encyclopedia)

It’s pretty clear that ecosystems don’t just happen; in the physical world they take millions of years to settle into a viable pattern. And in the world of organizations it’s going to involve much more than just assembling a set of components. It will need active management to secure the emergent properties.

Systems of this kind aren’t just a challenge in the world of commercial innovation. In fact social innovation – making changes to create a better world – requires even more attention to assembling ecosystems which create value. Take the World Food Program, one of the agencies within the United Nations which tries to help deal with the severe and age-old challenge of making sure people get enough to eat. They have a long history of innovation and recent examples include the Optimus programme which aims to improve efficiencies on the supply-chain which eventually makes it possible to feed a hungry child – or not. Optimus uses digital tools to help, and it worked as an effective pilot project back in 2015 in Iraq. But scaling it required many players coming on board and working together, not least national governments. Thankfully the results have moved the needle in the right direction; Optimus now operates in 20 countries including Ukraine, Yemen and Syria, reaching close to 7.5m beneficiaries and with efficiency savings (which equate to more effective food relief) running at over $50m.

So ecosystems matter in the innovation journey to scale. Which introduces three challenges for innovators:

· How to find complementary partners?

· How to form them into a coherent value network?

· How to get that value network to perform as an ecosystem?

All three of these rather depend on having a good understanding of who ‘they’ are and the different roles they play. So we need a map and a way of charting our journey to scale using it. We’ve developed a model for our new book about scaling innovation which identifies 9 core roles which entities in a value network can play:

· 1. Value Creators are those who develop new value – the innovators. This can be one organization, a partnership or joint venture, or it can be done across a distributed network. The key aspect of this creation is that it is new value.

· 2. Value Consumers are those who consume the value which our system creates. Although we often talk of ‘the market’ we should remember that such ‘markets’ are often multi-layered. Our innovation might be used by individuals, businesses, organizations or governments. For many products and services, those who gain value from it may not directly purchase it – that’s often the case with public services like education or health.

· 3. Value Captors – so far this looks a simple enough story – value being created and consumed. But there’s another key role here which is occupied by those who capture value from the innovation not by using it, but by being a part of it.

This is where the entrepreneur takes their profit from the risks they have expended. It is investors in the company which launches and sells the product or service. And it’s all the other supply-side players whose complementary goods and services link together to create the offering.

We need these different players to be part of our value network, our ecosystem. But we also need to recognize that they need an incentive – what’s in it for them? Importantly this doesn’t have to be a financial gain or reward – it could also be an investment in learning new approaches or accessing new markets or it could be about reputation and social identity. Think about the brand-building possibilities for companies which help scale social innovations as part of their ESG story.

These 3 entities are ‘bookends’ – the principal players in the value process. But there’s a second set of roles played by ‘movers’ – those entities which enable the process to happen. These include:

· 4. Value Conveyors are players actively involved in the process of adding value to how our solution comes into being and how it is experienced by consumers. Essentially, the value of the innovation grows through the activities they perform. They are more than just channels: their actions actually increase the value of the innovation itself, be it a product or service. Conveyors might be supply side partners upstream or marketing and distribution partners downstream; either way we need them in our ecosystem to ensure value gets created and moved to where it can be consumed.

Brownie Wise’s performances at Tupperware parties were the stuff of legend. She had all sorts of tricks including throwing a container full of tomato soup across the room to demonstrate the strength of the seal (no messy carpets). But her real contribution to the success of the brand was in the role she played as a conveyor, mobilizing an army of other women to act as demonstrators and sales agents across the country.

· 5. Value Channels are passive in the sense that, like roads or railways, they exist as infrastructure but are independent of the nature of the traffic using them. They are important, necessary elements in scaling but they are not sufficient to assure scale. If they weren’t present or if they are disrupted then value movement couldn’t take place, but they are not active elements in the value creation process. It’s important to think about them not least to explore dependencies and how alternatives might be brought into play.

Think about the huge impact to global value flow when the container ship Ever Given got stuck in the physical channel of the Suez Canal for a week back in 2021! Or the way in which the containers on that ship represented a revolution fifty years earlier in the way that the channel of intermodal transportation (road/rail/sea) operated – Malcolm McClean’s innovation of containerization literally changed the world.

· 6. Sometimes there is a role for Value Coordinators to help to make connections and bring different players together to enact value. For example, a department store offers a physical space in which multiple value creators can connect with value consumers; street markets and large-scale shopping malls offer a similar opportunity. Today’s platform businesses like Alibaba, Amazon or Apple build on this model, providing ‘digital department stores’ across which millions of transactions can take place between creators and consumers.

A third group of players in our value network are those we call ‘shapers’ – because they do just that. They shape the potential amount of value that can be created, consumed, moved and captured within a value network.

· 7. Value Cartographers are the ones who make the maps; they play key roles in structuring a market and determining how much value is possible within a value network. Examples might be regulators, trade unions or influential umbrella organizations. Cartographers can play a major role in accelerating – or slowing – the journey to scale. Think about the current moves towards scaling electromobility; much of the journey to scale will be influenced by the regulatory roadmap. Policies like subsidies or tax relief on electric vehicles, or those which militate against fossil fuels, will provide acceleration – for example, the UK has a target of no new cars running only on fossil fuels by 2035. Equally, legislation to ensure compliance can slow down scaling possibilities – think about the EU’s stance on genetically modified organisms which has acted as a brake on investment and exploration of this technology.

· 8. Value Competitors compete with us for the attention of value consumers. They might be direct competitors offering a similar product or service or they might be indirect competitors – for example Netflix is not only in competition with other streaming services but with other ways in which people might allocate their attention– reading, sleeping, looking at their partner while having a conversation. The important thing is that these competitors all shape the context in which value creation/consumption can take place.

· 9. Lastly we have Value Complementors – entities which complement the value an innovation offers. Sometimes they are essential: Thomas Edison’s attempts to revolutionize domestic lighting arrangements depended on having something (an electricity supply) into which users could plug his new light bulb innovation. Bluetooth devices like intelligent earphones depend on having the technology available and operating to a common standard.

