Category Archives: Strategy

by Braden Kelley

In my last article, Digital Transformation Matters, we looked at the accelerating pace of change, the case for digital transformation, and our evolving interactions with technology. We also asked a simple question:

Are you ready to do business in a digital way for the digital age?

In our digital age all companies must change how they think, change how they interact with customers, partners, and suppliers, and change how the business works inside. Customer, partner, and supplier expectations have changed and a gap is opening between what they expect from their interaction with companies, and what those companies are currently able to deliver. Companies must immediately work to close this expectation gap or the entire business is at risk.

There are groups of digital natives out there that are extremely capable, have greater access to capital than ever before, and are very likely to re-imagine your business and your entire industry from the ground up if you don’t start making the necessary changes in your business to eliminate the opportunity.

If they attack, they will do it with a collection of digital strategies that utilize the power of the digital mindset to more efficiently and effectively utilize the available people, tools and technology, and to design better, more seamlessly interconnected and automated processes that can operate with only the occasional human intervention.

To defend your company’s very existence, you must start thinking like a technology company or go out of business. Part of that thinking is to fundamentally re-imagine how you structure and operate your business. You must look at your business and your industry in the same way that a digital native startup will if they seek to attack you and steal your market. To make this easier you can ask yourself five questions:

If I were to build this business today, given everything that I know about the industry and its customers, and given all of the advances in people, process, technology and tools, how would I design it?
From the customers’ perspective, where does the value come from?
What structure and systems would deliver the maximum value with the minimum waste?
What are the barriers to adoption and the obstacles to delight for my product(s) and/or service(s) and how will my design help potential customers overcome them?
Where is the friction in my business that the latest usage methods of people, process, technology, and tools can help eliminate?

There are of course potentially other questions you may want to ask, but these five should get you most of the way to where you need to go in your initial strategic planning sessions. If you have other key questions that you think I’ve missed, please add them in the comments.

Digital Strategy vs. Digital Transformation

But how much appetite for going digital do you have?

This is where the question of digital strategy versus digital transformation comes in.

The two terms are often misused, in part by being used interchangeably when they are in fact two very different things.

A digital strategy is a strategy focused on utilizing digital technologies to better serve one particular group of people (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, etc.) or to serve the needs of one particular business group (HR, Finance, Marketing, Operations, etc.). The scope of a digital strategy can be quite narrow, such as using digital channels to market to consumers in a B2C company, or broader, such as re-imagining how marketing could be made more efficient through the use of digital tools like CRM, marketing automation, social media monitoring, etc. and hopefully become more effective at the same time.

Meanwhile, a digital transformation is an intensive process that begins by effectively building an entirely new organization from scratch utilizing:

All of the latest DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES (artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, BPM, crowd computing, etc.)
The latest TOOLS (robotics, sensors, etc.)
The latest best practices and emerging next practices in PROCESS (continuous improvement, business architecture, lean startup, Business Process Management (BPM), crowd computing, and continuous innovation using a tool like The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation™)
The optimal use of the other three to liberate the PEOPLE that work for you to spend less time on bureaucratic work and more time imagining the changes necessary to overcome barriers to adoption and obstacles to delight through better leadership methods, reward/recognition systems, physical spaces, collaboration and knowledge management systems, etc.

And ends with a plan for making the transformation from the old way of running the business to the new way.

The planning of the digital transformation is of course all done collaboratively on paper, whiteboards, and asynchronous electronic communication (hopefully not email, but more on that later). The goal is to think like a digital native, to think like a startup, to approach the idea of designing a company to utilize all of the advances in people, process, technology and tools to kill off your own company (at least as you know it). Because, if you don’t re-invent your company now and set yourself up with a new set of capabilities that enable you to continuously re-invent yourself as a company, then some venture capitalist is going to see an opportunity, find the right team of digital natives, and give them the necessary funding to enter your market and re-invent your entire industry for you.

It’s All About the Interfaces

People are fascinated with startups like Uber and with good reason because they have changed the lexicon and the way that we think about entire categories of products and services. Whether or not you believe there is causation, the fact remains that Yellow Cab in San Francisco filed for bankruptcy, and that Uber has placed an immense amount of pressure on taxi and airport limousine companies. But you should also be looking at what established technology companies like Amazon are doing because established technology companies are looking for growth and new markets too, and they might decide yours looks attractive, so you have to think like a technology company or go out of business.

