Category Archives: Innovation

Innovation Management ISO 56000 Series Explained

The paradox of standardizing innovation

When we talk about innovation and standards, we should first clarify a few concepts.

What is innovation?
Why should you manage innovation?
What is a standard in the context of innovation?

First, if you wish to transform the way you innovate, it is crucial to establish a shared understanding of what innovation means for you.

In its simplest form, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines innovation as the introduction of something new. However, there are many types of innovation and therefore, ways of innovating. That’s why it’s important to define it within the context of your organization, your goals, and strategy.

Also, note that innovation is not just an ingredient you add to the mix and hope for a better result than before. It has to be placed at the core of the organization. That’s where innovation management comes into play.

Innovation has to be placed at the core of the organization.

Innovation management is the process through which you get to create and introduce that “something new”. This process can look different from one organization to another, which makes it more challenging to see it in perspective.

We usually structure the core aspects of innovation management into capabilities, structure, culture, and strategy. However, the International Standards for Innovation expand them further into eight principles.

eight principles of innovation management

We previously explored each of these topics in detail on our blog, as they all contribute to successful innovation. But maybe the most important one, which should be your North Star, is the creation of value. Unless you add value, you are simply creating innovation theater.

Unfortunately, this is very common in organizations attempting to innovate through sporadic activities. But innovation is a complex, dynamic process that evolves over time.

At the same time, it’s understandable why the skepticism around the standards for innovation. Just as innovation is not easy, neither is adhering to a set of standards that will help you succeed at it.

Obviously, standards come with both downsides and benefits, but as pointed out in the ISO documentation, these innovation management principles are “an open set to be integrated and adapted within the organization”.

Naturally, now you might question how standardization is possible if innovation and its management are so complex and can vary so greatly across organizations and industries.

The problem is that traditionally, innovation has been seen as a creative and sometimes chaotic process that may or may not result in something new that adds value.

However, if we take a closer look at some of the most innovative companies, we see that it’s not about randomly generating wild ideas and hoping for the best.

The myth of the crazy innovator has been popularized by the media that portrays innovators as superheroes. This stereotypical view on innovation fed the belief that innovation and standardization are two opposing forces. Innovation comes from pure chaos, and standards fight it with order. In fact, creativity and standardization can be complementary. You need both for successful corporate management.

Creativity and standardization can be complementary. You need both for successful corporate management.

For example, even though Apple marketed itself as a group of rebels revolutionizing the computer, Steve Jobs actually instilled a disciplined culture where people had to adhere to his methods. In a way, he had his own set of standards for what an innovative product meant.

Similarly, Toyota, renowned for its enduring success, has developed its own system called “The Toyota Way”. Through this system, they have embraced continuous improvement as an approach to innovation, refining it into a set of principles that have become synonymous with their brand.

If it wasn’t for Toyota’s systematic approach to innovation, and Jobs’ eccentricity who insisted on doing things a certain way, today we might have had two very different companies.

Even though their way is by no means a “recipe” that can be replicated by others, we can see how having a framework sets the tone for how an organization is innovating on the long term.

Efforts have been ongoing to develop a comprehensive framework that can be universally adopted by organizations of all sizes and industries. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has taken a significant step in this direction with the introduction of the ISO 56000 suite of innovation standards.

Let’s next take a closer look at these standards to see if they have any practical benefits.

ISO 56000 Suite for Innovation

In essence, standards are meant to be a reference point for organizations, industries, and individuals. They are used to establish best practices, promote efficiency, enhance safety, and facilitate communication and cooperation. Even though they could seem just rigid rules, standards are simply ways of working and they are not meant to hinder creativity.

Where did the ISO standards for innovation come from? The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is developing and promoting international standards that facilitate consistency, interoperability, and quality across various industries and sectors.

The ISO 56000 series of standards for innovation is a rather new initiative where experts from 50 countries came together in an effort to establish a common understanding of innovation and support organizations across all industries to improve their ability to survive and thrive in this uncertain world.

Also, note that some standards from the eight-part series are still under development (as per July 2023), so we will get back and update this article when necessary. If you consider complying with these standards, the ISO website is the official source to get them in full.

However, the standards we believe to be the most relevant in helping you succeed have already been published:

ISO 56000 Innovation Management – Fundamentals and vocabulary
ISO 56002 Innovation management – Innovation management system
ISO 56003 Tools and Methods for innovation partnership.

For a better understanding of the use and purpose of the ISO standards, let’s focus on the ISO 56000 Fundamentals and vocabulary, and the ISO 56002 for Innovation management system.

ISO 56000 Innovation management — Fundamentals and vocabulary:

Provides vocabulary, fundamental concepts, and principles of innovation management and its systematic implementation.
Applicable to various organizations, including those implementing an innovation management system, seeking to improve their innovation capabilities, or aiming for effective communication and common understanding in innovation management.
Suitable also for providers of training in, assessment of, or consultancy for, innovation management and innovation management systems.
It can be applied by all types of organizations, regardless of the sector, size, or maturity level. It’s useful for different types of innovations (product, services, processes, etc), and approaches (internal, open, design-driven, etc.)

