@paul4innovating - Innovation Thinking and Resources

Struggling with counting ALL the sums of our capital

By @paul4innovating June 12, 2018Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Outcomes & Expectancies, The Big Challenges

Organizations have been focused for far too long around the importance of financial capital. It determines and drives organizations destinies. We are caught in a constant focus upon our achieving a return on our (financial) capital as our measuring criteria. Organizations strive for improving their ROCE, RONA, IRR, EVA and a host of other financial measures.

As Clayton Christensen has been arguing the agenda of organizations begins and ends with the “search for numbers”. I think there is a time for changing this, we need to search for the knowledge that makes-up eventually the numbers.

There has been a distant voice for some time putting forward the need to appreciate and value the other capitals sitting within organizations. Much of the discussions have been housed under the term “intellectual capital” which denotes the sum of knowledge made up and contributed by our human assets, our organizational structures and our relationships that are developed.

These are the ‘capitals’ that transform into economic value through organization action. It is the financial capital that simply finances this.

Understanding that innovation capital becomes your new core

By @paul4innovating June 11, 2018Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Outcomes & Expectancies

Much of my focus within my work is to move organizations towards recognizing and expanding their innovation capital or stock.

The hard part for many organizations is that many of the key elements of innovation capital consist of many intangibles as well as tangibles and this needs deeper understanding and appreciation. These intangibles are in most cases non-technological and embodied in the organizational routines and thinking of the employees.

It is focusing on building the stock of this innovation capital as well as making the flow more dynamic, ever evolving, adapting and changing to the different conditions being presented to the company.

Some of the critical elements that need to be considered can be described as follows:

Solving root causes of innovation blockage

By @paul4innovating June 11, 2018Creation of Sustainable Value, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication

So what does block innovation? Arguably there are plenty of things up and down organizations.

For instance a lack of resources, an overcrowded portfolio of ideas, a lack of dedicated people, treating innovation as a one-off, keeping it isolated and apart from mainstream activities.

Yet many are simply hidden and need surfacing and require often an outside perspective.

Here are ten really important barriers, that can hold innovation back.

Putting some dynamic tension into the system

By @paul4innovating June 8, 2018Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Natural & Unnatural tensions

There is a growing need for having some dynamic tensions within the organization’s system; these helps generate the better conditions for innovation to thrive. We are learning more on the better tools, techniques and approaches available for putting the learning tensions into our work, making them more dynamic, linked and increasingly relevant to the work to be done.

1). A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system needs that ability to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quicker to the concepts and solutions, as others can ‘understand’ them as well. It is through working on the inner stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification to those needs for working on a common cause.

Solving root causes of innovation blockage

By @paul4innovating June 7, 2018Creation of Sustainable Value, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication

So what does block innovation? Arguably there are plenty of things up and down organizations.

For instance a lack of resources, an overcrowded portfolio of ideas, a lack of dedicated people, treating innovation as a one-off, keeping it isolated and apart from mainstream activities.

Yet many are simply hidden and need surfacing and require often an outside perspective.

Here are ten really important barriers, that can hold innovation back.

Innovation tension lies in our layers and structures

By @paul4innovating June 6, 2018Impact & Scale, Mapping & Rugged Terrains, Natural & Unnatural tensions, Pathway dependence curves, System Solution models

Reduce the tension in the layers or structures for innovation to emerge.

A really hard part of managing in larger organizations is in managing the layers and competing forces. Hierarchy dominates the speed of what we do.

Often we forget to reinforce the very design within our organizational structures, we leave role structures incomplete and uncertain and we set the deliverables in often ‘woolly’ ways so we can side step the often intransigence within our organizations way of working . This just further promotes uncertainly and it is not an adaptive organization but one left open so the leadership can side step when it suites their purpose.

In leaving this so open to ignoring one minute, using it as the ‘whipping boy’ the next they slowly immobilize those underneath. These create unnatural built-in tensions and often create a shearing effect.

They grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

Cracking the complexity code

By @paul4innovating June 5, 2018Capabilities and Capacities, Exploratory Walks & Needs, Mapping & Rugged Terrains, System Solution models

There was a good article within the McKinsey Quarterly, published in 2007 entitled “Cracking the complexity code” written by three authors Suzanne Heywood, Jessica Spungin and David Turnbull.

Cracking the complexity code of organizations

They lead this article with “one view of complexity that holds that it is largely a bad thing- that simplification generally creates value by removing unnecessary costs”. Certainly we all yearn for a more simplified life, structure, organization, approach to systems or just reducing complexity in our daily lives to find time for what we view as improving its ‘quality’.

Within the article they argue there are two types of complexity – institutional and individual.

Organizational legacy so often chokes innovation

By @paul4innovating June 4, 2018Absorptive Capacity, Capabilities and Capacities, Natural & Unnatural tensions, Pathway dependence curves

Often organizations are weighed down by legacy; it chokes off innovation and much of the potential creativity. This comes in many forms; in its culture, in its history, its core markets or products, in its systems, structures, and processes built around innovation practice.

Today, we are confronted with a very different global marketplace than in the last century. National borders and regulations built to protect those that are ‘within’ in the past have rapidly become a major part of the ‘containing- restraining’ factors that are rendering many previously well-respected organizations as heading towards being obsolete and not in tune with today’s different world where global sourcing determines much.

They are increasingly trapped in declining markets, starved of the new capabilities and capacities to grow a business beyond ‘traditional’ borders, so this means they are unable to take up the new challenges that are confronting them. They see themselves as reliant on hanging on to the existing situation as long as they can, often powerless to make the necessary shifts, failing to open up, finding it increasingly more than difficult to find the ways of letting go, of changing. They are trapped in legacy.

A platform providing innovation learning.

By @paul4innovating June 4, 2018Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

I was reminded last week of what I seem to have forgotten in my years of focusing on innovation or was it that feeling it was simply repeating. I am constantly aware on just how innovation has seemingly stayed still in much of its design in recent years, irrespective of what we believe has been ‘innovation advances’.

We certainly do keep moving relentlessly on in finding new tools, to squeeze a little more out of the innovation process but when you stop and think about it, we actually are still extracting mostly that incremental juice, we are not transforming how we innovate.

In the main, the radical solutions often so desperately needed in our business are somehow avoided. This is where this repeating cycle comes in, we are as stuck today in the same incremental ‘stuff’ as we have been for years. A sort of “rinse and repeat” cycle.

Revolving doors and growing intensity

Offering You An Innovation Coaching Methodology

By @paul4innovating June 1, 2018Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

Coaching offers real benefits. For instance, in Leadership Coaching, the results offer an ROI on the initial investment of nearly SIX times on average.

Can you image this X return factor going through the roof, going way beyond the initial investment if the innovation outcomes ‘take off’ ? One that delivers the level of growth across the organization’s business, partly gained from a greater awareness of innovation through coaching and how to then apply these different levers within it’s application to achieve this X return?

It often puzzles me the lack of investment we make in coaching, mentoring, or even facilitating innovation with the use of an external innovation expert. That should change and this is one of my personal goals to contribute to this intent as outlined in my Building a Strong Advocacy Practice on the launch of this site and service.

Let’s look at a possible innovation coaching methodology here

Are you aware we all pass through 4 distinct stages when it comes to learning and being coached?