So nine different roles which may be present in a value network. Some are obvious – for example, we clearly need a value creator and a value consumer to bookend our model. But even here the lines can blur. Consumers can also play a role as creators – think about what Lego has done with its efforts to engage users as co-creators. GiffGaff is a small but highly successful player in the tightly competitive world of mobile phone networking; its excellent customer service record is in no small measure down to the way in which it has engaged its community of consumers to play this role…

And some are less obvious but important. Take cartographers and the ways in which they can make or break scaling efforts. Mobile money is still an exciting new field for apps and hardware players – yet it’s been a reality in east Africa for over a decade. M-PESA has been a transformational innovation and has scaled around the world – but its early success depended critically on the support of the central bank rather than its opposition to newcomer ideas. It helped create a fertile regulatory landscape within which mobile money could develop and scale.

Sometimes these roles are emergent – for example the TV and movie industry is increasingly interacting with fans who organize themselves into active communities whose activities and opinions can influence (for better or worse) the scaling possibilities of a core offering. Think about the role played by the ‘Star wars’ community with its conventions, costumes and huge online presence. This is not directly controlled by the film companies but instead exists alongside it, complementing the rate and direction of development. Fans of this kind increasingly play a role in creating new characters and backstories for fringe players who later make it to the mainstream of the media offerings – think about some of the Star Wars spin-offs. Robert Jenkins work atMIT has been tracking the huge influence such fandom has on innovation in the creative industries.

It’s useful to think in terms of the different roles we need and how they might interact, first to help us in our hunt for finding partners. But we also need to form them into viable ecosystems – each system has different configurations but drawing a system boundary is a good starting point. Then we have to work with them to create high performing ecosystems – and this is where the work really starts. It’s about creative relationship building, getting to win-win partnerships.

Which is another story, one which we’ll follow up in a future post.

You can find out more on the model and our approach in The Scaling Value Playbook, published shortly by de Gruyter.

Image Credits: John Bessant, Ian Gray, Pixabay

You can find a podcast version of this here and a video version here

And if you’d like to learn with me take a look at my online course here

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2023

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2023 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are July’s ten most popular innovation posts:

95% of Work is Noise — by Mike Shipulski
Four Characteristics of High Performing Teams — by David Burkus
39 Digital Transformation Hacks — by Stefan Lindegaard
How to Create Personas That Matter — by Braden Kelley
The Real Problem with Problems — by Mike Shipulski
A Triumph of Artificial Intelligence Rhetoric — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Ideas Have Limited Value — by Greg Satell
Three Cognitive Biases That Can Kill Innovation — by Greg Satell
Navigating the AI Revolution — by Teresa Spangler
How to Make Navigating Ambiguity a Super Power — by Robyn Bolton

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in June that continue to resonate with people:

“I don’t know,” is a clue you’re doing it right — by Mike Shipulski
Generation AI Replacing Generation Z — by Braden Kelley
Making Employees Happy At Work — by David Burkus
Embrace the Innovation Hate — by Greg Satell
How to Fail Your Way to Success — by Robyn Bolton

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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

3 Ways to Make Smarter Decisions – Confidently

2 Replies

3 Ways to Make Smarter Decisions - Confidently

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

When my niece was 4 years old, she looked at her mom (my sister) and said, “I can’t wait until I’m an adult so I can be in charge and make all the decisions.” My sister laughed and laughed.

Being in charge looks glamorous from the outside, but it is challenging, painful, and sometimes soul-wrenching. Never is this truer than when you must make a tough decision and don’t have all the data you want or need.

But lately, I’ve noticed more and more executives defer making decisions. They’ll say they want more data, to hear what another executive thinks, or are nervous that we’re rushing to decide.

This deferral is a HUGE problem because making decisions is literally their job! After all, as Norman Schwarzkopf wrote in his autobiography, “When placed in command, take charge.”

When you decide, you lose

A decision is “a choice that you make about something after thinking about several possibilities.” Seems innocent enough, right? Coke or Pepsi. Paper or plastic. Ariana Madix or Raquel Leviss (if you don’t know about this one, consider yourself lucky. If you choose to know about it, click here).

The problem with making decisions is that loss is unavoidable. Heck, the word “decide” comes from the Latin roots “de,” meaning off, and “caedre,” meaning cut. When you choose Coke, paper bags, or Ariana, you are cutting off the opportunity to drink Pepsi with that meal, use a plastic bag to carry your purchases or support Rachel in a pointless pop culture debate.

Decisions get more challenging as the stakes get higher because the fear of loss skyrockets. Loss aversion, a cognitive bias describing why the psychological pain of loss is twice as acute as the pleasure of gain, is common in cognitive psychology, decision theory, and behavioral economics. You see this bias in action when someone refuses to ask questions or challenge the status quo, to take a good deal because it’s below their initial baseline, or to sell an asset (like a house) for less than they paid for it.

No decision is the worst decision

Deciding not to decide is often the worst decision of all. Because it feels like you’re avoiding loss and increasing your odds of making the right decision by gathering more data and input, it’s easy to forget that you’re losing time, employee engagement and morale, and potential revenue and profit.

When you decide not to decide, progress slows or even stops. No decision gives your competition time to catch up or even pass you. Your team gets frustrated, morale drops, and people search for other opportunities to progress and have an impact. The date of the first revenue slips further into the future, slowly becoming just a theoretical number in a spreadsheet.

Decide how to decide

In a VUCA world, a perfect, risk-free decision that offers only upside does not exist. If it did, the business wouldn’t need an executive with your experience, intellect, and courage. Yet here you are.

It’s your job to make decisions.

Make that job easier by deciding how to decide

1. Tell people what you need to see to say Yes. “I’ll know it when I see it” is one of the biggest management cop-outs ever. If you don’t know what you want, don’t waste money and time requiring your team to become mind readers. But you probably know what you want. You’re just afraid of being wrong. Instead of allowing your fear to fuel inefficiency, tell the team what you need or want to see and that, as they make progress, that request might change. Then set regular check-ins so that if/when it happens, it happens quickly and is communicated clearly.