One way that technology companies differ from non-technology companies is that they naturally focus on the interfaces, because that is where complex systems often fail. And so, if you are pursuing a digital strategy on your way to a digital transformation, you must first pick an interface, and then optimize the experience at that interface. It could be the interface between the company and customers, it could be the company to employee or employee to employee interface, or even the company to partner or company to supplier interface. Whatever interface you choose, your goal is to ultimately look at that interface with a fresh modern lens, and then utilize all of the latest (and emerging) approaches from a people, process, and technology perspective, to create a more efficient and more effective (aka better) experience.

The better job you do as an organization at removing friction at the interfaces, the more likely you are to become a partner of choice, supplier of choice, employer of choice, and/or a brand of choice. The value of becoming any or all of these could be the difference between the survival and growth of the organization, and a slow, agonizing death at the hands of a new, digital entrant or a digitizing incumbent that completes a digital transformation before your leadership team can agree it’s even necessary.

Architecting Your Organization for Change

One thing that both a digital strategy and a digital transformation have in common is that they will inflict change (in varying amounts) upon the organization, and with a more visual, collaborative approach to planning that change – like that enabled by the Change Planning Toolkit™ that I introduce in my new book Charting Change (available February 24, 2016) – you will increase your odds of beating the 70% change failure rate and of successfully achieving your digital change goals.

As you plan your change efforts it helps if you keep in mind the Five Keys to Successful Change™ and that you consider Architecting Your Organization for Change. Below you will see visualizations of both concepts and both are available as free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™, which is a collection of frameworks, worksheets, and other tools (including the Change Planning Canvas™).

Five Keys to Successful Change 550

Architecting the Organization for Change

Click to access these frameworks as scalable 11″x17″ PDF downloads

These two frameworks will help you take a more holistic view of organizational change wider than just change management or change leadership, and helps organizations:

Visualize a new way to increase organizational agility
Integrate changes in the marketplace and customer behavior into the strategy
Create a new organizational architecture that integrates all five elements of organizational change
Make project, behavior and communications planning and management a central component of your change efforts
One thing that should immediately jump out as you look at the Architecting the Organization for Change framework is that The Five Keys to Successful Change™ are embedded it.

Change Maintenance forms the foundation of a change-centric organization, ensuring that the changes necessary to ensure a healthy firm continue to persist (or are “maintained”), while the top of the organizational pyramid is driven by a conscious strategy that evolves over time, informed by changes in customer behavior and changes in the marketplace.

The strategy of the firm then determines the appropriate business architecture, and as the organization’s strategy changes, the business architecture may also need to change. Any necessary changes in the architecture of the business (new or updated capabilities or competencies) then will lead to modifications to the portfolio of change initiatives and projects (and remember every project is a change effort). These projects and initiatives will consist of innovation initiatives and efforts to create positive changes in the operations of the business.

The change efforts and projects identified as necessary and invested in as part of the change portfolio then represent projects that impact the innovation and operations for the firm, and in order to successfully execute them in the short term includes change planning, management, and leadership, and in the longer term the maintenance of the required changes.

And for the change efforts and projects to be successful the organization must also focus on project planning and management, behavior planning and management, and communications planning and management. The related projects, behaviors, and communications must all be effectively planned and managed in a way that keeps all three in sync.

I hope you see that by increasing your focus on the Change Planning discipline and through increased use of tools like the Architecting the Organization for Change framework from the Change Planning Toolkit™, your business will be able to more collaboratively and visually plan change efforts as large as a digital transformation or as small as a digital strategy and to increase your organizational agility.

More on organizational agility soon, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, please get yourself a copy of Charting Change as a hardcover (ebook coming soon) and get your free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™ (or go ahead and purchase a license now).

Now you can buy the Change Planning Toolkit™ – Individual Bronze License – Advance Purchase Edition here on this web site before the book launches.

This article originally appeared on Linkedin

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Increasing Organizational Agility

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Increasing Organizational Agility by Braden Kelley

Companies seeking to cope with the pace of accelerating change are looking for ways to go faster, and managers in non-technical disciplines have become increasingly infatuated with the Agile Software Development methodology and many are finding ways to adapt parts of it to create agile change or agile marketing or other such things. Sure agility sounds like a good thing and sure agile marketing sounds like it must be better than regular marketing, but is it?

What is agility really?

According to Dictionary.com, agility is:

“The power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness”
OR
“The ability to think and draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity”

When it comes to a business context, I however prefer to define agility a bit more simply, a bit more concisely. Agility, or organizational agility in our case, is:

“How quickly an organization can change directions”

Many people, especially in an organizational or commercial context, get confused between agility and flexibility. They are NOT the same thing.

