The Nine Stages that are needed for developing an understanding of your innovation capabilities, so as to make them more dynamic and as a result to be at the top of your innovation game.

This “step process” I believe gets you to the point of understanding what innovation capabilities are a better ‘fit’ for the purpose, to deliver on your innovation needs on a consistent, repeatable and evolving basis.

Building innovation capabilities take time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment. Any learning involves sensing, seizing and then transforming.

We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustainable into the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components. The outcomes are to know where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs.

1. Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need and seeing the differences

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet the strategic need
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
• Knowing and aligning  your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction takes courage and decisive leadership

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and then bringing these in successfully, in gradual steps. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation allows for designing a flexible response capability

4. Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity, and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages helps maintain momentum
• Simulation modeling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’

5. The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6. The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing the time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and outmaneuvering
• Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8. Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to the team, to organizational learning, in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.

9. Keeping the innovation fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control, and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving the impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls, and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches

The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape

The post Understanding your innovation capabilities to make them more dynamic first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How can we bring increasing agility into our innovation work, that requires both stable and dynamic moments to deliver better outcomes?

Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices, that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?

Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.

As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile.

A report provided by McKinsey “How to create an agile organization” has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

McKinsey does point out in this report you do need all eighteen practices to be fully alert to agile, but it is these dynamic ones that hold the real promise in my mind. These are the ones we all should move towards as our projected aim to achieve.

So let me summarize these nine dynamic practices

I have taken the nine dynamic practices outline meaning from this McKinsey report and added my own thoughts and reflections within these summaries.

1. Information Transparency

Today we need to take away all the filtering going on in organizations. Those who fill positions to control and attempt to influence the data. If we can’t unlock the knowledge within the organization, we fail to connect the people working within the organization to its products and related customer needs. Transparency makes the sharing of the knowledge increasingly relevant to connecting up the ‘whole’. There needs to be a very powerful concept of un-filtering, to allow the flow of understanding. It is highly dynamic and powerful in all it can release if encouraged and supported.

2. Rapid iteration and experimentation

The whole emphasis today is on rapid and fast cycles of learning. That testing, learning and adjusting from mistakes and building on these become really valuable progress points. Prototyping is getting so much better, it is creeping into the everyday culture when we innovate, or should. The MVP concept is so right to get features that are potentially better, out there, to test and learn from.

3. Continuous Learning

The moment we stop personally learning, we are the real losers. We need to find ways to ”cut out time” to explore and look for new ways to learn to improve ourselves and what we do within organizations. We need to push for new ways of working and to learn ‘more freely’ from other’s knowledge, in open exchanges and ways to collaborate. We progress by learning from failures and relating to them.

4. Flexible resource allocation.

We need to be adaptive, fluid in any organization and team design. The ability to feel in a position to ‘ramp up or shut down’ initiatives empowers us. We need to want to constantly change teams, seek out joining new ventures. To be always wanting to be redeployed, not because we are hanging on but because any new deployment means new horizons and opportunities. Seek change out, embrace this flexible world and show you are a key resource to help mold and shape it.

5. Open physical and virtual environment.

I often struggle with open planned offices, they provide an environment that distracts and not promote. If you can achieve a way that people communicate and collaborate with each other then great but when you are in a globally dispersed organization it is how you openly ‘react’ in your daily work. For me the virtual environment holds the real future and with so many organizations denying social tools the key to make it ‘purposefully designed’ is to make the activities clearly visible to all that need to know, to constantly show where your intervention and impact has made a difference in building context, content, structure or sharing knowledge. We need to find much better ways to make this a really dynamic, exciting, and rewarding part of agility within organizations

6. Sensing and seizing opportunities.

The value of being proactive, to watch out for signals, to then act upon them, to make your insights valuable to change perceptions, to alter customer bias, to engage with the external environment to shape, influence and contribute into new initiatives makes ‘sensing and seizing’ so important to drive innovation as the catalyst of change.

