Teaching at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) offers a unique perspective. By day, I engage with seasoned business professionals. By night, I interact with budding designers and artists, each group bringing vastly different experiences to the table.
Customer-centricity is the hill I will die on… In my Product Innovation Lab course, students learn the innovation process and work in small teams to apply those lessons to the products they create.
We spend the first quarter of the course to problem-finding. It’s excruciating for everyone. Like their counterparts in business and engineering, they’re bursting with ideas, and they hate being slowed down. Despite data proving that poor product-market fit a leading cause of start-up failure and that 54% of innovations launched by big companies fail to reach $1M in sales (a paltry number given the scale of surveyed companies), they’re convinced their ideas are flawless.
We spend two weeks exploring Jobs to be Done and practicing interviewing techniques. But their first conversations sound more like interrogations than anything we did in class.
They return from their interviews and share what they learned. After each insight, I ask, “Why is that?” or “Why is that important?
Amazingly, they have answers.
While their first conversations were interrogations, once the nervousness fades, they remember their training, engage in conversations, and discover surprising and wonderful answers.
Yet the still prioritize the answers to “What” over answers to “Why?”
…Because it’s the hill that will kill me. Every year, this cycle repeats. This year, I finally asked why, after weeks of learning that the answers to What questions are almost always wrong and Why questions are the only path to the right answers (and differentiated solutions with a sustainable competitive advantage), why do they still prioritize the What answers?
The answer was a dagger to my heart.
“That’s what the boss wants to know,” a student explained. “Bosses just want to know what we need to build so they can tell engineering what to make. They don’t care why we should make it or whether it’s different. In fact, it’s better if it’s not different.”
I tried to stay professional, but there was definitely a sarcastic tone when I asked how that was working.
“We haven’t launched anything in 18 months because no one likes what we build. We spend months on prototypes, show them to users, and they hate it. Then, when we ask the researchers to do more research because their last insights were wrong, they get all cra….OOOOHHHHHHHH…..”
(insert clouds parting, beams of sunlight shining down, and a choir of angels here)
“That’s why the researchers are so sad all the time! They always try to tell us the “Whys” behind the “Whats” but no one wants to hear it. We just want to know what to build to get to work. But we could create something people love if we understood why today’s things don’t work!”
Honestly, I didn’t know whether to drop the mic in triumph or flip the table in rage.
Ignorance may be bliss but obsolescence is not It’s easy to ignore customers.
To send them surveys with pre-approved answers choices that can be quickly analyzed and neatly presented to management. To build exactly what customers tell you to build, even though you’re the expert on what’s possible and they only know what’s needed.
It’s easy to point to the surveys and prototypes and claim you are customer-centric. If only the customers would cooperate.
It’s much harder to listen to customers. To ask questions, listen to answers you don’t want to hear, and repeat those answers to more powerful people who want to hear them even less. To have the courage to share rough prototypes and to take the time to be curious when customers call them ugly.
So, if you want to be happy, keep pretending to care about your customers.
Pretty soon, you won’t have any left to bother you.
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High-performing teams are often perceived as having extraordinary talents and capabilities, but they are not that different from regular teams—at least in terms of composition. Research indicates that high-performing teams are not just about having exceptionally talented individuals. Instead, they excel in understanding how to collaborate effectively and harness the diverse talents within the team.
In other words, talent doesn’t make the team. The team makes the talent.
The foundational quality that turns everyday people into members of a high-performing team is common understanding, sometimes called shared understanding or collective intelligence. Common understanding encompasses a shared grasp of the team’s collective expertise, assigned tasks, personality differences, work preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. This understanding can be broken down into two crucial aspects for leaders: clarity and empathy.
In this article, we’ll outline the importance of common understanding and provide practical ways to build clarity and empathy on any team.
1. Clarity
Clarity within a team is about ensuring that every member comprehends their roles and responsibilities, tasks, and deadlines. When team members have a clear understanding of what is expected of them and their teammates, they are more engaged, more productive, and even more collaborative. Clarity also allows individuals to operate within their sweet spot of capabilities, avoiding boredom or feeling overwhelmed.
One activity that can establish and maintain clarity on a team is the regular huddle. A huddle is a short, sync-up session where team members answer questions like, “What did I just complete? What am I focused on next? What’s blocking my progress?” These questions help everyone stay aligned, distribute tasks, set deadlines, and offer support when needed. Huddles promote transparency and keep everyone accountable, making it easier to identify issues and slackers without micromanaging.