ISO 56002 Innovation management system

Provides guidance for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and improving an innovation management system in established organizations.
Applicable to organizations seeking sustained success in managing innovation activities, interested parties assessing innovation capabilities, and policymakers supporting innovation and competitiveness.
Provides generic guidance applicable to all types of organizations, innovations, and approaches, with a focus on established organizations.
This standard goes beyond the foundational principles and offers more practical guidance on how to structure, implement, and continuously improve innovation processes. It emphasizes the importance of leadership, communication, and organizational culture in fostering innovation.
However, it does not prescribe specific activities, requirements, tools, or methods for innovation but offers general-level guidance.

How does this translate into innovation practices? Well, let’s take a step back and look at how most organizations approach innovation.

Traditionally, many organizations innovate by focusing primarily on episodic events that are centered around ideas. These could be hackathons, suggestion boxes, idea challenges, brainstorming sessions, or similar events. Something could come out of these sporadic activities, but mostly they turn out to be wasted efforts and resources.

Truth be told, ideas are not worth much. The execution is more important. The issue with the old, funnel approach, which is mostly about collecting numerous ideas, filtering, evaluating, and selecting a few for implementation, is that it can overlook the essence of innovation and focus on the wrong things.

Innovation at the corporate level is not, or should not be, just about creating something new for the sake of novelty. That is an invention and not all inventions are innovations. Instead, innovation should create value and align with the overall business strategy and goals.

All in all, the traditional funnel works fine at the ideation level, but is not an all-encompassing system to repeatedly innovate at an organizational level.

ISO 56002 brings together all the elements that can enable value creation through innovation. The innovation management system, which is at the core of the ISO 56002 is made of different interrelated elements that make up the framework on which an organization can develop and deploy innovation capabilities, evaluate performance, and achieve the intended goals.

Source: ISO 56002 Innovation Management System: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/en/#iso:std:iso:56002:ed-1:v1:en

As shown in this graphic, the innovation management system can be very complex, especially for larger, more established organizations.

The good news is that you don’t have to adopt all the elements at once. You can gradually integrate them to create a system that works for your organization and its specific context. As their guideline indicates, it all starts with committing and promoting the capabilities required to create such a system.

If you’ve read our articles before, you probably noticed that we talked extensively about continuous improvement, as well as the tools and processes that drive sustained innovation. So, it’s no surprise that the ISO 56002 also integrates the PDCA (Plan – Do – Check – Act) cycle, which enables continuous improvement of the innovation practices.

This model also ties together the business strategy with the innovation strategy. It gives insights into the intent and where the innovation activities should be directed.

So, instead of collecting ideas for projects that may not add anything valuable to the bottom line, you should generate ideas based on opportunities.

In broad terms, this is how standardization can enable innovation. It’s not about a “to do” list, but about the bigger picture. The ISO 56000 suite highlights the need for an end-to-end approach to innovation, where barriers are removed, and creativity can flourish. It enables the conditions for innovation to thrive.

It’s great to see there is this attempt to establish a foundation for managing innovation as a process, through a holistic approach. Even so, there are still shortcomings that sceptics of the ISO standards are right to be concerned about. Let’s see what those are.

The Pros and Cons of ISO Standards for Innovation

What should you know before deciding to make the leap, and what are the downsides of adhering to ISO standards for innovation? Also, what are the benefits, and is it worth investing the effort, time, energy, and resources? Let’s see.

The downsides of ISO standards for innovation

Limited scope

Innovation is multifaceted and complex and the road to success looks very different for each organization. The size, industry, and specific goals of each organization mean that the processes required to innovate can also look very different. Adopting a set of standards with such a broad scope can be very challenging for organizations.

ISO 56000 lays the ground to define fundamental concepts and vocabulary, ISO 56002 provides guidance for establishing and implementing an innovation management system and ISO 56003 focuses on specific types of innovation. Even though they attempt to provide guidance in different scenarios, they still cannot fully address every organization’s unique needs.

That’s why you need committed, knowledgeable leaders who can show the way and understand how to adapt the system to the specifics of their organization.

Not a playbook for success

It should be clarified that even if you adhere to these standards and you put in all the work, the ISO standards are not a playbook for success.

The impact of implementing these standards can vary from one organization to another depending on the industry, maturity of the innovation practices, size, culture, and so on.

So, it’s important to set the expectations right and to take them for what they are. These standards can help you move ahead, but they won’t provide the recipe for disruptive or radical innovations, which can truly set you apart.

Rigidity and too much focus on compliance

A lack of flexibility is on the top of leaders’ minds when they think of standards. Employees also fear that being compliant with specific standards will take away from the flexibility and freedom to think creatively or try unconventional approaches.

But having constraints is not all bad. In fact, constraints can foster creativity. Having constraints can help you understand the problem better, it can force you to be creative and think outside the box, and can ultimately turn into a source of competitive advantage.

Costs and resources

The process of implementing ISO innovation standards can be time-consuming, complex, and costly. It requires allocating resources for conducting assessments, audits, and certifications, which can be a burden for smaller organizations with limited budgets. Other costs may include purchasing the standards, training employees on their implementation, and conducting internal assessments to ensure compliance.