2. Break big decisions down into little decisions. I once worked with a team that had an idea for a new product. They planned to pitch to the executive committee and request 3 million dollars to develop and launch the idea. After some coaxing, we decided to avoid that disaster and brainstormed everything that needed to be true to make the idea work. We devised a plan to test the three assumptions that, if we were wrong, would instantly kill the idea. When we pitched to the executive committee, we received an immediate Yes.

3. Present options and implications. As anyone with a toddler knows, you don’t ask yes or no questions. You give them options – do you want to wear the yellow or pink shirt? If they pick something else, like their Batman costume, you explain the implications of that decision and why the options previously presented are better. Sometimes they pick the yellow shirt. Sometimes they pick the Batman costume. You could force them to make the right decision, but no one wins. (Yes, I just compared managers to toddlers. Prove me wrong).

It’s your decision

Being in charge requires making decisions. When you decide, you lose the option (maybe temporarily, maybe forever) to pursue a different path. But you can’t be afraid to do it.

After all, “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”

Image credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Are You an Innovation Leader or Manager?

Leave a reply

Are You an Innovation Leader or Manager?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Leader” is a word that gets thrown around A LOT.

Senior Management Teams are now Senior Leadership Teams.

Business schools no longer train managers. They “educate leaders.”

Training programs for specific skills are now “Leadership Development Programs”

If “innovation” is a buzzword (and it is), then “leadership” is the grand poo-bah of buzzwords.

Let’s get one thing straight.

“Leadership,” as it is commonly used, is the “extra-ordinarization of the mundane.”

But it’s not meant to be.

If you are a leader, you use your personal qualities and behaviors to influence and inspire others to follow you because they choose to (not because the org chart requires them to). Any person, anywhere in the org chart, can be a leader because leadership has nothing to do with your position, responsibilities, or resources.

If you are a manager, executive, or senior executive, you have positional power, usually earned. These terms put you in a particular place in the org chart, define your scope of responsibility, and set guardrails around the human and financial resources you control.

There is nothing wrong with being a manager (or executive or senior executive). Those positions are earned through hard work and steady results. They are titles to aspire to, be proud of, and use in a professional setting.

But if you run around telling people you’re a leader, well, to misquote Margaret Thatcher, “Being a leader is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

Are you a leader?

There are thousands of books on leadership, millions of articles, and hundreds of experts. I am not a leadership expert, but I know a leader when I meet one. The same is true for the people around you.

What do we see that helps us know whether or not you are a leader?

If the dozen articles I skimmed for this post are any indication, everyone has their own list, but there are some common items. To find the most frequently mentioned, I asked ChatGPT to list the qualities and behavior distinguishing leaders from managers and executives.

Here’s what I got:

Here are my reactions:

Uh, ok. This leadership list feels like what an executive should do, but I guess the difference between the two (executives focus on strategy, and leaders inspire and connect) proves my point (which is a bit discouraging)
It feels like some leadership qualities are missing (e.g., empathy, fostering psychological safety, inspiring trust)
Kinda surprised to see other leadership qualities (do you need to “foster creativity and innovation” to be a leader?)

That 3^rd thought led to a fourth – if “fostering creativity and innovation” is a quality shared amongst all leaders, then is there a difference between business, operational, and innovation leaders?

Are you an innovation leader?

I’ve worked for and with leaders, and I can say with absolute confidence that while each of them was a great leader, few were great leaders of innovation.

Why? What made them great leaders in business and operations but not in innovation?

Do you even need to be good at leading innovation if you’re good at managing it?

What does it even mean to be an “innovation leader?”

What do you think?

Off the top of my head, qualities specific to innovation leaders are:

Patient for revenue, impatient for learning and insights
Oriented to action, not evaluation (judging)
Curious and questioning, not arrogant and answering

What am I missing (because I know I’m missing a lot)?

What characteristics have you experienced with innovation leaders that make them unique from other types of leaders?

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

From Sticky Notes to Digital Transformation

1 Reply

How to Properly Leverage Kanban Boards

From Sticky Notes to Digital Transformation

GUEST POST from Dainora Jociute

Whether it’s a bunch of sticky notes on an office wall or a clever digital tool with color-coded boxes, most of us are familiar with the ingenious concept of a Kanban board.

Perhaps that’s not the name you use. Maybe for you and your team, it’s Trello or simply a whiteboard, yet at the very core of it all, hides a little neat Japanese invention that sparks joy – Kanban.

It is not exactly a new concept, however over the years Kanban remains largely unchanged and its popularity unwavering. In this article, I will try to take a deeper look at what it is and how to make it work for you.

A Short History of Kanban

The word Kanban translated from Japanese means sign or signboard. Back in the day, and I am talking way back – 17th century – that was exactly what Kanban was. It was a signboard signaling to passersby what services or products a business offered.

In a more recent chapter of history, in the wake of the Second World War, the Japanese automotive manufacturer Toyota was in a pickle. The company struggled to make any profit, and they realized that something must be done. This is where Taiichi Ohno, the so-called founding father of Kanban comes into the picture.

A budding industrial engineer, Ohno was sent to the US to scout and gather inspiration for improving manufacturing back at the Toyota plant. The revelation hit Ohno in the most inconspicuous place – a grocery store. He noticed that some supermarkets stocked their shelves based only on customer demand. Customers would pull products they need off a shelf, and the store would restock them only once it was gone, avoiding unnecessary overloading of the shelves with excess products in advance. This system ensured that the store only sold products with real demand.

This pull approach (on that a little later) clearly reduced waste: it saved the time wasted on restocking, resources spent on overproduction, produce thrown out, and much more. Aiming to eliminate waste without sacrificing production back at the Toyota plant, Ohno introduced the pull system in the shape of paper cards that he later named Kanban.

