What is Your Purpose?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Purpose. Goal. Mission. You hear these words a lot this time of year. Not because it’s the start of the annual business planning cycle but because it’s graduation season.

Across the country, commencement speakers and wise family members espouse the importance of having a purpose to guide and sustain graduates as they set out on their next adventures.

All the talk of purpose can feel overwhelming, especially as you listen to graduates’ wide-eyed optimism about how they will change the world while stewing in an existential crisis that makes you wonder if you even have a purpose.

You do.

And part of that purpose is finding and creating purpose.

What is “Purpose?’

Purpose hasn’t reached buzzword status, but it’s close, so let’s start with a definition, or three, courtesy of The Britannica Dictionary:

the reason why something is done or used: the aim or intention of something – The purpose of innovation is to create value
the feeling of being determined to do or achieve something – The team worked with purpose
the aim or goal of a person: what a person is trying to do, become, etc. – He knew from a young age that her sole purpose in life was to be an orthodontist

Three different definitions of purpose. Three questions that it’s part of your purpose to ask.

“What’s THE purpose?”

Innovation is all about creating value. Sometimes, to create value, you need to do new things. Sometimes, you need to stop doing things. It’s hard to tell the difference if you don’t ask.

That’s why innovative leaders are curious. You aren’t afraid to ask, “What’s the purpose of this product/process/meeting/decision/(fill in the blank).” You want to know “why something is done or used,” and they know that the best way to figure that out is by asking.

You ask this question at least once a day. When you ask it, you’re genuinely curious about the answer. After all, we’ve all experienced people and cultures that weaponize questions – “Johnny, is that where the scissors go?” or “Why did you think that was a good idea?” – and you reassure people that you’re asking a genuine question, even if they should know that by your tone.

“What’s OUR purpose?”

Innovation is hard. You live in ambiguity and uncertainty. You fail (learn) more often than you succeed. You are told “No” and “Stop” more than “Yes,” “Keep going,” and “Thank You.”

Innovators are courageous. You do the hard work of innovation because you are “determined to do or achieve something.”

You also know that sustaining courage and purpose requires a team.

You aren’t fooled by the myth of the lone genius. After all, Thomas Edison worked with as many as 200 people in his West Orange lab. Heck, even Steve Jobs needed Sir Jony Ive (and a few hundred other people) to bring his vision of “1,000 songs in your pocket” to life.

“What’s MY purpose?”

Innovation takes a long time. Change happens gradually, then suddenly. We chose to preserve what we have, rather than take a risk to get more.

Innovators are committed. You are patient for change, steadfast in the face of resistance, and optimistic when others are afraid because of your “aim or goal…what [you are] trying to do, become, etc.”

Even if you can’t articulate it in a grand statement or simple, pithy soundbite, you have a purpose. As Viktor Frankl wrote, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

Three Purposes. Three questions

Even if you lack the wide-eyed optimism of a new graduate and feel like you spend most days just muddling through life, because you are here, you have a purpose. So tell me:

When was the last time you were curious and asked, “What’s the purpose of (artifact of the status quo)?”
When was the last time you were courageous and used your feeling of determination to inspire others to join your purpose, overcome obstacles, and get something done?
When was the last time you had to dig deep, rediscover your purpose, and reinforce your commitment so that you could bear and overcome the “how?”

Image credit: Dall-E via Microsoft Bing

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems

1 Reply

Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the 1960s and 70s, Route 128 outside of Boston was the center of technology, but by the 1990s Silicon Valley had taken over and never looked back. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, the key difference was that while Route 128 was a collection of value chains, Silicon Valley built an ecosystem.

Clearly, ecosystems are even more important today than they were back then. In fact, a study by Accenture Strategy a few years ago found that ecosystems are a “cornerstone” of future growth and that 60% of executives surveyed viewed ecosystems as a way to disrupt their industry. A similar number saw them as key to increasing revenue.

The problem is that competing in an ecosystem environment is vastly different than a traditional value chain strategy. While a value chain is driven by efficiencies, an ecosystem is driven by connections in a network. So we need to do more than adapt our strategy and tactics, we need to learn how to play a whole new game. The first step is to learn the rules.

First, Start Early

One of the key aspects of ecosystems is that they don’t seem all that important at first. By the time it becomes clear that a change is underway, it is often too late to adapt. The demise of Boston’s technology companies is a great example of how that can happen. Dominant firms such as DEC, Data General and Wang Laboratories found themselves irrelevant so quickly that they never recovered.

Network scientists call this an ‘instantaneous phase transition’ and it happens because connections tend to form slowly. They start as isolated clusters that, even taken in sum, don’t seem to amount to much. However, when those clusters connect, a cascade ensues and what once seemed inconsequential suddenly becomes predominant.

That’s why it’s so important to become active in an ecosystem before those clusters connect, when things are moving relatively slowly, everybody wants to talk to you and the price of admission is still fairly cheap. Once an ecosystem begins to thrive, things move much faster and costs for entry raise exponentially.

Consider the automobile industry, which is now spending billions to set up research centers in Silicon Valley. Just think of how much cheaper — and more effective — it would have been for those companies to have started 20 or 30 years ago.

Not Just Spinning Out, But Spinning In

A typical strategy for an enterprise looking to leverage an ecosystem is to spin out a division to focus on activities that are relevant to it. These spinoffs tend to have a lot more in common with the ecosystem firms than the parent company and therefore are much more able to connect. However, because links to the parent company become more tenuous over time, benefits are limited.

A potentially more successful strategy is to spin ecosystem firms in. For example, the National Labs have set up programs like Cyclotron Road, Chain Reaction and Innovation Crossroads that invite entrepreneurial firms to come work at the labs, make use of the scientific facilities and be mentored by top scientists.