What’s more, adhering to new standards involves a significant commitment of time and effort. Developing new processes, aligning existing practices with the standards, and undergoing audits or assessments demand substantial dedication. This can strain resources and may divert attention from other critical business activities.

Workforce resistance

Embracing ISO standards often require organizational change, which can encounter resistance from employees and management. Change management efforts are essential to successfully integrate the standards, but they can add complexity and take time to fully adopt the new practices.

Leadership commitment is essential and their approach to enforcing change can make or break the initiative. If the standards will be imposed rules, they can become a cause of friction between leaders and employees.

Despite these downsides, it’s important to recognize that investment in ISO standards can bring substantial benefits. What kind of benefits?

Benefits of Adopting ISO Standards for Innovation

Enhanced Innovation Management Practices

With the ISO standards you get the guidance and framework to develop more efficient and structured innovation management processes.

With such a complex endeavor it’s so easy to get lost in the details and forget the big picture. The ISO 56002 standards provide the guidelines on how to ideate, evaluate, and implement innovative ideas, leading to better utilization of resources and increased innovation success rates.

Improved Governance and Organizational Structure

Without structures in place there is no common understanding of how the organization understands innovation. There are inconsistent practices, fragmented activities that lead to no results, and no clear direction or alignment with the overall strategy.

The ISO standards are like a map, showing the team the best route to take and ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Armed with these guidelines, organizations establish a smoother and more organized innovation process. Everyone knows their roles and responsibilities, communication flows better, and collaboration becomes easier. It’s like having a well-oiled machine, where everyone knows what to do and how they fit into the bigger picture.

The ISO standards also emphasize the importance of leadership and accountability. Leaders take charge and guide the innovation process, while everyone is responsible for their part in making innovation successful. For innovation to succeed, you need a strong captain steering the ship and a crew that works together.

Increased Competitiveness and Growth

Armed with these standards, you can identify new opportunities, develop innovative products or services, and gain a competitive advantage.

Standards act as a roadmap, guiding you towards effective strategies and practices that fuel the competitive edge. As we saw in the overall structure of the ISO 56002, it promotes a culture of continuous improvement and learning within organizations. This encourages the exploration of new ideas, the identification of areas for growth, and the development of innovative solutions. It enables organizations to stay agile, responsive, and innovative in a rapidly evolving business landscape.

Better Ability to Manage Risk

The concept of risk is too often seen as purely a negative issue that one should look to minimize by diversifying the innovation portfolio. Instead, you should look at risk through a broader lens, especially when it comes to innovation.

Risk is the potential of something either gaining or losing value, which means that it simply represents the uncertainty related to that something. Since working on innovation involves a lot of uncertainty, you should look at risk as more than just something to minimize. Of course, the acceptable level of risk depends on ambition, capabilities, and the types of innovations pursued.

Since working on innovation involves a lot of uncertainty, you should look at risk as more than just something to minimize.

For example, startups, particularly early-stage ones, are often more willing to take significant risks by dedicating all their resources to a single ambitious project with a high likelihood of failure but the potential for substantial rewards.

Therefore, even in the context of standards, flexibility and adaptability are crucial. You have to establish unified or separate structures for innovation activities with different leadership styles, competencies, and cultures.

Implementing an innovation management system challenges the status quo, enabling effective management of uncertainties and risks.

Ability to Forge Meaningful and Valuable Partnerships

ISO standards help organizations forge meaningful and valuable partnerships by providing a common framework and shared language for collaboration.

The ISO 56003 can help you decide whether you should enter an innovation partnership, identify, evaluate, and select partners and assess the alignment and perceptions of value and challenges of the partnership.

Even more, through ISO standards organizations can also demonstrate their commitment to best practices and a high level of quality in their operations. This can attract potential partners who value reliability and trustworthiness. When partners see that an organization follows recognized standards, it gives them confidence that they can work together effectively and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

When organizations follow these standards, they can collaborate more efficiently and make better decisions together. This fosters trust and strengthens the partnership, leading to more successful projects and innovations.

Effective Intellectual Property Management

IP management is like a safety net for new ideas and inventions. It protects them from being copied or used by others without permission. When innovators get patents, trademarks, copyrights, or keep their secrets, it gives them legal rights over their creations. This protection encourages them to invest in more research and come up with even better things.

If you are concerned about IP management, the ISO 56005 was developed as a guidance and framework to address the management of intellectual property rights.

Clear guidelines for IP management can help you protect and capitalize on your innovations. The ISO 56005 explains the steps to carry out an IP order and create an IP strategy that aligns with your business goals.

Overall, the adoption of innovation standards paves the way for continuous improvement, growth, and impactful collaborations in today’s dynamic and rapidly evolving business landscape. But ultimately, the decision to invest in the ISO standards for innovation depends on your objectives, resources, and long-term commitment to continuous improvement.

What Next?

Now that you know what’s the deal with these ISO standards for innovation, what should you do next?

Assess Readiness: Begin by evaluating your organization’s readiness for implementing standards for innovation. It’s important to understand why transformation is necessary. Assess factors such as your maturity as an organization, your current innovation practices, resources, and commitment to driving innovation improvements.
Familiarize Yourself with the ISO Standards: Take the time to understand the ISO standards relevant to innovation, such as ISO 56000 and its related standards. Familiarize yourself with the content as much as possible to understand where to start.