7. Technology, systems, and tools.

The constant demands being placed on us, to learn and adapt to new technology, systems, and tools as it keeps changing is mega-hard to keep pace with. New organization design in architecture, infrastructure, practices, and ways is tough to integrate the old and the new. How we respond to these is highly dependent on the articulated needs of the business. We can only be ‘responsive’ if we relate to the changing needs. The ability to have a more modular architecture, updates coming in a shorter interval of times can help in a continued updating. It is when the process determines rigid design you can’t change. To ‘react and respond’ you need to keep looking at moving towards technology frontiers. Exploring and exploiting contributes to a better holistic desired business outcome.

8. Role mobility

The movement needs to be constant. When we design we need to always account for achieving a certain fluidity. We need to constantly match our present skills with organizational needs. As we develop a more open talent marketplace we need to have this increasing mobility. Communicating roles, tasks and project outlines need to be demanded, then we have the understanding to change and then deliver to these ‘askes’ of us. These need to constantly match with our own goals, the alignment is the enabler to make this happen.

9. Active partnerships and ecosystems.

Relationships are our trading value. As we build out networks we need to trade. We trade in knowledge, in contribution, in working alongside others to co-develop. We seek out partnering, to invest our intellectual capital with theirs. We look to build the organization’s ecosystem through these engagements, to contribute to new products, services and solutions to look to bring them always to fruition. Our ‘need’ for activity and engagement builds a thriving, more dynamic environment.

In summary.

If we can embrace change by seeking out ways to re-equip ourselves, we encourage our organization to become more dynamic by these actions. We do get stuck in a certain mindset and set of behaviors. We become beholden to them, they eventually ‘freeze’ our progress, we stop learning and experimenting. We need to push for formal mechanisms of change, we need to seek out our own. We need to take hold of our actions, be clear on our organization’s vision and how we believe we can contribute.

As individuals, as members of fluid teams and as an organization we need to be mutually reinforcing. For me, fluidity is equally the growing need of organization’s today.  It is in recognizing that the dynamic practices found for building agility into ourselves and the organization do lie in these nine practices, they give us this level of fluidity. Take them on board, practice them constantly and over time your agility becomes your transformation. It becomes the ‘norm’ and allows for constant adaption.

The post Achieving agility within your innovation work first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

They ‘freeze out’ creativity unless it ‘arrives’ from the top of the organization. Eventually the organization dies as it is not generating new forms of creativity from within, this has been hollowed out by this imposing from the top.

Organization design needs to change. We need to ensure creative knowledge flows up and down organizations. We need to change our thinking from layers into a network of connected parts that we keep small, flat and focused but constantly aware their existence is dependent on others outside their mini ecosystem. Today these different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. We add layers onto our layers and each time we are constraining the organizations or the individuals to explore, they stay ‘trapped’ within their space.

Imposing the killer effect of time just because of a financial calendar is stupid – it hurts innovation significantly

Just look at how organizations impose time on us. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off,’ is the pressure of time. Imposing time as a condition for innovation can be a real killer. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated’ but sadly they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for delivery of new concepts.

We need to re-establish the difference between goals – within a certain period covered (one year), objectives – attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but clearly possible concepts, that progress at slower rates and go well beyond normal goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons and managing across these needs different mindsets, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products. Managing innovation across the three horizon methodology helps reduce tensions, design innovations that can be more radical or breakthrough.

Tacking the incompatibles to ease the tensions

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and actually state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on a daily basis. The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside the tangibles (known) needs greater appreciation of their complexities, and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving  a ‘decent’ result.

Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of inquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect. We do need to address this lack of serious innovation management within our organizations.

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes.  Outcome orientation holds a precious key to think about far more.  We have struggled on many occasions to clearly establish the really good metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations. Part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost centre, or the capacity was already established and we often don’t break these down and assign these clearly enough to the different activities, we should, but into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency or innovation? We judge these through effectiveness of the outcome.

We need to balance existing performance engines for repeatable everyday tasks with innovation delivery engines for new activities to make our organizations function more effectively. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have offered some thoughts on this at the implementation stage, although these still need more examination and exploration.

