Thank you everyone for your nominations for the Innovation category of the Thinkers50 Distinguished 2015 Distinguished Achievement Awards. The short lists for the eight categories will be announced in early September.
Your Name Your Email Person who gets your vote: Braden Kelley That person’s title: Founder That person’s organization: Innovation Change Leadership That person’s email address: thinkers50@bradenkelley.com
We’d all like to be the best at everything and to make everything a priority, but that’s just not the real world.
So what did CEOs say was their priority when they were surveyed by KPMG for their Global CEO Outlook 2015.
Here are nine of the key findings from the report:
62% of CEOs are optimistic on the economy
54% are optimistic on company performance
74% believe the competitive environment is getting tougher
52% believe aggressive growth strategies prevail
30% feel they are not risking enough for growth
86% are concerned about the loyalty of their customers
42% are pursuing a mix of both organic and inorganic growth
47% of CEOs are pursuing significant geographic expansion
73% feel regulatory environment having a big impact on their business
It is also interesting that American CEOs are more pessimistic about growth prospects than their international brethren:
Especially given that survey respondents see the greatest potential for growth in the United States:
And while American, German, and Japanese CEOs definitely live in the most mature markets, part of their growth pessimism may come from more completely grasping the impact of the top four concerns of CEOs voiced in the survey:
“Maintaining status quo, while incredibly comfortable, is the most risky thing you can do in today’s world.” – Mark A. Goodburn, Global Head of Advisory, KPMG
Most interesting for me is the chart at the very top that shows fostering innovation as a lower priority than developing new growth strategies. Obviously innovation is just one component of any holistic growth strategy, but shouldn’t fostering innovation be a little more important if CEOs hope to create sustainable growth?
But it shouldn’t be surprising that this option scored the lowest, because my experience has been that leaders want innovation but they often aren’t willing to invest the dollars required when the rubber hits the road, and even more troublesome is that many leaders don’t understand how to foster innovation. Most CEOs see innovation as a project and not as an organizational capability they need to develop in order to help fend off disruption. Anyways, here are the top three barriers to innovation CEOs identified in the survey:
Rapidly changing customer dynamics
Unsure of which technologies will deliver the greatest return
Budget constraints
Maybe there is no money for innovation and companies are so worried about disruption is because the survey tagged the CFO as the executive gaining the most clout in the C-suite and the CIO came in last. Just a thought.
So what’s holding you back from making sustained innovation a priority?
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What Matters Most Management (WMMM) is the Key to Success
Most times you’ll see this posed as a question “What matters most?” as people grapple with finding the meaning of life. That is not the case here…
Instead I would like to share with you my simple management philosophy that will help you be more successful in today’s sometimes overwhelming, chaotic world of too many competing demands on your time.
I will help you succeed on a whim! (well, okay a WMMM)
Your success in this case comes from following the whim (or WMMM) of What Matters Most Management. It can be tailored for use in managing your time, a project, etc. For simplicity we’ll look at time management today by popular request (people ask me all the time how I manage to get so much done).
It involves quite simply making a quick inventory of all of the things that you could focus on today, or that you’re being asked to focus on, and identifying three key things:
1. How big of an impact will completing this task have (Hi/Med/Lo)
2. How big of an effort will it take to complete this task (Hi/Med/Lo)
3. When will my energy be the best for completing this task (Morning/Afternoon/Evening)
This daily inventory of tasks can be done in your head, or on paper, depending on how detail oriented you are. After you have your mental or written list, then plan your day, prioritizing of course any tasks with a low effort/high impact combination (often very rare).
You will also want to prioritize any tasks that involve getting others to do work. Getting others started on their work sooner rather than later, will lead to those tasks getting done faster because they are not sitting in your inbox.
Consider also whether it makes sense to start a task you can’t finish today or not. Sometimes there is no advantage to starting something today instead of tomorrow if you’ll end up finishing it tomorrow either way. Other times there will be tasks you need to finish tomorrow that you’ll have to start today to make it work. Going through this exercise is how you’ll identify What Matters Most (WMM).
I find this method to suit an organic person like me much more than a rigid system like Franklin Covey, plus systems like that don’t take into account when the ideal time might be to do a certain type of work based on the composition of your day and personal energy patterns. Save up somewhat mindless, administrative type work for when you’re brain is tired and do your more creative, intense work when your mind is fresh.
