Category Archives: Management

Innovation is Human

Death of the Chief Innovation Officer

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)

This article originally appeared on Linkedin

Accelerate your change and transformation success

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

Measuring Organizational Agility – The Triple T Metric v1.0

1 Reply

Measuring Organizational Agility - The Triple T Metric 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!

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

Change the World – Step Two

1 Reply

Change the World - Step Two Are you and your organization ready for change?

Too often organizations define the change effort they want to pursue without first identifying whether there are people, resources, legislation, etc. present that must be in place before the change effort can begin. We will explore the circumstances you may want to explore before beginning any change effort and the areas to explore as potential prerequisites to the change program and its eventual success.

During the course of any change initiative many different challenges will appear, and the most successful change efforts will anticipate those challenges and have a plan for dealing with them. Part of that anticipation begins with identifying how ready the organization is for change and understanding what some of the top challenges are.

In a 2008 global CEO study conducted by IBM on the enterprise of the future, IBM identified the top challenges to successfully implementing strategic change as:

Changing mindsets and attitudes (58%)
Corporate culture (49%)
Underestimation of complexity (35%)
Shortage of resources (33%)
Lack of higher management commitment (32%)
Lack of change know-how (20%)
Lack of motivation of involved employees (16%)

You will notice that many of the items on this list are more about the people factors of change rather than the process or technology factors of change. The weight of the human dimensions of change is reflected in my PCC Change Readiness Framework™. This framework focuses on the psychology of key groups surrounding the identified change, the capabilities needed to successfully execute the change, and the organization’s capacity to tackle this change effort (along with everything else).

PCC Change Readiness Framework

You will notice that I don’t speak about organizational psychology or culture in my PCC Change Readiness Framework™. The reason I don’t highlight culture in the same way that many other people do is that in today’s more social, customer-centric business, we must look more broadly than the typical inward focus of company culture when it comes to identifying the readiness of not only employees, but leaders, customers, and partners too. Inevitably many of our change efforts will have some impact on one or more external groups (possibly even non-profit entities and one or more governments).

You will notice that within the PSYCHOLOGY box there is a common focus on the mindsets, attitudes, beliefs and expectations of the individuals. Culture is incorporated into the psychology realm by focusing on what the shared understandings are around the potential change, but more broadly too. And, finally you will notice that my PCC Change Readiness Framework™ highlights the need for successful change efforts to move towards gaining commitment to the change from leadership, acceptance of the change by employees, and a desire for the change from customers and partners.

Within the CAPABILITY box of my PCC Change Readiness Framework™ we must investigate whether our change effort has any regulatory or statutory implications and whether we are ready to adapt, adopt or influence the changes necessary in this sphere. We must also ask ourselves a series of questions:

“Do we need to get permission from anyone to do this?”
“What knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for this change do we already possess?”
“What knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for this change do we need to acquire?”
“What relationships do we possess that will be useful in advancing the change?”
“What relationships do we need to build to help advance the change?”
“What are the enablers of making this change successful?”

Within the CAPACITY box we have to look at where our resources are approaching, or have already achieved, change saturation. This means they are unable to productively participate in any more change efforts or adopt any more change. But we also have to look at the availability of our resources:

Human
Financial
Physical
Information
Executive Sponsors
Space in our desired communication channels

It is easy to take for granted that the organization will have the capacity to undertake your change effort, but often there are capacity constraints that you will run into, especially as the pace and volume of change increases inside an organization. The one that is easiest to overlook and fail to plan for, is making sure that you’re going to be able to communicate your change messages in your desired messaging channels (they may already be full).

In my upcoming collaborative, visual Change Planning Toolkit™ you will find the companion tools for the PCC Change Readiness Framework™, two large format change readiness worksheets to download for printing that will help you collaboratively explore all of these topics and more.

Be sure and sign up for the Braden Kelley newsletter to receive the latest news on my new book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016) and the licensing options for the Change Planning Toolkit™.

Finally, when you consider all of the potential stumbling blocks in advance of the change that we highlighted above, evaluate your readiness in each area, and make a plan for closing any gaps (before you even begin your change effort), you will greatly increase the chances of its success. But, there are certain items that are not just good to know in advance, but are actually prerequisites for change, and we will explore that topic in the book, so stay tuned!

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve gone ahead and created a free downloadable flipbook PDF for people to grab. It was inspired by Art Inteligencia’s article titled Change Readiness: What It Is and How to Achieve It.

P.S. In case you missed it, click to read Change the World – Step One

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

Most Companies Fail at Innovation Because…

2 Replies

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.

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

Your Chance to Help Change Change

1 Reply

Your Chance to Help Change Change My first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire was designed to help organizations identify and remove barriers to innovation, but readers also found it to be a great primer on how to take a structured, sustainable approach to innovation, and as a result the book has found its way into university courses and libraries around the world.

I’ve been thinking over the last few years about where I could provide the most value in a follow-up book, and it came to me that innovation is really all about change and that where most organizations fail to achieve innovation is in successfully making all of the changes necessary to transform their inventions into innovations. At the same time, the world has changed, the pace of change is accelerating and organizations are struggling to cope with the speed of changes required of them, including the digital transformation they need to make.

So, my next book, this time for Palgrave Macmillan, will focus on highlighting the best practices and next practices of organizational change. And where does any successful change effort begin?

With good planning. But it is really hard for most people to successfully plan a change effort, because it is hard to visualize everything that needs to be considered and everything that needs to be done to affect the changes necessary to support an innovation, a digital transformation effort, a merger integration, or any other kind of needed organizational change.

But my Change Planning Toolkit™ and my new book (January 2016) are being designed to help you get everyone literally all on the same page for change. Both the book and my collaborative, visual Change Planning Toolkit™ are nearly complete. But before they are, I’d like to engage you, the intelligent, insightful Innovation Change Management community to help contribute your wisdom and experience to the book.

