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39 Digital Transformation Hacks

1. Corporate Mindset

Strategy for a digital world: Your company needs new approaches to strategy that must be rooted in the belief that there is no such thing as a digital strategy; just strategy in a digital world. Besides crucial digital focus, your strategy approach must also be built on speed and flexibility which means that you must listen, adapt, experiment and execute better and faster than ever before – and than what your competition does.

Profitability: Digital acceleration should be geared towards driving economic benefits aimed of keeping – or developing – a healthy culture of profitability. So focus on growth and profitability and know that when setting up something new, it does not always mean that the old is bad. The key is to know the gaps and build the bridges.

Create a vision statement: You need a vision statement in order to build the narrative for the digital transformation your organization must undertake. Build upon the visions you already have in place, but have in mind that you need to think as if you are already in a digital world.

Align digital efforts to vision and overall corporate strategy: Executives – and later on their teams and the rest of the organization – need to think of digitalization as a tool to reach the goals stated in the corporate strategy – short, mid and long-term.

Ride the waves of merging industries: Exponential growth, mergers of technologies and disruption created by new business models will change the supply and value chains that make up the industries as we know them today. This will happen faster in some industries than others, but every company need to prepare themselves to be disrupted. Digital is a key enabler.

Be competitively unpredictable: Either your industry stays the same or it will be disrupted significantly in the coming years. The challenge is that you don’t know which scenario wins, so you need to prepare the organization to face either option. Agility is key for this. If you decide to be proactive on this and if you read the merging of industries right, you are on the way to become competitively unpredictable.

Develop the digital compass: Knowing where to go in the digital world is one of the biggest challenges. In this context, you must look at digital for operational elements as well as digital for transformation/innovation efforts. This covers all aspects of digital from social media, e-commerce, digital life to big data, artificial intelligence and IoT. It is difficult developing a digital compass so be ready to experiment to find the right way forward for your organization.

Step up the communication efforts: You have to develop a common understanding and a common language around digital transformation. Build your communication strategy on the above efforts.

2. Personal Leadership / Executives

Go from doing digital to being digital: Internal and external forces with a special focus on the shifts in customer expectations require new approaches for dealing with digital. Did you company react to these changes by doing digital or by being digital? Getting to know your patterns of action will help you on the long journey of understanding what digital transformation really is about.

Know the leadership challenges: Who leads on digital in your organization? Is digital leadership spread across silos, functions and business units or is it unified? Who has the ownership of the touch-points in the customer, supplier, innovation and other journeys? Do you have the capabilities and infrastructure to be data-driven or do you rely on your gut instincts? If the leadership team does not get this, all other efforts will be in vain.

Build a core team and give executives skin in the game: Set up a small core team with a mix of top level executives (at best led by the CEO him or herself) and people with the right mindset and skills towards digitalization. This team must make things happen and the key elements are to set the direction, build the belief and remove the obstacles for digital transformation. Don’t turn this into a talk, talk committee. It has to be action-driven and people – including the executives – need to be hold accountable for its success.

Focus on the root causes, not the barriers: Too many executives and their chosen teams keep fighting the barriers, but they will not go away if you don’t attack the root causes. Root causes are different for each organization. Know yours.

Bring Emotional Intelligence (EQ) into digital efforts: Develop your ability to have successful conversations with others, up, down, sideways, inside and outside the organization. The ability to empathize impacts employee engagement, retention and performance and it is critical to good teamwork. It it also critical for customer engagement and ecosystem driven innovation. This is about interacting rather than managing. It is important today and even more so in a growing digital world.

Identify the heroes and make space for the first rebels: Who sounds the alarm horn, when the rest of the organization steers towards the abyss? You need to identify the heroes who really make a difference for your digital transformation and you must beware that many of the future heroes might have the label of being a rebel today. Once you know what to look for in people and later on who the heroes are, make sure they are close to your inner circle.

Build belief, instill a sense of urgency: First, the executives and their teams must believe – and upgrade their own mindset and competences. Then, they must build belief within the organization and external stakeholders. Communication including networking and stakeholder management is key. The paradox is that this must be done with a sense of urgency that very few people can understand.

Manage speed plus complexity: Today, we all try to handle speed, but in the near future it will also be about handling complexity. The rising complexity gives leaders headaches, and thereby resistance to take the first steps towards change. Establish a collective realization to embrace change og listen and adapt much more dramatically than ever before. Maybe AI will soon help us on this.

3. People – Mindset, Skills and Toolbox

Asses your digital maturity: You need to assess not only the organizational maturity but also your personal maturity for digitalization. Once you know your starting point as well as your objectives, it becomes easier to develop in the right direction. You can find many assessment tools online although it can take some time finding one that works for you. We are working on this.

Know your network and skills: Assess your network and skills with regards to the elements that are the most important for your work and career issues today and in the near future. If you read this, you already know that digital is important. The next questions to consider are how you can grow your network in this direction and context.