In the private sector, corporate venture capital operations, as well as incubators and accelerators, can be a great way to connect with small entrepreneurial companies early in the ecosystem lifecycle. Beyond the actual investments made, these programs give you the opportunity to connect with hundreds of small firms, some of which can become important partners, suppliers and customers later on.

What’s crucial is that you are not seen as an interloper, but a true source of value, whether that value is in actual monetary investment, access to facilities and expertise or connection to points of market access. What may be insignificant to your company may be incredibly valuable to a small, entrepreneurial firm.

Maintaining Open Nodes

One of Saxenian’s most interesting findings in Regional Advantage was how differently the Boston technology firms treated outsiders compared to the Silicon Valley companies. The Boston firms were vertically integrated and sought to keep everything in-house. The Silicon Valley companies, on the other hand, thrived on connection.

For example, in Silicon Valley if you left your employer to start a company of your own, you were still considered part of the family. Many new entrepreneurs became suppliers or customers to their former employers and still socialized actively with their former colleagues. In Boston, if you left your firm you were treated as a pariah.

When technology began to shift in the 80s and 90s, the Boston firms had little, if any, connection to the new ecosystems that were evolving. In Silicon Valley, however, connections to former employees acted as an antenna network, providing early market intelligence that helped those companies adapt.

So while it is necessary to reach out to evolving ecosystems, it is just as important to ensure that there are also paths for small entrepreneurial firms to engage within your enterprise. Ecosystems thrive on personal connections. Those may not show up on a strategic plan or a balance sheet, but they are just as important as any other asset.

The New Competitive Advantage

Ever since Harvard professor Michael Porter published his seminal book, Competitive Strategy in 1980, strategists have sought advantage through driving efficiencies in order to maximize bargaining power against customers, suppliers, substitute goods and new market entrants. By doing so, they could achieve higher margins and invest in greater efficiencies, creating a virtuous cycle.

Yet today things move much too fast for that kind of chess game. To compete in a networked world, you must constantly widen and deepen connections. Instead of always looking to maximize bargaining power, you need to look for opportunities to co-create with customers and suppliers, to integrate your products and services with potential substitutes and form partnerships with new market entrants.

Power no longer resides at the top of value chains, but rather at the center of networks and collaboration has become the new competitive advantage. Value is no longer merely a target for extraction, but an asset for connection. You need to be seen to be adding value to the ecosystem in order to get value out.

The truth is that we can no longer manage for stability, we must manage for disruption. We can’t predict the future, but we can connect to it, nurture it and profit from it. Yet to do so requires far more than a simple shift in strategy and tactics. It requires a fundamental change in mindset.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Four Forms of Team Motivation

1 Reply

What Science Tells Us

Four Forms of Team Motivation - What Science Tells Us

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Keeping a team motivated is the one of the most important aspects of a leader’s job. It’s also one of the most misunderstood aspects of a leader’s job. Many organizations still equate “motivating your team” with “designing the right incentives.” But more than four decades of research into self-determination theory have revealed the limits of these types of extrinsic motivators and offers a wealth of insight into intrinsic motivation and how leaders can leverage it.

But even when expanding their perspective on motivation, many leaders still suffer from the misunderstanding of a binary choice between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In reality, self-determination theory research suggests that motivation is better thought of as a spectrum with four points along the way: extrinsic, introjected, identified, and intrinsic.

In this article, we’ll outline these four forms of motivation and offer a glimpse at how to leverage the most overlooked form when motivating your team.

The Four Forms Of Motivation

1. Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation refers to the external factors that drive individuals to take certain actions or adopt specific behaviors, whether it involves completing a task or achieving a personal objective. These external influences can take the form of rewards, promotions, prizes, and so on. Extrinsic motivation can work well in the short-term when the tasks being incentivized are clear and individuals know how to achieve them. However, extrinsic motivation often falls short in terms of providing genuine meaning. The impact of reward-based motivation tends to be inconsistent and frequently ineffective. In addition, when the path towards completion is unclear—extrinsic motivation tends to fall apart.

2. Introjected Motivation

Introjected motivation can be understood as an internalized form of motivation, similar to intrinsic motivation. However, it refers to a specific a sense of pressure to perform in order to receive validation or approval from significant individuals, such as bosses or influential colleagues. This type of motivation is more prevalent than commonly realized and impacts individuals in two distinct ways. First, individuals can be motivated to perform tasks to bolster their feeling of self-worth (introjected approach). Second, individuals can be motivated to perform tasks to avoid feelings of failure or diminished self-worth (introjected avoidance).

However, both forms of introjected motivation are difficult to sustain. In addition, introjected avoidance in particular can have long-term harmful effects—since it’s basically indistinguishable from emotional manipulation.

3. Identified Motivation

Identified motivation pertains to a type of motivation where individuals recognize or acknowledge the necessity of performing or completing a task, yet they have not yet taken action to fulfill this need. Identified motivation is what is felt when people may not be motivated to do a task but know that doing it is important. It is a potent form of motivation that primes individuals for action. And is especially powerful in a work context because relying on others to become motivated is generally impractical in most situations.

However, this form motivation is also quite underutilized because it requires connecting the work of an individual or team to something important enough to create a feeling of identified motivation. While most organizations have a mission or purpose statement—connecting specific tasks to that mission or purpose is often overlooked.

4. Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation refers to internal drives that are subjective in nature, emerging from actions that align with personal values or bring pleasure in performing a task. It is experienced in the present moment when individuals engage in activities they find enjoyable or meaningful.

However, intrinsic motivation is subjective and can be challenging to manage and harness effectively, since so much depends on the specific person and what satisfies them. That is why, despite studies suggesting intrinsic rewards have a stronger motivating effect compared to extrinsic ones, there is no universally applicable method or approach.

Three Ways to Motivate Your Team

Looking at the entire spectrum of motivation, it’s pretty apparent that identified motivation is both powerful and underutilized for motivating your team. Intrinsic motivation is great, but it’s not possible all of the time. Some tasks are vital, just not enjoyable. When that is the case, identified motivation can become the motivator of choice. And there’s three specific ways to leverage identified motivation.

