Building Capability - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Building Capability and Capacity to Expand Capabilities for Innovation

@paul4innovating — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 14:04:03 +0000

A new equation

For innovation to be successful, the bottom line is the commitment and focus made for building the capabilities and competencies in innovation as people make us the real value and ARE the innovation success equation in my opinion,

So we must simply invest in them by focusing on the 3 C’s of developing peoples Capability, Competency and Capability.

As we set about to build and expand capabilities, we need to consider:

How we can accelerate the uptake of innovation activity around the conditions provided through investing in them
The need to trigger engagement and achieve growing attainment of knowledge acquisition and dispersion skills- essential for collaborative innovation
Setting about building practices for greater synergies, relationships and networking conditions, for ongoing learning and absorptive capacity
Extracting the right cultural, design, climate and environmental conditions,
Placing increasing value on evolving the structures, processes and technology application
Investing in lessons learnt through validation and resolutions to challenges to build an ongoing adaptive capacity.
Recognizing people solve the critical bottlenecks and find solutions to overcome the constraints, they become increasingly motivated to find solutions and resolve gaps through their ability to be creative and inquisitive.
The ongoing building of capabilities and competencies clearly leads to a more sustaining and determined innovation future.

Increasing capacity through coaching

There are many benefits from having an intense course of one-on-one coaching, irrespective of the level of responsibility you have for innovation within your organization.

It is very similar to management behavioural coaching to change perceptions, reorientate your thinking and approach, and open up to different thinking to build out your innovation understanding. Coaching yields a clear return, but the hard work lies with coaching, wanting to see the alternatives, and adding these into their daily actions and lives.

Increasingly your innovation knowledge through coaching, you can accelerate different insights that can form a vital part of any innovation comprehension that can reduce uncertainties, encourage experimentation, draw others towards a changing relationship of trust, and increase productivity and engagement.

Working with us you work through some fairly intensive and context-specific sessions, you quickly deepen personal knowledge and accelerate your critical business awareness and contribution.

Our innovation coaching approach provides ideal safe environments to enable innovation to quickly take hold and be translated.

Leaders, champions, sponsors and teams can gain from this coaching as well as the individual.

The Real Tipping Point in your understanding comes through ‘tailored’ Innovation Coaching where you see real benefits by discussing why and this, in my opinion, always is framed around content and context:

•Context matters a great deal

•Content needs to offer a total solution

•Success takes time & effort

•Finding a release of working time to focus on adding new value to the Business (hard-wiring) becomes essential to achieve this shift

I wrote this sometime back ““Learning the Mantra of Innovation Context. “It has value to read.

I take the approach in coaching innovation in multiple ways:

•Our approach is a mix of questioning, listening and re-skilling techniques and why this makes sense

•We recommend coaching is normally on a 1to1 basis is ideal, but this can be in team situations as well, although this has a different approach

•This coaching is always innovation-centric in everything we do in these 1on1 sessions

•Ownership lies with the person being coached, and we seek to transfer the necessary insight and knowledge quickly and effectively

•We facilitate the unscrambling of many random thoughts and provide the clarity of piecing the innovation puzzle all together

It is yours alone to finally assimilate and use this new knowledge gained; we will help you achieve your personal goals, provide a fresh dimension, and place innovation understanding into the context necessary.

Why not contact me to find out more about the many unique ways we approach innovation through coaching. Many of these become ‘deep dives’ to provide the necessary breakthroughs.

Then we have Peer-to-Peer Mentoring.

There are certainly growing benefits in using external advisors and innovation mentors.

Finding someone empathetic and experienced in business innovation is growing harder to avoid many typical, sometimes unseen ‘pitfalls’ on innovation.

Someone who has a depth gained from their own business experiences; working in large organizations, managing complexity, projects and starting up fresh initiatives or taking them over to turn them around.

Someone who can empathize with the managing of innovation; in learning and leading significant activities.

A mentor or advisor can certainly provide:

* The opportunity and environment for you to step back from the day-to-day detail to take fresh stock, to re-engage in the bigger picture of what innovation can provide. They can help you to refocus and re-energize innovation activities. They can be timely.

* They can be a great sounding board; they can prompt and stimulate your thinking as they listen. They can challenge it and help in arriving at new ideas towards solutions to your challenges. They can offer a series of directions and courses of actions to be considered.

* Growth or the needs for Renewal needed are often tough areas to manage and deliver through innovation activities. Timely advice can instil growing confidence, the chance to debate and explore alternatives, and explore emerging options. A mentoring approach can help in avoiding ‘classic’ mistakes made by others.

* Today, we need to leverage the connections within our networks more and more. Knowing who, where and why becomes increasingly valuable to avoid loss of time, energy and basic mistakes.

A mentor who has a wide network to tap into can seek the best advice to support assumptions or offer even more clarification.