Note that you don’t have to get on board with all standards. If you are new to innovation work, you might want to start with the ISO 56000 to establish the concepts of innovation in relation to your organization. From there you will get more familiar with the topic and start to understand the basics.
Define Objectives and Benefits: If you already know you want to adopt ISO standards, make sure you have defined the objectives you aim to achieve. Consider the potential benefits for your organization, such as improved innovation management practices, enhanced competitiveness, and better risk management.
Gain Leadership Commitment: Having that clear understanding of what you want to achieve through the standards will also help secure leadership commitment, which is vital for the successful adoption of ISO standards. Engage top management, to gain their support and endorsement of the initiative.
Make a Plan: Next, develop a detailed plan for implementing ISO standards for innovation. The plan should outline the steps, timelines, responsibilities, and resources required for successful implementation.
Engage Stakeholders: Involve all relevant stakeholders in the process. Seek input from employees, teams, and departments that will be impacted by the adoption of ISO standards to ensure their buy-in and cooperation. Offer training and awareness programs to employees to ensure they understand the importance and benefits of adopting these ISO standards.
Continuous Improvement: As the innovation management system proposed by the ISO organization also outlines, continuous improvement is the backbone of any process. Once you execute the plan and start adhering to innovation standards, you should monitor progress, measure outcomes, and continually assess and improve your innovation management practices.
Consider Certification: Lastly, the elephant in the room. Whenever you think of ISO standards you think of the ISO certificates. While certification can signal a commitment to best practices and continuous improvement in innovation management, it is not mandatory for implementing effective innovation initiatives within an organization.

You can adhere to the standards without additional investment into getting certified. The ISO 56002 is the only one that is eligible for certification, meaning that you can seek certification from accredited certification bodies to demonstrate your compliance with ISO 56002 as well as your commitment to effective innovation management.

Conclusion

Because we don’t like to do things halfway, this was a lengthy article. We didn’t go into the details of each standard because that is beside the point here. Our goal was to provide you with the bigger picture of what it means to standardize innovation practices.

This will hopefully help you better understand that innovation is not a one-time activity you do after a workshop, and that a systematic approach is essential for long-term success and growth.

Innovation can be like deciding to go to the gym or sticking to a workout routine. Sometimes the most difficult part is to get started and make that first step.

With this information at hand, you can start digging deeper into the specifics of each standard that interests you and use them as a compass to steer you in the right direction. They can give a new perspective into the methods you can use to achieve success in innovation, and help you rethink how you manage innovation at an organizational level.

Image credit: Unsplash.com, Pixabay, viima.com, iso.org

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Leaders Avoid Doing This One Thing

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GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Being a leader isn’t easy. You must BE accountable, compassionate, confident, curious, empathetic, focused, service-driven, and many other things. You must DO many things, including build relationships, communicate clearly, constantly learn, create accountability, develop people, inspire hope and trust, provide stability, and think critically. But if you’re not doing this one thing, none of the other things matter.

Show up.

It seems obvious, but you’ll be surprised how many “leaders” struggle with this.

Especially when they’re tasked with managing both operations and innovation.

It’s easy to show up to lead operations.

When you have experience and confidence, know likely cause and effect, and can predict with relative certainty what will happen next, it’s easy to show up. You’re less likely to be wrong, which means you face less risk to your reputation, current role, and career prospects.

When it’s time to be a leader in the core business, you don’t think twice about showing up. It’s your job. If you don’t, the business, your career, and your reputation suffer. So, you show up, make decisions, and lead the team out of the unexpected.

It’s hard to show up to lead innovation.

When you are doing something new, facing more unknowns than knowns, and can’t guarantee an outcome, let alone success, showing up is scary. No one will blame you if you’re not there because you’re focused on the core business and its known risks and rewards. If you “lead from the back” (i.e., abdicate your responsibility to lead), you can claim that the team, your peers, or the company are not ready to do what it takes.

When it’s time to be a leader in innovation, there is always something in the core business that is more urgent, more important, and more demanding of your time and attention. Innovation may be your job, but the company rewards you for delivering the core business, so of course, you think twice.

Show up anyway

There’s a reason people use the term “incubation” to describe the early days of the innovation process. To incubate means to “cause or aid the development of” but that’s the 2^nd definition. The 1^st definition is “to sit on so as to hatch by the warmth of the body.”

You can’t incubate if you don’t show up.

Show up to the meeting or call, even if something else feels more urgent. Nine times out of ten, it can wait half an hour. If it can’t, reschedule the meeting to the next day (or the first day after the crisis) and tell your team why. Don’t say, “I don’t have time,” own your choice and explain, “This isn’t a priority at the moment because….”

Show up when the team is actively learning and learn along with them. Attend a customer interview, join the read-out at the end of an ideation session, and observe people using your (or competitive) solutions. Ask questions, engage in experiments, and welcome the experiences that will inform your decisions.

Show up when people question what the innovation team is doing and why. Especially when they complain that those resources could be put to better use in the core business. Explain that the innovation resources are investments in the company’s future, paving the way for success in an industry and market that is changing faster than ever.