2. Empathy
Empathy within a team means understanding the perspectives, strengths, weaknesses, work preferences, and factors that influence each team member’s behavior. This deeper understanding leads to reduced conflicts and enhanced collaboration. Team members who empathize with one another can tailor their communication and actions to suit the needs and preferences of their colleagues.
A powerful tool for building empathy in a team is creating “Manuals of Me.” In this activity, each team member provides insights into themselves by answering four fill-in-the-blank questions: “I’m at my best when_____. I’m at my worst when_____. You can count on me to_____. What I need from you is_____.” These manuals shed light on individual characteristics, strengths, and preferences, helping team members understand each other better.
The Manuals of Me exercise is an invaluable tool for addressing conflicts and on-boarding new team members. By sharing these manuals with the entire team and discussing how they can adapt their behavior based on the information, a team can build empathy and trust.
Building common understanding through clarity and empathy is the foundation of high-performing teams. It fosters a sense of unity and shared purpose, helping team members leverage each other’s unique skills and talents to achieve common goals. By fostering clarity and empathy in your team, you can build a strong common understanding that drives collaboration, reduces conflict, and helps everyone do their best work ever.
If you research why certain countries are leaders and others are laggards in high performance teamwork, you quickly see that Norway and thus the Norwegian society has several notable characteristics that contribute to the success of high-performance teams in business and organizations.
Note: Thank you to those who joined me in Oslo to discuss high-performance teams and explore my new and developing concept of High Performance Zones for Teams: Trust, Empowerment, and Collaboration.
Here are a few key factors for Norway in the context of high-performance:
High Levels of Trust: Norwegian society is characterized by high trust both in institutions and among individuals. This trust extends into the workplace, where there is a strong belief in the reliability and integrity of colleagues. High trust environments can enhance collaboration and the sharing of ideas, which are crucial for high-performance teams.
Flat Organizational Structures: Norwegian companies often favor flat organizational structures over hierarchical ones. This promotes open communication and a sense of equality among team members, enabling quicker decision-making and greater flexibility – important attributes for high-performance teams.
Work-Life Balance: Norway places a strong emphasis on work-life balance, which helps maintain high levels of job satisfaction and motivation among employees. Well-rested and well-rounded employees are more likely to contribute positively to their teams.
Focus on Consensus-Building: In Norwegian business culture, there is a tendency towards consensus-building rather than top-down decision-making. This approach ensures that various perspectives are considered and that team members are committed to the agreed-upon course of action, leading to more sustainable and effective team performance.
Investment in Employee Development: There is a significant investment in training and development within Norwegian organizations. A well-trained workforce with opportunities for continuous learning and improvement can adapt and perform better in dynamic business environments.
Innovation and Technological Adaptation: Norway is well-known for its adaptation of new technologies and innovation. High-performance teams often leverage cutting-edge technologies and new practices to maintain competitive advantages.
These aspects of Norwegian society and organizational culture provide a supportive environment for cultivating high-performance teams, which are essential for achieving exceptional outcomes in business and other fields.
How does your country compare on these six factors? Please share, and let’s discuss.
Image Credits: Pixabay
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Corporate offsites – the phrase conjures images of everything from “mandatory fun” with colleagues to long and exhausting days debating strategy with peers. Rarely are the images something that entice people to sit up and shout, “YEA!” But what if the reality could be something YEA! worthy?
Offsites May Be the Answer to the WFH vs. RTO Debate
Offsites aren’t new but they’ve taken on a new role and new significance as companies grapple with how to manage Work from Home (WFH) and Return To Office (RTO) policies.
As with most things in life, the pendulum swings from one extreme to another until eventually, finally, landing in a stable and neutral midpoint. When the pandemic hit, we swung from every day in the office to every day at home. Then society opened back up and corporate landlords came calling for rent, whether or not people were in the offices, so we swung back to Return to Office mandates.
Offsites, the authors suggest, may be the happy medium between the two extremes because offsites:
“give people opportunities for interactions that otherwise might not happen. Offsites create unique opportunities for employees to connect in person, forming new relationships and strengthening existing ones. As a result, offsites help people learn about others’ knowledge and build interpersonal trust, which are both critical ingredients for effective collaboration.”
Offsite Connections Lead to Collaborations that Generate ROI
After analyzing eight years of data from a global firm’s offsites and 350,000 “instances of formal working relationships” for 750 employees, the authors found that intentionally designed offsites (more on that in a moment) yield surprisingly measurable and lasting results:
24% more incoming requests for collaboration amongst attendees post vs. pre-offsite (silos busted!)