Learn in new ways: You need to challenge yourself constantly in the next couple of years in order to keep up with the best – or just stay relevant. You can do this through reverse mentoring, taking classes at platforms like Singularity and Udacity and by expanding your network in directions that works for your new future. As a starter, you could look into exponential growth and how this brings along merging technologies and even industries.

Embrace the positive aspects: There are so many public perspectives on digitalization and they are both positive and negative. If you want to prosper in this new era, you must embrace the positive aspects and explore the opportunities while still keeping a healthy balance by having a realistic view and understanding of the less positive consequences. And remember that the worst you can do is to do nothing at all.

4. Organizational Structures and Processes

New ways of working: Explore the “new” ways of working which often includes buzz words such as lean, agile, experimentation, MVP, holocracy, RACI and boss-less management. Adapt the ways that can work within your organization and experiment on how to bring the past and future together.

Don’t act like a startup: You are not one, but you should still adopt a beginner’s mindset. This means you need to look at things with a fresh perspective, stay curious and be open for experimentation while learning from the failures that come along with experimentation.

Experiment, implement and standardize on digitalization: Set up small teams that work in new ways, capture the lessons learned from successes as well as failures and communicate strategically about this. Build from this to float more projects into the organization and consider establishing a new competence center. Validate and standardize well consolidated working methods across the corporation and focus on the next development.

Break down silos, review governance structures: Internal resistance is often caused by business units and functions that are working towards different objectives. This will be a major issue with digitalization as it has strong impact across the board. Assess the processes, policies and systems that prevent success in this context. Update.

Educate in new ways: Forget Harvard, INSEAD, London Business School and all the other business schools that are rooted in the last century. Ok, that might be a tad too much, but you should definitely find ways to complement traditional training and educational efforts with the offerings by the likes of Singularity University and Udacity. Learn by doing and train the trainers.

Work with HR – when/if they are ready: Most HR teams lack a strategic role when it comes to corporate transformation, digitalization and innovation. This is a paradox as everyone agrees that people are the key element here. This has to change and the core team need to help them upgrade their capabilities in this context. If successful, HR becomes a powerful partner as they have a strong influence on corporate training including the executive level.

Don’t go full frontal with learning activities: Before you push learning, use 3-6 months to influence the executives by sharing short pieces of information and insights that fit their specific situation and objectives in the context of digital transformation. Build further on this to help them develop their own ideas on how digital can help their personal agendas. Then, develop a program to upgrade their mindset, skills and toolbox (and for their key people and teams). Make it action-driven.

Note: several of the below hacks on networks and ecosystems are also highly relevant to organizational structures and processes.

5. Networking and Ecosystems

Digital business models are platforms based on networks and communities: Products have features, platforms have communities and networks. Platforms are connected, collaborative and scalable. You do not have to replace your current business models based on products as the digital business models often live alongside the traditional ones (at least for now). The key is to learn the new rules of strategy based on a platform-driven world or begin planning your exit.

Develop a networked business structure: A next generation organization is highly networked. It is plugged into physical as well as virtual assets and resources and entrepreneurial and industrial ecosystems on a global scale. The external strategic stakeholders (current and potential) must be identified and mapped based on their role in the value chain, business model ecosystem and/or supply chain. Better interaction and flow across ecosystems must be enabled.

The internal networked business structure: The same as the above needs to be done internally where the focus is also to break down silos. Here it is critical to know how to navigate the fine line between the existing corporate culture and the different culture that is often needed for a successful transformation. A mindset upgrade program must be initiated in this context, and key internal resources should get their feet wet fast.

Form a strategic alliance with IT: You cannot do it without them. But make sure IT also sees opportunities that everyone can pursue together rather than just risk that IT wants to shut down.

Be the accelerator for your ecosystems: Strive to become the accelerator that brings together your ecosystems and takes the lead in developing the services, processes and products needed for everyone to win with digitalization.

Win early and reap the benefits: The key benefit of being perceived as the thought/action leader within your industry and the preferred partner of choice within your (innovation) ecosystems is that your organization get the first look on new opportunities as well as the important heads-up on new directions within the industry.

Work with multi-layered approaches: Today, networking and ecosystems is not just organizations with its teams and people working with other organizations and their teams and people to form ecosystems. It is also the digital and virtual infrastructures of these companies and ecosystems. Furthermore, we need to have in mind that competition today is not between two or more companies, but between two or more ecosystems.

6. Tools

Current versus new services, systems and tools: What is already in place to facilitate digital transformation? How do we learn what else is needed? How do we get the new things and how do we bridge the new and the existing in ways that build competitive advantages? Getting the overview here is a job for the top executives. You might need new tools just to get this overview.

Tap into existing structures and opportunities for digital development: Many companies and service providers have been working on digital transformation for years. Just think of Watson in general (and their narrow approaches towards health and law) and the new partnership between IBM and Salesforce with regards to digital-driven sales structures. As above, you first need the overview and then you find out how to tap into what is already on the market and link this with your own efforts.