Agile vs. Flexible

Organizational agility is about how quickly an organization can change directions, while flexibility in an organization gives it the ability to do different things with the same resources, often by purchasing more flexible equipment (at a higher price) or by training people to do more than one thing (resulting in higher training costs) or by hiring people that are skilled at more than one thing (higher salary/benefit costs). Flexibility definitely has its benefits (being able to shift resources among purposes) but it also has costs like the ones mentioned above, and probably more importantly, flexibility usually decreases the efficiency of systems.

Fixedness on the other hand, reduces variability, allows you to focus on the things that do vary and get really good at executing all aspects of a system, including the acquisition of the very best tools and technology to perform each particular function. But, as you can imagine, fixedness has its downside too. If a human resource goes down due to illness or a piece of production equipment breaks, potentially, the whole system grinds to a halt.

So, as you can imagine, increased organizational agility is achieved by establishing the right balance between flexibility and fixedness.

The Organizational Agility Framework

I have captured this principle below in the Organizational Agility Framework:

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download
(Tooklit purchasers also get access to the Organizational Agility Worksheet)

The Organizational Agility Framework helps organizations:

Adapt to changing environmental conditions
Stretch existing resources and the organization itself to do new things in new ways
Enable faster change inside the organization and faster adoption by customers
Evolve profitable customer relationships to keep the organization strong and vibrant

The Organizational Agility Framework (and corresponding worksheet in the Change Planning Toolkit™) also helps you ask two key questions:

Where can we stretch our existing resources and the organization itself to do new things in new ways?

What should we keep the same to enable faster change inside the organization and faster adoption by customers?

Flexibility vs. Fixedness

Too much Flexibility and it will take too long to make decisions and changes.

Too much Fixedness and you will suffer from organizational rigidity.

Companies seeking increased organizational agility and an improved ability to cope with the accelerating pace of change and ever-evolving customer expectations must seek to strike that optimal balance between fixedness (so you can go fast) and flexibility (so you can quickly adapt to changing customer needs).

Can your organization find the right balance?

More on digital transformation and organizational agility soon, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, please get yourself a copy of Charting Change as a hardcover (or ebook) and get your free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™ (or go ahead and purchase a license now).

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Digital Transformation Matters

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Digital Transformation Matters

The pace of change is accelerating.

Much has changed since we all started to dial in with our modems and connect to online services like America Online or Compuserve and eventually directly onto the Internet and the World Wide Web. Elements of our digital world continue to invade our language and our consciousness.

“Text me later.”
“Skype me tomorrow.”
“Google it.”
“#hashtag”
“rtofl”

Whether we like it or not the physical world and the digital world, and people are more likely to freak out about leaving their mobile phone at home than their wallet. Soon you won’t even need to carry a wallet (unless you want to). Canada stopped making pennies. In Sweden many businesses no longer take cash. Have you tried buying a drink on an airplane lately? (no cash accepted there either)

We now live in a digital age.

Not because technology is new, but because the way we react to technology and interact with it is different.

We’ve had technology for a while, but we used it primarily for performing calculations, and then for information storage and retrieval. But now, because the computer has moved from being a machine in a lab programmed with punch cards, to something nearly every one of us carries in our pocket or wears on our wrist, we’re beginning to form relationships with machines and more importantly, to use our machines to form, maintain, and even deepen, our human relationships.

So what does this mean for you as a business person?

It means that people like me have to drag you kicking and screaming away from the way you’ve always done business, away from the way you’ve always structured your enterprise, away from the ways you’ve facilitated communication among employees and between you and your customers, partners, and suppliers and towards a fundamentally different way of organizing and operating your business.

Are you ready to do business in a digital way for the digital age?

No?

Well, your market is large and attractive to me and my digital native friends. While you struggle under the weight of your legacy systems and the denial that you must change how you think, change how you interact with customers, change how your business works inside, maybe we will re-imagine your business and your entire industry from the ground up with a collection of digital strategies that utilize the power of the digital mindset to more efficiently and effectively utilize people, process and technology with some venture capital backing to challenge the incumbents and put them out of business. People are fascinated with startups like Uber and with good reason, but they should also be looking at what established technology companies like Amazon are doing because you’re either have to think like a technology company or go out of business.