Also Scott Anthony has pointed out in his article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension there is one, in my opinion, that needs deeper investigation and development and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces. Roger Martin suggests in one of his books “The Opposable Mind” that we need to develop “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change.

Innovation should be alongside as a equal partner to efficiency. It becomes efficient innovation and core to what you do and how you operate

Seeking constant efficiencies is actually slowing down our organizations. We need to do the opposite, to speed them up and capitalize on finding innovation opportunities quickly and then knowing how to scale them equally fast. We need to do this by developing the competencies and understandings of experimentation, piloting, prototyping in fast, discreet and measured ways

The worrying thing is any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along.

“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick”.

The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted and evolve the organization design away from layers and hierarchy. We need to build up a series of inner networks that depend on each other but constantly reach out to connect, share and exchange but more within a organizational design that is flat but highly responsive and inter dependent to work well. This needs orchestration not hierarchy in its managing.

Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will certainly reduce the tensions, reduce the ‘shearing effects’ and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation and that certainly is not the current business way we often see today.

The post Innovation tension lies in our layers and structures first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

Legacy can choke an organization in so many ways to limit expansion. 

How can we break out of this and rethink? When we begin to investigate legacy to cut loose and design differently, it begins to infringe, it challenges, it simply attacks what has taken often years to build and those most involved become defensive and fit to hang onto what has been established, as it feels familiar.

It feels like ‘their’ legacy is being destroyed and what they have fought hard to gain now needs protecting. Most organizations never feel fully capable to address legacy, they even will deliberately design duplication into their operating model, they will recognize they are far from optimal and more often than not, live with the consequences. In today’s world, this is a real mistake.

The world is changing

You can’t afford to keep heads buried in the sand like an ostrich, although that’s actually a myth stating when ostriches are faced with an attack by predators they bury their heads. New global adversaries are altering our landscape and forcing us to become increasingly competitive, forcing us to often reluctantly alter our established ways.

We can’t afford not to refresh and renew on a constant basis. We need to not just adapt, become more agile but we must think through what, where and how we manage. We need to build a more dispersed network of innovation connections within and outside our organizations to gather and synthesize knowledge that has potential value and future worth.

To allow this to happen, for knowledge to flow into, within and across organizations we need to strip away many of the constraints built into our structure that are designed to ‘contain’ knowledge, whereas today we have to ‘spread’ knowledge far and wide, so we can make the new connections to build int this existing knowledge the  new value points where innovation resides.

Today we have solutions to make a real change and address those legacy systems.

Today we have a solution, we can migrate our current systems into the cloud, breaking them up and building some unique APIs that can ease the transition to cloud services by decoupling critical parts of a company’s cumbersome legacy infrastructure.. These become microservice architecture, providing modular and improved flexibility with the aim of decreasing time to market for example. Or building a suite of small services that allow more external people to contribute, a greater agility in response and build greater independence but can still be internally managed.

So we break down some of those legacy systems into vital chunks that can benefit from external partnering, so as to speed up innovation-to-market. These are driven far more by the business perspective not the technology aspect alone. You are looking to find increased business value by breaking out of some of your legacy problems.

Any journey starts with ‘letting go’

Control gives comfort; we constantly design this into the system. The larger we are, the greater the controls built into the system it seems but somehow, controlling for control sake, does need replacing; we need to let go of more than we realize to reduce the constraints placed on our business. We need to replace ‘command and control’ built up over numerous years with something different. The cloud offers a way forward by finding points of value that can be broken out to accelerate innovation performance.

We need to begin to ask a range of strategic questions that question our legacy so we can be released to move forward.

The post Organizational legacy so often chokes innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Let me share the part that works really well for me. This relates to approaching social media but it equally applies to building innovation capital, it is recognizing and then building the stock and the flows around innovation.

Robin Sloan does a brilliant job of explaining this:

“One of the biggest takeaways was the concept of stock and flow. Do you know about this? Couldn’t be simpler, and really, it’s not even that much of an a-ha.

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy – too easy.