Metrics and KPI’s in a digital world: Many traditional metrics are outcome-driven in the sense that they are based on 1-3 year old decisions and the actions taken around these decisions. In the future, we need to balance traditional metrics and KPI’s with new ones that focus more on behavior in order to provide an overview of the corporate capabilities and a sense of the direction that the organization and its partners is taking. This is important in order to facilitate much faster strategy development processes and even faster responses to the markets.

Harness the power of big data: This will be the starting point for many organizations. You can start start small by forming data collection and insight teams and build up your analytical capabilities. But starting small does not mean that you should not invest heavily in this. If you are at this stage, you are years behind and you have to catch up fast.

Use digital to work smarter, not harder: What good are all the tools if they do not enable your organization to work smarter rather than harder?

Thanks!

Image Credit: Unsplash

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3 Innovation Types Not What You Think They Are

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But They Do Determine Your Success

3 Innovation Types Not What You Think They Are

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The Official Story

When discussing innovation, you must be specific so people know what you expect. This is why so many thought leaders, consultants, and practitioners preach the importance of defining different types of innovation.

Clayton Christensen encourages focusing on WHY innovation is happening – improve performance, improve efficiency, or create markets – in his 2014 HBR article.
The classic Core/Adjacent/Transformational model focuses on WHAT is changing – target customer, offering, financial model, and resources and processes.
McKinsey’s 3 Horizons focus on WHEN the results are achieved – this year, 2-3 years, 3-6 years.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options and worry about which approach is “best.” But, like all frameworks, they’re all a little bit right and a little bit wrong, and the best one is the one that will be used and get results in your organization.

The REAL story

Everything in the official story is true, but not the whole truth.

“Innovation” is not peanut butter.

You can’t smear it all over everything and expect deliciousness.

When doing innovation, you must remember your customer – the executives who make decisions, allocate resources, and can accelerate or decimate your efforts.

More importantly, you need to remember their Jobs to be Done (JTBD) – keep my job, feel safe and respected, and be perceived as competent/a rising star – because these jobs define the innovations that will get to market.

Three (3) REAL types of innovation

SAFE – The delightful solution to decision-makers’ JTBD

Most closely aligned with Core innovation, improving performance or efficiency, and Horizon 1 because the focus is on improving what exists in a way that will generate revenue this year or next. Decision-makers feel confident because they’ve “been there and done that” (heck, doing “that” is probably what got them promoted in the first place). In fact, they’re more likely to get in trouble for NOT investing in these types of innovations than they are for investing in them.

STRETCH – The Good Enough solution

Most like Adjacent innovation because they allow decision-makers to keep one foot in the known while “stretching” their other foot into a new (to them) area. This type of innovation makes decision-makers nervous because they don’t have all the answers, but they feel like they at least know what questions to ask. Progress will require more data, and decisions will take longer than most intrapreneurs want. But eventually, enough time and resources (and ego/reputation) will be invested that, unless the team recommends killing it, the project will launch.

SPLATTER – The Terrible solution

No matter what you call them – transformational, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or moonshots – these innovations make everyone’s eyes light up before reality kicks in and crushes our dreams. These innovations “define the next chapter of our business” and “disrupt ourselves before we’re disrupted.” These innovations also require decision-makers to let go of everything they know and wander entirely into the unknown. To invest resources in the hope of seeing the return (and reward) come back to their successor (or successor’s successor). To defend their decisions, their team, and themselves when things don’t go exactly as planned.

How to find the REAL type that will get real results.

“You said you want X. Would you describe that for me?” (you may need to give examples). When I worked at Clayton Christensen’s firm, executives would always call and ask for our help to create a disruptive innovation. When I would explain what they were actually asking for (something with “good enough” performance and a low selling price that appeals to non-consumers), they would back away from the table, wave their hands, and say, “Oh, not that. We don’t want that.”
“How much are you willing to risk?” If they’re willing to go to their boss to ask for resources, they’re willing to Stretch. If they’re willing to get fired, they’re willing to Splatter. If everything needs to stay within their signing authority, it’s all about staying Safe.
“What would you need to see to risk more?” As an innovator, you’ll always want more freedom to push boundaries and feel confident that you can convince others to see things your way. But before you pitch Stretch to a boss that wants Safe, or Splatter to a boss barely willing to Stretch, learn what they need to change their minds. Maybe it will be worth your effort, maybe it won’t. Better to know sooner rather than later.

Image credits: Pixabay

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3 Examples of Why Innovation is a Leadership Problem

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Through the Looking Glass

3 Examples of Why Innovation is a Leadership Problem

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Do you sometimes feel like you’re living in an alternate reality?

If so, you’re not alone. Most innovators feel that way at some point.

After all, you see things that others don’t.

Question things that seem inevitable and true.

Make connections where others only see differences.

Do things that seem impossible.

It’s easy to believe that you’re the crazy one, the Mad Hatter and permanent resident of Wonderland.

But what if you’re not the crazy one?

What if you’re Alice?

And you’re stepping through the looking glass every time you go to work?