In my next article on digital transformation we will circle back to discuss Uber in a bit more detail as we explore the difference between a digital strategy and a digital transformation. Because they are not the same and are vastly different in what they require to be successful. The one thing they both have in common is that they will inflict change (in varying amounts) upon the organization, and with a more visual, collaborative approach to planning that change – like that enabled by the Change Planning Toolkit™ that I introduce in my new book Charting Change – you will increase your odds of beating the 70% change failure rate and successfully achieving your digital change goals.

Stay tuned!

This article originally appeared on Linkedin

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Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation – Revisited

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Eight I's of Infinite Innovation

Some authors talk about successful innovation being the sum of idea plus execution, others talk about the importance of insight and its role in driving the creation of ideas that will be meaningful to customers, and even fewer about the role of inspiration in uncovering potential insight. But innovation is all about value and each of the definitions, frameworks, and models out there only tell part of the story of successful innovation.

I’ve been talking for a while now in my innovation keynotes how crucial value is to innovation. It is no consequence as a result that value sits at the center of my definition of innovation:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.”

In this definition you will see that I draw a distinction between useful and valuable, and I develop it further in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.

“Often usefulness comes from what a product or service does for you, and value comes from how it does it. If you’re looking to truly deliver innovative products and services into the marketplace, then once you succeed at the designing and developing the ‘what’, don’t forget to also focus on achieving excellence in the ‘how’.”

One of my favorite examples of the useful versus valuable distinction is the mousetrap. Despite the hundreds or thousands of patent applications submitted every year for new mousetrap designs, most people still purchase the same simple snapping mousetrap that you see in cartoons and that has been around for a hundred years. The mousetrap is a great example of how easy it is to generate innovation investment opportunities and how difficult it is to create something that is truly valuable.

This distinction between useful and valuable is one that you must seek to understand and by turning this into a lens through which you can look at the potential of your innovation investment opportunities, the higher the return you will have from your innovation portfolio.

Innovation is All About Value

Speaking of which, maybe we should stop talking about idea generation, idea management and idea evaluation and instead begin thinking about ideas as innovation investment opportunities. Just changing the language we use in talking about innovation can change the way we think about things and the outcomes that we are able to generate. The images we choose and the language we use is incredibly important and we’ll discuss this in more detail here in a moment. But first I would like to share my innovation equation to counter the popular (innovation = idea + execution) equation. I like to say that:

Innovation = Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation

Now you will notice that the components are multiplicative not additive. Do one or two well and one poorly and it doesn’t necessarily add up to a positive result. Doing one poorly and two well can still doom your innovation investment to failure. Let’s look at the three equation components in brief:

Value Creation is pretty self-explanatory. Your innovation investment must create incremental or completely new value large enough to overcome the switching costs of moving to your new solution from the old solution (including the ‘Do Nothing Solution’). New value can be created by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or create new psychological or emotional benefits.

Value Access could also be thought of as friction reduction. How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?

Value Translation is all about helping people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Value translation is also about understanding where on a continuum between the need for explanation and education that your solution falls. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch).

Done really well, value translation also helps to communicate how easy it will be for customers and consumers to exchange their old solution for the new solution. My favorite example of poor value translation and brilliant value translation come from the same company and the same product launch – The Apple iPad. It’s hard to believe, but Apple actually announced the iPad with the following statement:

“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

iPad Billboard This set off a firestorm of criticism and put the launch at risk of failure. But amazingly Apple managed to come up with the Out of Home (OOH) advertisements with a person with their feet up on a couch and the iPad on their lap (see above) by the time the product shipping. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this particular picture will probably end up being worth billions of dollars to Apple.

Never Forget!

Value creation is important, but you can’t succeed without equal attention being paid to both value access and value translation…

Because innovation is all about value…

Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation = Success!

Creating a Continuous Innovation Capability

To achieve sustainable success at innovation, you must work to embed a repeatable process and way of thinking within your organization, and this is why it is important to have a simple common language and guiding framework of infinite innovation that all employees can easily grasp. If innovation becomes too complex, or seems too difficult then people will stop pursuing it, or supporting it.

Some organizations try to achieve this simplicity, or to make the pursuit of innovation seem more attainable, by viewing innovation as a project-driven activity. But, a project approach to innovation will prevent it from ever becoming a way of life in your organization. Instead you must work to position innovation as something infinite, a pillar of the organization, something with its own quest for excellence – a professional practice to be committed to.

