best practices | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Change Agents and the Future of Change Management Recently I was identified in a mini research study as one of the top Key Opinion Leaders in change management on Twitter by Maven7, and they were curious about some of my opinions about organizational change, and asked me these two questions for an article titled ’14 Insightful Quotes from Influencers in Change Management’ on their blog.

1) In your opinion, how will change management evolve in the next 10 years?

2) Why is change agent involvement essential during a change initiative, and what best practices are there to involve them?

The article on their site just highlights a few quotes from the insights I shared with them surrounding these two questions, so if you’re more interested in hearing the full responses, please continue reading.

Question: In your opinion, how will change management evolve in the next 10 years?

I believe that the field of organizational change will evolve first by moving beyond change management. We currently speak about change management and maybe change leadership, but I believe we need to make the conversation about The Five Keys to Successful Change™ more pervasive. These five keys are:

Change Planning
Change Leadership
Change Management
Change Maintenance
Change Portfolio Management

When we start moving the conversation beyond change management, we can start focusing as change professionals on achieving excellence in practice in all five areas, creating more efficient and effective tools and techniques for each. The new Change Planning Toolkit™ introduced in my book Charting Change (Feb 2016) is focused on making the planning of a change effort of any size (up to the level of mergers & acquisition, and down to the level of the project) more visual, more collaborative, and more human.

In today’s environment it is innovate or die, and the reason that most organizations are bad at innovation is that they are bad at change. So, the ability to create a culture of continuous change in an organization, and a commitment to empowering employees with the tools, techniques, and mindsets that lead to the creation of a new organizational capability in change for the organization, will lead to THE most important competitive advantage an organization could possibly possess – greater organizational agility.

This evolution of change management will lead to a group of companies with incredible organizational agility and a collection of companies that will join Blockbuster, Montgomery Ward, Borders, and Tower Records not because of mismanagement, but because of a refusal to move beyond change management to embrace The Five Keys to Successful Change™. Which will you be?

Question: Why is change agent involvement essential during a change initiative, and what best practices are there to involve them?

I don’t like the notion of a change agent. Instead I prefer the notion of a change movement inspired by a motivated change leadership team. The notion of the change agent confers the idea that one person can affect lasting change, and that’s just not reality. We might like to attribute a successful change to a single individual, but the truth is that in those situations a movement was created where people eagerly participated in affecting a certain change, where imagination and creativity were captured and harnessed to create a new reality.

The truth is that successful changes are led by a passionate change leadership team with a clear plan that empowers and engages people with a clear, and often tailored, vision for the new reality they hope to create with the broader team. Successful change leadership teams build a clear plan that can be easily shared in order to start creating movement, in order to overcome the inertia of the organization, and then they focus on building and sustaining the momentum necessary to realize the desired transformation, whether that is a “BIG C” change or a “little c” change.

Successful change leadership teams build a shared vision of the change process, and a common language for the change effort, with the support of something like the Change Planning Toolkit™. Unfortunately, 70% of change efforts fail, and one of the big reasons is the lack of alignment, and frankly, an understanding of why the change is necessary, important, and how it might be achieved. At the same time, organizations fail to provide the support necessary to help the change participants successfully adopt the desired change. If you focus on change agents instead of empowered change leadership teams, people will be less likely to adopt the change, or to sustain it. So, choose wisely.

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Innovation Best Practices from Microsoft

“Industries are being commoditized at a faster rate and you have to look for ways to create more value and set yourself apart,” says Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation. “Innovation is one of the few ways to do that because people use the same best practices for operational excellence. The way they innovate and the culture they build are the ways they can differentiate.”

To help companies with their quest to sustain their innovation efforts, Microsoft has reached out to collect a number of innovation best practices into an evolving framework, that I’ve provided a preview of below.

Microsoft’s Innovation Management Framework

Every company serious about innovation should anchor their pursuit in a vision, strategy and goals for innovation. These core innovation components should address not just enabling technology but processes and culture too. Microsoft has published this Innovation Management Framework as the culmination of a collaboration with a consortium of visionaries and practitioners to ensure that it includes thought leadership on innovation from Microsoft and its broader ecosystem, including current charter members and contributors to the framework:

3M
Avanade
Capgemini
Ericsson
Business Strategy Innovation
Microsoft
Pcubed
PTC
Quantum PM
Siemens PLM
Sopheon
Tech-Clarity
UMT
United Healthcare
Wolters Kluwer

“Microsoft’s Innovation Management Framework is designed to help companies develop a comprehensive, integrated approach to implement and support an innovation management strategy. This framework is a repeatable reference architecture for innovation and is intended to allow companies to share and learn about innovation management best practices and enabling technologies as a starting point for strategic discussions for their company’s innovation management strategy.

The framework includes best practice processes and solutions that offer a strategic roadmap. The roadmap offers techniques that are proven through experience to improve innovation and innovation management performance. For example, the framework shares lessons learned from Microsoft’s own innovation strategies and processes that help fuel innovation across the Microsoft enterprise. These processes are used within Microsoft, enabling teams to quickly implement innovation programs that are fit for purpose.”

At its core the framework focuses on five main innovation sub-processes that we’ll give you a very brief preview of here:

1. Envision

Innovation is critical to achieving the goals of the modern business strategy. The Envision process should put in place the strategy and plan to achieve the innovation goals in the business strategy.

2. Engage

At the front end of innovation where ideas are generated, sometimes referred to as “ideation,” is where Engage occurs.

In this process, companies engage employees, customers, and partners in an innovation community to capture and share new ideas. Formalizing engagement transforms it from a passive, unfocused, ineffective “suggestion box” to a proactive approach that effectively produces targeted ideas. The goal is to generate ideas that will drive new business value. As Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation explains, “The key in the engage processes is to get closer to the customer, what they desire, how they will make their lives better, and how your product will displace something.”

3. Evolve

The third process, “Evolve,” takes the output of the Engage process to the next level. In this process, companies evolve ideas – as individuals or as teams – to increase their quality and value. Soliciting and capturing ideas is not enough. Early feedback allows great ideas to be improved upon and issues to be raised so they can be resolved (if possible).

4. Evaluate

Simply discussing ideas is not enough. “It’s important to be able to organize, de-duplicate, and merge ideas and take them to the next step in order to turn ideas into money,” offers Newsgator’s Markus von Aschoff. At some point companies must identify the innovations they believe are candidates for further investment. Unfortunately, many companies are drowning in too many ideas.

5. Execute

Of course all of the best ideas, proposals and business plans in the world are of no value unless they can be turned into a reality. The “Execute” sub-process takes the input from the previous processes and executes a formal project to further develop the idea or commercialize it.

The Microsoft DIRA Framework

This Innovation Management Framework is tightly aligned with Microsoft’s Discrete Industry Reference Architecture for the discrete manufacturing industry. The DIRA framework covers three primary business imperatives that are critical to the growth and profitability of a manufacturing enterprise. These imperatives are:

Innovate – Manage cross-boundary innovation and accelerate time-to-market

Perform – Deliver operational excellence with reliable business continuity

Grow – “Observe & serve” customers globally to drive growth with profitable proximity

This framework represents the “Innovation Management” portion of the “Innovate” imperative (see diagram). This framework will also align with the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Framework, which also falls under the Innovate imperative of DIRA.

I’m sure you can tell by now, or at least I hope you can tell, that this has just been a teaser of some of the great content that exists in the full document.

For more detail on Microsoft’s DIRA Framework and to see the complete Microsoft Innovation Framework, be sure and download it as a PDF.