Each Kanban card contained a clear description of each step in the production line, be it the number of materials needed or a particular task of the production chain to be done. It controlled amounts of production ensuring that only what is needed will be created. These cards moved systematically along the whole manufacturing process and guided what must be done throughout the journey. It became a simple yet ingenious tool for managing the whole manufacturing process ensuring that no waste will be created along the way.

Later down the line, other brilliant minds realized that the same approach can be applied to other industries too, not just manufacturing.

One of the key figures responsible for this adaptation was David J. Anderson. He is known for adapting Kanban principles from their origins in manufacturing to knowledge work, particularly software development and project management.

Although there were other prominent advocates of Kanban in software development, Anderson’s 2010 book on Kanban gained significant popularity, leading him to gain widespread recognition as one of the main proponents of the Kanban we all know today.

What is Kanban?

With all that said, it is time to go into more detail about what Kanban actually is.

In the simplest words, Kanban is a visual tool, a signboard for mapping and tracking planned work, work in progress, and work done.

Kanban is a visual tool for mapping and tracking planned work, work in progress, and work done.

While Toyota mainly used the original Kanban system to track inventory in their manufacturing processes, today’s Kanban can be applied to a much broader range of work areas.

Today, Kanban is widely used in knowledge work to visualize and map the value stream. It helps teams and individuals self-organize and minimizes the need for constant supervision.

However, it takes a bit of time to reach that harmonious sync with your team and squeeze the full value from the board. There are key things in the process that should be known before kicking one off, so let’s break the Kanban down.

Kanban, the Pull System

Now, you read it in this article and most likely you heard it before: Kanban is based on the pull process. But what does that entail?

In Kanban, the concept of “pull” means that tasks or projects are pulled into the process based on the team’s skills, readiness, and capabilities. Similarly, to the pull that Ohno observed in American grocery stores, in Kanban, you take action when there is a need and capability. This approach ensures that tasks are not imposed on individuals who might not have the time but are instead taken up by those who are more likely to complete them.

This enhances efficiency and effectiveness, prevents bottlenecks, increases the completion rate, and prevents waste. In the end, by pulling tasks based on readiness, the team can maintain a sustainable workflow and deliver outcomes within the expected timeframe.

Elements of the Kanban Board

When it comes to Kanban, the true beauty hides in its simplicity, and here, less is truly more. All you need is just a few elements to have a working Kanban board:

Column: an element indicating the stage of the process (most commonly to be done, doing, and done.
Card: an element visually representing a work item. This is where you write what has to be done, when, how, and who is responsible for it.
Work-in-progress (WIP): a number indicating the number of tasks in the respective column. Having a WIP limit set for each “active” column helps with workload management.
Swimlane: horizontal lines that split the columns, used to indicate the team responsible for the tasks, urgency, or just differentiate other relevant categories. The swimlanes are particularly useful for larger projects that involve multiple departments.
Commitment point: a step in the process that signals when a task is ready to be taken to the next step of the development process. For example, when a team member selects a task from the backlog and moves it to the next column, the task crosses the commitment point. This means that the responsible person is committed to completing the task to the best of their knowledge.

Kanban Board

Kanban Board

In addition, it is worth knowing the following definitions:

Cycle time: This is the time need to complete a work item or progress a card from the backlog to the done column. Cycle time starts from the moment the work item crosses the very first commitment point and ends at the moment the work item is completed. It measures the actual time spent working on a task and is an essential metric for understanding how long it takes to complete individual items within the workflow.
Lead time: It is the total time taken for a work item to move through the entire workflow, starting from the moment it is requested or initiated until it is completed and delivered to the customer. It includes not only the time spent actively working on the task (cycle time) but also any waiting time or delays while the task is in progress or in queues.

Cycle time measures the actual time spent working on a task.

Lead time measures the whole time spent on a task, both active work time and inactive waiting time.

These elements, paired with a clear process policy are all you need for the Kanban process to work.

How to Make Your Kanban Work

So, while the elements of Kanban are simple and straightforward, the success of the Kanban process and results heavily depend on the implementation of policies and effective communication practices.

There are a few of those that should be set in place before you start your Kanban initiative:

Process policies. Essentially, this is a set of rules, guidelines, and agreements that will define how work needed to be done will be executed by the team. Having policies set before you start managing projects with Kanban will ensure that the team knows how to handle different types of tasks, and how to tackle possible issues along the way, it will assist in prioritization of work. Process policies act as the standard of your Kanban process.
Commitment. Tasks should not cross commitment points because a member was bored or had extra time on their hands. Goals and expectations for each task should be communicated clearly. Assigning a responsible department or team for certain tasks helps to keep track and ensure that tasks remain in competent hands.
Defined workflow. This refers to the specific stages (columns) through which work items move as they progress from initiation to completion. By defining your workflow in Kanban, you create a clear and visible representation of how work progresses through your process. This allows everyone to have a shared understanding of every step involved and the sequence of work.
Limited WIP. It is a crucial aspect in reducing the cycle time for each project. By placing a cap on the number of tasks in progress, teams can allocate their capabilities and resources more effectively, avoiding the inefficiencies of multitasking. Having a smaller number of WIPs enables rapid identification of bottlenecks and prevents overburdening the team.
Feedback. It helps to make iterative adjustments to optimize workflow, catalyzes learning, and promotes a culture of continuous improvement. Feedback in the Kanban process can be provided in many different ways, for example, daily stand-up meetings or code reviews done after the work item moves to a respective column (i.e. from doing to testing).