You can’t lead if you don’t show up.

Early in my career, a boss said, “A leader without followers is just a person wandering lost.” Your followers can’t follow you if they can’t find you.

After all, “80% of success is showing up.”

Image credit: Pixabay

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A Top-Down Open Innovation Approach

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A Top-Down Open Innovation Approach

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

For high-tech in much of the 20 century, when start-up capital was scarce and the need for it was great, innovation began at the core and migrated to the edge. Today we have the reverse. Start-up capital is plentiful, the need for it is modest, and innovation is thriving at the edge and moving reluctantly to the core, fearful of the inertia it will encounter once it gets there.

Yet if innovations are going to scale, they must leverage the core-edge dynamic in both directions. That means, in addition to enabling innovation from the bottom up—something today’s start-up enterprises are having great success in doing—we must also be able to manage it from the top down, from the core out, from the acquiring-sponsoring enterprise to acquired-innovating start-up. Here success is not so widespread, but there is a fix for that.

Geoffrey Moore Return on Innovation

In the core-edge dynamic, the job of the core acquiring institution is not to innovate—it is to get a return on innovation from wherever it is sourced. This could be an internal skunk works project, a major R&D project, a tuck-in acquisition, or a merger with another mature enterprise. The challenge is not, in other words, to bring innovation into existence but rather to capitalize on it in a meaningful way. That is what the pie chart above is all about.

The key claims of this model are 1) that there are three ways to get a positive return from an innovation investment and 2) that they are mutually exclusive. (There are also at least five ways to get a negative return which we will get to in a moment.)

The winning returns can come from:

Differentiation. To win here you must create an offer that dramatically outperforms its competitive set on at least one vector of innovation. You are playing for competitive separation, looking for a 10X result on at least one chosen vector, either in product performance, customer delight, or operational savings. This sort of thing creates the highest return on innovation possible. Think Apple iPad over any prior tablet (or arguably any tablet since).
Neutralization. To win here you must catch up to a competitor’s innovation sufficiently to get your offer back in the hunt. This means getting to “good enough” as quickly as possible. Here you are playing for speed—how fast can you get back in the game. Think Google Android catching up to (and then overtaking) the Apple iPhone.
Optimization. To win here you produce essentially the same offer on a better, faster, cheaper basis. Basically, you are extracting resources from an established effort in order to hit a new price-point, repurpose them for innovation elsewhere or simply taking to the bottom line. Here you are playing neither for separation nor for speed but rather for money. Think Nokia’s long history of success with feature phones.

The critical thing to note about these three sources of return is that they are at odds with one another. If you are going to get maximum separation, you cannot tell exactly when that will occur, so you cannot play for speed. Conversely, if you are playing for speed, you must suppress any impulse to go beyond a “good enough” standard. But in both cases you are willing to spend extra money to achieve your primary goal, be that separation or speed. That puts both approaches at odds with optimization, where the goal is to extract cost from the system.

The net of this is that top-down management of innovation requires leaders to charter their innovation teams with one—and only one—of these objectives. Where you have multiple needs, you need multiple teams. To understand why, let’s turn to look at how innovation investments fail to pay off.

There are at least five ways this can happen, as follows:

The innovation doesn’t work. Ouch. But that is the price of playing innovation poker. In fact, if you have no failed experiments, you probably are not taking enough risk.
The differentiation doesn’t go far enough. Yes, you create something different, but it is a far cry from a 10X separation, and so the market accepts it as good but does not grant you any competitive advantage for it. Basically, you just spent your R&D budget and have nothing to pay you back for it. HP and Dell have both suffered here greatly in recent years.
The neutralization doesn’t go fast enough. The team got caught up in out-doing the competition rather than simply getting to good enough. The problem is, the market will not pay you any return on improvements beyond good enough, so all you have done here is waste time, which is the one thing you cannot afford to waste when your product is out of the game. Nokia was a prime offender here with respect to its tardy response to the iPhone challenge.
The optimization doesn’t go deep enough. Basically, you optimize around the edges and do not attack any of the sacred cows (typically meaning you do not touch either engineering or sales). The gains are minimal, and the bottlenecks that are holding you back are still deeply in place. Ginny Rometti made a version of this point in one of IBM’s earnings calls, but so could every other Tech 50 CEO in any given quarter. This is a really big problem because tech has never been good at optimization.
The innovation project blended two or more goals. The problem here is that either the differentiation goal slowed you down or the neutralization goal dumbed you down or the optimization goal tied you down. One way or another, you went down.

So the net here is simple. Managing innovation is a different discipline from innovating per se. It is all about controlling the charter, targeting one and only one kind of return, and then focusing the team solely on that set of outcomes. It isn’t all that cool. It is just very, very important.

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

Image Credit: Pexels

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Productive Disagreement Requires Trust

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Productive Disagreement Requires Trust

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When there’s disagreement between words and behavior, believe the behavior. This is especially true when the words deny the behavior.

When there’s disagreement between the data and the decision, the data is innocent.

When there’s agreement that there’s insufficient data but a decision must be made, there should be no disagreement that the decision is judgment-based.