But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril.
I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

But I’m not saying you should ignore flow! No: this is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after long months or years with your perfectly-polished opus. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisitely-carved marble statue of Boba Fett is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (here it is!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find them all again next time you emerge from your cave.

You can tell that I want you to stop and think about stock here. I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast. But flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein. And the real magic trick in 2010 is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. It’s the hybrid strategy.

Anyway: this is not a huge insight, I know. Mostly I just wanted to share the lingo, because it’s been echoing in my head since my first microeconomics course. Today, whenever I put my hands on the keyboard, I’m asking myself: Is this stock? Is this flow? How’s my mix? Do I have enough of both?”

Source: Robin Sloan http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890

He also added “You’re totally right about the interplay; when everything’s working together, stock leads to flow leads to stock”. “Building bridges between stock and flow”

The post Building bridges between stocks and flows first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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 market place 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.

Legacy can choke an organization in so many ways to limit expansion. 

How can we break out of this and rethink? When we begin to investigate legacy to cut loose and design differently, it begins to infringe, it challenges, it simply attacks what has taken often years to build and those most involved become defensive and fit to hang onto what has been established, as it feels familiar.

It feels like ‘their’ legacy is being destroyed and what they have fought hard to gain now needs protecting. Most organizations never feel fully capable to address legacy, they even will deliberately design duplication into their operating model, they will recognize they are far from optimal and more often than not, live with the consequences. In today’s world this is a real mistake.

The world is changing; you can’t afford to keep heads buried in the sand like an ostrich, although that’s actually a myth stating when ostriches are faced with attack by predators they bury their heads. New global adversaries are altering our landscape and forcing us to become increasing competitive, forcing us to often reluctantly alter our established ways.

We can’t afford not to refresh and renew on a constant basis. We need to not just adapt, become more agile but we must think through what, where and how we manage. We need to build a more dispersed network of innovation connections within and outside our organizations to gather and synthesize knowledge that have potential value and future worth.

To allow this to happen, for knowledge to flow into, within and across organizations we need to strip away many of the constraints built into our structure that are designed to ‘contain’ knowledge, whereas today we have to ‘spread’ knowledge far and wide, so we can make the new connections to build int this existing knowledge the  new value points where innovation resides.

Any journey starts with ‘letting go’

Control gives comfort; we constantly design this into the system. The larger we are, the greater the controls built into the system it seems but somehow, controlling for control sake, does need replacing; we need to let go of more than we realize to reduce the constraints placed on our business. We need to replace ‘command and control’ built up over numerous years with something different.

We need to begin to ask a range of strategic questions that question our legacy, so we can be released to move forward.

The post Organizational legacy often chokes innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Three simple rules have great intent.

Possible a starting point is through three simple rules I came across, but presently I can’t find the reference source on this regretfully. These seem to me to have a powerful intent:

1. Mapping organizational and project innovation processes in the context of a shared responsibility for innovation relies on the rule of taking full responsibility that allows all “to see” the space of innovation that exists.

2. Generalizing organizational and project knowledge in the context where knowledge is a central task relies on the rule of supporting routines for getting to that space and for keeping it open for all to share and explore:.

• -This helps people be collectively conscious of what they know and how they know it, build up and having expertise in are all dynamic routine activities to become competent experts or are clear on where to go to find out where it resides.

• – It also fosters respect for knowing and leaning from what others know and contributes to a growing improved skill set far more geared towards understanding higher-level conceptual frameworks

3. Spiraling across cycles of adaptation in a context of constantly looking for new opportunities relies on the rule for constantly searching for new opportunities that creates an organization in which people are used to innovation that becomes a second nature– “the chaos is that we are constantly innovating”. Also the rule provides people with vital resource of having ways to deal with inevitable surprises of innovation.

We need to find ways to combined general knowledge for wide awareness of available options, and specialized knowledge for assessing the systemic impact of specific options. We need to move towards the development of “T-Shaped skills” being available constantly, to apply to different problems. Choice can stay fluid and it gradually ‘firms up’ to allow greater exploration and evaluation, as we ‘master’ knowledge and progressively experiment.