It’s also amazing how frequently the Pareto Principle proves out (where the items that deliver 80% of the value only require 20% of your effort, and vice versa). Focus on that 20% that will drive the 80% of your potential positive perception in the minds of others and in tangible impact in your life.
The WMMM approach works the same on projects, and can be super powerful when a family, project team, etc. all follow a similar philosophy.
The WMMM approach can also be used by product managers and entrepreneurs to create more successful products and services!
Go ahead! Try it! I think you’ll find that you’ll get more done, and sometimes more importantly, people will notice.
In many ways organizations are like humans, and others have described organizations and organizational change in biological terms before. But this biological context applies to innovation as well, and I’d like to put it forward quickly in simple terms.
As humans we must eat to survive, but if we focus too much on eating, we get unhealthy.
If we don’t focus enough on eating or if we eat the wrong things, we get unhealthy.
If we don’t enjoy enough variety in our experiences, we get unhealthy.
If we don’t spend enough time synthesizing those new experiences to uncover insights via sleep, we get unhealthy.
If we don’t eliminate our waste, we get unhealthy.
And finally, and probably most important to our health, we must exercise to increase our strength, flexibility, agility, reduce our stress levels, to build new capabilities, and to increase our longevity.
But, you can exercise too much, and get unhealthy as well.
The key is balance.
And the same is true for organizations, and parallels for all of these human activities can be drawn to the activities of organizations as well.
And while our interactions with food can be compared to our focus on the day to day operations within the context of the organization, the pursuit of innovation is the exercise for the organization.
And in much the same way that many people resist exercise even though they know it is good for them, many organizations do as well.
But for organizations to stay fit and enjoy a long and productive life, they must strike that balance between a healthy diet and exercise.
So, is your organization going to be fit or fat?
And next time someone in your organization says that innovation isn’t important, or that they can’t focus on it right now, ask them if they think exercise is important, then remind them that innovation like exercise is how we reinvigorate our organizations and keep them vibrant and alive, and go find yourself a carrot stick.
Keep innovating!
Image credit: fitinafatworld.wordpress.com
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Among my innovation peers, we have talked about how crucial executive commitment is, and some organizations have responded by hiring Innovation Managers, Innovation Directors, VP’s of Innovation, and Chief Innovation Officers (CINO’s not CIO’s so there is no confusion with Chief Information Officers).
One of the dangers of putting people in charge of innovation though, is that unless you carefully craft the positions and communicate their place and purpose across the organization, you can leave people feeling that innovation is not their job.
But, the reality is that everyone has a role to play in innovation, and in my five-star book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (available at many local libraries) I outlined nine innovation roles that must me filled at the appropriate times for innovation to be successful. The Nine Innovation Roles include:
Revolutionary
Artist
Conscript
Connector
Troubleshooter
Customer Champion
Judge
Magic Maker
Evangelist
It is because everyone has a role to play in innovation, and because everyone is innovative in their own way, that installing a Chief Innovation Officer may not be the best idea.
Any time you put someone in charge of something at that level of the organization, you end up with someone who thinks they are in charge of the area, in control of innovation. And innovation is not something that you should seek to control, but instead to facilitate.
The idea that people are either innovative or not, and either possess the Innovator’s DNA or they don’t, is complete poppycock (feel free to insert a stronger or more colorful word if you’d like, but I’ll try and keep it PG – for now).
Is there is any type of work more in need of a servant leader than the innovation efforts of the company?
So, if you fire your Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) how are you going to make your organization more innovative?
The answer is to hire an Innovation Enablement Leader.
The implication is that this person’s job will be to lead not to manage, and to enable instead of control. The job of an Innovation Enablement Leader is to facilitate the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture (working title):
Cultivating a Culture of Curiosity
Collection of inspiration and insight
Connections
Creation
Collaboration
Commercialization
Communications
More on the details of the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture in a future article.
Responsibility for innovation should remain with the business, under an innovation vision, strategy and goals set by the CEO and senior leadership. The job of an Innovation Enablement Leader (or Innovation Facilitator) meanwhile is to serve the rest of the organization and to work across the organization to help remove barriers to innovation and to focus on the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture. This could also providing a set of tools and methodologies for creative problem solving and other aspects of innovation work, organizing events, and other activities that support deepening capabilities across the Seven C’s of Successful Innovation Culture.