1. Provide Purpose

The first way to motivate your team through identified motivation is to provide purpose. Ultimately for introjected motivation to work, people have to feel the tasks they’ve been assigned are important. And the most effective way to help them feel that way is to demonstrate how they serve a bigger purpose. More specifically, connecting the team’s effort to a “prosocial purpose.” Identified motivation is most powerful when the tasks needing completion are seen as tasks that promote or protect the well-being of others (sometimes also called prosocial motivation). For leaders, this means answering the question “Who is served by the work that we do?” and then reminding the team of that answer on a regular basis.

2. Connect to Values

The second way to motivate your team through identified motivation is to connect to values. Once purpose is established, it’s important to make the shared values that undergird that purpose salient. You’re working for something specific in the world—because you share a certain set of values that dictate the change you’re working for. Those shared values can be a powerful way to leverage identified motivation when discussing seemingly unimportant tasks. Those tasks may not be enjoyable, but they’re critical to achieve the purpose and hence critical to staying aligned with shared values.

3. Add Autonomy

The third way to motivate your team through identified motivation is to add autonomy. For tasks that don’t have a specific set of instructions—and for tasks that are not intrinsically motivating—allowing people to have a say in the way they achieve the task can be a powerful way to motivate them. Autonomy is a powerful motivator not only because it allows individuals to adjust their tasks into ways they may find enjoyable, but also because it eliminates the feeling of manipulation that people may have experienced when they’ve felt introjected motivation in the past.

Motivating your team can be tricky—much of the common practice in organizations seeks to leverage less powerful, more difficult forms of motivation. But by focusing on intrinsic and identified motivation, you can give your team a renewed zeal and help them do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on May 22, 2023

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

Unlocking Innovation Through Prototyping

1 Reply

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

A prototype moves us from “That’s not possible.” to “Hey, watch this!”

A prototype moves us from “We don’t do it that way.” to “Well, we do now.”

A prototype moves us from “That’s impossible.” to “As it turns out, it was only almost impossible.”

A prototype turns naysayers into enemies and profits.

A prototype moves us from an argument to a new product development project.

A prototype turns analysis-paralysis into progress.

A prototype turns a skeptical VP into a vicious advocate.

A prototype turns a pet project into top-line growth.

A prototype turns disbelievers into originators of the idea.

A prototype can turn a Digital Strategy into customer value.

A prototype can turn an uncomfortable Board of Directors meeting into a pizza party.

A prototype can save a CEO’s ass.

A prototype can be too early, but mostly they’re too late.

If the wheels fall off your first prototype, you’re doing it right.

If your prototype doesn’t dismantle the Status-Quo, you built the wrong prototype.

A good prototype violates your business model.

A prototype doesn’t care if you see it for what it is because it knows everyone else will.

A prototype turns “I don’t believe you.” into “You don’t have to.”

When you’re told “Don’t make that prototype.” you’re onto something.

A prototype eats not-invented-here for breakfast.

A prototype can overpower the staunchest critic, even the VP flavor.

A prototype moves us from “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” to “Oh, yes I do.”

If the wheels fall off your second prototype, keep going.

A prototype is objective evidence you’re trying to make a difference.

You can argue with a prototype, but you’ll lose.

If there’s a mismatch between the theory and the prototype, believe the prototype.

A prototype doesn’t have to do everything, but it must do one important thing for the first time.

A prototype must be real, but it doesn’t have to be really real.

If your prototype obsoletes your best product, congratulations.

A prototype turns political posturing into reluctant compliance and profits.

A prototype turns “What the hell are you talking about?” into “This.”

A good prototype bestows privilege on the prototype creator.

A prototype can beat a CEO in an arm-wrestling match.

A prototype doesn’t care if you like it. It only cares about creating customer value.

If there’s an argument between a well-stated theory and a well-functioning prototype, it’s pretty clear which camp will refine their theory to line up with what they just saw with their own eyes.

A prototype knows it has every right to tell the critics to “Kiss my ass.” but it knows it doesn’t have to.

You can argue with a prototype, but shouldn’t.

A prototype changes thinking without asking for consent.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Harnessing the Secrets of Successful Customer Engagement

Leave a reply

Harnessing the Secrets of Successful Customer Engagement

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

What is customer engagement? A Google search will provide plenty of definitions to consider. Here are a few to give you a clear understanding:

Qualtrics defines it as “the emotional connection between a customer and a brand.”
A recent Forbes article defines it as “building relationships with customers at every touch point.”
Wikipedia offers numerous definitions from multiple sources, including this one from Forrester from 2008: “creating deep connections with customers that drive purchase decisions, interaction, and participation over time.”

All of these (and more) are correct. They work. As a modern marketer, the new question is about how to deliver on the foundational definition of customer engagement using current tools and technology.

I had a chance to do an Amazing Business Radio interview with Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze, a customer engagement platform that offers messaging solutions to multiple communication channels. We discussed the innovative ways marketers and customer experience (CX) leaders are taking customer engagement to new levels.

Burke simplified the marketing and customer engagement definition to four words: connecting brands to consumers. That’s really the job of a marketer. The result is that customers want to buy, come back and buy more.

It may sound simple, but there are obstacles to the optimal customer engagement experience. According to Burke, “Marketers have a lot on their plate. It’s not easy to be creative when there’s an emphasis on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and time-draining routine tasks.”

To support this statement, Burke shared findings from the 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review, in which Braze interviewed 1,900 marketing decision makers to learn about challenges and opportunities in the marketing and CX industries.