In Lewis Carroll’s book, the other side of the looking glass is a chessboard, and all its inhabitants are chess pieces that move in defined and prescribed ways, follow specific rules, and achieve defined goals. Sound familiar?

Here are a few other things that may sound familiar, too

“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.” – The White Queen

In this scene, the White Queen offers to hire Alice as her lady’s maid and pay her “twopence a week and jam every other day.” When Alice explains that she doesn’t want the job, doesn’t like jam, and certainly doesn’t want jam today, the queen scoffs and explains the rule.

The problem, Alice points out, is that it’s always today, and that means there’s never jam.

Replace “jam” with “innovation,” and this hits a little too close to home for most innovators.

How often do you hear about the “good old days” when the company was more entrepreneurial, willing to experiment and take risks, and encouraged everyone to innovate?

Innovation yesterday.

How often do you hear that the company will invest in innovation, restart its radical innovation efforts, and disrupt itself as soon as the economy rebounds, business improves, and things settle down a bit? Innovation tomorrow.

But never innovation today. After all, “it’s [innovation] every other day: today isn’t any other day, you know.”

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more, not less.” – Humpty Dumpty

In this scene, poor Alice tries to converse with Humpty Dumpty, but he keeps using the “wrong” words. Except they’re not the wrong words because they mean exactly what he chooses them to mean.

Even worse, when Alice asks Humpty to define confusing terms, he gets angry, speaks in a “scornful tone,” and smiles “contemptuously” before “wagging his head gravely from side to side.

We all know what the words we use mean, but we too often think others share our definitions. We use “innovation” and “growth,” assuming people know what we mean. But they don’t. They know what the words mean to them. And that may or may not be what we mean.

When managers encourage people to share ideas, challenge the status quo, and take risks, things get even trickier. People listen, share ideas, challenge the status quo, and take risks. Then they are confused when management doesn’t acknowledge their efforts. No one realizes that those requests meant one thing to the managers who gave them and a different thing to the people who did them.

“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to go somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” – The Red Queen

In this scene, the Red Queen introduces life on the other side of the looking glass and explains Alice’s new role as a pawn. Of course, the explanation comes after a long sprint that seems to get them nowhere and only confuses Alice more.

When “tomorrow” finally comes, and it’s time for innovation, it often comes with a mandate to “act with urgency” to avoid falling behind. I’ve seen managers set goals of creating and launching a business with $250M revenue in 3 years and leadership teams scrambling to develop a portfolio of businesses that would generate $16B in 10 years.

Yes, the world is moving faster, so companies need to increase the pace at which they operate and innovate. But if you’re doing all you can, you can’t do twice as much. You need help – more people and more funding, not more meetings or oversight.

“Life, what is it but a dream?”

Managers and executives, like the kings and queens, have roles to play. They live in a defined space, an org chart rather than a chessboard, and they do their best to navigate it following rules set by tradition, culture, and HR.

But you are like Alice. You see things differently. You question what’s taken as given. And, every now and then, you probably want to shake someone until they grow “shorter – and fatter – and softer – and rounder – and…[into] a kitten, after all.”

So how do you get back to reality and bring everyone with you? You talk to people. You ask questions and listen to the answers. You seek to understand their point of view and then share yours.

Some will choose to stay where they are.

Some will choose to follow you back through the looking glass.

They will be the ones who transform a leadership problem into a leadership triumph.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Kickstarting Change and Innovation in Uncertain Times

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Kickstarting Change and Innovation in Uncertain Times

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last article, we described why innovation is transformational, and why, at this moment in time, it is more important than ever to innovate. We stated that innovation-led growth is absolutely critical and that people need to be enabled and equipped to adapt, connect and collaborate in new ways to kickstart change in agile, constructive, equitable, and sustainable ways to innovate in uncertain times. Yet, our research and experience at ImagineNation™ over the past 10 years has revealed that many governments, communities, organizations, teams, and leaders, feel somewhat – but not very – confident in their readiness, competence, and capacity to change and innovate in a world of unknowns.

Six Strategies to Kickstart Change and Innovate in Uncertain Times

To help build this confidence we have identified six key strategies and the key first steps to help you focus your attention, kickstart change, and drive and execute your change and innovation initiatives, to survive, thrive, and flourish in uncertain times.

Strategy #1

Build change readiness and receptivity to survive and thrive in an uncertain world by:

Giving people permission and safety that allows them to accept and acknowledge the range of emotional reactions (fears), physical consequences (exhaustion), and work-life imbalances as a result of the imposed WFH environment.
Acknowledging how people are feeling helps them better re-balance, adapt, and become resilient by supporting them to develop a work-life balance to better connect with others, tolerate uncertainty to change, and innovate in uncertain times.
Challenging people’s habitual default patterns of remaining in the safety of their comfort zones, breaking habitual “business as usual” habits, inertia, and complacency.
Being empathic and compassionate with people’s anxieties, confusion, insecurity, and uncertainties about their futures at work, and supporting them through their personal conflicts.