17% of new connections were still active two years after the offsite (lasting change!)
$180,000 in net new revenue from collaborations within the first two months post offsite (real results!)
The benefits event extended to non-attendees because they “seemed to get the message that collaboration is important and wanted to demonstrate their commitment to being collaborative team players” and “likely identified new collaborators after the offsite through referrals.”
How to Design Offsites That Get Results
Four key strategies emerged from the authors’ research and work with over 100 other organizations:
Design for the people in the audience, not the people on stage. Poll attendees to understand their specific needs and goals, then design collaborative activities, not management monologues.
Design for the new hires, not the tenured execs. Create opportunities for new hires to meet, connect with, and work alongside more experienced colleagues.
Set and communicate clear goals and expectations. Once the offsite is designed and before it happens, tell people what to expect (the agenda) and why to expect it (your design intentions and goals). Also, tell them how to make the most of the offsite opportunities by thinking about the skill and network gaps they want to fill.
Track activities to measure ROI. The connections, collaborations, and commitments that start at the offsite need to continue after it in the form of ongoing communication, greater collaboration, and talent engagement. Yes, conduct a post-event survey immediately after the event but keep measuring every 2-3 months until the next offsite. The data will reveal how well you performed against your goals and how to do even better the next time.
Offsites can be a powerful tool to build an organization’s culture and revenue, but only if they are thoughtfully designed to go beyond swanky settings, sermons from the stage, and dust-collecting swag and build the connections and collaborations that only start when people are together, in-person, outside of the office.
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If you’re asked to do cost reduction, before doing that work, ask for objective evidence that the work to grow the top line is adequately staffed. You can’t secure your company’s future through cost reduction, so before you spend time and effort to grow the bottom line, make sure the work to grow the top line is more than fully staffed. Without top-line growth, cost reduction is nothing more than a race to the bottom.
If you’re asked to do more of what was done last time, before doing that work, look back and plot how that line of goodness has improved over time. If the goodness over time is flat (it hasn’t increased), the technology is mature, there’s nothing left, and you should improve something else (a new line of goodness). If the goodness continues to increase over time, ask customers if it’s already good enough. Do this by asking if they’d pay more for more goodness. If they won’t pay more, it’s already good enough. Stop work on that tired, old line of goodness and work on a new one. If goodness over time is still increasing and customers will pay more, teach someone else how to improve that line of goodness so you can establish the next line of goodness which will be needed when the old one gets tired.
If you’re asked to make your product do more, before doing that work, figure out if the planet will be better off if your product does more. If the planet will frown if your product does more, make your product do less with far less. In that way, your customers will get a bit less, but they’ll use far fewer resources and the planet will smile. And when the planet smiles, so will the stockholders of the company that provides less with far less.
If you’re asked to improve a specific line of goodness, before doing that work, look to see if competitive technologies are also improving on that same line of goodness. If their improvement slope is steeper than yours, you will be overtaken. Find a new line of goodness to improve, or buy the dominant company in that’s making progress with the competitive technology. Don’t wait, or sooner rather than later, they’ll buy you.
If you’re asked to make your product do more, before doing that work, look at the byproducts that will increase and how that relates to the regulatory standards. If those nasty byproducts are (or will be) regulated, future improvements will be blocked by regulatory limits. You can argue about when those limits will be a problem, but you can’t argue that those regulatory limits will ultimately take you out by the knees. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s time to look to a new technology because your existing one will soon be outlawed.
Everything changes. Nothing is static. Technologies get better, then it’s difficult to make the next improvement. Competitors get better, then it’s difficult to be better than them. Environmental constraints get tighter, then you’re legally blocked from improvements that violate those constraints. Last year’s solutions become obsolete. Last year’s analysis tools become obsolete. Last year’s best materials are no longer best. And last year’s manufacturing best processes are no longer best. That’s just how it works.
Before you allocate precious resources to do what you did last time, spend a little time to analyze the situation in a dynamic sense. What changed since last time? Has the regulatory environment changed? Have competitors made improvements? Have new competitors emerged with new technologies? Has your legacy technology run out of gas or does it still have legs? Have new tools come of age and who is using them?
Everything has a half-life – technologies, products, services, tools, processes, business models, and people. When new things are come to be, the only thing you can guarantee is that time will run out and they will run their course. Even if your business model has been successful, it has a half-life and it will die.