Marketing used to be about finding creative ways to engage with customers, but today’s marketers are burdened in four areas:

1. Too much emphasis on KPIs: Forty-two percent of marketers surveyed felt KPIs inhibit a focus on creativity. Numbers/KPIs are important. After all, you can’t manage what you don’t or can’t measure (Peter Drucker). But if they get in the way of creativity, then consider pushing the numbers aside for a moment—or maybe just focus on one or two KPIs.
2. Too many routine tasks: Forty-two percent feel too much time is spent on “business as usual execution and tasks,” leaving less time for creative work. If there’s something that can be automated, then automate it. Don’t waste any employee’s time—especially when they are trying to be creative—with tasks and processes that drain energy and take up too much time.
3. Lack of technology: Forty-one percent feel that a lack of technology hinders the execution of creative ideas. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support the process. How can AI make a creative marketer’s life easier? There are many, many ways!
4. Return on Investment (ROI) is hard to track: Forty percent said it’s hard to demonstrate the ROI impact of creativity. Leadership wants ROI. Often, they demand to know the ROI before a project starts. You can’t fight this. Start with the end in mind. Understanding the benefits of the work that is to be performed is important to getting leadership to buy in and support the marketing and customer engagement efforts.

AI should be used as a tool to free up time and let creatives be creative, according to Burke. For example, he says, “When you know what you want to say but haven’t been able to articulate it just right, it’s a huge confidence booster to know you can drop the message into an AI interface to get feedback and suggestions for improvement.” The time savings are substantial, but more importantly, the marketer’s focus gets to be on creating, not finishing.

Burke also mentioned how important personalization is in today’s customer engagement strategy. There’s a tremendous amount of data on customers, and brands must be thoughtful in how they manage that data. AI can help interpret the data and deliver insights about customers that can be useful. For instance, Netflix learns its customers’ viewing habits and suggests TV shows and movies. Amazon remembers what its customers have bought in the past and can accurately predict when the customer should order more. The best brands use the data AI provides to create a better experience. But, it’s a balancing act. Too much personalization creates “the creepiness factor,” where being too detailed or specific has the opposite effect of what marketers want to achieve.

Astha Malik, Chief Business Officer of Braze, says, “Today’s marketers face growing expectations from increasingly connected consumers, who want value in exchange for their attention. In response, we see a growing number of marketers tapping into first-party data and utilizing AI to ignite creativity and craft personalized experiences that both resonate with consumers and foster brand loyalty.”

In addition, brands need to be consistent with their personalization. You can’t recognize a customer one time and not know them the next time. That defeats the entire personalization campaign.

All of this takes us back to Burke’s original definition of customer engagement, which is connecting brands to consumers. That connection must be consistent and accurate. There are more and better tools than ever to help create an optimal customer engagement experience, one interaction at a time. The closer you can get to meeting customers where they are, when they need you and provide value in those interactions, the more likely they will see you as a trusted brand and say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credits: Pexels, Shep Hyken

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Organizational Debt Syndrome Poses a Threat

3 Replies

Organizational Debt Syndrome Poses a Threat

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Organizations face numerous challenges as they grow and evolve. One of the most significant challenges is the Organizational Debt Syndrome, a phenomenon that results from accumulated compromises and shortcuts taken in people, culture, and leadership practices over time.

Just as financial – and technical – debt accumulates and becomes a burden, organizational debt accumulates and creates difficulties for the organization, such as reduced agility, slower delivery, decreased competitiveness, decreased employee morale, and increased resistance to change.

Organizational Debt Syndrome is a particular concern for scale-up companies, given the rapid pace of growth they experience and the changes they face both internally and externally. This syndrome can become a vicious cycle, as the organization’s inability to address the debt leads to further compromise and a worsening of the situation. However, even large, more established organizations and their teams need to address this issue to stay, or become, more agile.

The ability to adapt to change, manage transformation, and drive innovation is essential for organizations to thrive and succeed in today’s fast-paced business environment. If left unaddressed, the Organizational Debt Syndrome can limit an organization’s ability to adapt to changing market conditions, make it less competitive, and ultimately lead to its downfall.

Signs of Organizational Debt Syndrome

Organizational debt can be identified by several signs that indicate the organization is struggling to be agile, efficient, and competitive.

Some of the signs of organizational debt include:

Decreased agility: When a company is struggling with organizational debt, it can become less agile and less able to respond quickly to changes in the market or new opportunities. This can result in missed opportunities for growth and increased competition.
Slowed delivery: Projects that once took only a few weeks to complete can start taking several months or even years. This can lead to a backlog of work that is never completed, which can further reduce efficiency and competitiveness.
Reduced competitiveness: Companies that are suffering from organizational debt often fall behind their competitors in terms of innovation, product development, and market share. This can be due to a lack of investment in research and development, a lack of focus on innovation, or a lack of support for new ideas.
Decreased employee morale: When a company is struggling with organizational debt, it can also lead to decreased employee morale. This can result in disengaged employees who are unenthusiastic about their work and may be more likely to leave the company.
Increased resistance to change: The culture of a company suffering from organizational debt can become resistant to new ideas and changes, making it difficult for the company to adapt to new market conditions. This can result in missed opportunities for growth and increased competition.

Leaders can spot these issues by regularly monitoring the company’s performance, gathering feedback from employees, and conducting regular audits of processes and systems.

Applying Metrics and KPI’s for Organizational Debt Syndrome

Here are some of the metrics that leaders can use to track the health of their organization and identify signs of organizational debt syndrome. These metrics provide insight into key areas such as delivery times, market share, sales and revenue, employee morale, company culture, competitiveness, and adaptability based on three categories of performance, behavioral and innovation metrics:

Performance metrics:

Delivery times: Leaders should track how long it takes for projects to be completed, as this can indicate a decrease in efficiency.
Market share: By monitoring their company’s market share, leaders can see if their organization is falling behind competitors.
Sales and revenue: Regularly monitoring sales and revenue can help leaders see if the organization is losing ground in the market.
Employee turnover: High rates of employee turnover can indicate low morale and engagement among employees.
Profit margins: Tracking the organization’s profit margins can give leaders insight into its financial health.
Productivity: Monitoring employee productivity can give leaders an understanding of how effectively the organization is utilizing its resources.
Operational costs: Keeping an eye on operational costs, including overhead expenses and supply chain expenses, can help leaders identify areas where the organization may be overspending.