Strategy #2

Allow, accept and ack knowledge people’s fears and struggles about change, help manage their anxiety, improve their productivity and attune them to the possibilities and potential opportunities in the current business environment by:

Providing individual and collective support to enable people to take back and refocus their attention, self-manage anxiety, and become grounded, mindful, and fully present, with self and with others.
Investing in time and money to enable people to unlearn, learn and relearn how to be change ready and change-receptive, and become adaptive to effectively facilitate successful business and digital transformation initiatives.
Helping people get familiar with the brain’s basic cognitive functions, and build the foundations to help get work done by regulating emotions, suppressing biases, switching tasks, solving complex problems, and thinking creatively.
Developing 21st-century skills to shift old mindsets, develop new behaviors and the reasoning, problem-solving, planning, and execution skills to initiate and sustain business, cultural and digital transformation initiatives to embed the changes and to innovate in uncertain times.
Developing the fundamental foresight and energizing vision to perceive innovation strategically and systemically, adopting an approach that is holistic, human, and technology-centered, to align, enable, and equip people to adapt and grow and to change and innovate in uncertain times.

Strategy #3

Make sense of innovation, and develop a common understanding and language as to what innovation means in a unique context by:

Developing an awareness that innovation is, in itself, a change process, and paradoxically requires rigorous and disciplined change management processes and a chaotic creative and collaborative interchange of ideas.
Clarifying an energizing and compelling “why” innovation is important to an overall “cause” developing a passionate purpose and a sense of urgency towards leveraging innovation to achieve long-term success, competitiveness, and growth.
Knowing how to both make connections and distinguish and leverage the differences between creativity, invention, and innovation.
Building the safety, permission, and trust that helps facilitate, educate and coach people to deal with the emotional consequences of failure, to reframe it as opportunities to encourage a culture of taking small bets to learn quickly.
Taking a disciplined and methodical approach to risk planning and management, that allows and encourages a culture of smart risk-taking to reduce risk adversity.
Creating a consistent and common understanding as to what innovation means in their unique government, community, social, organizational, leadership, or team context and creating an engaging and compelling narrative around it.

Strategy #4

Optimize the notion that innovation is transformational and leverage it as an overall energizing strategic and systemic alignment mechanism and set of processes to kickstart change by:

Improving engagement, energizing and maximizing people’s potential and intentionally cultivating their collective genius to learn how to execute and deliver deep change and innovate in uncertain times.
Aligning technological, processes and adopting a human-centered structure for change management to deliver business breakthroughs and digital transformation initiatives.
Breaking down silos and supporting people to collaborate; re-connect, re-energize and re-invent themselves in a disrupted world.
Maximizing differences and diversity that exist between people’s demographics, cultures, values, perspectives, knowledge, experiences, and skillsets to deliver their desired outcomes.
Learning and coaching people to adapt to survive and thrive by solving complex problems, uncertainty, instability, and trends that are constantly emerging.
Improving both customer centricity and the customers’ experience.
Building accountable, equitable, and sustainable business enterprises that people value, appreciate, and cherish.

Strategy #5

Challenge the status quo and conventional ways of perceiving innovation to unleash the possibilities and the opportunities and kickstart change that true innovation offers by:

Taking a strategic perspective in the longer term and the need for investment in innovation, rather than being reactive, and short-term profit-focused.
Developing an understanding of the different types of innovation and how they can be applied, including incremental, breakthrough, sustaining, and disruptive, depending on their strategic imperative and motivation for change, and not just focussing on making continuous and process improvements.
Improving trust in organizational boards and leadership decisions, reducing self-interest and eliminating corruption, and focussing on being in integrity to successfully empower people in change and innovate in uncertain times.

Strategy #6

Explore opportunities for measuring, benchmarking, and contextualizing the impact of innovation on business performance, leadership, executive team, and organizational ability to adapt, innovate and grow by:

Embracing new business models, developing leadership capabilities and collaborative competencies, capacities, and building people’s confidence to perceive their worlds differently, and with fresh eyes.
Letting go of “old” 20th century methods of diagnosing and assessing culture, based solely on the “nice to haves” rather than exploring the emerging “must haves” to enable people to survive and thrive by experimenting with new assessment tools like the OGI® and the GLI® to quantify and qualify current and potential strengths and weaknesses.
Using data to know what new mindsets, behaviors, and skills to embody and enact, differently to become future-fit and succeed in the 21^st century, and accepting that some of these are “not nice”.
Cultivating an innovation culture to embed deep change, provide learning and coaching to evoke, provoke and create mindset shifts, behavior and systems changes, and radically new sets of artifacts and symbols.

Taking the first steps to change and innovate in 2023

Embracing a range of new and different strategic and systemic approaches governments, communities, organizations, teams, and leader organizations can successfully kickstart change and innovate in uncertain times.