Success causes us to think statically, but the universe behaves dynamically. The trick is to use the resources created by our success to sow the seeds that must grow into the solutions of an uncertain future. The best time to plant a tree was fifteen years ago, and the next best time to plant one is today.
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Team building is a crucial element of creating a strong team culture. Understanding each other’s differences and preferences is a vital step in becoming a high-performing team. But many leaders struggle to find and deliver effective team building exercises. There are many too choose from, and many fall short. So many exercises focus solely on getting teammates to understand each other’s differences—often expressed as personality, identity, or experiences.
But for team building exercises to work, teams can’t just understand each other. They need to understand each other’s behavior.
And that’s what makes the “manual of me” activity the single best team building exercise. Instead of assigning different letters or numbers to different team members based on personality. It focuses on having teammates share their different work preferences. This tool allows team members to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s strengths, weaknesses, preferred environments, and working preferences. And over time, teams become be able to coordinate and even predict each other’s behavior.
In this article, we will delve into the concept of a Manual of Me, how to construct one, and the benefits of sharing and collecting these manuals within the team.
The “Manual of Me”
The Manual of Me is a powerful tool that enables team members to gain insights into each other’s behavior and preferences. It consists of a core of four, fill-in-the-blank questions: “I’m at my best when _____,” “I’m at my worst when _____,” “You can count on me to _____,” and “What I need from you is _____.”
By discussing these questions, team members can understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, preferred environments, and working preferences. This understanding is crucial for creating a harmonious and productive team culture.
Constructing a Manual of Me
Constructing a Manual of Me involves a conversation within the team where each member shares their answers to the four core questions. Before starting the activity, it is important to inform the team about the purpose and provide them with the template and questions ahead of time.
The first question, “I’m at my best when _____,” focuses on identifying individual strengths, preferred activities, and environments for optimal performance. This question allows team members to understand how they can bring their best selves to the team.
The second question, “I’m at my worst when _____,” helps identify tasks and environments where individuals may struggle or under-perform. By understanding these limitations, team members can provide support and create an environment that minimizes challenges.
The third question, “You can count on me to _____,” highlights each person’s contributions and areas where they can provide help to the team. This question promotes collaboration and allows team members to leverage each other’s strengths.
The fourth question, “What I need from you is _____,” identifies areas where individuals need support or assistance from others. This question fosters open communication and helps team members understand how they can best support each other.
Additional questions can be added to the Manual of Me based on the team’s industry and level of familiarity with each other. These questions can delve deeper into specific aspects of work or personal preferences that are relevant to the team’s dynamics.
Sharing and Collecting Manuals of Me
Once each team member has shared their answers, there should be time for discussion and clarification. This allows team members to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s perspectives and preferences.
The completed Manuals of Me can be in various formats such as PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, or videos. It is important to choose a format that is easily accessible and can be stored in a shared folder or platform where the team can easily access them.
The ongoing conversation and understanding fostered by the Manuals of Me can lead to improved collaboration and performance within the team. By referring back to these manuals, team members can ensure that they are effectively supporting each other and leveraging their strengths.
When new team members join, they can be introduced to the Manuals of Me and encouraged to share their own once they feel comfortable. This helps integrate new members into the team and ensures that everyone is on the same page.
The Manual of Me is a powerful team building exercise that promotes understanding and collaboration within a team. By discussing strengths, weaknesses, preferred environments, and working preferences, team members can create a strong team culture and enhance their performance. The ongoing conversation and understanding fostered by the Manuals of Me can lead to improved collaboration and performance within the team.
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations are recognizing the importance of not just their customers’ experience, but also their employees’. The concept of employee experience encompasses every touchpoint a worker encounters from recruitment to retirement. However, what often remains underappreciated is the systematic examination of this experience through regular audits. Today, we’ll explore why annual employee experience audits are critical for any forward-thinking organization.
Understanding Employee Experience
The employee experience can be defined as the sum total of all interactions an employee has with their employer. This includes the culture, the physical workspace, tools and technology provided, leadership behavior, and organizational practices. Together, these elements shape how employees perceive their organization and directly influence engagement, productivity, and retention.
The Need for Regular Audits
Conducting regular audits of the employee experience is crucial for several reasons:
Identifying Pain Points: Just as businesses conduct customer journey mapping to understand customer pain points, employee experience audits help uncover hidden obstacles impacting employee satisfaction and performance.