The ability to innovate is in the people, it is not in a procedures. Our pressing need is to structure innovation activity into everyday work, to make it dynamic in capability and become the new routine work.  I feel these three simple rules just seem to make such good sense as a starting point for making innovation part of every persons working day. Do you?

The post Building into our Organizations a more Dynamic Social Fabric first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

They ‘freeze out’ creativity unless it ‘arrives’ from the top of the organization. Eventually the organization dies as it is not generating new forms of creativity from within, this has been hollowed out by this imposing from the top.

Organization design needs to change. We need to ensure creative knowledge flows up and down organizations. We need to change our thinking from layers into a network of connected parts that we keep small, flat and focused but constantly aware their existence is dependent on others outside their mini ecosystem. Today these different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. We add layers onto our layers and each time we are constraining the organizations or the individuals to explore, they stay ‘trapped’ within their space.

Imposing the killer effect of time just because of a financial calendar is stupid – it hurts innovation significantly

Just look at how organizations impose time on us. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off,’ is the pressure of time. Imposing time as a condition for innovation can be a real killer. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated’ but sadly they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for delivery of new concepts.

We need to re-establish the difference between goals – within a certain period covered (one year), objectives – attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but clearly possible concepts, that progress at slower rates and go well beyond normal goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons and managing across these needs different mindsets, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products. Managing innovation across the three horizon methodology helps reduce tensions, design innovations that can be more radical or breakthrough.

Tacking the incompatibles to ease the tensions

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and actually state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on a daily basis. The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside the tangibles (known) needs greater appreciation of their complexities, and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving  a ‘decent’ result.

Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of inquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect. We do need to address this lack of serious innovation management within our organizations.

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes.  Outcome orientation holds a precious key to think about far more.  We have struggled on many occasions to clearly establish the really good metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations. Part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost centre, or the capacity was already established and we often don’t break these down and assign these clearly enough to the different activities, we should, but into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency or innovation? We judge these through effectiveness of the outcome.

We need to balance existing performance engines for repeatable everyday tasks with innovation delivery engines for new activities to make our organizations function more effectively. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have offered some thoughts on this at the implementation stage, although these still need more examination and exploration.

Also Scott Anthony has pointed out in his article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension there is one, in my opinion, that needs deeper investigation and development and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces. Roger Martin suggests in one of his books “The Opposable Mind” that we need to develop “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change.

Innovation should be alongside as a equal partner to efficiency. It becomes efficient innovation and core to what you do and how you operate

Seeking constant efficiencies is actually slowing down our organizations. We need to do the opposite, to speed them up and capitalize on finding innovation opportunities quickly and then knowing how to scale them equally fast. We need to do this by developing the competencies and understandings of experimentation, piloting, prototyping in fast, discreet and measured ways

The worrying thing is any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along.

“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick”.

The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted and evolve the organization design away from layers and hierarchy. We need to build up a series of inner networks that depend on each other but constantly reach out to connect, share and exchange but more within a organizational design that is flat but highly responsive and inter dependent to work well. This needs orchestration not hierarchy in its managing.

Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will certainly reduce the tensions, reduce the ‘shearing effects’ and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation and that certainly is not the current business way we often see today.

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“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick”

There is so much built in tension, bias, barriers, mindsets, mental model conflicts, and all types of friction seemingly going on around us, you must sometimes think all our organizations can only be totally dysfunctional.

Has anyone not come across some or all of these?

Dysfunctional leadership symptoms and those typical warning signs of dictatorial leadership, no feedback on performance, personal agendas, more ‘political’ compensation than ‘performance related ones, inefficient use of resources, empire-building practices, unequal workload distribution, too much management, fragmented organization efforts. There is simply just too much talk, ineffective  and incessant meetings, a lack of collaboration across departments, ‘selective’ low productivity when you are working way beyond the normal, feeling in a constant crisis mode, watching a morale deterioration take place before your eyes, the,  backstabbing, starving projects of essential resources and finally, working in highly stressful workplaces.