Behavioral metrics:

Employee feedback: Leaders should gather feedback from employees on a regular basis. This can help them understand how engaged employees are with their work and the company culture.
Meeting dynamics: Observing the dynamics of meetings and interactions between employees can give leaders a sense of the company culture and whether it is resistant to change.
Employee satisfaction: Measuring employee satisfaction through regular surveys can help leaders understand the level of morale and engagement among employees.
Communication patterns: Tracking the frequency and effectiveness of communication within the organization can give leaders an understanding of the organization’s culture and dynamics.
Collaboration: Measuring the level of collaboration between departments and teams can give leaders insight into the organization’s ability to work together effectively.

Innovation metrics:

Customer satisfaction with new products: Feedback from customers on their satisfaction with new products and services
Employee engagement in innovation: Measure of employee engagement and involvement in the innovation process
Adoption of new technologies: Monitoring the organization’s adoption of new technologies can give leaders an understanding of its ability to adapt to new trends and advancements in its industry.
Number of new ideas generated: Tracking the number of new ideas generated by employees can give leaders insight into the organization’s ability to innovate.

If leadership teams regularly monitor the various metrics, they achieve valuable insights into the state of their organization and this helps them identify signs of organizational debt syndrome.

It is important to note that metrics should be used as a tool, not as the sole indicator of success or failure, as it’s important to consider the context and complexity of organizational dynamics. By taking an holistic approach like this, leaders can work to prevent and mitigate the negative impact of organizational debt syndrome.

Addressing Organizational Debt Syndrome

To prevent and address the Organizational Debt Syndrome, leaders and their teams must take a proactive approach, which includes steps such as:

Awareness: Leaders must first be aware of the concept of Organizational Debt Syndrome and its potential impact on the organization.
Assessment: Leaders must regularly assess the organization’s performance and gather feedback from employees and stakeholders to identify any signs of organizational debt.
Root cause analysis: Once the issues have been identified, leaders must conduct a root cause analysis to understand the underlying causes and drivers of organizational debt.
Prioritization: Leaders must prioritize the most pressing issues and determine which ones to address first based on their impact on the organization.
Action plan: Leaders must develop a comprehensive action plan to address the root causes of organizational debt, which may include revising processes, restructuring teams, and implementing new systems and technologies.
Implementation: The action plan must be implemented effectively, with clear goals, timelines, and metrics for measuring progress.
Continuous improvement: Leaders must continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the action plan and make adjustments as needed to ensure the organization remains agile and competitive.

At the early stages of addressing the Organizational Debt Syndrome, reflection is key for the leadership team. Everyone is super busy these days and there is a tendency to focus on short term issues related to growth and “just” managing the day-to-day business rather than shaping the future and taking steps to do the right things for the long run.

So, it’s understandable that leaders will not dive into action immediately but they must start to reflect on this and develop a plan for addressing this.

Organizational Debt Syndrome is a real challenge for organizations as they grow, evolve and transform. By recognizing the signs of this syndrome and taking a proactive approach to addressing its root causes, leaders can help their organizations overcome the negative impacts of organizational debt and become more stable, sustainable, and successful.

It’s definitely not easy but it is doable and it starts with reflection and acknowledgement of the issues at hand.

Image Credit: Pixabay, Stefan Lindegaard

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

Creating Value from Nothing

Leave a reply

Creating Value from Nothing

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Doing nothing fuels creativity and innovation, but that fuel is wasted if you don’t put it to use. Idleness clears the mind, allowing fresh ideas to emerge, but those ideas must be acted upon to create value.

Why is doing something with that fuel so difficult?

Don’t blame the status quo.

The moment we get thrown back into the topsy-turvy, deadline-driven, politics-navigating, schedule-juggling humdrum of everyday life, we slide back into old habits and routines. The status quo is a well-known foe, so it’s tempting to blame it for our lack of action.

But it’s not stopping us from taking the first step.

We’re stopping ourselves.

Blame one (or more) of these.

Last week, I stumbled upon this image from the Near Future Laboratory, based on a theory from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow:

There’s a lot going on here, but four things jumped out at me:

When we don’t have the skills needed to do something challenging, we feel anxiety
When we don’t feel challenged because our skills exceed the task, we feel boredom
When we don’t feel challenged and we don’t have the skills, we feel apathy
When we have the skills and feel challenged, we are in flow

Four different states. Only one of them is positive.

I don’t love those odds.

Yet we live them every day.

Every day, in every activity and interaction, we dance in and through these stages. Anxiety when given a new project and doubt that we have what it takes. Boredom when asked to explain something for the 82^nd time to a new colleague and nostalgia for when people stayed in jobs longer or spent time figuring things out for themselves. Sometimes, we get lucky and find ourselves in a Flow State, where our skills perfectly match the challenge, and we lose track of space and time as we explore and create. Sometimes, we are mired in apathy.

Round and round we go.

The same is true when we have a creative or innovative idea. We have creative thoughts, but the challenge seems too great, so we get nervous, doubt our abilities, and never speak up. We have an innovative idea, but we don’t think management will understand, let alone approve it, so we keep it to ourselves.

Anxiety. Boredom. Apathy.

One (or more) of these tells you that your creative thoughts are crazy and your innovative ideas are wild. They tell you that none of them are ready to be presented to your boss with a multi-million-dollar funding request. In fact, none of them should be shared with anyone, lest they think you, not your idea, is crazy.

Then overcome them

I’m not going to tell you not to feel anxiety, boredom, or apathy. I feel all three of those every day.