When there’s disagreement on the fact that there’s no data to support the decision, that’s a problem.

When there’s disagreement on the path forward, it’s helpful to have agreement on the process to decide.

When there’s disagreement among professionals, there is no place for argument.

When there’s disagreement, there is respect for the individual and a healthy disrespect for the ideas.

When there’s disagreement, the decisions are better.

When there’s disagreement, there’s independent thinking.

When there’s disagreement, there is learning.

When there’s disagreement, there is vulnerability.

When there’s disagreement, there is courage.

When there’s disagreement, there is trust.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Imagination versus Knowledge

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Is imagination really more important?

Imagination versus Knowledge

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Is imagination really more important than knowledge? How does imagination link to catalyzing collective innovation and unleashing corporate vitality?

When I did my research, I discovered that the answer is actually paradoxical!

Albert Einstein famously said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Why is the answer so paradoxical?

According to a well-researched and scientific article “Einstein’s most famous quote is totally misunderstood” in BIGTHINK magazine, the author suggests that he’s really doing is encouraging people to look beyond the current, conservative frontiers of what we know and into the realm of what we’re compelled to explore next.

He describes that imagination, in Einstein’s mind, is shorthand for a thought experiment: to simulate the consequences of a theory in a regime that’s yet to be tested, where the imaginative predictions were all well-quantified far in advance of the observations/experiments.

Both knowledge and imagination

This means that for your imagination to take you to worthwhile places, you also need a strong foundation of knowledge of the subject to build your theory or idea.

This makes it a “both/and” paradox.

This means that you need both a deep knowledge of the subject or problem and a capacity to create, evolve and exploit mental models of things or situations that are often counterintuitive and counterfactual and don’t yet exist.

Doing this enables you to generate new lines of feeling and thinking, and to connect fields, problems, and ideas that others find unrelated. To ultimately inspire, and result in collective innovation.

How does this relate to innovation?

Most of us are already aware that companies increasingly need to innovate — across strategies, operations, offerings, and business models. Especially when business environments are experiencing a range of global and local crises, accelerating change and ongoing, relentless instability and uncertainty. Where many have become survival focused, and adopt a short-term reactive lens in attempts to restore “normality” and arrest a decline in long-term growth rates and competitiveness.

As well as arrest a serious decline in their corporate vitality. Which is crucial for long-term success, growth, and sustainability. Yet some companies are unaware that imagination is upstream of innovation. Sadly lack the focus towards entering this critical realm and leveraging it to stimulate a capacity for collective innovation which is needed for corporate vitality to thrive.

Corporate vitality enables organizations to thrive

An organizational culture that embraces corporate vitality enables them to thrive, by knowing how to shape visionary strategies in the imagination age that enables it to:

Rebound and reinvent themselves, under pressure.
Ignite people’s imagination to co-create ideas.
Collaborate to accelerate collective innovation.
Deliver and accelerate growth in a VUCA/BANI.

Yet, according to research by the BCG Hendersen Institute in an article “Competing on Imagination”

“Big businesses often struggle to make use of imagination. They may try to make it a predictable process, and end up with routine and incrementalism. Or they may treat it like a magical power, celebrated in tales of great innovators, in the hope that good ideas will appear as needed. As companies grow, it becomes harder to be imaginative. Larger companies tend to focus on exploiting what they know and what originally gave them scale”.

What else inhibits the development of corporate vitality?

The BCG research also reveals that most companies don’t yet know how to ignite people’s imagination. Which is required to co-create ideas and collaborate.

Often because they usually lack the motivation, rigor, and knowledge required to:

Clarify, ignite, and activate imagination: what it means and how it works at either an individual or collective level.

Which restricts an ability to develop the capacity required to deviate from the norm and emerge creative insights and breakthroughs, invent, and innovate on a scale.

Strategically and systematically improve the individual and collective capacity to imagine: which keeps them stuck within their own spheres, and focuses on averages rather than on exceptions.

This also restricts individual and collective investment in creating free time and space for daydreaming, mind wandering, and meandering into the unknown.

Cultivate individual and collective imaginative capacity through social transmissions: that evoke new questions and provocative ideas.

Which keeps them restricted to the confines of their own, or current mental models, rigid role parameters, and focus on metrics and conventional short-term siloed approaches.

Ultimately inhibiting our capacity to alter our cognitive habits, allowing our minds to make new associations, develop, and experiment with new ideas. That forms the foundations for cultivating a culture that catalyzes collective innovation and unleashes corporate vitality.

Taking a neurological approach

Research presented by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Dr Martin Seligman, in their recent book Tomorrow Mind enables us to take a neurological approach towards igniting people’s imagination – to arouse our curiosity and co-create ideas, that result in collective innovation.

Default Mode Network (DMN)

Stating that when we allow our minds to wander and daydream, our brain doesn’t just “power down.” Instead it “switches to a new mode of thinking, one so vital that it is our default – or the activity our brains jump to in every free moment” which specializes in two processes: imagining and planning.

This is known as our Default Mode Network (DMN). Which activates when we let our minds wander or drift into a daydream, to create spontaneous oscillations that allow us to observe novel thought streams and extract new patterns, generalizations, interpretations, and insights.