Benefits of Using the Kanban Method

Kanban is flexible, easy to use, and quick to master and there are plenty of benefits of using the method. To name a few:

Workflow visualization. Visualization allows transparency, immediate feedback and real-time updates. And Kanban is an excellent way to visually represent and manage workflow, no matter how simple or complicated it is. By visually breaking down the process into small steps and putting it on a board, you can get a great view of who is working on which tasks and the overall progress of your project.
Improved communication and collaboration. The possibility to see everyone’s progress with each task and who is responsible for what fosters more transparent communication. Regular meetings and check-ins on the board allow teams to provide feedback and leave comments. Knowing who is responsible for certain tasks improves collaboration by making it easy to give feedback or suggestion.
Bottleneck identification. By leveraging the visual nature of Kanban, teams can proactively identify and address bottlenecks in the workflow. This helps optimize the flow of work, reduce delays, and increase efficiency and productivity.
Reduced waste and increased productivity. Kanban allows gathering information about the processes quickly and changes might be made on the spot eliminating time for rework needed. Visualizing work and identifying bottlenecks enable streamlined processes, while work-in-progress limits prevent overload, leading to faster task completion.
Continuous improvement. All the best aspects of Kanban culminate in Continuous Improvement. It is the most significant benefit of using Kanban in project management. With a clear and visual representation of the workflow, teams can easily identify areas in need of improvement and address issues quickly. By making incremental changes based on real-time feedback, teams can enhance their workflow, deliver higher-quality outputs, and be more responsive to customer needs.

The transparency provided by Kanban fosters a culture of ongoing optimization, making it an amazing tool for driving continuous improvement.

From Sticky Notes to a Digital System

Some years back, I worked in a company where we used a real, physical Kanban board. And I don’t mean a whiteboard, I mean a full wall, covered from top to bottom in sticky notes (big organization, big team, and a huge process). And part of me loved it.

We all worked like busy bees, with our individual tasks, tied to a common goal. Kanban was the place where everything fell into place.

Every morning we would hover over that wall, with a cup of coffee in our hands, checking where those stickies are traveling. It was a whole story unfolding in front of our eyes.

People with Sticky Notes

However, everyone agreed that tracking each sticky note took a big bite of our mornings.

Was the task I worked on approved by legal and moved to the next stage, or was it sent back to be reworked?

That’s why I see the digitalization of Kanban as a blessing. It makes things easier to track and increases readability, which reduces waste.

Also, think about the analytics and reporting. Our manager used to take pictures of the wall and show them during the Monday team meetings. Zooming and deciphering individual handwriting… yeah, not the best. Luckily, digital tools save us from this burden.

Pros and Cons of Digital Kanban Board

There are some obvious benefits of a digital Kanban board:

Remote collaboration. Digital Kanban provides coherent communication and coordination among distributed teams. The team can access the Kanban board from anywhere, enabling real-time updates, tracking, and smooth communication. This fosters a sense of unity and efficiency, even when team members are geographically dispersed, ensuring that projects move forward cohesively and productively.
Security. Digital Kanban tools often provide encryption and secure data storage, protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access, and in case of unexpected issues, you can often rely on automatic data back-ups and easy data recovery. Finally, such tools eliminate the risks of post-it falling off, being removed without a trace or simply getting damaged. In addition, it allows you to keep all the possible sensitive data hidden away from the curious eyes of office visitors.
Automation. Most of the tools come with certain automation features. For example, notifications and email reminders ensure that Kanban stays active, deadlines are not forgotten, or finished tasks progress automatically. All relevant data is just a few clicks away, and integration with other relevant tools makes reporting and process improvement much easier.
Document management. Most digital tools provide one safe and easy-to-access place to gather information, supporting files, and leave comments and feedback by the team.
Customization. Most of the tools allow flexible customization, you can adapt the Kanban to your unique workflow, limit WIPs, add swimlanes, or add additional columns. As a secondary bonus, customization gives a chance to create a visually appealing board or a board that perfectly fits your brand.

However, as with most tools, there is no one right way. Digital Kanban tools has some disadvantages too:

Lack of communication. Digital tools allow us to check information when we want, from wherever it is comfortable for us, meaning that we can finish the whole process barely ever meeting our team.

So, without a physical board, people might end up working in isolation. While it might sound like a dream for an introvert, in the grander scheme of things, lack of communication might cause an array of issues like misunderstandings, misalignment, delayed issue resolution, and others.
Unfiltered input. The digital board might open the gate to idea dumping. While shooting as many shots as possible can be a good thing in a brainstorming session, only planned and discussed tasks should end up on a Kanban board to ensure that planned projects are finished efficiently.
Dependency on third-party vendors. Using digital tools means relying on third-party vendors, and if the vendor faces issues or discontinues the product, it could disrupt the team’s workflow.

With that said, if you will look deeper into the pros and cons of digital vs physical, you might find a lot of contradicting information. Some articles might argue that digital tools can be time-consuming, requiring people to navigate additional applications, while others claim that physically going to a board might take extra time.

Similarly, some articles highlight concerns about communication issues and working in silos, whereas others praise digital tools for facilitating communication, especially among remote teams. The contrasting viewpoints can lead to different interpretations and opinions on the impact of digital tools in the workplace.

So, physical, or digital? As predictable as my answer will sound – it all depends on your unique way of working.

Going Digital

There are a lot of tools that could be used as a digital Kanban board. From the good old Excel to a dedicated digital Kanban tool such as Kanbanize, you have plenty to choose from. However, such tools are not necessarily equal to one another. If you were to take the digital route, here are some points worth considering before committing:

Integration: i.e.: does the tool work with systems and other tools you already use?
Visualization: i.e.: does the allow easy visualization of the workflow?
Customization: i.e.: can you change and add elements as columns, WIPs, etc?
Automation: i.e.: are you able to get reminders, or do finished tasks move automatically to the next column?
Analytics: i.e.: can you extract data on cycle time or lead time?
Ease of use: i.e.: how steep is the learning curve?
Price: i.e.: does additional features, like the number of users, or analytics cost extra?

Conclusion

Kanban has come a long way from its inception as a simple manufacturing process management tool to the project management tool that it is today. And while Kanban is often associated with development, software, Lean, Agile, and Scrum… do not get tricked. Kanban can be used to manage wide-ranging projects with multiple stakeholders and at the same time, it can be used to help with organizing and managing personal projects.