So, if we take a lot of the best practices of innovation excellence and mix them together with a few new ingredients, the result is a simple framework organizations can use to guide their sustainable pursuit of innovation – the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation. This new framework anchors what is a very collaborative process. Here is the framework and some of the many points organizations must consider during each stage of the continuous process:

1. Inspiration

Employees are constantly navigating an ever changing world both in their home context, and as they travel the world for business or pleasure, or even across various web pages in the browser of their PC, tablet, or smartphone.
What do they see as they move through the world that inspires them and possibly the innovation efforts of the company?
What do they see technology making possible soon that wasn’t possible before?
The first time through we are looking for inspiration around what to do, the second time through we are looking to be inspired around how to do it.
What inspiration do we find in the ideas that are selected for their implementation, illumination and/or installation?

2. Investigation

What can we learn from the various pieces of inspiration that employees come across?
How do the isolated elements of inspiration collect and connect? Or do they?
What customer insights are hidden in these pieces of inspiration?
What jobs-to-be-done are most underserved and are worth digging deeper on?
Which unmet customer needs that we see are worth trying to address?
Which are the most promising opportunities, and which might be the most profitable?

3. Ideation

We don’t want to just get lots of ideas, we want to get lots of good ideas
Insights and inspiration from first two stages increase relevance and depth of the ideas
We must give people a way of sharing their ideas in a way that feels safe for them
How can we best integrate online and offline ideation methods?
How well have we communicated the kinds of innovation we seek?
Have we trained our employees in a variety of creativity methods?

4. Iteration

No idea emerges fully formed, so we must give people a tool that allows them to contribute ideas in a way that others can build on them and help uncover the potential fatal flaws of ideas so that they can be overcome
We must prototype ideas and conduct experiments to validate assumptions and test potential stumbling blocks or unknowns to get learnings that we can use to make the idea and its prototype stronger
Are we instrumenting for learning as we conduct each experiment?

5. Identification

In what ways do we make it difficult for customers to unlock the potential value from this potentially innovative solution?
What are the biggest potential barriers to adoption?
What changes do we need to make from a financing, marketing, design, or sales perspective to make it easier for customers to access the value of this new solution?
Which ideas are we best positioned to develop and bring to market?
What resources do we lack to realize the promise of each idea?
Based on all of the experiments, data, and markets, which ideas should we select?

You’ll see in the framework that things loop back through inspiration again before proceeding to implementation. There are two main reasons why. First, if employees aren’t inspired by the ideas that you’ve selected to commercialize and some of the potential implementation issues you’ve identified, then you either have selected the wrong ideas or you’ve got the wrong employees. Second, at this intersection you might want to loop back through the first five stages though an implementation lens before actually starting to implement your ideas OR you may unlock a lot of inspiration and input from a wider internal audience to bring into the implementation stage.

6. Implementation

What are the most effective and efficient ways to make, market, and sell this new solution?
How long will it take us to develop the solution?
Do we have access to the resources we will need to produce the solution?
Are we strong in the channels of distribution that are most suitable for delivering this solution?

7. Illumination

Is the need for the solution obvious to potential customers?
Are we launching a new solution into an existing product or service category or are we creating a new category?
Does this new solution fit under our existing brand umbrella and represent something that potential customers will trust us to sell to them?
How much value translation do we need to do for potential customers to help them understand how this new solution fits into their lives and is a must-have?
Do we need to merely explain this potential innovation to customers because it anchors to something that they already understand, or do we need to educate them on the value that it will add to their lives?

8. Installation

How do we best make this new solution an accepted part of everyday life for a large number of people?
How do we remove access barriers to make it easy as possible for people to adopt this new solution, and even tell their friends about it?
How do we instrument for learning during the installation process to feedback new customer learnings back into the process for potential updates to the solution?

Conclusion

The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework is designed to be a continuous learning process, one without end as the outputs of one round become inputs for the next round. It’s also a relatively new guiding framework for organizations to use, so if you have thoughts on how to make it even better, please let me know in the comments. The framework is also ideally suited to power a wave of new organizational transformations that are coming as an increasing number of organizations (including Hallmark) begin to move from a product-centered organizational structure to a customer needs-centered organizational structure. The power of this new approach is that it focuses the organization on delivering the solutions that customers need as their needs continue to change, instead of focusing only on how to make a particular product (or set of products) better.

So, as you move from the project approach that is preventing innovation from ever becoming a way of life in your organization, consider using the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation to influence your organization’s mindset and to anchor your common language of innovation. The framework is great for guiding conversations, making your innovation outputs that much stronger, and will contribute to your quest for innovation excellence – it is even more powerful when you combine it with my Value Innovation Framework (which I’ve done here in this article). The two are like chocolate and peanut butter. They’re powerful tools when used separately, but even more powerful when used together.