I am telling you not to get stuck there.

Yes, all the things anxiety, boredom, and apathy tell you about your crazy thoughts and innovative ideas may be true. AND it may also be true that there’s a spark of genius in your crazy thoughts and truly disruptive thinking in your innovative ideas. But you won’t know if you don’t act:

When you feel anxious, ask a friend, mentor, or trusted colleague if the challenge is as big as it seems or if you have the skills to take it on.
When you feel bored, find a new challenge
When you feel apathetic, change everything

Your thoughts and ideas are valuable. Without them, nothing changes, and nothing gets better.

You have the fuel. Now, need to be brave.

We need you to act.

Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

How to Pursue a Grand Innovation Challenge

Leave a reply

How to Pursue a Grand Innovation Challenge

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

All too often, innovation is confused with agility. We’re told to “adapt or die” and encouraged to “move fast and break things.” But the most important innovations take time. Einstein spent ten years on special relativity and then another ten on general relativity. To solve tough, fundamental problems, we have to be able to commit for the long haul.

As John F. Kennedy put it in his moonshot speech, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” Every organization should pursue grand challenges for the same reason.

Make no mistake. Innovation needs exploration. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent and if you don’t invent you will be disrupted. It’s just a matter of time. Unfortunately, exploration can’t be optimized or iterated. That’s why grand challenges don’t favor the quick and agile, but the patient and the determined.

1. Don’t Bet The Company

Most grand challenges aren’t like the original moonshot, which was, in large part, the result of the space race with the Soviets that began with the Sputnik launch in 1957. That was a no-holds-barred effort that consumed the efforts of the nation, because it was widely seen as a fundamental national security issue that represented a clear and present danger.

For most organizations, those type of “bet-the-company” efforts are to be avoided. You don’t want to bet your company if you can avoid it, for the simple reason that if you lose you are unlikely to survive. Most successful grand challenges don’t involve a material investment. They are designed to be sustainable.

“Grand challenges are not about the amount of money you throw at the problem, Bernard Meyerson, IBM’s Chief Innovation Officer, told me. “To run a successful grand challenge program, failure should not be a material risk to the company, but success will have a monumental impact. That’s what makes grand challenges an asymmetric opportunity.”

Take, for example Google’s X division. While the company doesn’t release its budget, it appeared to cost the company about $3.5 billion in 2018, which is a small fraction of its $23 billion in annual profits at the time. At the same time, just one project, Waymo, may be worth $70 billion (2018). In a similar vein, the $3.8 billion invested in the Human Genome Project generated nearly $800 billion of economic activity as of 2011.

So the first rule of grand challenges is not to bet the company. They are, in fact, what you do to avoid having to bet the company later on.

2. Identify A Fundamental Problem

Every innovation starts out with a specific problem to be solved. The iPod, for example, was Steve Jobs’s way of solving the problem of having “a thousand songs in my pocket.” More generally, technology companies strive to deliver better performance and user experience, drug companies aim to cure disease and retail companies look for better ways to drive transactions. Typically, firms evaluate investment based on metrics rooted in past assumptions

Grand challenges are different because they are focused on solving fundamental problems that will change assumptions about what’s possible. For example, IBM’s Jeopardy Grand Challenge had no clear business application, but transformed artificial intelligence from an obscure field to a major business. Later, Google’s AlphaGo made a similar accomplishment with self-learning. Both have led to business opportunities that were not clear at the time.

Grand challenges are not just for technology companies either. MD Anderson Cancer Center has set up a series of Moonshots, each of which is designed to have far reaching effects. 100Kin10, an education nonprofit, has identified a set of grand challenges it has tasked its network with solving.

Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Executive Director of 100Kin10, told me she uses the 5 Whys as a technique to identify grand challenges. Start with a common problem, keep asking why it keeps occurring and you will eventually get to the root problem. By focusing your efforts on solving that, you can make a fundamental impact of wide-ranging consequence.

3. Commit To A Long Term Effort

Grand challenges aren’t like normal problems. They don’t conform to timelines and can’t effectively be quantified. You can’t justify a grand challenge on the basis of return on investment, because fundamental problems are too pervasive and ingrained to surrender themselves to any conventional form of analysis.

Consider The Cancer Genome Atlas, which eventually sequenced and published over 10,000 tumor genomes When Jean Claude Zenklusen first came up with the idea in 2005, it was highly controversial, because although it wasn’t particularly expensive, it would still take resources away from more conventional research.

Today, however, the project is considered to be a runaway success, which has transformed the field, greatly expanding knowledge and substantially lowering costs to perform genetic research. It has also influenced efforts in other fields, such as the Materials Genome Initiative. None of this would have been possible without commitment to a long-term effort.

And that’s what makes grand challenges so different. They are not business as usual and not immediately relevant to present concerns. They are explorations that expand conventional boundaries, so cannot be understood within them.

An Insurance Policy Against A Future You Can’t Yet See

Typically, we analyze a business by extrapolating current trends and making adjustments for things that we think will be different. So, for example, if we expect the market to pick up, we may invest in more capacity to profit from greater demand. On the other hand, if we expect a softer market, we’d probably start trimming costs to preserve margins.

The problem with this type of analysis is that the future tends to surprise us. Technology changes, customer preferences shift and competitors make unexpected moves. Nobody, no matter how diligent or smart, gets every call right. That’s why every business model fails sooner or later, it’s just a matter of time.

It’s also what makes pursuing grand challenges is so important. They are basically an insurance policy against a future we can’t yet see. By investing sustainably in solving fundamental problems, we can create new businesses to replace the ones that will inevitably falter. Google doesn’t invest in self-driving cars to improve its search business, it invests because it knows that the profits from search won’t last forever.

