As we start to think about the next year, (is it here already?) it is a time of reflection and some forward thinking. We do need to make some real changes.

From my standpoint, I am simply amazed at how the world seems to be spinning faster and faster. I am convinced my working days are shorter or the clock is moving faster or worse still, I am being “deflected” even more by everything “digital”.

I never seem to finish what I had intended to complete by the end of a day or week. I then get caught up in the spillover effect. Something always gets in the way, something has to give. So we make a resolution to change something to improve on this constant catch up state we find ourselves in. We all seem to be spinning faster but equally slowing down. Often our innovation activities face the same dilemma.

Innovation needs time, it needs evolution and resolution but also speeding up

Here are some thoughts for our future. The need for innovation results has sped up considerably. The belief that lean management principles will get the innovation out of the door quicker, has been one of those management adoptions that often trick us into believing we are achieving more than we actually are. Reality is, we have only been tackling part of the innovation process and the end results often remain the same – a slow process of innovation follows as lean hits organization reality, it gets caught up in internal roadblocks, countless discussions, and debates.

Certainly, in the majority of cases we have found nothing wrong at all with applying lean management, as it tends to lead to improvements in a final outcome, but does it actually speed up the process? I’m not sure it does. Leans slows down and becomes increasingly burdened by fat being layered on, further down the innovation execution process.

For me, I think the real need is in speeding up of the whole innovation process, approaching the whole innovation in a systematic way, as the only path to tread in the years ahead. We need to broaden out the whole process of rapid innovation application beyond the two current favorites of lean and design thinking. That requires it to be fully connected up and that means making the innovation process one that is fully digital, on a platform and accessible by all, those that can bring value and meaning to the process to deliver greater innovation outcomes. We need a greater innovation rapid prototype approach to the whole innovation process- test, learn, adapt, adjust, iterate, refine at speed and rapid scaling.

Designing the complete rapid innovation application process.

Digital technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the methods, approaches, and rates of our innovation outputs. Social technologies are giving us real-time understanding. We can connect with customers real-time. We can have meaningful dialogues and exchanges that build relationships and constant sharing of knowledge and insights.

We continually learn real time, and recognize at our cost if we do not adapt, that intuition and ‘gut feel’ or research set up and gathered weeks or months ago, is becoming so out of date before we can learn from it, and sometimes highly dangerous to follow or believe in. We live in a rapidly evolving world and we have to be highly adaptive and responsive in what we offer in products and services. To get to this “responsive” state we need to fully connect up, freely exchange and build adaptive systems that accelerate our pathway of discovery into tangible meaning, through better products and services. We need to change our thinking and design in the digital insight part more specifically within and along the innovation process.

Digital technology and transformation are changing the innovation ‘game’.

We have, in the past, tended to take a safer route to market, by trying to achieve well-defined problems, place these into process maps and worked along the timelines, often impervious to the market conditions changing before our eyes. We continue to couch our bets and gravitate to solutions that are as close to what we currently offer, and that just keeps reinforcing the incremental route regretfully.

Yet digital threatens this entire incremental pathway. Markets continue to have even greater uncertainty and we need to respond in very different ways. Competition is changing, markets are blurring and customers are becoming far more vocal. To respond we need to reconceive innovation into a constant and rapid learning approach.

The need to be highly iterative, full of experimentation, testing and adjusting lends itself to the minimal viable product approach, where we continually test assumptions, checking what we are thinking against the concept of value gained from the customer or market feedback.

Digital is also pushing us to shake off complacency since customers are increasingly further connected and interacting in new ways, we need to find paths to ‘plug into’ and join the conversation, to help shape that conversation and through these exchanges recognize how the brand and reputations become increasingly important in all things innovating.

Digital tools are changing how customers discover, evaluate, explore, make their purchases and use products and then how they react, share, interact and make their connections with our brands. The whole process is highly dynamic and reliant on the ‘network effect’, and the job of the innovator is to translate this and respond in fast, nimble, agile ways, to fulfill the needs and capitalize in responsive ways. This demands a radical redesign of the innovation process.