Click to access this framework as a FREE scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

Click to download the PDF version of this article

People who upgrade to the Bronze Version of the Change Planning Toolkit™ will get access to my Innovation Planning Canvas™ which combines the Value Innovation Framework together with the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation, allowing you to track the progress of each potential innovation on the three value innovation measures as you evolve any individual idea through this eight step process.

Now you can buy the Change Planning Toolkit™ – Individual Bronze License – Advance Purchase Edition here on this web site before the book launches.

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Architecting the Organization for Change

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In my last article and the first free download from the Change Planning Toolkit™ on The Five Keys to Successful Change™ we looked at the five different disciplines that must come together to make any organizational change effort (or even a project) successful. They included:

Change Planning
Change Leadership
Change Management
Change Maintenance
Change Portfolio Management

While most people would agree that change is a constant, it is not however a constant focus for the business. One of the reasons many organizations are so bad at change is that they are not architected for change and pay attention to only one or two of The Five Keys to Successful Change™. Instead most organizations focus on executing the day-to-day business and they focus on executing a portfolio of projects, hopefully on time and on budget. In some cases, projects may incorporate some elements of Change Management (usually too late in the process) and ignore Change Planning, Change Leadership, Change Maintenance, and Change Portfolio Management.

As a result, most organizations are terrible at change. And ultimately, most organizations are bad at innovation because they’re bad at change.

Most companies focus on delivering a set of new systems, products, and services prioritized purely on the ROI they may return, instead of consciously executing ‘Big C change efforts’ and ‘Little C change projects’ to support a constantly evolving business architecture that changes in support of a fluid strategy driven by constantly changing customer behaviors (including wants/needs), regulation and competition, and influencing changes in employee, supplier, and partner behaviors. Continuous improvement and innovation then are effectively tools used to keep the organization successfully aligned to maintain the optimum levels of competitiveness and customer connection.

In this article we will explore some of the ways that organizations need to re-think the way that the firm is structured, in order to place change purposefully at the center, enabling enable increases in organizational agility and the building of continuous change capabilities.

Architecting the Organization for Change helps organizations:

Visualize a new way to increase organizational agility
Integrate changes in the marketplace and customer behavior into the strategy
Create a new organizational architecture that integrates all five elements of organizational change
Make project, behavior and communications planning and management a central component of your change efforts

One thing that should immediately jump out as you look at the image of the Change Planning Toolkit™ download titled Architecting the Organization for Change, is that The Five Keys to Successful Change™ are embedded in the framework.

I hope you see that by increasing your focus on the Change Planning discipline and increased use of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and tools like the Architecting the Organization for Change framework will allow businesses to more collaboratively and visually plan each change effort and prepare the plans for the Change Management and Change Leadership teams to execute with help from the Project Planning, Project Management, and Change Maintenance professionals in the organization.

I hope you’ll come join me on this journey to improve the pace and execution of change efforts in our organizations!

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

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Thought Leadership Builds Firm Value

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by Braden Kelley

Consulting firms sell expertise, and their currency is trust. Large consultancies like Boston Consulting Group, Bain, McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture and others make their money from being a trusted advisor to companies around the world. Why do companies trust them?

One reason is that companies always value an external perspective, and there is a large army of alumni from these firms in organizations around the world guiding their leadership to choose their former employer as that external perspective or that extra pair of hands needed in tackling a large strategic challenge.

But there are also several other considerations that factor into an organizations choice of a trusted advisor, including:

Previous experience
Industry expertise
Area of practice specialty (Strategy, HR, Innovation, Finance, M&A, Technology, etc.)
Personal relationships
Thought leadership

The resulting client work creates staffing plans within consultancies to provide billable hours for project execution. And, while most consulting firms spring to life and find early success because of the strength of their thought leadership, in general, over time most consulting firms tend to under-invest in thought leadership and as a consequence they find themselves vulnerable to new entrants nibbling around the edges of their core business and see their growth slow and eventually turn negative. Thought leadership generates the initial creation and success of the firm and leads to millions of dollars, or potentially even billions of dollars, of revenue for the consulting firm, but despite this fact, most consultancies under-invest in thought leadership.

