Category Archives: Innovation

Failure makes visible our naked condition

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Just read a great article from the New York Times on failure by Costica Bradatan – In Praise of Failure.  Check it out for his three reasons failure is important to human existence:

  1. Failure allows us to see our existence in its naked condition
  2. Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are
  3. We are designed to fail

Bradatan points out that “To experience failure is to start seeing the cracks in the fabric of being, and that’s precisely the moment when, properly digested, failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise. For it is this lurking, constant threat that should make us aware of the extraordinariness of our being: the miracle that we exist at all when there is no reason that we should. Knowing that gives us some dignity.”

Somehow we have become a population that shies away from failure – we talk about ‘failing forward’, or how we don’t have to ‘fail’, we can instead ‘learn’. We get aggressive about failure ‘tackling it head on’, ‘turning it around’, ‘refusing to fail’, or being ‘too big to fail’. We are afraid of what we are, as Bradatan reminds us, biologically designed to fail in the end.

Philosophically it is fascinating to consider – what happens when we seriously interrogate our popular aversion to failure? What to we give up, what do we gain?

At the intersection of Creativity and Management

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Somewhere in the world today there are ‘creative types’ chafing under the burden of management processes, who just want time and space to ‘do their thing’. Just down the virtual or real hallway from them is a ‘management type’ who is drowning in frustration with them because of a missed deadline, a failure to follow process, or a need to create a status report on progress that is not following the plan.

These archetypes populate many an article, TED Talk, or best seller on innovation – the thing so many companies say they want, and that so few companies truly foster. As I wrote about earlier this year, many companies say they want creativity, but they have really no interest in the messiness that it brings. They want the neat and tidy version of innovation, which rarely produces groundbreaking results. The yin and the yang of corporate life in the internet economy – freedom or bureaucracy, it is a dualism that cannot be resolved.

And yet, I think that creatives and management types are actually quite co-dependent. In today’s market, we need people who can comfortably move between the two, interpreting, guiding, and providing enough structure to validate budgets and enough freedom to encourage broad thinking. The best companies are seeing a convergence of technology, marketing, and management as they develop new products. This convergence creates a space where people who can conceptualize beautiful things, leverage new media to render their concepts, and by the way know their way around a project plan are the new rock stars – the triple threats as it were.

Take a look around you. Are you recruiting and retaining triple threats? Or are you starving them by forcing them to ‘choose a discipline’? People coming into the job market today aren’t likely to be satisfied with being one or the other. Roles need to be shaped and management processes rethought to create the space for these individuals to thrive. And yes, the creatives need to learn a few new skills themselves. That’s what convergence means – everyone moves.

If you have someone who is a triple threat, figure out how to grow them in all ways. If you are a triple threat, first congratulations, and second, don’t settle for being compartmentalized. You are the first of your kind, and you will have to fight to grow and to establish a place in the new economy.

Commoditizing knowledge and expertise

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Here’s a great article by Jessie Hempel from Fortune Magazine on the ways in which information fuels our economy today, and going forward.  It ties to my interest in the future of work and how knowledge is playing a role in shaping what we understand to be work. Tools like Watson (highlighted in the article) will challenge the assumptions around knowledge workers, and what it means to be an ‘expert’ by creating new ways to quickly aggregate and understand massive amounts of data in a specific and contextual way.  What happens then?  We will find out….. companies like the grocery chain Kroger’s (highlighted in the article) are experimenting with how to leverage Watson in their call centers.  It will be fascinating to watch and see what happens.

Is that really a “best” practice?

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I’ve been talking a lot with clients lately about knowledge sharing and collaboration. This is a broad umbrella that includes content management, collaboration environments, reconfigured physical spaces, reconfigured cloud spaces, expert designations, profiles, and other tools to help build knowledge communities and great content. I love the work and the conversations of which I get to be a part as a result – it feels like it is having an immediate impact on the culture, the results, and the successes of some very large companies, which is fun for me.

A consistent debate that comes up in every instance is around “best practice”.  The debate rages around what defines a best practice, how do we acknowledge it, who vets and approves it, etc. I recently pointed out to a client that part of the problem is that “best” is binary.  There can only be one. And in most of life, there are many ways that something can be great and work well.  What’s worse is that things change fast – best today may be terrible tomorrow. So who maintains what is identified as ‘best’?

In some organizations we’ve switched to using “successful practices” – an inventory of things that have proven to work in certain situations as certain times. In others, we’ve moved to a star rating, where it makes total sense for more than one type of practice or collateral or content to have the highest star rating. We still have to debate the process for assigning and maintaining the ratings, but it seems to create a much more productive and useful  conversation.

In my mind, best is too definitive for most complex environments, and it makes little sense in my mind to spend time debating how ‘best’ will be assigned and maintained. Moving away from a binary descriptor can help shape the discussion and create positive change.  Give it a try!

If it isn’t uncomfortable, it probably isn’t “Disruptive”

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Seems everyone is talking about disruption (in a positive way) these days.  Just this past week, I’ve seen executives waxing poetic over how their company is ‘disruptive’, because they demonstrate the characteristics described in an HBR article on disruption in their industry. Hmmm…. I thought…. if it is described in an HBR article, it probably isn’t incredibly radical, right?  I mean, it is understood well enough that HBR is writing about it.