It is the place our best ideas come from.

Discovering what does not yet exist

In this realm, our minds break the bonds of space and time, blending memory and fantasy, creating an eternal cycle that dances between exploitation and exploration.

Allowing us to exploit our “knowns” and explore new possibilities by imagining scenes that differ radically from the actual past and the actual present, allowing us to discover and learn deeply about what does not yet exist.

What does this mean to organizations, leaders, and coaches?

Power of provocation

ImagineNation™ has pioneered innovation coaching by presenting The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, globally online for more than 10 years. To teach the traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills to ignite people’s imagination, based on our experience that consciousness, imagination, and curiosity are the precursors to both creativity and innovation.

Where consciousness contains the states and qualities of the mind, which is where our imagination is located, creativity is the process of bringing something new to the mind, and innovation is bringing the new to the world.

Being a disruptive provocateur

We teach participants to become “disruptive provocateurs” who know how to compassionately, creatively, and courageously create collective holding spaces.

That creates the permission, safe space, and trust for developing generative thinking processes that enable peoples to see and solve challenging problems that evoke and emerge new discoveries, and creative ideas and generate learning by:

Disrupting peoples’ habitual feelings and thought processes and comfort zones,
Co-creating the permission, safety, and trust to deviate and differ,
Space and time for elasticizing and stretching habitual thought processes.

Imagination can be provocative because it arouses scenes that differ radically from the actual past and the actual present. This allows us to discover and learn deeply about what does not yet exist. It enables us to focus on being intentional, in taking intelligent and right actions to solve the problem differently and develop corporate vitality.

Power of prospection

Developing the co-creative frequencies requires us to alter our cognitive habits, allowing our minds to make new associations, develop, and experiment with new ideas, and cultivate a culture that embraces corporate vitality. This involves the capacity to imagine alternate futures, and developing prospection skills – “the ability within each of us to think about the future and envision what’s possible.”

According to USA-based leading global coaching platform BetterUps’ Report on the Future Minded Leader:

“Imagining ourselves into alternate futures and evaluating them as a way to make decisions and guide present action is unique”.

These occupy at least one-quarter of our waking thoughts, and when it comes to imagining the future, we are at once both our most optimistic and pessimistic selves, which is, in essence, also contradictory. Because we can both project optimism about what is to come and make risk-averse decisions to build the foundations for envisioning a range of desirable and alternate futures.

Sparking corporate vitality

Building an “imagination machine” – an organization where the imagination of individuals work together is fully supported intentionally and by design involves creating space for our Default Mode Networks (DMN) to activate and lay the foundations for collective innovation by:

Creating space and time for reflection enables people to regain control of their attention and minds, and to allow spontaneous, generative mind wandering – by engaging in simple activities like walking, reading, bathing, exercising, and free writing.
Making it safe and permissible to regularly expose people to the unfamiliar and the unknown – by building their discomfort resilience, provoking and elasticizing their core and habitual thinking processes.
Coaching, teaching, and training people to view their worlds systemically, to wander and daydream at the edges of the social fields – to sense, perceive and emerge anomalies, and counterintuitive and counterfactual patterns and trends.
Coaching, teaching, and training people to safely disrupt and challenge their habitual mental models – by creating mindset flips and paradigm shifts, developing their curiosity, and enhancing their cognitive diversity and agility.
Introducing more playfulness into the working environment – by improvising, exploring, introducing business simulations, and learning events, as well as gamification, to generate insights, that saturate us with ideas that we can then incubate.

Imagination, collective innovation, and corporate vitality

When we combine a rigorous approach to expanding and applying both our knowledge and our imagination, we can co-create ideas, and innovate in ways that illuminate people’s hearts and minds.

By altering and elasticizing our cognitive habits, allowing our minds to make new associations and unlikely connections, we can develop, and experiment with new ideas, and cultivate a culture that leverages and scales collective innovation that unleashes real corporate vitality.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Why Most Corporate Innovation Programs Fail

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(And How To Make Them Succeed)

Why Most Corporate Innovation Programs Fail

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Today, everybody needs to innovate. So it shouldn’t be surprising that corporate innovation programs have become wildly popular. There is an inherent tradeoff between innovation and the type of optimization that operational executives excel at. Creating a separate unit to address innovation just makes intuitive sense.

Yet corporate innovation programs often fail and it’s not hard to see why. Unlike other business functions, like marketing or finance, in a healthy organization everybody takes pride in their ability to innovate. Setting up a separate innovation unit can often seem like an affront to those who work hard to innovate in operational units.

Make no mistake, a corporate innovation program is no panacea. It doesn’t replace the need to innovate every day. Yet a well designed program can augment those efforts, take the business in new directions and create real value. The key to a successful innovation program is to develop a clear purpose built on a shared purpose that can solve important problems.

A Good Innovation Program Extends, It Doesn’t Replace

It’s no secret that Alphabet is one of the most powerful companies in the world. Nevertheless, it has a vulnerability that is often overlooked. Much like Xerox and Kodak decades ago, it’s highly dependent on a single revenue stream. In 2018, 86% of its revenues came from advertising, mostly from its Google search business.