Part of the reason for the inevitable decline in the firm’s thought leadership investments occurs because thought leadership is rarely anyone’s primary focus inside most consulting firms. Thought leadership is usually seen as the responsibility of the partners and principals of the firm AFTER they meet their revenue goals. How frequently are these people likely to have the time or energy to create the kind of quality and revolutionary thought leadership that leads to the sustaining or expansionary growth that every firm desires?

What we end up with is a level of thought leadership inside most firms that in the best case leads to a maintenance of the firm’s existing business, and in the worst case either no new thought leadership is created, or that which is created, is insufficient to maintain the firm’s current level of business.

A successful partner in most firms keeps their people busy and possibly creates some growth in billable hours for the firm, but rarely will you find that partners are able to create thought leadership capable of creating whole new lines of business. Not through any fault of their own, but because they simply don’t have the time to do it all.

To make things worse, the world is changing…

It used to be that information was scarce and external knowledge was valued by the client.

Now information is freely available and knowledge can thus be created within the client.

An increasing number of companies are therefore relying on their employees to educate themselves, while also creating their own internal consultancies, and relying less on external consultancies as a result.

At the same time, companies are becoming less open to being sold consulting services and instead more focused on becoming buyers of consulting services. And where do companies turn when they seek to be educated buyers of consulting services?

To the thought leadership they can find online from the different consulting firms in their consideration set. This is part of the reason for the rising importance of inbound marketing and content marketing as part of the marketing mix in all industries, but consulting firms are struggling to identify and provide the content necessary to help them maintain (and possibly extend) their success in this new environment.

And, even with all of these changes, most traditional consulting firms still hire traditional consultants and fail to hire people with established social media visibility, great content creation skills, the ability to get published, and the ability to help traditional consultants create both sustaining and revolutionary thought leadership. Firms are still hiring round pegs for their round holes to generate thousands of dollars a year in revenue and ignoring the square pegs with these skills that could generate millions of dollars in new revenue per year for the firm.

Marketing and advertising agencies operate in a similar client-firm ecosystem, but their value proposition is more tilted towards selling creativity and execution. In these industries we’ve seen huge consolidation driven by the need to acquire the new thought leadership, creativity and execution necessary to keep their existing clients, and we’re starting to see the same dynamics in the business consulting market.

The value of thought leadership and employees capable of creating and facilitating the execution of a great content marketing strategy driven by thought leadership, cannot be underestimated.

If anyone doubts the value boost of a thought leader to a firm, even outside the consulting market, ask yourself:

How much did Steve Jobs add to the value of Apple?

How much value did Jack Welch add to the value of GE?

How much value does Elon Musk bring to Tesla Motors?

Great thought leaders and thought leadership add a tremendous amount of value to the brand equity and the value of the firm, so why don’t consulting firms pay more attention to attracting or cultivating great internal thought leaders and thought leadership facilitators within their firms?

How much is a thought leader worth to you?

Do you need one?

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The Future of Fractional Employees

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The Future of Fractional Employees

In my last article 10 Reasons to Hire a Part-Time Chief Innovation Officer, I looked at the reasons why an organization might want to hire someone part-time to lead their innovation efforts (a follow-up to my previous post Hiring the Right Chief Innovation Officer).

Now I’d like to explore the idea of a fractional employee in a much broader context with you. A few years ago in my popular white paper Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation commissioned by Innocentive, I introduced the idea of building a global sensing network along with other ways that companies can reach outside their four walls to speed up their ability to innovate. I have continued since then to hypothesize that successful organizations of the future will possess more porous boundaries, becoming less like castles keeping everything inside their walls and more like atoms, freely combining with other atoms to form the molecules the market requires just-in-time.

Organization of the Future

Purpose and Passion

One of the key tenets of this belief is that purpose and passion are the key to unlocking the full potential of any human, and that inherently companies do a very job of unlocking either in their quest to match resumes with job descriptions.

In an effort to develop and retain employees, and fill discrete project needs, some companies are reaching beyond the job description to try and tap into more of the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the people they hire. One way this happens is through HR initiatives like the internal internships at Cisco, where a Finance employee with an interest or passion for marketing, could do an internal internship in Marketing, spending a small number of hours each week working on a discrete project with a resource need.

Outside of the organization, there are an increasing number of avenues for employees to use their un-tapped knowledge, skills, and employees to satisfy their quest for passion and purpose. These include challenge driven marketplaces for both crowdsourcing and open innovation, places like Innocentive, 99 Designs, Idea Connection, Crowdspring, and others.