As discussed earlier, it is obvious that the simplicity, flexibility, ease of deployment, and effectiveness in visualizing workflows, promoting collaboration, and continuously improving processes make Kanban an attractive tool for a variety of industries. It brings a myriad of benefits such as the reduction of bottlenecks, enhanced productivity and efficiency, improved communication and so much more. So, it is a no-brainer when it comes to giving Kanban a shot.

As to why it remains mostly unchanged, the good old rule of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it applies here perfectly. From the 1940s to 2023, from automotive manufacturing to software development, Kanban has been and still is a simple tool that simply works.

Image credits: Viima, Unsplash

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Why Not Now?

Leave a reply

Why Not Now?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you are anxious, you’re worried about what might happen. You’re living in the future. If you are sad or angry, you’re reacting to what happened. You’re living in the past. Nothing can be accomplished when living in the past because the die is cast. And nothing can be accomplished when living in the future because it’s all in your head. The only time we have is now.

The only time to start is now. Even if your project is a short one, you’re in a day-for-day slip with your completion date for every day you don’t start. And this is doubly true for long projects. If you’re living in the past, you block yourself from starting because the last project was difficult, you didn’t have the resources or it didn’t come out as expected, and you want to protect yourself from a rerun. If you’re living in the past, you block yourself from starting because you don’t know how it will turn out, you don’t have all the answers, you don’t have sufficient resources, and you don’t know what you don’t know. Acknowledge the problems with the past and potential problems with the future, and start anyway.

Starting starts with starting.

The only time to say something is now. If you’re living in the past, you block yourself from saying something controversial or thought-provoking because you remember how it went the last time someone did that. If you’re living in the future, you prevent yourself from saying something radical because, well, you weren’t paying attention and missed your opportunity to change history. Acknowledge that there may be some blowback for your insightful comments, live in the now and say them anyway. And live in the now so you can pay attention and use your sharp wit to create the future.

If you don’t say something, nothing is ever said.

The only time to help is now. Living in the past, you block yourself from understanding the significance of the situation because you see it through old lenses. Living in the future, you block yourself from helping because you worry if the helping will help or worry the helping will get in the way of your future commitments. If someone needs help, help them now. They will understand that the outcome is uncertain, and they’re okay with that. In fact, they will be happy you recognized their troubling situation and made time to check in with them. When you live in the now, people appreciate it. The time to help is now.

When no one helps, no one is helped.

When you find yourself living in the past, close your eyes, recognize your anger or sadness, and focus on your breath for ten seconds. And if that doesn’t work, put your hand on your chest and do it again. And if that doesn’t work, tell yourself your sadness is temporary and do it again. This is a fail-safe way to bring yourself into the now. Then, sitting in the now, start that project, say what must be said, and help people.

And when you find yourself living in the future, close your eyes, recognize your anxiety, and focus on your breath for ten seconds. And if that doesn’t work, put your hand on your chest and do it again. And if that doesn’t work, tell yourself your anxiety is temporary and repeat. This will bring you into the now. Then, sitting in the now, start that project, say what must be said, and help people.

The only time to shape the future is now.

Image credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Women Start-up Entrepreneurs Battle Against Gender Stereotypes and Ageism

Leave a reply

Women Start-up Entrepreneurs Battle Against Gender Stereotypes and Ageism

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

It’s been thirty-five years since I exited my life as a top retail corporate executive, and become a serial female entrepreneur. It’s been an awesome roller-coaster ride, which includes ten years as one of many adventurous, brave, global women start-up entrepreneurs. Its also been a very challenging, rewarding, and fulfilling learning journey, where I have been both privileged and humbled to have impacted thousands of men and women positively, and globally through my consulting, learning, mentoring, and coaching practice.

Yet, I can’t help wondering how my journey could have been significantly less challenging, and possibly even more profoundly impactful, had gender stereotypes and later, ageism not been so pervasive. Where the “Gender Stereotypes and Their Impact on Women Entrepreneurs” by the Cherie Blair Foundation qualify this further by providing evidence of gender stereotyping impacting women’s journeys to and through entrepreneurship. Which then affects their “aspirations, sources of support, opportunities, access to resources, perceptions, and the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem”.

What is the impact of gender stereotypes on women start-up entrepreneurs?

Some of the key findings revealed by this report include:

70% of women entrepreneurs surveyed said that gender stereotypes have negatively affected their work as an entrepreneur.
More than six in ten of those surveyed (61%) believe that gender stereotypes impact their business growth and almost half (49%) say they affect profitability.
Stereotypes start early, shape women’s journeys to entrepreneurship, and can have a lasting impact on aspirations, confidence, and behavior.
Over half of the women entrepreneurs surveyed (56%) said that social approval or disapproval of different careers played a role in their choice of career.
The majority of women entrepreneurs surveyed (70%) also reported knowing a woman entrepreneur when they were children, suggesting the powerful influence of role models on children and young women.

What is the impact of gender stereotyping on women start-up entrepreneurs raising venture capital?

When I attended a recent webinar “Coaching for Success – How Can Investors Support Start-up Founders” held by EMCC Asia Pacific I checked out the percentage of women start-up entrepreneurs who had actually received venture capitalist’s funds. I was shocked, yet not surprised to see TechCrunch report that in the US “women-founded start-ups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022, a drop from 2021.”

Here in Australia, as reported by the Women’s Agenda just 3% of total VC capital went to all-women-founded start-ups in 2022, while just 10 percent went to those with at least one woman in their co-founding teams. This report also reveals that “83 percent of women believe their gender has impacted their ability to raise external capital, compared with 14 percent of men”.

What is the impact of gender stereotyping on women start-up entrepreneurs’ ability to impact globally?

The new Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2021/2022 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report showed that “start-up rates for women dropped by 15% from 2019 to 2020, and held constant in 2021. Women also experienced sharper declines than men in their intentions to start a business within three years and overall start-up rates in 2020, but not in upper-middle income countries”. Where “Women represent two out of every five early-stage entrepreneurs”.

This means that almost half of the world’s potential entrepreneurs have been handicapped, and are still being restrained and held back from adding value to the quality of people’s lives and making the difference they want to, and can make in the world.