Most organizations have innovated at least once in their existence, and in many organizations people are still innovating. A true Innovation Enablement Leader is more of a coach, supporting emergent innovation, and helping people test and learn, prototype and find the right channel to scale the most promising insight-driven ideas (or work with the organization to create new channels).
So, are you seeking to control innovation with a Chief Innovation Officer or to facilitate it with an Innovation Enablement Leader?
Keep innovating!
P.S. If you’re looking to hire an Innovation Enablement Leader, drop me an email.
Image credit: E Sotera (via interaction-design.org)
There is an increasing amount of chatter and confusion out there around what organizational agility is and feeling that it must be important to organizational success.
But, before we discuss organizational agility, it is important to define what we mean by the term.
BusinessDictionary.com has a decent definition:
“The capability of a company to rapidly change or adapt in response to changes in the market. A high degree of organizational agility can help a company to react successfully to the emergence of new competitors, the development of new industry-changing technologies, or sudden shifts in overall market conditions.”
Usually people begin speaking about organizational agility and its importance to the success of the organization when they speak about the increasing pace of change, and the challenge the organization faces in keeping up.
Because of this, one of the key measures of organizational agility you may want to consider using, I like to call the Triple T Metric:
Time to Transform
The Triple T Metric is a measure of how long it takes an organization to make a transformation. But to measure your progress on the Triple T Metric over time, you must define it and measure it in a consistent manner. So, if a transformation is like a trip from Point A to Point B, we must define Point A and Point B.
Point A = the point in time at which the organization recognizes a change is needed away from the steady state
Point B = the point in time at which the organization successfully arrives at the new steady state
You’ll notice that Point A doesn’t start at the point at which people AGREE that a change is needed and AGREE to make it, but at the point the organization RECOGNIZES a change is needed. This is because there is great opportunity to increase your organizational agility by increasing the speed at which the organization moves from recognizing the need for change, to agreeing to change, to planning the change, to executing the change.
This is just v1.0 of our discussion of the Triple T Metric, to introduce the concept. We’ll get into more detail in a future post.
All of these transitions must be included because organizational agility is ultimately about how quickly the organization can successfully plan, lead, and execute (manage and maintain) a change effort, increasing your organizational agility requires that you increase both your change capability and your change capacity.
How fast can your organization change?
If you want to learn how to change faster, and make your organization more agile, grab a copy of Charting Change and the supporting materials for book buyers!
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Most companies fail at innovation because they fail at change.
There you go, there is the entire article in a single sentence. Please click the like button or leave a comment on your way out, and I’ll turn out the lights.
I’m actually serious, but I didn’t come to this single sentence overnight, but through decades of research and experience. It coalesced however this morning in an interview with Chad McAllister that will air next month.
This sentence also highlights the reason why after writing the popular Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (a book about innovation) and traveling the world delivering innovation keynotes and workshops, that my next book for Palgrave Macmillan (@PalgraveBiz) will be about change, not innovation.
Because after all, my life’s work is to help others change the world for the better by creating and sharing valuable tools and insights that hopefully serve to accelerate innovation and change in communities around the world.
I will continue on to say though that if you want to be successful at innovation you need to get better at planning, leading, managing, and maintaining change.
If you doubt the linkage, please check out my other article Managing Innovation is About Managing Change. This will give you a great example of how innovation inflicts change on the organization.
And if you’d like to learn more about making your organization more change capable, then I encourage you to check out my article Change the World – Step One, which is the first in a series of articles I will be publishing here in the run up to the launch of my book in January 2016 to help organizations build a stronger, more sustainable approach to change. This first article outlines the Four Keys to Successful Change, with much more content and a whole Change Planning Toolkit™ being released over the next few months.
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Change often feels overwhelming, scary even, and frequently we don’t know where to begin.
Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire focused on helping organizations identify and remove barriers to innovation, and has also served as a great innovation primer for innovation practitioners all over the world.
As people choose and commit to going down the innovation path in a measured way, one of the first things they discover is that many things will have to change inside the organization and in how the entity engages with others outside the organization for their new product or service ideas to successfully walk the transitional path from insight to idea to experiment to implementation project to market offering and market success.
Because of this, my next book and most of my future articles here on Innovation Excellence in the run up to the release of my Change Planning Toolkit™ will be focused on helping people build a strong foundation for achieving successful organizational change. This series of articles will culminate with the launch of a new book from Palgrave Macmillan in January 2016 on the best practices and next practices of organizational change and an introduction to my Change Planning Toolkit™.