Traveling the Hyperloop Ten Hours a Week

But now, we are starting to see direct to talent (DTT) models emerge. The latest example of the fractional employee model comes from Dirk Ahlborn of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), rethinking how companies are built in the first place. Instead of hiring full-time, salaried employees, Ahlborn has decided to crowdsource the labor to part-time workers and offer stock options in lieu of salary, successfully attracting about 450 workers, based in more than a dozen countries, moonlighting from organizations like NASA and Boeing.

HTT requires crowdsourced labor to commit to a 10-hour workweek to be eligible for stock. “The guys are working for stock options — they’re doing 10 times better job [than paid employees],” says Dirk Ahlborn.

Companies like Aecom, one of the world’s largest engineering design firms, are joining individuals in participating in the potentially “transformative” project, as a way to get employees executing mundane projects for the company to also get excited about building something new.

“I always tell everyone it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Ahlborn says. With 450 workers accumulated over the past couple of years and growing, Ahlborn adds, “It is becoming a movement.”

The Way Forward

From internal internships, to challenge-driven external innovation, to crowdsourced projects, to fractional employee initiatives, the world of work is changing as companies seek to accelerate to match the pace of continuous change and the continuous innovation expectations that come along with it.

If we go back to the Organization of the Future graphic above, you’ll see that job descriptions often overlap not just with employee knowledge, skills, and abilities but those of customers, partners, suppliers, and other employees as well.

Organizations seeking to increase their organizational agility will not only use tools like the Change Planning Toolkit™ but will also change their thinking about how they get work do

ne and will do a better job of recognizing when and where to tap into the abilities of other employees, partners, suppliers, and even customers to achieve the outcomes that will allow them to continue to surprise and delight their customers, clients, or constituents.

And this means embracing a fractional employee future.

Are you ready?

Get the Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation white paper

Sources: Innovation Excellence, MSN

This article was originally featured on Linkedin

P.S. If you’re looking to hire a Chief Innovation Officer (an Innovation Enablement Leader) on a full-time or part-time basis, drop me an email and I can either tackle the role or find someone else who can!

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The Five Keys to Successful Change

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5 Keys to Successful Change

by Braden Kelley

My next book, Charting Change, is a followup to Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and is now available for pre-order. While my first book helped people identify and remove barriers to innovation, my next book is designed to make the process of planning change efforts less overwhelming and more human.

Charting Change will introduce a visual, collaborative Human-Centered Change™ methodology designed to help get everyone literally all on the same page for change.

The toolkit begins by painting a different background for the landscape of organizational change. Here we introduce the first of more than fifty tools and frameworks comprising that make up the Human-Centered Change™ methodology.

When it comes to organizational change, most people focus on change management and there is even a couple of professional associations organized around the practice of change management, including the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP).

But change management is only one of the Five Keys to Successful Change:

Five Keys to Successful Change 550

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 five 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 my new book in February 2016.

The Five 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 Human-Centered Change™ methodology 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.

5. Change Portfolio Management

Every organization will have a broad collection of larger change efforts (digital transformation, merger integration, layoffs, etc.) and smaller change efforts (including all projects) underway or in the planning or maintenance stages at all times. This portfolio of change efforts must be managed and Change Portfolio Management represents the necessary activities for balancing all of the resource needs of this variety of change efforts.

Conclusion

This is the first step in the Human-Centered Change™ approach to organizational change that you can use to help change the world in the series of Big C and Little C change efforts that you may lead throughout your life. Big C change efforts are what most people think as change initiatives (mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, transformations, etc.) while Little C change efforts are any project that you might undertake (after all every project changes something).

If we want to do better than the 70% failure rate that change practitioners face in their work, we must look beyond change management or change leadership, and instead think more holistically about change, and to consider all Five Keys to Successful Change.

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 Human-Centered Change™ methodology 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!

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Innovation, change and transformation thought leadership, lovingly curated by Braden Kelley

Category Archives: Strategy

Amazon Changes Everything in a New Way

FedEx Not Keeping Pace

Digital Transformation versus Digital Strategy

Increasing Organizational Agility

What is agility really?

Agile vs. Flexible

The Organizational Agility Framework

Flexibility vs. Fixedness

Digital Transformation Matters

Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation – Revisited

Innovation is All About Value

Creating a Continuous Innovation Capability

Architecting the Organization for Change

The Future of Fractional Employees

The Five Keys to Successful Change

The Five Keys to Successful Change

1. Change Planning

2. Change Leadership

3. Change Management

4. Change Maintenance

5. Change Portfolio Management

Conclusion

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download