What are some of the key challenges women start-up entrepreneurs face?

Referring to my own personal experience with founding ImagineNation™ as an Israeli Australian start-up 10 years ago, I am able to share a range of key frustrations and challenges which confronted me. This was catalyzed by a recent article featured in Business News Daily which shares the range of core challenges and how other women start-up entrepreneurs might possibly choose to deal with, resolve and overcome them.

Hopefully, other women start-up entrepreneurs might find some inspiration, motivation, and encouragement to be steadfast in pursuing their dreams courageously, with a bit of healthy self-compassion to creatively execute their vision for a better world, from my story.

Defying social expectations

As a relatively new arrival to the Israeli start-up scene, I was repeatedly told that as an “outsider” I could not know “how we do things around here” despite my 25 years of culture and change management consulting experience. I attended weekly start-up events in Tel Aviv, and often stood, as a lone woman, alongside diverse groups of young men, usually drinking beer and dressed in black. I also found that being older than the average start-up entrepreneur, despite my 25 years of experience in mentoring women in business, I also faced the dreaded “ageism bias” and as a result, I was largely ignored at many of these crucial networking events. Because in Israel “if you don’t network, you don’t work!”

I chose to detach from this, by refusing to conform to what appeared to be men’s ideas of what a start-up entrepreneur should look, be and act like. Instead, I chose to learn as much as I could from my range of experiences, enabling me to adapt, innovate and grow, as do many other women start-up entrepreneurs when faced with these challenges, to accelerate my innovation solution.

Accessing funding

With no family or relatives locally, or the ability to get a financial guarantor, I had no access to source funds externally, despite meeting a number of local venture capitalists. Who, I noticed, tended to focus mostly on investing in a “quick win” or in growth-stage start-ups. When attending a government-sponsored meeting in Sydney, to qualify for an Australian Government Entrepreneurship Grant, I was confronted by a panel of three aggressive and oppositional male VC consultants who mercilessly tore my start-up invention and myself apart. Telling me it was not worth investing in and would be replicated by others within six months. To date, it still hasn’t been copied.

I eventually recovered my composure, confidence, and courage and made the decision to bootstrap, self-fund, and pay my own way forwards, which took longer, and yet was the best decision.

Struggling to be taken seriously

Even when I applied my then 25 years of consulting, learning, and development knowledge, skills, and corporate experience to research, model, and replicate the “secret sauce” behind the Israeli start-up system, it was hard for me to be taken seriously. Finding that some people, in both Israel and Australia, found defensive ways to negate and minimize my 10-year immersion in an innovation culture when I was designing, iterating, pivoting, and marketing my unique innovation learning and coaching curriculum.

I focused on continuing to develop my self-efficacy, on finding my tribe, and on researching, and building a global reputation as a thought leader on the people side of innovation, by experimenting with blogging and presenting webinars.

Owning your accomplishments

In the first 9 years, I presented more than 6 free innovation webinars, and 10 blog posts a year, generously sharing my IP and knowledge, without really recognizing and acknowledging the value of my own creative ideas and inventions. Whilst this helped me find my collaborators, build an ecosystem, and added to my reputation-building efforts, I gave away far too much without getting sound financial commitments from potential clients.

I now truly value and esteem my knowledge and IP at a deeper, and still share free webinars and 10 blog posts a year. I now focus on only presenting 2 learning and coaching programs a year where I charge participants more than double, compared to what I initially charged.

Building a support network

Interestingly, this has been very challenging, due to having lived in a patriarchal culture in Israel and a “boys club” and the “old boys’ network” here in Australia which permeates every level of our organizational culture and civil society. In my experience, I have also sadly discovered that the majority of women in the consulting, learning, and development sectors prefer to compete, rather than collaborate.

I find that I am still constantly challenged by people’s ageism bias, and manage this by mostly working globally, and online, mentoring and coaching both men and women who are seeking to fulfill their potential, adapt, innovate, and grow to effect positive change in their worlds.

I also focused on developing the “friendlies” included in my global Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams alumni and network, my Linked In tribe, and my International Coaching Federation (ICF) colleagues to draw upon, and support when needed.

Balancing business and family life

Having recovered from a significant burnout experience more than 25 years ago, I have been able to achieve and sustain a reasonable work-life balance. By managing, developing, and leading my business effectively, being both self-disciplined, and methodical, and being curious and creative, even when my old habitual task holism threatens to take over.

It takes focused attention and deep intention, being passionately purposeful to ensure that I stay on track with doing the “one thing” I am creating, inventing, and innovating whilst on the roller-coaster ride.

Coping with fear of failure

Self-doubt, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, risk adversity, and rejection are the key neurological perils confronting many women (and men) start-up entrepreneurs. This creates opportunities for women start-up entrepreneurs to learn how to bravely and boldly be, think and act differently in articulating their passionate purpose and achieving their vision in an uncertain and constantly changing world.

I experienced a number of significant failures, which deeply hurt me viscerally, emotionally, and cognitively, as well as resulted in serious financial losses.

I focussed on using these as “teachable moments” to learn how to take smart risks, manage my self-talk and not self-depreciate my inherent self-worth. To seek feedback and help when I froze as a result of my mistakes, losses, and failure, which ultimately enabled me to develop the deep courage, healthy self-compassion, and GRIT to stay in the start-up entrepreneurship game.

This enables me to role model, mentor, teach and coach other women start-up entrepreneurs, develop embodied presence, and be congruent in walking my talk.

How can you take action to eliminate gender (and age) stereotypes as a women start-up entrepreneur?

If we want to ensure that almost half of the world’s potential women start-up entrepreneurs are empowered, and enabled to add value to the quality of people’s lives and make the difference they want to, and can make in the world, make sure to take personal responsibility in:

Supporting women in their efforts to make a difference and contribute to the common good, despite age or gender differences, gives women start-up entrepreneurs greater chances of long-term growth and impactful success.
Eliminating from your locus of control and influence, any gender stereotyping and ageism biases.