By using this moment in time to choose to refuse to walk backward and sleepwalk through life, by simply committing to take the first baby steps in allowing and enabling people to pause, retreat, reflect and:

Recover from the effects of working mostly alone, from home, and online.
Re-balance work and home lives through reconnection and resolving loneliness and rebuilding a sense of belonging.
Know how to tolerate uncertainty and become resilient and adaptive.
Reimagine and refocus a more energizing, compelling, and sustainable future.
Reinvent themselves, their professions, business practices, and teams in meaningful and purposeful ways.

We can then confidently, meaningfully, and purposefully energetically engage and enroll people, mobilize and harness their collective genius, to innovate in uncertain times in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives in ways they appreciate and cherish.

To kickstart changes that contribute effectively to global stability, security, connectedness, and sustainability in the current decade of transformation and disruption.

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starting Tuesday, February 7, 2023.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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3 Steps to Find the Horse’s A** In Your Company (and Create Space for Innovation)

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3 Steps to Find the Horse's A** In Your Company (and Create Space for Innovation)

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation thrives within constraints.

Constraints create the need for questions, creative thinking, and experiments.

But as real as constraints are and as helpful as they can be, don’t simply accept them. Instead, question them, push on them, and explore around them.

But first, find the horse’s a**

How Ancient Rome influenced the design of the Space Shuttle

In 1974, Thiokol, an aerospace and chemical manufacturing company, won the contract to build the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) for the Space Shuttle. The SRBs were to be built in a factory in Utah and transported to the launch site via train.

The train route ran through a mountain tunnel that was just barely wider than the tracks.

The standard width of railroad tracks (distance between the rails or the railroad gauge) in the US is 4 feet, 8.5 inches which means that Thiokol’s engineers needed to design SRBs that could fit through a tunnel that was slightly wider than 4 feet 8.5 inches.

4 feet 8.5 inches wide is a constraint. But where did such an oddly specific constraint come from?

The designers and builders of America’s first railroads were the same people and companies that built England’s tramways. Using the existing tramways tools and equipment to build railroads was more efficient and cost-effective, so railroads ended up with the same gauge as tramways – 4 feet 8.5 inches.

The designers and builders of England’s tramways were the same businesses that, for centuries, built wagons. Wanting to use their existing tools and equipment (it was more efficient and cost-effective, after all), the wagon builders built tramways with the exact distance between the rails as wagons had between wheels – 4 feet 8.5 inches.

Wagon wheels were 4 feet 8.5 inches apart to fit into the well-worn grooves in most old European roads. The Romans built those roads, and Roman chariots made those grooves, and a horses pulled those chariots, and the width of a horses was, you guessed it, 4 feet 8.5 inches.

To recap – the width of a horses’ a** (approximately 4 feet 8.5 inches) determined the distance between wheels on the Roman chariots that wore grooves into ancient roads. Those grooves ultimately dictated the width of wagon wheels, tramways, railroad ties, a mountain tunnel, and the Space Shuttle’s SRBs.

How to find the horse’s a**

When you understand the origin of a constraint, aka find the horse’s a**, it’s easier to find ways around it or to accept and work with it. You can also suddenly understand and even anticipate people’s reactions when you challenge the constraints.

Here’s how you do it – when someone offers a constraint:

Thank them for being honest with you and for helping you work more efficiently
Find the horse’s a** by asking questions to understand the constraint – why it exists, what it protects, the risk of ignoring it, who enforces it, and what happened to the last person who challenged it.
Find your degrees of freedom by paying attention to their answers and how they give them. Do they roll their eyes in knowing exasperation? Shrug their shoulders in resignation? Become animated and dogmatic, agitated that someone would question something so obvious?

How to use the horse’s a** to innovate

You must do all three steps because stopping short of step 3 stops creativity in its tracks.

If you stop after Step 1 (which most people do), you only know the constraint, and you’ll probably be tempted to take it as fixed. But maybe it’s not. Perhaps it’s just a habit or heuristic waiting to be challenged.

If you do all three steps, however, you learn tons of information about the constraint, how people feel about it, and the data and evidence that could nudge or even eliminate it.

At the very least, you’ll understand the horse’s a** driving your company’s decisions.

Image credit: Pixabay

Endnotes:

To be very clear, the origin of the constraint is the horse’s a**. The person telling you about the constraint is NOT the horse’s a**.
The truth is never as simple as the story and railroads used to come in different gauges. For a deeper dive into this “more true than not” story (and an alternative theory that it was the North’s triumph in the Civil War that influenced the design of the SRBs, click here

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Shark Tanks are the Pumpkin Spice of Innovation

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Shark Tanks are the Pumpkin Spice of Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

On August 27, Pumpkin Spice season began. It was the earliest ever launch of Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte and it kicked off a season in which everything from Cheerios to protein powder to dog shampoo promises the nostalgia of Grandma’s pumpkin pie.

Since its introduction in 2003, the Pumpkin Spice Latte has attracted its share of lovers and haters but, because it’s a seasonal offering, the hype fades almost as soon as it appears.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for its counterpart in corporate innovation — The Shark Tank/Hackathon/Lab Week.