Measuring Impact of Changes: Organizations implement initiatives to improve the work environment regularly. Audits provide a structured approach to assess the impact of these initiatives, offering insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Aligning with Strategic Goals: As companies evolve, ensuring that the employee experience aligns with the organization’s strategic goals becomes imperative. Audits help in recalibrating experiences to support these objectives.
The Benefits of Annual Audits
Moving from sporadic reviews to a structured annual audit brings several benefits:
Enhanced Engagement: Regular audits demonstrate a commitment to employee well-being, fostering a culture of trust and transparency which enhances overall engagement.
Improved Retention: By identifying factors that contribute to dissatisfaction or turnover, organizations can proactively address issues, making it easier to retain top talent.
Informed Decision Making: Comprehensive data from audits enable leaders to make informed decisions about policies, benefits, and strategic initiatives that can enhance the employee experience.
What a Complete Employee Experience Audit Looks Like
A thorough employee experience audit should include several key components:
Comprehensive Surveys: Distribute surveys that cover a wide range of topics including workplace culture, management effectiveness, communication, work-life balance, career development, and employee satisfaction.
Focus Groups and Interviews: Conduct focus groups and one-on-one interviews that allow employees to provide detailed feedback and personal insights that might not surface through surveys alone.
Observation: Observe working conditions, team dynamics, and workflow interactions to gain an understanding of the daily employee experience.
Data Analysis: Analyze HR data, turnover rates, and performance metrics to identify trends and areas needing improvement.
Technology and Tool Assessment: Evaluate the tools and technologies available to employees for their effectiveness in enhancing productivity and satisfaction.
Leadership and Management Review: Assess leadership styles and their alignment with employee needs and organizational values.
Feedback Loop: Establish a mechanism for continuous feedback and updates to the audit process to ensure it evolves with organizational changes.
What An Employee Experience Audit IS NOT
An employee experience audit is not an employee experience survey. Like a financial audit, it should also typically be conducted by a small group from outside the organization to maintain objectivity and honesty in the observations, devoid of assumptions and rationalizations of design tradeoffs. Employee experience auditors are trying as much as possible to walk in the shoes of employees across channels for key activities and so they must not be isolated from key systems or key employee groups to determine the most important activities and systems to dive the deepest into the experience of.
An employee experience audit is not a solution but research with recommendations. It is worthless without a commitment to act on the findings found. The leadership commitment and plans for how deficiencies will be addressed is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than how the employee experience audit is conducted.
Implementing Effective Audits
For an audit to be effective, it should be thorough and inclusive. Consider the following steps:
Define Objectives: Clearly outline what you aim to achieve with the audit.
Utilize Surveys and Interviews: Gather quantitative and qualitative data through employee surveys and interviews.
Analyze Data: Use data analytics to identify trends and patterns. Pay attention to anomalies and outliers.
Actionable Recommendations: Transform insights into actionable steps that can be implemented to drive positive change.
Leadership Commitment: Secure commitment from leadership to fund and implement the greatest improvement opportunities identified during the audit.
Conclusion
The workplace is fundamentally changing, and so too must our approach to understanding it. Annual employee experience audits provide a robust framework for consistently enhancing the environments we create for our workforces. In doing so, we not only improve the lives of our employees but also drive innovation, loyalty, and performance that propels our organizations forward. But an employee experience audit is not the same thing as an employee survey. It is instead an outside-in evaluation of the experience employees have while executing key activities across key systems. By embedding an annual employee experience audit practice into our routine, we fortify the human connection at the heart of every successful enterprise.
If you would like to team up to conduct an Employee Experience Audit at your company, please contact me and we can get you on the calendar to meet with our team.
Image credits: Pixabay
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Content Authenticity Statement: The core premise and structure for this article was created by Braden Kelley. The OpenAI Playground, taking on the role of human-centered change and innovation thought leader Braden Kelley has helped to flesh out the content of the article with supplementary content added by Braden Kelley, including the section on What An Employee Experience Audit IS NOT.
It’s that time of year again – the annual ritual of strategic planning. But as Seth Godin points out in “How to Avoid Strategy Myopia,” we often mistake annual budgets and operational efficiency plans for true strategy. Strategies are not plans or guarantees; they’re informed choices to pursue possibilities that may or may not work.
Godin’s insights, while often associated with innovation, are fundamentally about strategy in its purest form. They challenge us to look beyond next quarter’s earnings and focus on transformative potential just beyond our current vision.