Each mentoring or advisory engagement will be different

Discussing constantly changing business challenges often values external evaluation. Often you can forget one issue as another one ‘pops up into the crowded agenda.

A mentor can remind, prompt and connect issues and bring a fresh perspective to these. Having the opportunity to revisit the different complexities within innovation to have available a knowledge resource to share and reflect on constant changes since the last conversation or meeting can provide a catalyst to taking the appropriate action.

Having the opportunity to engage around different discussions about innovation can become a powerful motivational force for you to recalibrate, stay motivated, and have added incentives to think through these again.

In our view, an innovation advisor or mentor needs to offer:

A good innovation mentor or trusted advisor should offer a different perspective based on a combination of their own practical business experiences and a real depth of innovation understanding to provide a real return to your needs from innovation.

So to build the 3 C’s of Capabilities, Capacities and Competencies, we can follow a peoples equation and invest in coaching and mentoring to really accelerate these.

The post Building Capability and Capacity to Expand Capabilities for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The art of "Back Casting" needs care

@paul4innovating — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 16:39:06 +0000

Backcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified “future to the present”. The fundamentals of the method were outlined by John. B. Robinson from the University of Waterloo in 1990. The fundamental question of backcasting asks: “if we want to attain a certain goal, what actions must be taken to get there?”
While forecasting involves predicting the future based on current trend analysis, backcasting approaches the challenge of discussing the future from the opposite direction; it is “a method in which the future desired conditions are envisioned, and steps are then defined to attain those conditions, rather than taking steps that are merely a continuation of present methods extrapolated into the future”
I have collected different views on “Backcasting”.
Those are from assorted references like Wikipedia, from past work on water and energy systems, from Natural Step, from Innosight, discussed and promoted in Mark Johnson’s book “Lead for the Future” and a really recent one from Roxi Nicolussi and her Backcasting; Creating a Strategic Roadmap for the Future” or finally here, this one “All Roads Lead From The Future Back — A Vision and Spoke Model” by Aidan McCullen. I am looking to further explore the applications applied in water, energy and climate work.
So exploring backcasting as a method

Backcasting involves establishing the description of a very definite and particular future situation.
It then involves an imaginary moving backwards in time, step-by-step, in as many stages as are considered necessary, from the future to the present to reveal the mechanism through which that particular specified future could be attained from the present.
Backcasting is not concerned with predicting the future: The major distinguishing characteristic of backcasting analyses is the concern, not with likely energy futures, but with how desirable futures can be attained. Thus, it is explicitly normative, involving “working backwards” from a particular future end-point to the present to determine what policy measures would be required to reach that future.^[
The concept of “backcasting” is central to a strategic approach for sustainable development. It is a way of planning in which a successful outcome is imagined in the future, followed by the question: “what do we need to do today to reach that successful outcome?” This is more effective than relying too much on forecasting, which tends to have the effect of presenting a more limited range of options, hence stifling creativity. More importantly, it projects the problems of today into the future.
In the context of sustainability, we can imagine an infinite number of scenarios for a sustainable society – and ‘backcasting from scenarios’ can be thought of as a jigsaw puzzle. We have a shared picture of where we want to go. We put the pieces together to get there. However, getting large groups of people to agree on the desired future scenario is often all but impossible. Further, scenarios that are too specific may limit innovation and distract our minds from the innovative, creative solutions necessary for sustainable development.
Over the years, I have pursued the Three Horizons methodology. I am more comfortable in this and applied this approach to countless issues or future thinking out as it feels more casting forward.

Backcasting offers a different approach nicely illustrated here.

Backcasting is further explained or applied.
So strategic sustainable development relies on ‘backcasting from sustainability principles’ – which are based in science and represent something we can all agree on: if these principles are violated, our global society is unsustainable. To achieve a sustainable society, we know we have to not violate those principles – we don’t know exactly what that society will look like. Still, we can define success on a principle level. In that way, backcasting from principles is more like chess – we don’t know exactly what success will look like, but we know the principles of checkmate – and we go about playing the game in a strategic way, always keeping that vision of future success in mind.
Natural systems are complex and non-linear, and while we understand more and more about how they behave on the principle level, we still cannot predict the weather. Social systems are far more complex. Still, we try to force these systems into models so we can ‘understand’ them and ‘predict’ how they will behave.
To do this, we are forced to make assumptions that often make the models reductionist, simplistic, and absurd. For example, in economic systems, the assumptions that all people are ‘rational actors’ and that there is ‘perfect information’. In large part, this is due to a tradition of compartmentalized disciplines in academia, where the social scientists have pushed a quantitative, value-neutral approach to study these systems in the misguided pursuit of establishing concrete laws similar to the laws of nature.
Even if we could predict the future, why would we want to? We have the power to create a better future.
If you backcast, future cast or apply the three horizons we do need to look out, into the future and try and bring it back to the present so we can move towards that desired state in a planned and methodical way.
More on backcasting in the future!!

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