We can then maximize the benefits gender and age differences and diversity bring, and collectively make the world a fairer, more inclusive, equitable, and balanced place in all domains that contribute to the common good, and a planet that balances and includes all people equally, with profits.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starts October 3, 2023. It can be customised as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Why You Must Define Innovation

Leave a reply

(Hint: It’s All About Efficiency)

Why You Must Define Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

As the world around you becomes more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA), you know that you need to build skills to navigate it and inspire others to follow your path.

But what if you are the source of ambiguity?

Because you are. Every time you speak.

The words we use always have clear meaning and intent to us but may not (and often don’t) have the same meaning and intent to others.

That’s why one of the first and most essential things a company can do when starting its innovation journey is to decide what “innovation” means. It may seem like an academic exercise, but it becomes very practical when you discover that one person thinks it means something new to the world, another thinks it’s a new product, and a third thinks it means anything commercialized.

Ambiguity = Efficiency?

“Innovation” isn’t the only word that is distractingly ambiguous. Language, in general, evolved to be ambiguous because ambiguity makes it more efficient. In 2012, cognitive scientists at MIT found the ambiguity–efficiency link, noting “words with fewer syllables and easier pronunciation can be ‘reused,’ avoiding the need for a vast and increasingly complex vocabulary.”

You read that right. In language, ambiguity leads to efficiency.

Every time you speak, you’re ambiguous. You’re also efficient.

The RIGHT level of Ambiguity = Efficiency!

In 2014, researchers at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona found that language’s ambiguity is critical to communicating complex ideas,

“the researchers argue that the level of ambiguity we have in language is at just the right level to make it easy to speak and be understood. If every single object and concept had its own unique word, then language is completely unambiguous – but the vocabulary is huge. The listener doesn’t have to do any guessing about what the speaker is saying, but the speaker has to say a lot. For example, “Come here” might have to be something like “I want you to come to where I am standing.” At the other extreme, if the same word is used for everything, that makes it easy for the speaker, but the listener can’t tell if she is being told about the weather or a rampaging bear.”

.

Either way, communication is hard. But Sole and Seoane argue that with just the right amount of ambiguity, the two can find a good trade-off.”

A certain level of ambiguity is efficient. Too much or too little is inefficient.

How to find the RIGHT level of Ambiguity for “Innovation”

In everyday life, it’s ok for everyone to have a slightly different definition of innovation because we all generally agree it means “something new.” Sure, there will be differences of opinion on some things (is a new car an “innovation” if it just improved on the previous model?). Still, overall, we can exist in this world and interact with each other despite, or maybe because of, the ambiguity.

Work is a different story. If you are responsible for, working on, or even associated with innovation, you better be very clear on what “innovation” means because its definition determines expectations and success for what you do. If it means one thing to you and a different thing to your boss, and a third thing to her boss, you’re in for a world of disappointment and pain.

Let’s avoid that. Instead:

Define the word
Get everyone to agree on the definition
Use the word and immediately follow it with, “And by that, I mean (definition)”

Gently correct people when they use the word to mean something other than the agreed-upon definition. Once everyone uses the word correctly, you can stop defining it every time because its meaning has taken root.

So, the next time someone rolls their eyes and comments on the “theoretical” or “academic” (i.e., not at all practical, useful, or actionable) exercise of defining innovation, smile and explain that this is an exercise in efficiency.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

3 Flavors of Product-Service Shift

Leave a reply

Which One is Yours?

3 Flavors of Product-Service Shift

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

The most profound change in enterprise computing in this century to date has been the shift in value delivery modality from product to service and the corresponding rise is XaaS or Everything-as-a-Service. The current bull market leaders in the tech sector take this for granted, and the prior generation of incumbents are still scrambling to get themselves onto the new model. For consumers this is an all-upside proposition; for enterprises, it is a balancing act of open fluidity versus secure compliance. But everyone seems to know their place in the new order—or do they?

As the product-service shift unfolds, it can manifest itself at three very different levels of value delivery, each of which has its own priorities. When you are looking to help your organization navigate the transition, it would be good to get clear as to which path you are on:

1. Infrastructure Model Transformation

This is the easiest to absorb, the impact for the most part contained on the vendor side within Finance and Legal and on the customer side within the IT organization itself. Basically, all you are doing is changing the contract from a license to a service level agreement, and staging a series of leasing payments out of op ex instead a one-time purchase out of cap ex. For clarity sake, think of this as a move to subscription, not yet to For most people in the organization, it is a non-event.

2. Operating Model Transformation

This move has the most impact on incumbent vendors and their installed base. As Todd Hewlin and J B Wood described in Consumption Economics, the shift is based on a change from the customer to the vendor as the one who must absorb goal attainment risk. In a product model, once the customer has bought and paid for it, the customer owns virtually all the risk. That can readily lead to a lot of drive-by selling, the sort of thing that built out empires of shelfware in the late 1990s. In a service model, by contrast, the vendor can never stop owning the success of the offering, not if they want to protect against their installed base churning out from underneath them. This is the true product-service shift, and even now it is sufficiently novel that both customers and vendors are still sorting out the implications for what staffing and expertise is needed on both sides of this relationship.

3. Business Model Transformation

This is the most impactful for venture-backed start-ups and the incumbent franchises they are looking to disrupt. Typically the former are re-architecting an established but aging value chain by substituting digital services for physical-world interactions. The biggest disruptions we have seen thus far are in retail, print media, financial services, transportation, hospitality, and communications, with lots more to come. They all represent daggers pointed at the heart of established enterprises because even when the latter can find ways to re-engineer their own offers to match the new paradigm, it is still painfully hard to bring the rest of their ecosystems up to speed to deliver the whole product. And to a lesser extent, the same goes for their customer bases. That is why disruption usually starts with targeting customers who have been disenfranchised by the old solution. It is only over time that the Innovator’s Dilemma bill comes to for the established vendors, but when it does, it hits with a wallop.

For most companies, the path you want to double-click on is the Operating Model Transformation, and in the next post, I want to dig in a lot deeper there.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.3