The problem is that there is a fundamental tradeoff between innovation and optimization, so few organizations have the discipline to invest in exploration today for a uncertain payoff tomorrow. That’s why so few businesses last.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Unsplash

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Rise of the Atomic Consultant

Leave a reply

Or the Making of a Superhero

Rise of the Atomic Consultant

by Braden Kelley

In today’s rapidly evolving world, the consulting landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. I was recently asked a series of questions to capture my thoughts on how the consulting industry and its employees will need to evolve to thrive in the coming years – including my thoughts on the creation of “superhero” consultants. The emergence of the “superhero” consultant is not merely a result of advanced tools and technologies, but rather the cultivation of essential skills and capabilities. As we navigate through this era of unprecedented change, it is imperative for consulting firms to foster a culture of flexibility, growth, and continuous learning. The future of consulting lies in the hands of those who can seamlessly integrate human expertise with artificial intelligence (AI), build meaningful connections in a hybrid work environment, and facilitate diverse perspectives to drive innovation. This article delves into the key attributes that will define the next generation of consultants and explores the obstacles that must be overcome to unlock their full potential.

Here are the questions:

1) What are the tools and technologies that a consultant should use to become a “superhero” consultant? Why are these specific tools/technologies important? How should these tools be used most effectively?

This is the wrong question. It is not tools and technologies that will enable “superhero” consultants, but instead the development of the right skills and capabilities. The future of consulting will require consulting firms to hire and develop employees that are:

Flexible and growth minded – the world is changing at an accelerating rate and consultants more than ever before will need to be lifelong learners, comfortable with knowledge gaps and eager to become an expert in something on behalf of the client with each new project
AI Taskmasters – the future of work is man and machine working together and consultants skilled at breaking down work to the right size (atomizing work) and assigning it to both human and AI workers
Socially Savvy – remote and hybrid work is here to stay and even clients have soured on having consultants travel in every week, so “superhero” consultants must excel at building connections and relationships via internal, external and client social tools to both distribute/execute work and to source new work
Skilled facilitators – as data and AI-generated work products become plentiful, sense-making rises in importance along with a diversity of perspectives – often in workshops facilitated by consultants
Open Sourced – gone are the days of rinse and repeat projects powered by proprietary frameworks and IP, instead “superhero” consultants will excel at identifying the right tools and frameworks to bring to bear – from FutureHacking™ to Design Thinking to the Change Planning Toolkit™

The capabilities of tools and technologies will grow over time and new ones will emerge. The best consultants will constantly be scanning the horizon for new tools, technologies, and capabilities and leverage the above skills and capabilities to unlearn and then re-learn the best ways to create value for their clients.

2) What are the biggest obstacles that prevent consultants from being able to access or learn the steps needed to become a “superhero” consultant? What should be done to remove these obstacles to help make this transformation easier for more consultants?

The biggest obstacles that prevent consultants from becoming “superheroes” are internal – to both the consultants themselves and the firms they work for. Companies will need to examine their own policies, procedures, and training programs to right-size them for this emerging new reality. Firms will need to allow consultants to pick the right frameworks, tools and technologies for addressing client challenges – instead of limiting them to those owned by the firm. Consultants will need to shift their mindset from being experts in a particular tool or technology and towards being masters of the above skills and capabilities and experts in achieving key client outcomes. Firms will need to invest in the training and the technology necessary to provide AI’s built for purpose to accelerate the ability of consultants to more efficiently and effectively solve client challenges. Firms will also need to update their tools and methods for capturing and sharing knowledge to leverage AI capabilities at the same time.

3) What specific areas of consulting (eg. IT, finance, marketing, etc.) have the greatest potential to produce this new brand of “superhero” consultants? Why?

This new brand of “superhero” consultants will excel in a number of different disciplines because they will be able to not only find more efficient and effective ways to execute work traditionally performed by consultants (technology implementations, analytical work, etc.), but as they are helping clients transform the ways they perform different types of work, they will also be able to help clients identify new activities that will be made possible by the transformation and the new technologies and ways of working they bring with it. The reason is their focus on building skills and capabilities into which tools and technologies plug in – somewhat interchangeably.

Conclusion

The journey to becoming a “superhero” consultant is not without its challenges, but the rewards are immense. By embracing a mindset of lifelong learning and adaptability, consultants can harness the power of emerging technologies to deliver unparalleled value to their clients. The future of consulting is not about rigid frameworks or proprietary tools, but about the ability to unlearn and relearn, to innovate and collaborate, and to drive meaningful change. As we look ahead, it is clear that the most successful consultants will be those who can navigate the complexities of a dynamic world with agility and foresight. Let us continue to push the boundaries of what is possible and strive to create a brighter future for the consulting industry. Keep innovating!

p.s. Be sure and follow both my personal account and the Human-Centered Change and Innovation community on LinkedIn.

Image credit: Bing Copilot (Microsoft Designer)

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

Your Ability to Innovate Determined By Your Ability to Pause

Leave a reply

Your Ability to Innovate Determined By Your Ability to Pause

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Many of my coaching clients have recently shared their struggles with feeling tired, emotionally overwhelmed, and cognitively overloaded and are close to burnout. They attribute these issues to the pervasive and addictive nature of technology, exacerbated by the pandemic and divisive global conflicts, accelerating change and the rise of AI and hybrid work. As a result, many have retreated and frozen into a state of habitual, reactive ‘busyness.’ This affects their overall emotional, physical, and mental health and wellness. It also inhibits their ability to focus, create, invent and innovate and restricts their optimism, hope, and positivity about their future in an unstable and uncertain world.

The Coaching Opportunity

Coaching creates a unique opportunity to partner with people to develop their pause-power to identify the transformative actions to reverse this pervasive phenomenon to flourish in a world of unknowns.

A coaching session usually serves as a first step towards cultivating the pause-power needed to stop, observe, reflect and take valuable time out to rest, replenish, re-energize and reboot. This allows people to courageously notice, attune to, and express their true feelings and thoughts, to disrupt, dispute and deviate them to develop the pause-power required to heal and provide relief, hope and optimism for a better future.