It makes me think of all the people who say they want ‘innovation’ in their culture, but what they really want is the output of successful innovation. They don’t really want to do the hard work of believing in and then cleaning up after the failed innovations that are an inevitable part of creativity.  Innovation takes a willingness to fail, it takes accepting sunk costs as possible losses in the service of potential future success. It requires investment without a guarantee of return, and taking a long view on profits. It means not having an efficient process with predictable results. See my post on September 16 for a link to an article from the NYT on just that thought, and another on September 19 for a link to an Information Week article on a similar vein.

Likewise, when people say to me “what we need around here is disruptive change!” or “I want to be a disruptive force around here!”, I always ask a few questions.  First, I ask “what does it feel like to be disrupted?”.  Second, “what does it feel like to be disruptive?”. And third, “what does it feel like to be in a disruptive environment?”.  Those three questions tend to make people pull up short, stumble over their answers, and the results are usually timid and incremental instead of bold and slightly crazy.  I’m sorry, but timid and incremental don’t equal disruptive to me.

We need to stop throwing bold words around and trying to make them fit into timid visions. You know what?  It is OK to want to do things incrementally. Maybe you aren’t at a point where risking your career is a worthy undertaking. Maybe your organization needs to play it safe for good reasons. Embrace it and make the most of it.

If you truly want disruptive change than be willing to accept that it is uncomfortable. It doesn’t always feel good. It isn’t always exciting.  Sometimes it is scary, and hard, and forces you to reevaluate things you hold dear. The return you get for accepting the lows is that the returns can be amazing. You can find yourself moved to new heights in your industry, or moved into new industries. You can go on a great adventure, if you are willing so risk an adventure gone very wrong.  If you can honestly say that you are OK with that, then be a disruptive force of change in your company.  Push your company to be disruptive in your industry. Just please don’t abuse the language by implying that incremental changes are disruptive in nature, and that innovation can somehow be managed into a neat and tidy process with predictable results.

I always tell clients, “if you already know what the answer is, don’t pay me to tell you.  If you can predict what innovation will produce, it probably isn’t innovative.” And now I’m also telling them, “if it isn’t uncomfortable, it probably isn’t disruptive.”

 

Innovation is Executive Porn – Coverlet Meshing

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Here’s a great article from “Coverlet Meshing” about “innovation” in business today.  Check it out for (his? her?) thoughts on how innovation has become a buzzword and how it is used with wild abandon.  It is written under a pseudonym by a ‘senior IT executive at a large bank’, so there’s the added bonus of puzzling out who actually wrote it!

Connecting strategy and decision making

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If a strategy exists, but people don’t use it to make decisions, does it really exist? An existential question? Perhaps, but it is also an important one when thinking about the ROI of investing in a ‘strategy refresh’, or creating a strategy for an organization. The biggest complaint I hear from clients about strategy is that a lot of time and effort (and money) goes into creating it, and it ends up on a shelf somewhere. The people involved in creating it ‘get it’, but they fail to communicate, to role-model, or to apply it. The people who weren’t involved get un-contextualized communications that they can’t hope to apply in a meaningful way.

You need to spend at least as much time helping people understand how to apply a strategy as you do developing it. In today’s VUCA environment of continual change, turnover, market fluctuations, and information moving at warp speed, you can’t afford to have only a few people in the organization who use the strategy to make decisions.

Here’s a presentation I gave recently on the importance of ‘engaged strategy’ – it talks about how to create a different type of strategy that people throughout the organization can use to effectively make decisions:  ODF Presentation vf

 

Want a strategy that works? Get more people involved.

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I continue to see clients investing in traditional strategy frameworks – balanced scorecards, strategy maps, 5 forces, etc. These are all good tools for working through how the company can grow and serve its clients. Sadly, the development process continues to be choked down to an elite corps – “a few good men (and maybe some women)” at very senior levels in the organization. This handful of people, by merit of going through the working processes, gains a clear understanding of what it’s all about. When it comes time to announce it (drum roll please…) at best we get some fancy communications, maybe some pretty pictures, but there is no effective way to communicate the experience of creating the strategy. And so it becomes the “flavor of the month/year” and most people simply continue on with their day to day activities, not really caring one way or the other especially after the initial flurry of noise about it. And then clients say “why didn’t it work”?

In today’s work environment it is absolutely possible to engage more people in the process of defining strategy, and not doing so means strategic success continues to be painfully throttled in most organizations. Through the creation process, people learn about how to make different decisions based on the strategic direction. They learn what their colleagues are weighing and considering in their decision making, and through the process, they change their approach to work. It is this change that carries through to embedding the strategy in the culture.

Without this vital step, all the lovely posters and catchphrases and marketing in the world aren’t going to get a strategy to stick.  The problem comes when the change is limited to a very small group of people very high up in the organization.

Even if you can’t break through the concept of strategy as belong to a privileged few, think about ways that help more people to use it in their day to day decision making. Otherwise, it is a lot of time and money spent for just a very few people in the company to get “strategically aligned”.