It may seem unfair to declare Shark Tanks the Pumpkin Spice of corporate innovation, but consider the following:

They are events. There’s nothing wrong with seasonal flavors and events. After all, they create a sense of scarcity that spurs people to action and drives companies’ revenues. However, there IS a great deal wrong with believing that innovation is an event. Real innovation is not an event. It is a way of thinking and problem-solving, a habit of asking questions and seeking to do things better, and of doing the hard and unglamorous work of creating, learning, iterating, and testing required to bring innovation — something different that creates value — to life.
They appeal to our sense of nostalgia and connection. The smell and taste of Pumpkin Spice bring us back to simpler times, holidays with family, pie fresh and hot from the oven. Shark Tanks do the same. They remind us of the days when we believed that we could change the world (or at least fix our employers) and when we collaborated instead of competed. We feel warm fuzzies as we consume (or participate in) them, but the feelings are fleeting, and we return quickly to the real world.
They pretend to be something they’re not. Starbucks’ original Pumpkin Spice Latte was flavored by cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. There was no pumpkin in the Pumpkin Spice. Similarly, Shark Tanks are innovation theater — events that give people an outlet for their ideas and an opportunity to feel innovation-y for a period of time before returning to their day-to-day work. The value that is created is a temporary blip, not lasting change that delivers real business value.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’re serious about walking the innovation talk, Shark Tanks can be a great way to initiate and accelerate building a culture and practice of innovation. But they must be developed and deployed in a thoughtful way that is consistent with your organization’s strategy and priorities.

Make Shark Tanks the START of an innovation effort, not a standalone event. Clearly establish the problems or organizational priorities you want participants to solve and the on-going investment (including dedicated time) that the company will make in the winners. Allocate an Executive Sponsor who meets with the team monthly and distribute quarterly updates to the company to share winners’ progress and learnings
Act with courage and commitment. Go beyond the innovation warm fuzzies and encourage people to push the boundaries of “what we usually do.” Reward and highlight participants that make courageous (i.e. risky) recommendations. Pursue ideas that feel a little uncomfortable because the best way to do something new that creates value (i.e. innovate) is to actually DO something NEW.
Develop a portfolio of innovation structures: Just as most companies use a portfolio of tools to grow their core businesses, they need a portfolio of tools to create new businesses. Use Shark Tanks to the surface and develop core or adjacent innovation AND establish incubators and accelerators to create and test radical innovations and business models AND fund a corporate VC to scout for new technologies and start-ups that can provide instant access to new markets.

Conclusion

Whether you love or hate Pumpkin Spice Lattes you can’t deny their impact. They are, after all, Starbucks’ highest-selling seasonal offering. But it’s hard to deny that they are increasingly the subject of mocking memes and eye rolls, a sign that their days, and value, maybe limited.

(Most) innovation events, like Pumpkin Spice, have a temporary effect. But not on the bottom-line. During these events, morale, and team energy spike. But, as the excitement fades and people realize that nothing happened once the event was over, innovation becomes a meaningless buzzword, evoking eye rolls and Dilbert cartoons.

Avoid this fate by making Shark Tanks a lasting part of your innovation menu — a portfolio of tools and structures that build and sustain a culture and practice of innovation, one that creates real financial and organizational value.

Image credit: Unsplash

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What’s Next – Through the Looking Glass

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What's Next - Through the Looking Glass

by Braden Kelley

Humanity is obsessed with the future, and we always want to know what’s next for us.

Sometimes we want to know the future so badly that we stress ourselves out about imagined futures that won’t ever come to pass instead of dealing with what is right in front of us.

Time is Not Linear

Most people think of time in a linear fashion, but this is the wrong way of thinking about it.

It is more helpful instead to think of time as a wave (or as a pulse) emanating from a central point in an outward direction, representing all of the possible futures. Then as the next point in one of those possible futures becomes fixed, then another wave emanates from this new point representing all of the new possible futures. The math of what the future MIGHT look like gets really big, really fast – as you might imagine.

This is what makes predicting the future so difficult.

The number of inputs influencing the next step in your future journey is massive, and the number of potential next steps that are outputs of your next best action is equally massive.

So, while it is important to plan for the future and to develop a point of view on the future you would like to be the result of your actions, it is still just a guess. Making it more important and impactful to look at the near future more often than not.

Recently I came across a video from CableLabs that looks at one potential near future:

We Are Already Living in a Virtual Reality

The first choice the creators faced was augmented reality versus virtual reality, and you’ll see that they chose to highlight augmented reality instead of virtual reality. I think this is the right choice as many people would say we are living in a virtual reality already.

Our eyes and other sensory organs do their best to provide inputs to our brain about the physical reality we live in, but the information is often inaccurate and incomplete. Our brain tries to fill in the gaps, but there is some much we don’t understand about how the reality we live in operates.

The world we live in is already amazing, and there is more value in augmenting our experience of the reality we live within, than there is escaping into another reality that is more clumsy, awkward and lower fidelity than our experience of the virtual reality we live in now.