A pretty depressing list isn’t it? I’m sure you can think of a few more besides.

When you are up against some or all of these how can you feel trust, belief and be innovative? Partly from what I’ve been reading and from my own perspective let me offer some thoughts to reduce some of these unhealthy tensions organizations seem to have, that certainly act as real constraints for innovation to really take hold.

The worrying thing is any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along.  Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick. The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted.  Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will reduce the tensions, reduce the shearing and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation has more space to equally site alongside efficiency as the organizations emphasis points, so both can focus on outcome orientation.

How can we break into this and design something different?

Recently a number of comments have triggered my thinking about this whole area of blockages that seem to not allow innovation to take hold in organizations the way it needs too. The writing of Scott Anthony recently under the article “Negotiating Innovation & Control”, the book “Relentless Innovation” and stream of thought provoking views of Jeffrey Phillips wanting us to challenge the “Business as Usual” approach. Then we have Gary Hamel in his new book “What Matters Now”  where he shares his agenda for building organizations, that can flourish in a world of diminished hopes, relentless change and ferocious competition. This is not a book about doing better. This is an impassioned plea to reinvent management as we know it—to rethink the fundamental assumptions we have about capitalism, organizational life, and the meaning of work.

Each has a theme running through them in different ways, the need to achieve continuous innovation needs a massive change in mindset and in managing the ‘heart’ of the organization. This heart is unhealthy and will need new values, new processes and new belief systems. You add in calls from John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Ranjay Gulati  and countless others, we are in need of a more radical agenda to rethink management, not just for innovation management.

The legend of the Gordian Knot

Some time back Chuck Frey, well known in innovation circles, wrote about the Gordian Knot. “For people the world over, the Gordian Knot represents the difficult, the intractable and often the insolvable problem. Today’s systemic business problems are the modern-day equivalent of this seemingly impossible challenge.

According to Greek mythology,  the huge, ball-like Turkish knot with no ends exposed was impossible to untie. An oracle had predicted that the first person to do so would become the ruler of all Asia. Thousands of people had tried, without success, to unlock its complex riddles. Alexander of Macedonia, son of King Philip II of Macedon, solved this puzzle simply and very creatively – by cutting it in half with his sword, exposing its ends and making it possible to untie. Alexander the Great went on to conquer all of Asia, just as the oracle predicted”.

So how can we cut the intractable knot inside organizations and survive?

We all face increasing uncertainties and are having our trust battered. We are seemingly not rising to the challenges that seem to be growing in complexity in global and organizational context.Innovation has a vital role to play but it must be ‘treated’ differently.

Where do we start? Firstly we need to revisit the work on “adaptive enterprises and systems”. We need to find ways to deal with unpredictable, discontinuous change and make this more predictable for us to manage.

We lack often a real coherence of purpose; we lurch from one opportunity to another, from one quarter of results into another with often no consistency in our activities. Performance has been taken over by opportunistic behaviours.  Innovation often takes the real brunt of this.

Our intended strategy, moves suddenly into a deliberate strategy, and then somehow this gets abandoned or unrealized and slowly we replace this with a emergent strategy that is rapidly become our realized strategy that we present to the world, as a response to ‘factors outside our control’ for our often indifferent performance. Who really talks about the EXACT results achieved from innovation for instance? All we here is just a general reference to it, to cloak innovation often in the ineffectiveness that lies within.

For innovation and many things going on within organizations they often lack a real coherence, they ‘signal’ inconsistent behaviours, especially within the organization. These bad signals simply build up all the tensions and dysfunctional aspects that middle order management and the organization in general has to mop up and cope with.

How can innovation thrive in this sort of chaotic mess? No wonder it never takes hold, it just has nothing ‘permanent’ to attach too and grow. Management needs a radical overhaul so innovation can be the vehicle for what is articulated but often poorly delivered on a consistent basis.

Context & Coordination needs designing in purposefully.

Again, where do we start? We start with ‘disconnect’ that organizations often have. The understanding of the underlying purpose of the organization beyond just making money and keeping the shareholders happy does need a deeper primary function, it needs rearticulating. Some organizations do a reasonable job of this but many simply don’t.