The Myth of “Strategic Planning”
Consider for a moment the last strategic planning session you attended. Was it dominated by discussions of cost-cutting measures, market share percentages, and incremental improvements? If so, you’re not alone. Many organizations focus on optimizing their current operations, behavior that is reinforced by the processes, templates, and forms required to secure next year’s funding.
However, as Godin warns, “When the boss demands a strategy that comes with certainty and proof, we’re likely to settle for a collection of chores, tasks, and tactics, which is not the same as an elegant, resilient strategy. To do strategy right, we need to lean into possibility.”
The Realities We Must Confront
Godin challenges us to confront several uncomfortable truths:
Today’s data doesn’t predict tomorrow: Executives rely heavily on easily measurable metrics based on false proxies when they make decisions. While these metrics provide a sense of control and comfort, they close our eyes to emerging opportunities and threats. When AT&T’s executives considered exiting the cell phone market in the 1980s, they turned to McKinsey to find data to inform their decision. Estimating that the total worldwide market for cell phones was 900,000, AT&T executives were comfortable exiting. It’s unknown if that comfort was worth the $11.5 billion AT&T spent to acquire McCaw Cellular in 1995.
Serving everyone serves no one: “Strategy myopia occurs when we fail to identify who we seek to serve and focus on what we seek to produce instead.” AMEN! True strategy begins with a deep understanding of our customers’ evolving needs, not just their current preferences. This requires empathy, foresight, and a willingness to challenge our assumptions. It also requires us to listen and act on what we hear from customers and not just from our bosses.
“All of the Above” is not an option: Strategy requires that we make choices and is as much about what we choose not to do as what we commit to doing. It requires the courage to say no to good opportunities in service of great ones. It requires facing your FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), loss aversion bias, and finding the courage to keep going.
5 Practical Steps You Can Take
If any of these sound familiar, it’s because they’re also innovation best practices.
Dedicate One Day per Month for Strategic Thinking: Set aside one full day each month for long-term strategic questions, free from the “Tyranny of Now.”
Cultivate Diverse Perspectives: Invite and listen to voices from different backgrounds, disciplines, and levels within the organization.
Embrace Small-Scale Experimentation: Run a series of small, low-cost, low-profile experiments instead of betting everything on a single initiative.
Redefine Success Metrics: Move beyond traditional financial metrics to include indicators of future potential, such as customer lifetime value and adaptability to change.
Foster a Culture of Questioning: Channel your inner two-year-old and ask “why” with genuine curiosity. Encourage your team to challenge assumptions because the most transformative strategies often emerge from questioning the status quo.
As we continue through this season of strategic planning, let’s challenge ourselves to think beyond the annual budget. Let’s envision the future we want to create and chart a course to get there. After all, in the words of Godin himself, “It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.”
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Looking back at the beginning of this decade now that we’re closing in on the halfway point, it’s clearly been a wild ride!
We’ve had a global pandemic, groundbreaking technological breakthroughs, geopolitical shocks, supply chain disruptions, and so much more.
These challenges have revealed a critical truth: organizations need to adapt and innovate faster than ever before.
Add to this the tough economic climate, shrinking capital availability, the disillusionment many business leaders feel toward their innovation teams (sometimes justified, sometimes less so), and we’re looking at a highly turbulent environment for corporate innovation.
The mandate has never been so clear: deliver more results, faster, and with fewer resources. For seasoned innovators, that’s just business as usual. However, structural shifts are poised to reshape the innovation management landscape.
With that background, here’s our take on the top trends to watch in 2025.
1. Innovation as a Distributed Core Capability
With tighter budgets, the rise of AI and other transformative technologies, the pressing need for organizations to reinvent themselves, and you can see why innovation is increasingly owned by individual business units.
This shift can arise from necessity—businesses needing to transform—or simply from a desire for better strategic alignment and more measurable outcomes.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a need for innovation expertise, but the role of corporate innovators is undoubtedly evolving. Instead of driving innovation directly, they are now enablers and educators, equipping the broader organization to innovate effectively. Embodying this phenomenon is TD Bank, for example:
“The program is truly driven by each line of business—we’re here as a tool to empower their innovation, not to direct it.”
– Josh Death, VP of Intellectual Property and Ideation at TD Bank.
To pull that off, every organization needs to have 3 key elements in place:
Innovation is now at a similar transition point as IT was during the digital transformation era a couple of decades ago: the exact method and approach can be debated, but one thing is clear: every organization must embed innovation as a core capability. Just as some organizations are “digital natives,” the situation is the same for “innovation natives.”