So, if we’re hoping to change the world, our world, whether that is with a big W or a little one, where should we begin?
Let’s begin by painting a background for the landscape of organizational change.
Above you’ll see a visualization of the Four Keys to Successful Change. Leave one out and eventually your change effort, no matter how big or small, will eventually fail. If you’re setting setting out to change the world, even a small corner of it, then you’ll want to be sure to consider each of the four keys and make sure that you proceed in a measured way that takes each into account.
Let’s look at each briefly in turn before we look at each area in more detail in future posts, and eventually in the book in January 2016.
The Four Keys to Successful Change
1. Change Planning
Change Planning is the first key to successful organizational change, and it focuses on drawing out the key issues of the necessary change and puts some structure and timeline around them. You will find you have a better experience and a more successful outcome if you use a more visual, collaborative method using something like the Change Planning Toolkit™ I will be releasing soon to help you create the necessary change plans, goals, metrics, etc.
2. Change Leadership
Change Leadership is the second key to successful organizational change, and is important because good change leadership provides the sponsorship, support and oversight necessary for the change activities to receive the visibility, care, and attention they need to overcome inertia and maintain momentum throughout the process of transformation.
3. Change Management
Change Management represents the third key to successful organizational change, and it is probably the one most people think of when they think about organizational change because it focuses on managing the change activities necessary to achieve the change objectives. The term itself has some challenges however as the term also refers to the management of code changes during the software development process and its relationship with project management is confused. We will dig more into the relationship between project management and change management in a future article.
4. Change Maintenance
Change Maintenance represents the fourth and probably most neglected key to successful organizational change. Many change leaders lose interest after the major launch milestones are achieved, and this is a real risk to sustained success of the change effort. During the change maintenance phase is when you measure the outcomes of the planned change activities and reinforce the change, to make sure the change effort has met the change objectives and when you ensure that the behavior change becomes a permanent one. Neglect this phase and people often slip back into their old, well worn patterns of behavior.
Conclusion
This is the first article in a series to help make changing the world seem a little less overwhelming, a little less scary. I hope you have found the article and the framework a useful first building block as we work together to build a strong foundation for successful organizational change. To be alerted when the Change Planning Toolkit™ becomes available, please be sure and click the link below to join the mailing list, and stay tuned for the next article in this series!
This week I was in Michigan for a family wedding and I had a great conversation with a family member about the history of Lifetime Products and how probably more than twenty years ago he saw the founder of Lifetime Products at a trade show demonstrating their first product, a basketball hoop that could be raised and lowered in seconds with the help of a pole or broom handle.
The founder was standing there and repeatedly saying “The basketball hoop goes up, the basketball hoop goes down.”
My family member was recounting how when he saw the guy at the tradeshow repeating this mantra over and over that he laughed at him, and how more than twenty years later how silly he feels because the guy has created a multimillion dollar company from these simple beginnings and his belief in the company’s first product.
Basketball hoops were the company’s only product for the first nine years until they started manufacturing a picnic table designed to fold flat.
According to my family member the company’s fortunes changed one day when a buyer at Walmart asked a simple question:
“Do you think you make a folding table?”
It obviously would have been easy at this point for the company to respond, “No, we make basketball hoops.” but given that business owners should always be watching to see what customers are struggling with and listening to hear what they might give you permission to sell them, it was smart for Lifetime Products in this situation to say “Of course.”
It also makes sense when you remember that two of the main questions you are always looking to answer for any new product are:
1. Can we make it profitably at scale at a price point where the value delivered is greater than the price?
2. Is there a market for it?
If the answer to question #2 has already been determined to be yes (like in this situation), then it simply becomes a matter of figuring out how to make question #1 true.
Lifetime Products found a way and so it is no longer about just “The basketball hoop goes up, the basketball hoop goes down.”
Basketball hoops may still be an important part of their product line, but their blow molded folding tables have nearly completely replaced much of their heavier wooden competition and they’ve moved on to make folding chairs, sheds, playgrounds, tent trailers, composters, and kayaks.
Now with 2,200 employees and revenue likely north of $250 million, the company is definitely no laughing matter.
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We’ve all seen the viral videos that seemingly come out of nowhere to garner millions of views on YouTube, videos like this one where five people play one guitar singing Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, which as of this date has garnered more than 163 million video views:
And if you add up all of the other postings of this same video, the total number of video views goes much, much higher.