Our world is changing so fast that it is important for organizations and individuals to not just plan for the next month or the next quarter, but to plan for what we would like the near future to look like and think about the ways in which we would like to, and realistically can, influence it.

FutureHacking™ is Within Our Grasp

But the concepts of futurology and the role of the futurist seem pretty nebulous at best. It is because of this that I’ve begun creating a collection of FutureHacking™ tools to help you.

These tools will be available to license soon, and I’ll be holding virtual, and possibly in-person, workshops to explain how to use these simple tools to identify a range of potential futures, to select a preferred future, and activities to help influence its realization.

I think you’ll really like them, but in the meantime, I invite you to check out the embedded YouTube video and to share your thoughts on how you look at and plan for the future in the comments below.

Finally, make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter to get our weekly collection of articles, along with updates on the forthcoming FutureHacking™ set of tools.

Keep innovating!

To read more about what scientists say we get wrong about time, check out this BBC article

Image Credit: Pixabay

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TODAY ONLY – Change Planning Toolkit – Fourth of July Special

Chance to Help Make Futurism and Foresight Accessible

Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

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Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

Innovation is all about change, and change only succeeds when people are put at the center. Therefore, people are also the heart of innovation.

It is because of this fact that I continue to build out my Human-Centered Innovation methodology and toolkit.

Keeping with the spirit of placing people at the center of innovation and change I have not only resurrected Blogging Innovation as Human-Centered Change & Innovation (follow us on LinkedIn) – complete with a weekly newsletter – but am also creating this curated collection of human-centered innovation tools.

I will give this page a start with some of my free tools from my Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit along with other well-know people-centric innovation tools.

BUT, this page will always be under construction, so please contact me with your suggestions of free tools to add.

Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

Assessments

1. Innovation Maturity Assessment

To help people evaluate their level of innovation maturity against the above graphic, I am sharing the 50 question innovation maturity assessment I use with clients. The assessment is most powerful when answers are gathered at multiple levels of the organization across several groups and several sites, but you can also fill it out yourself and get instant feedback – for FREE.

Click here to visit the Free Innovation Maturity Assessment page

Strategy Tools

1. Play-to-Win Strategy Canvas

Matthew E. May designed and developed a wall canvas to be used when facilitating strategic choice-making with small teams. Over time, the canvas has evolved as he learned more and more about the art and discipline of strategy facilitation… what people struggle with most, where the resource of time is best spent, etc.

He introduced v3.0 of the canvas a few years ago in a short post, but here’s a little content to both explain what’s different (and why) and a few tips.

The first thing you’ll notice is that strategy-making is in three big steps:

1. Choose (strategic choices using the Play-to-Win framework)
2. Reverse Engineer (what must true for the choices to be good ones)
3. Test (validating what must be true is in fact true, or true enough)

Click here to download the free Play-to-Win wall size canvas

Click here to download the free Play-to-Win 11×17 canvas (aka A3)

Planning Tools

1. Visual Project Charter™

The Visual Project Charter™ helps organizations:

Move beyond the Microsoft Word document
Make the creation of Project Charters more fun!
Kickoff projects in a more collaborative, more visual way
Structure dialogue to capture the project overview, project scope, project conditions and project approach

This download includes a premium 35″ x 56″ scalable PDF that I am making available to project managers for use in planning their projects in a more visual and collaborative way for greater alignment, accountability, and more successful outcomes.

The download will also include a JPEG version for use with online whiteboarding tools like Miro, Mural, Lucidspark and Microsoft Whiteboard for when your sticky notes need to be virtual.

Click here to get the Visual Project Charter™ for free

2. Business Model Canvas

The Business Model Canvas is a popular tool from Strategyzer than can be used collaboratively to sketch out and iterate on potential business models for a new business or innovation opportunity. Why use the Business Model Canvas?

Map Existing Business Models – Visualize and communicate a simple story of your business model.
Design New Business Models – Use the canvas to explore new business models whether you are a start-up or an existing business.
Manage a Portfolio of Business Models – Use the canvas to easily juggle between “Explore” and “Exploit” business models.

Click to visit Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas download page

People & Culture

1. Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.

Click here to visit the Nine Innovation Roles free gifts page
(multiple languages available)

Frameworks

1. Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation

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.

Click here to download the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation PDF from LinkedIn
(go into fullscreen mode to download)

2. Building a Global Sensing Network

Building a Global Sensing Network The purpose of a global sensing network is to allow an organization to collect and connect the partial insights and ideas that will form the basis of the organization’s next generation of customer solutions. This involves collecting and connecting:

Customer Insights
Core Technology Trends
Adjacent Technology Trends
Distant technology trends
Local social mutations
Expert Communities

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

Prototyping & Testing Tools

1. The Experiment Canvas™

The Experiment Canvas™ is designed to help people instrument for learning fast in iterative new product development (NPD) or service development activities. The canvas will help you create new innovation possibilities in a more visual and collaborative way for greater alignment, accountability, and more successful outcomes.