Frameworks, toolkits, and best practices: Innovation isn’t (always) rocket science, but you still need to know what you’re doing. To pull this off, the organization needs to provide its employees with practical tools, frameworks and practices, preferably in the format of a well-designed Innovation System or Program. The recently published ISO 56000 series of standards is now a great starting point, but they need to be complemented with tools that innovators across the organization can use.
Education, coaching, and enablement: A good framework serves as an efficient and effective launching pad, but without proper education, most employees won’t benefit from it. This is where corporate innovation leaders play a key role. They need to organize education and enablement for innovators across the organization, and coach people on how to get past common obstacles. However, doing that at the scale of a large organization is complex—that’s where programs such as The Innovation System, which is included for all HYPE software customers, can be highly effective.
Scalable and adaptive system support: To get measurable outcomes from innovation, you need to operationalize your program. Even the best designed programs with highly effective leaders and coaches can struggle to scale their work and get the outcomes they want without proper system support. That’s where a holistic innovation platform, such as the HYPE Suite, can play a key supporting role.
Generative AI has been the focus of most of the hype around AI lately, and for good reason, but there’s more to AI than that. When you combine the latest generative AI models with proven innovation best practices, more traditional machine learning algorithms, and data from your innovation ecosystem, you have a powerful toolkit that enables a variety of different use cases.
AI can:
Analyze and structure large datasets.
Provide actionable recommendations.
Help users locate relevant information more efficiently.
Detect market signals earlier.
Generate novel ideas.
Coach innovators to enhance their work.
The common denominator for all of them is that AI can help streamline, automate, and accelerate work, and provide easier access to information and skills that used to be the domain of only a few experts within the organization.
However, scaling AI’s benefits isn’t without challenges. Most employees aren’t going to be expert prompters or data analysts that know all the right innovation best practices. So, to unlock the real benefits of using AI, you’re going to need a capable system that is specifically designed for corporate innovation and deeply integrated with AI across the board. When deployed right, AI can help democratize, scale and accelerate innovation like never before.
3. Democratization of Innovation
The third trend builds on the first two. As innovation becomes a core capability better supported by tools, processes, and technology, it will also become more democratized.
Here are the three key shifts are driving this transformation:
Innovation tools, frameworks, and best practices are becoming more widely available, understood, and easier to use: This makes it easier for anyone that wants to be an innovator to get started on the right path and avoid many of the common beginner mistakes.
Technology reduces barriers to entry: Thanks to technologies such as 3D printing, low or no-code software, and Gen AI, it’s never been easier, faster, and cheaper to prototype innovations, whether focused on digital solutions, physical products, or process improvements.
Organizations are looking for more bottom up, employee and team-led innovation and intrapreneurship: Corporate innovation is no longer solely driven by top management. While management needs to set the strategy and targets, more and more organizations are looking towards empowering their employees to help them get where they want to go. It all starts from ideas, but self-organized teams, business units, and intrapreneurship programs are all on the rise. Companies increasingly want to encourage employees to think and act more like entrepreneurs.
When you put all three together, they create a powerful combination that can propel organizations to new heights of innovation and growth.
4. Partner Innovation and the Venture Client Model
No organization, no matter how large or powerful, can house all the best talent on every topic. That’s why the “Not Invented Here” syndrome can be particularly dangerous.
When you need to move fast, and do so with a lower budget, your best bet is to leverage talent from outside your organization.
The trick? Partnering with leaders and early movers in your area of interest to accelerate time to market and gain valuable insights. These partners can include research institutes, universities, or, increasingly, startups.
Historically, large organizations have relied on accelerators or Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) investments to engage with startups. However, both approaches have limitations:
Learning is indirect and secondhand.
They often fail to directly contribute to strategic business goals.
CVC investments require significant capital that could be allocated elsewhere.
The better approach? The Venture Client Model. This approach allows organizations to act as customers and development partners to startups that align with their strategic goals, resulting in:
Lower costs and faster time to market.
Accelerated learning through direct engagement.
Quick ROI by leveraging the organization’s existing scale.
To succeed with this model, you need a systematic approach, the right tools—like HYPE Partnering—and a clear focus on addressing real business problems, not just nice to haves.
The Venture Client Model, featured in Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Innovation Practices, brings all these elements together, making it a proven and effective strategy for driving innovation.
5. Cross-industry Collaboration
Building on the trend of partnering, companies are increasingly looking beyond their industries to find innovation opportunities.