Now, surely Gotye’s version of the song couldn’t have possibly garnered more views than this viral sensation that Walk Off the Earth’s cover created, could it?
Um, actually it did. To date Gotye’s official video has captured nearly 600 million video views, or nearly FIVE TIMES as many video views. So, it hasn’t turned out all bad for Gotye.
Now you might ask yourself, how could the huge success of the Walk Off the Earth viral campaign be trumped by traditional marketing if viral marketing is supposed to be the silver bullet?
Well, the truth is that whether you pursue traditional marketing and advertising or supposedly “viral” marketing activities, the goals are the same:
Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
And it is within that first bullet point, that you find the viral component that any marketing activity or any evangelism activity (for innovation, for change, etc.) should always contain – spreadability.
Now, WordPress doesn’t seem to think that spreadability is a word, but let’s assume for a moment that it is and focus on the fact that most of the time, one of your goals in business (and your personal life) is spreadability. Ultimately, in many cases, success is determined by whether or not you can get your idea to spread.
This is true whether we are talking about an IT project, a Six Sigma continuous improvement effort, a change initiative, a Lean event, a marketing campaign, or a project commercializing an invention into a potential innovation.
So, can anyone guarantee that an idea or marketing campaign will spread?
The short answer is no.
Sorry, I wish I had better news for you, but the fact is that nobody can guarantee that your idea or your marketing campaign will go viral. Why?
You’re dealing with humans living in a complicated world. We’re not all built the same and the same person can have different reactions to the same stimulus (driven by mood and context among other things). This can result in a perfectly spreadable idea or message being stopped dead in its tracks, depriving you of all of the potential downstream sharing that you might have been hoping for or counting on.
Sorry, you can’t guarantee spreadability, despite what opportunistic marketing consultants claiming to know the magic formula might tell you.
But, an idea can be built to spread.
And I’d like to share with you a simple framework, for free, that you can download and spread far and wide.
Click here to download the “Planning to Spread” starter worksheet as a PDF.
It’s based on the same priniciples as mind mapping and it will help you start either with a particular node in mind (someone you’d like to reach and influence) and work backwards, identifying both how to evolve your idea to best influence that particular node, and how you might be able to reach them (at the same time). Or you can work from the idea outwards. Focusing primarily on the WHO and the WHY as you move outward.
The key questions to consider as you are “Planning to Spread” your idea are the following:
What is your idea or message? (Does it resonate with my target audience?)
Who are you trying to reach?
How will you reach them?
When will they be most receptive to the message or idea?
Where will they be most receptive to the message or idea?
Why will they engage? (What value will they get?)
Why will they share? (What value will they derive?)
How will they share?
Working your way thoughtfully through these questions will increase the chances that your idea or message will spread, but they won’t guarantee it. Going through the process however will help you refine your idea or message, help you think through the mechanics of how you might encourage and increase engagement, and may even help you uncover flaws in your idea or message that you missed (and give you a chance to fix them).
Happy spreading!
(and please let me know in the comments below any things I might have missed)
So what am I trying to spread?
Well, in the run up to my second book (this time focusing on the best practices and next practices of organizational change), soon I will be releasing a new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit to help organizations work smarter by planning their change initiatives (and projects) in a less overwhelming, more human way that will help get everyone literally on the same page.
This is the idea that I will be spreading and there are many ways that you can benefit.
One way is by becoming a case study volunteer. I’m looking to select a handful of companies to teach how to use the toolkit for free and feature their experience in my next book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change. If you would like to get a jump on the competition by increasing your speed of change (and your ability to work smarter), register your interest here.
But there are several other ways you can benefit, and all of them can be found here (including upcoming chances for consultants to train on the methodology and boost their revenue and success as they work with their clients around the world to deliver positive change). I’ll be focusing on teaching and tools, not consulting.
What message or idea are you trying to spread?
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Thank you everyone for your nominations for the Innovation category of the Thinkers50 Distinguished 2015 Distinguished Achievement Awards. The short lists for the eight categories will be announced in early September.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
There is an increasing amount of chatter and confusion out there around what organizational agility is and feeling that it must be important to organizational success.
Most companies fail at innovation because they fail at change.
Do you want to change the world?
This week I was in Michigan for a family wedding and I had a great conversation with a family member about the history of 
But, an idea can be built to spread.