We need to restate our primary function and purpose far more in its societal contribution. We need to express the bounds as a governing set of principles that are known, reinforced and measured against. We then need to set about building in a consistent way, the capabilities that are able to produce the outcomes. We need to build in the accountabilities into the roles that reflect that innovation, effectiveness and efficiency that is needed so they can be managed equally side by side. We need to teach the ability to be adaptable and recognize the differences so as to actively manage the ‘creative’ conflicts and tensions.

Reduce the tension in the layers or structures

The really hard part of managing in larger organizations is in managing the layers and competing forces. Often we forget to reinforce acceptable behaviours, we leave role structures lose and incomplete and we set deliverables in often ‘woolly’ ways. This just promotes uncertainly and it is not an adaptive organization in leaving this so open. These unnatural built-in tensions create this shearing effect. They grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

These different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off,’ is the pressure of time. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated’ but sadly they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for delivery of new concepts. We need to re-establish the difference between goals– within a certain period covered (one year), objectives– attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but clearly possible concepts, that progress at slower rates and go well beyond normal goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons and publically discussed, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products.

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and actually state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on a daily basis.  The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside tangibles (known’s) needs greater appreciation of their complexities, and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving  a ‘decent’ result. Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of enquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect.

The opportunity of the network economy

Again, the realization of the growing web of networks that we are constantly engaging with, is become a growing part of the new more adaptive innovating enterprise. We need to encourage more empowerment to engage with outside parties, to explore, to investigate, to bring in and then diffuse and disperse in new ways. For this we need to design around more absorptive capacity I’ve often written about. (See   http://bit.ly/zdfmba).

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes.   We have struggled on many parts of establishing the really good metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations. Part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost centre, or the capacity was already established and we often don’t break these down and assign these clearly enough to the different activities, we should, but into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency or innovation? We judge these through effectiveness of the outcome.

We need to balance existing performance engines for repeatable everyday tasks with innovation delivery engines for new activities to make our organizations function more effectively. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have offered some thoughts on this at the implementation stage, although they are still needs more examination.  As Scott Anthony points out in his article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension there is one, in my opinion, that needs deeper investigation and development and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces. Roger Martin suggests in one of his books “The Opposable Mind” that we need to develop “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change.

Ecosystems often reflect the shearing effect.

In any environment the ‘rates of exchange’ of the different components or constituents operate at different speeds. Interactions occur more at your own level of contribution, the different layers sometimes you are simply oblivious too or ignore. The ‘in-spite of’ syndrome kicks in. Sometimes though, something catastrophic does occurs and you have to pay attention ( a merger, layoffs, threat of closure) but the real reality is, different layers within organizations tend to be often simply oblivious, even impervious, to necessary change and just ‘does its job’.

Maybe then, this is why so many organizations seem dysfunctional but do continue to survive, to limp along, until something really does disrupt their world as the existing ecosystem just seems to allow different interactions and speeds. Can we not alter this though in more thoughtful ways. than the ‘carrot and the stick’ approach or ‘fear and retribution’ methodologies often employed to achieve results?

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the worrying thing is that any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along. Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick. The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted.

Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will certainly reduce the tensions, reduce the shearing and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation and that certainly is not the current business as usual we see today.

Perhaps working on these dysfunction spots it might free up some real, much needed space for innovation to take a deeper hold. It does seem with all the suggested emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness, if you accept this argument, it might be a good idea to have innovation alongside, as it does thrives more when there is creative tensions around!

You bring a more ‘dynamic’ environment into play by bringing together the sense of purpose and the governing principles of how you are setting about achieving this- through your people and building their capabilities to innovation.

The post Layers that shear against each other are full of tension. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The question is how do you see the journey to achieve innovation fitness through two different ‘cloud’ maps

Or do you see this journey totally differently, not what it needs to cover but the route and challenges it will need to work out?

Irrespective the terrain can look rugged and challenging. Are you ready to begin your journey?

The post How do you see your innovation journey? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.