Experienced innovators know that there’s no such thing as a new idea. Every idea is simply a combination of previous concepts and ideas applied to solve a specific problem. By partnering with organizations in different industries, companies can leverage highly advanced, specialized capabilities to uncover surprising opportunities and tackle the often-difficult execution phase of innovation.
As such, we’re seeing more and more strategic partnerships between companies from different industries, such as automotive or life science firms partnering with tech companies, to not just learn from one another, but to cocreate hybrid solutionsand products that unlock new value for customers and enable breakthroughs that neither industry could achieve alone.
6. Sustainability and ESG-driven Innovation
Last decade, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) was all the rage. In the last couple of years, many of these initiatives took a backseat due to economic pressures and growing disillusionment with some of the failures associated with many of these programs.
The problem was that many organizations implemented ESG at a superficial level—promises and policies with little real-world impact—leading to skepticism about the value behind the topic at large.
However, the fundamental need for transformation remains critical. From addressing government deficits to combating climate change, the urgency for sustainable innovation is greater than ever.
What’s different now? The drivers and enablers are firmly in place:
Regulatory Pressure: Many governments across the globe are introducing stricter mandates for sustainable practices.
Technological Advancements: Breakthroughs in renewable energy, electrification, AI, and circular solutions provide tools for real change.
Consumer Preferences: Shifts toward sustainability are influencing demand and shaping circular economic models.
For innovators, this is a perfect storm—a unique opportunity to create breakthroughs that move the needle for both their organizations and the planet. Sustainability has been through the Hype Cycle, and is now nearing the plateau of productivity. For many, it’s no longer a “nice-to-have” but a strategic imperative, making ESG-driven innovation one of the most significant trends shaping the future of corporate innovation and strategy.
Conclusion
These trends highlight a clear shift toward more agile, sustainable, and externally focused innovation practices. For many organizations, they’re not just a nice addition, but a must to stay competitive in increasingly complex and fast-moving global markets. What hasn’t changed, is that those organizations that master innovation, unlock new opportunities to create value, drive impact. They will be able to future-proof themselves and leave the competition in the dust.
This article was originally published in HYPE’s blog. Images from Unsplash and Pixabay.
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Everything has a half-life, but we don’t behave that way. Especially when it comes to success. The thinking goes – if it was successful last time, it will be successful next time. So, do it again. And again. It is an efficient strategy – the heavy resources to bring it to life have already been spent. And it is predictable – the same customers, the same value proposition, the same supply base, the same distribution channel, and the same technology. And it is dangerous.
Success is successful right up until it isn’t. It will go away. But it will take time. A successful product line will not fall off the face of the earth overnight. It will deliver profits year-over-year and your company will come to expect them. And your company will get hooked on the lifestyle enabled by those profits. And because of the addiction, when they start to drop off the company will do whatever it takes to convince itself all is well. No need to change. If anything, it is time to double-down on the successful formula.
Here’s a rule: When your successful recipe no longer brings success, it’s not time to double-down.
Success’ decline will be slow, so you have time. But creating a new recipe takes a long time, so it is time to declare that the decline has already started. And it is time to learn how to start work on the new recipe.
Hardship 1 – Allocate resources differently. The whole company wants to spend resources on the same old recipes, even when told not to. It is time to create a funding stream that is independent of the normal yearly planning cycle. Simply put, the people at the top have to reallocate a part of the operating budget to projects that will create the next successful platform.
Hardship 2 – Work differently. The company is used to polishing the old products and they don’t know how to create new ones. You need to hire someone who can partner with outside companies (likely startups), build internal teams with a healthy disrespect for previous success, create mechanisms to support those teams and teach them how to work in domains of high uncertainty.
Hardship 3 – See value differently. How do you provide value today? How will you provide value when you cannot do it that way? What is your business model? Are you sure that’s your business model? Which elements of your business model are immature? Are you sure? What is the next logical evolution of how you go about your business? Hire someone to help you answer those questions and create projects to bring the solutions to life.
Hardship 4 – Measure differently. When there is no customer, no technology and no product, there is no revenue. You must learn how to measure the value of the work (and the progress) with something other than revenue. Good luck with that.
Hardship 5 – Compensate differently. People that create something from nothing want different compensation than people that do continuous improvement. And you want to move quickly, violate the status quo, push through constraints and create whole new markets. Figure out the compensation schemes that give them what they want and helps them deliver what you want.
This work is hard, but it’s not impossible. But your company doesn’t have all the pieces to make it happen. Don’t be afraid to look outside your company for help and partnership.
Image credit: Pixabay
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