I’m looking for a few change management tips and quotes attributable to you (not someone else) to include in the book along with the other best practices and next practices of organizational change that I’ve collected and the introduction to my Change Planning Toolkit™ that I’m preparing.

It’s super simple to contribute. Just fill out the form, and the best contributions will make it into the book or into a series of articles that I’ll publish here and on a new site focused on organizational change that I’m about ready to launch.

I look forward to seeing your great organizational change quotes and tips!

UPDATE: The book is now out! Grab a copy here:

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

Is working smarter for suckers?

1 Reply

Work Smarter Manifesto

Last night I dreamed about the extremely unbalanced view of work in our societies, and woke up wondering whether working smarter is for suckers.

Why is that we lionize the workaholics among us and penalize those that find ways to be more efficient?

Why is that we say “thank you for working so hard” to someone who takes sixty hours to complete a task and penalize the person who figures out how to do it in twenty hours by giving them more work to do?

Out of one side of our mouth we talk about the importance of work life balance and out of the other side we praise those who worked the weekend. What’s worse, we often also speak behind the back of those who find a way to leave promptly at 5 PM every day, and look down upon them instead of admiring them.

There is the old saying “Work smarter, not harder”, but what’s the point when you get punished for doing so?

Where’s the reward?

We reward companies for getting more efficient and more profitable by raising their stock price. Where’s the reward for the individual for finds a way to get more efficient?

And why do people who work neither hard or smart get a free ride?

I am reminded of the saying “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”

The attitudes about work in our society that make this quote a truism, along with the penalties for working smarter, make it nearly impossible to achieve work life balance in our culture unless you’re lazy and difficult to fire.

People marvel at how much I seem to achieve between working full-time, traveling the world delivering keynotes on innovation and change, writing books and articles, helping to run Innovation Excellence, and getting ready to launch a new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit.

The only way I’m able to pull it off is by doing my best not to explode while I work harder at working smarter.

Books like Essentialism by Greg McKeown (and many other similar ones) serve as a great continuing education and gentle reminders for the legions of us trying to working smarter.

My wife also helps keep me focused only on the ground in front of me and becoming comfortable with whatever forward progress I’m able to make on my content creation efforts as I move through the world and all of the requirements and expectations that I’ve signed up for. The importance of family also lead me to protect evenings and weekends against potentially encroaching work.

Work Smarter Not Harder But many organizations, and our culture at large, definitely doesn’t make it easy by inflicting their own inefficient processes, policies, and expectations on us.

So, what could we do better as organizations and leaders to teach people how to be more efficient in their jobs and have the foresight to let them use that improved efficiency to allow them to go home at a decent hour to their families?

We must remember, all parents have another job to go home to, and single employees have passions to explore that work probably is not fulfilling.

Help your employees work smarter and let them reap the rewards and you too will be rewarded with a stronger next generation of employees, increased employee retention, and MORE INNOVATION. Not a bad deal, right?

P.S. For my part 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 literally get everyone one the same page.

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.

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

Agile Change Management is Coming

1 Reply

Agile Change Management

How fast is your organization capable of changing to continue to remain relevant and successful in the marketplace?

The world is changing at an accelerating pace as new technologies are discovered, developed, released and adopted by consumers faster than ever before. At the same time companies are rising to global scale faster and large, successful companies are disappearing faster too.

In this new reality that we all face, organizations of all types are going to need to:

Change how they change
Increase their organizational agility
Increase the flexibility of the organization
Become capable of continuous change
Inhibit the appearance and/or growth of change gaps that can doom your company

It is because of this tidal wave of change and a recognition that there is a need in the marketplace for more human change processes and tools that make change seem less overwhelming, that my next book for Palgrave Macmillan will focus on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (aka change management), and I’ve developed a new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit to go with it (but more about that later).

One way to do all of the items in the bulleted list above is to take more of an agile approach to change, to adopt some of the values and principles of the Agile Software Development methodology and use those to create a set of what could be described as Agile behaviors within the organization. If you are not familiar with the Agile Software Development methodology, I have included below the Agile Software Development Manifesto from http://agilemanifesto.org that details the values and principles of Agile Software Development. As you read through the manifesto I hope you’ll see that the values and principles can easily be applied to other endeavors outside of software development, whether that might in the project management discipline of your organization, or within your larger change initiatives.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items in bold more.

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Agile and Constant Change

FIGURE 1

You will see in FIGURE 1 that constant change sits at the center, Agile Values providing the initial direction for an organization with a committed goal of becoming more agile. Radiating out from Agile Values as we pursue success in coping with constant change will be our Agile Principles. But, ultimately we can’t live our values or follow our principles if we don’t exhibit behaviors that personify those values and principles. Unless our organizations begin to behave in a more agile way then the potential of truly becoming more agile will remain just words, and go largely unfulfilled.

It is because of the challenge of behaving in a new way that I encourage all of your to make a move towards a formal pursuit of organizational agility. To help you in this pursuit, I will soon be releasing my brand new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit for companies to use on their own (with free training for a select few who agree to use it and document their experience for the book). In addition I will be launching separate training for consultants so they can use the tools with clients in their change management and project management practices. Please register your interest here.

Using this new set of change planning and execution tools and processes will not only make change seem less overwhelming, but it will also help you build alignment behind your effort, help you work through as a group how to LITERALLY all get on the same page for change, and create a more agile organization as adoption of the tools spreads.

Stay tuned for more great change content coming soon!

In the meantime, check out the different ways to get involved.

SPECIAL BONUS: You can now access my latest webinar ‘Innovation is All About Change’ compliments of CoDev with passcode 1515 (link expired)

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