It is with this in mind that the company created its X division. Because the unit was set up to pursue opportunities outside of its core search business, it didn’t encounter significant resistance. In fact, the X division is widely seen as an extension of what made Alphabet so successful in the first place.

Another important aspect is that the X division provides a platform to incubate internal projects. For example, Google Brain started out as a “20% time project.” As it progressed and needed more resources, it was moved to the X division, where it was scaled up further. Eventually, it returned to the mothership and today is an integral part of the core business.

Notice how the vision of the X division was never to replace innovation efforts in the core business, but to extend them. That’s been a big part of its success and has led to exciting new business like Waymo autonomous vehicles and the Verily healthcare division.

Focus On Commonality, Not Difference

All too often, innovation programs thrive on difference. They are designed to put together a band of mavericks and disruptors who think differently than the rest of the organization. That may be great for instilling a strong esprit de corps among those involved with the innovation program, but it’s likely to alienate others.

As I explain in Cascades, any change effort must be built on shared purpose and shared values. That’s how you build trust and form the basis for effective collaboration between the innovation program and the rest of the organization. Without those bonds of trust, any innovation effort is bound to fail.

You can see how that works in Alphabet’s X division. It is not seen as fundamentally different from the core Google business, but rather as channeling the company’s strengths in new directions. The business opportunities it pursues may be different, but the core values are the same.

The key question to ask is why you need a corporate innovation program in the first place. If the answer is that you don’t feel your organization is innovative enough, then you need to address that problem first. A well designed innovation program can’t be a band-aid for larger issues within the core business.

Executive Sponsorship Isn’t Enough

Clearly, no corporate innovation program can be successful without strong executive sponsorship. Commitment has to come from the top. Yet just as clearly, executive sponsorship isn’t enough. Unless you can build support among key stakeholders inside and outside the organization, support from the top is bound to erode.

For example, when Eric Haller started Datalabs at Experian, he designed it to be focused on customers, rather than ideas developed internally. “We regularly sit down with our clients and try and figure out what’s causing them agita,” he told me, “because we know that solving problems is what opens up enormous business opportunities for us.”

Because the Datalabs units works directly with customers to solve problems that are important to them, it has strong support from a key stakeholder group. Another important aspect at Datalabs is that once a project gets beyond the prototype stage it goes to one of the operational units within the company to be scaled up into a real business. Over the past five years businesses originated at Datalabs have added over $100 million in new revenues.

Perhaps most importantly, Haller is acutely aware how innovation programs can cause resentment, so he works hard to reduce tensions through building collaborations around the organization. Datalabs is not where “innovation happens” at Experian. Rather it serves to augment and expand capabilities that were already there.

Don’t Look For Ideas, Identify Meaningful Problems

Perhaps most importantly, an innovation program should not be seen as a place to generate ideas. The truth is that ideas can come from anywhere. So designating one particular program in which ideas are supposed to happen will not only alienate the rest of the organization, it is also likely to overlook important ideas generated elsewhere.

The truth is that innovation isn’t about ideas. It’s about solving problems. In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I came across dozens of stories from every conceivable industry and field and it always started with someone who came across a problem they wanted to solve. Sometimes, it happened by chance, but in most cases I found that great innovators were actively looking for problems that interested them.

If you look at successful innovation programs like Alphabet’s X division and Experian’s Datalabs, the fundamental activity is exploration. X division explores domains outside of search, while Datalabs explores problems that its customers need solved. Once you identify a meaningful problem, the ideas will come.

That’s the real potential of innovation programs. They provide a space to explore areas that don’t fit with the current business, but may play an important role in its future. A good innovation program doesn’t replace capabilities in the core organization, but leverages them to create new opportunities.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Do you ever admit you don’t know?

Scale Your Innovation by Mapping Your Value Network

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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

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

3 Ways to Make Smarter Decisions – Confidently

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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

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Keynote Speaker & Futurist – Braden Kelley

Category Archives: Innovation

Innovation Management ISO 56000 Series Explained

The paradox of standardizing innovation

ISO 56000 Suite for Innovation

ISO 56000 Innovation management — Fundamentals and vocabulary:

ISO 56002 Innovation management system

The Pros and Cons of ISO Standards for Innovation

What Next?

Conclusion

A Top-Down Open Innovation Approach

Productive Disagreement Requires Trust

Imagination versus Knowledge

Is imagination really more important?

Why is the answer so paradoxical?

How does this relate to innovation?

Corporate vitality enables organizations to thrive

What else inhibits the development of corporate vitality?

Taking a neurological approach

What does this mean to organizations, leaders, and coaches?

Imagination, collective innovation, and corporate vitality

Why Most Corporate Innovation Programs Fail

(And How To Make Them Succeed)

A Good Innovation Program Extends, It Doesn’t Replace

Focus On Commonality, Not Difference

Executive Sponsorship Isn’t Enough

Don’t Look For Ideas, Identify Meaningful Problems

Do you ever admit you don’t know?

Scale Your Innovation by Mapping Your Value Network

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

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

3 Ways to Make Smarter Decisions – Confidently

When you decide, you lose

No decision is the worst decision

Decide how to decide

It’s your decision