Everyone must cultivate intentional pause-power to empower them to observe and understand their inner and outer worlds. This practice helps them remove distractions, stop multitasking, and break free from the ‘busyness’ that depletes their cognitive, emotional, and visceral resources, putting them in the driver’s seat of their mental and emotional well-being.

Self-reflection and reflective practice become potent tools, enabling people to move away from reactivity and short-term focus and towards taking the transformative actions to adapt, create, invent, and innovate.

Hitting Your Pause Button

Being adaptive, creative, inventive and innovative involves consciously taking your hands off the controls and encouraging yourself and others to notice and disrupt your habitual and addictive ‘busyness’ (time scarcity + task focus).

This awareness is the first step towards reclaiming your focus and attention so that you can engage with and interpret the modern world rather than try to control it or withdraw from it.

Being willing to take a break and hit the ‘pause button’ stops your continuous cycle of doing. It focuses your attention on breaking limiting beliefs or unresourceful patterns and provides a support structure for applying rigorous perception practices to our daily lives.

Using pause-power to create a place, as recently described by Otto Scharmer from the Presencing Institute:

“Between action and non-action, there is a place. A portal into the unknown. But what are we each called to contribute to the vision of the emerging future? Perhaps these times are simply doorways into the heart of the storm, a necessary journey through the cycles of time required to create change”.

What Does Pause-Power Involve?

A pause is created when you suspend activity, a time of temporary disengagement when you no longer move towards any goal. It can occur amid almost any activity and can last for an instant by taking a deep breath to get grounded, for minutes to become mindful or to take a rest, for hours to enjoy a well-deserved break, or for years to experience life in a different culture or place.

Intentionally pausing enables you to take time between your range of habitual, largely unconscious reactive responses; it helps our brain’s executive function utilize the valuable ‘empty spaces’ between stimulus and response and between different ideas. It creates a space open to options and choices for being, thinking and acting differently.

Doing this allows you to notice and disrupt unresourceful and habitual auto ‘stimulus-response’ default patterns, which usually occur when things go wrong, you make a mistake and fail, or you dive into blaming, shaming or avoiding others as part of our naturally wired defence mechanisms.

Radical Acceptance

Learning to pause is one of the critical steps in innovation because it helps you initiate a practice of radical acceptance. This requires embracing uncertainty, or ‘what is’ truly happening in the present moment, relationship, or situation, by accepting things just as they are.

“During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond: We can continue our futile attempts at managing our experience or meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of Radical Acceptance”.

By being willing to dive into an ‘empty space’ from an emergent process, you can unleash possibilities, opportunities, options, and choices towards identifying the transformative actions that create your desired future.

People who can artfully and skillfully facilitate creative conversations that funnel pause power and co-create valuable ‘empty spaces’ to occur can generate our imagination and curiosity to manifest glorious moments of insights required to emerge creative ideas.

Pausing also enables you to observe, pay attention, notice, and regulate how your overall nervous system impacts and manages your brain’s functions. This is key to being practical, resourceful, healthy, and productive in the face of volatility, complexity, uncertainty, and accelerating change in our hyper-connected world.

It also needs rest to do this. By applying our pause-power and giving ourselves some rest, we offer our bodies, hearts, and minds a chance to recharge, keep moving, and work towards taking the transformative actions required to build better workplaces and flourishing futures.

A Valuable Toolkit and Habit

This skill is valuable for everyone to reflect upon, cultivate and master. It is initiated by intentionally stopping by hitting an invisible cognitive ‘pause button’ to observe, pay attention, notice your inner experience, and see yourself as the cause of it.

Developing pause power involves six simple vital steps and questions:

1.Retreat from reacting to the situation – by stepping back into the present moment or time to notice, be with, allow, accept (radical acceptance), and acknowledge ‘what is’ going on internally and externally, and be willing to name it with detachment and discernment.

What is going on for me right now – how am I feeling about it?

2. Step up and out to disrupt yourself and create an opening, doorway, threshold, or empty space – to allow something new to emerge.

What can I learn from this situation?

3. Step up and out to disrupt yourself and create an opening, doorway, threshold, or empty space – to allow something new to emerge.

What can I learn from this situation?

4. Be willing to introduce and explore options and choices that allow you to deviate and refocus your attention on what really matters – taking a rest, having a holiday, completing a project, being a better person, getting a new job, or getting a promotion.

What are some of my options for change?

5. Be inquisitive, curious and open to reimagining, reinventing, and pivoting – an intention, mindset, behaviour, task, goal, or business focus to re-plenish, re-energize, re-engage and re-boot to mobilize yourself.

How might I feel, think or act differently to achieve my outcome?

6. Step out into the system’s edges – by being calm, hopeful and optimistic, to identify the transformative actions required to move towards and exploring new creative, inventive and innovative solutions for providing value in ways people appreciate and cherish.

What will I do next?

Engaging in a Looking Lab

As many of our ImagineNation community members know, I am currently writing a book on ‘Being Innovative.’ There is a whole chapter on developing pause power to help people engage what Christian Madsbjerg calls in his latest book “Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World” (Riverhead Books) – a Looking Lab, to:

“Get away from your screens, turn off your notifications, go out into the wilds of reality, and look around. Let go of all filters—clichés, conventions, colour corrections, whatever they may be. Try to pay attention to the simple act of seeing.”

He reveals that “if we choose to look for them, there are invisible worlds all around us ready to reveal their magic. The seemingly mundane or average can appear extraordinary, but only if we take the time to notice and see it”.

This is a vital part of our remarkable human capacity to transform through the slow, patient act of observing, attending, noticing, replenishing, re-energizing, re-engaging, and re-booting to take the transformative actions that will help you make the world a better place and achieve your 21st-century growth and success differently.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, it is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalised innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customised as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.