The need always is to “test to learn” and constantly adapt

• Without a doubt, it is finding and using more techniques and tools that help you make far greater rapid prototyping, testing, piloting and learning from these understandings and how they can be quickly translated back into the innovation process to improve on what you have known, into one of what you have become aware of. “Testing to learn” will become the new innovation mantra and the accepted innovation process; a dynamic, fluid and rapid experimenting that makes it a constant learning one.
• We are today, partly down this route of early learning, with the help of software that can capture ideas, offering a sound vehicle for communicating these and a place to gather and define solutions that can be taken forward. Yet we have to push the path of constant evolution and that will continue to come at increasing speed from technology to keep providing new knowledge so as you can constantly improve on your eventual value proposition but that is going to require an ever-increasing agile organization and adaptive system.
• We will need to find different ways to redesign the manufacturing process (more outsourcing) to have more adaptive points where we can intervene and change product design. We will need to find different ways to ramp up or dampen down finished goods, that require a more rapid change, and that is going to push ‘agile’ even further. The ability to balance “scale, speed, and scope” will become paramount in this.
• We will need to learn to focus on the seizing of emerging opportunities in quicker ways but also take a much tougher approach to divestment, so as to release resources from declining positions of advantage. The whole lifecycle thinking needs challenging and thinking through differently.
• We will need to push for “agile systems” where we can design new applications, find better communication and collaborative social technologies, so as to reduce delays of getting better access to the right information, connecting to the right people, so as to advance the process. We need to actively reduce the duplication of work or the search for the information needed, to complete the job. We need to focus much more on reducing innovation process cycle time for faster deployment
• We will also need to invest in more data-driven front ends to build a more sophisticated process of discovery. The whole concept of divergent experiments and convergent testing and validations will become the way to think along the innovation process as a re-looping process. This will require a critical mindset change from a linear one on how you set about it, in the design of the process, Then also on the use and application of the digital tools you deploy, to move this through this constant, ongoing iterative process. Nothing can remain ‘static,’ we need to make it ‘highly’ dynamic.

Rapid innovation matters and it will become even more central as digital innovation takes hold.

Rapid-iteration needs to replace the fixed product release date mentality. We are in a world, driven by digital that requires us to constantly adapt to new learning that is coming from real-time market feedback. The way we learn from this and our rapid innovation application process will be all about this continually testing new assumptions to improve our (final) product and service propositions.

I have said this often, I believe we need to rethink the innovation process, as we will need to transform the existing methods and make them increasingly digital and social, in real-time. We need to focus on the rates of innovation output from our learning and improvement in the eventual offering, as our constant bearing or benchmark. It is how we design this in a more comprehensive manner will be a real challenge going forward

I predict that innovation has some very pivotal years ahead of it, as we absorb and use more rapid innovation application processes. We should start thinking about how we can fully design and adopt a more digital innovation discovery to the execution process,  at increasing speed for final innovating outcomes.

A design that pursues a constant path of innovation understanding and evolution, that fits far more with these digital transformational times we are going through. We are entering the digital innovation era.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site and modified here.

The post Adopting a Rapid Digital Innovation Process first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Any innovation common language needs working upon. It firstly needs recognition it is in our best interests to find a common point. It needs to be relevant to each of us, it must be current, appropriate, accurate and highly visible throughout the entire organization. It also needs to be allowed to grow and flourish, to evolve and become the lingua franca of all our innovation work. It needs building and constructing in conscious ways and design.

Let’s step back just for one minute, these ‘sentiments’ are fine, yet we actually do, seriously lack a common language for innovation and we should find the ways and the means to change this. It holds innovation back significantly. It can’t continue in a world of greater networking and collaboration.

Languages unites us or keeps dividing us

Language can have the power to unite us or potentially divide us. Developing a language to unite us in our innovation efforts goes some way to reduce disagreements and egos, to qualify individual interpretation or bias, often a key inhibitor that can block a team’s success. It lays in a common foundation. It builds confidence and understanding.

Once we have a common language, we can set about building and creating a more robust innovation management system. One that builds on this framework so it can relate to the relevant context, conditions, and environment for innovation, to offer within this building block, the common identity.

These identifiers can build into better understanding how to structure governance, process, and functional structures, to build a culture that is responsive as ‘they’ can identify a need for a common cause of understanding. It is in this central innovation language that becomes our clear unifying context, the enabler, and sense of personal identity with the purpose of what we are wishing to achieve.

In any common language, we need to master the understanding, the nuances and how it all fits together. We need to exploit it and extract what it can offer to enhance all the work we do in innovation. We need to appreciate always its terms, its definitions (and limitations) and the related performance values that can help to improve our performance and in our achievements of working increasingly with others.  A common understanding of our meaning to ‘innovate’ becomes an imperative.

Today we all having a different meaning and interpretations within our innovation understanding.

Each organization has specifics in meaning that can often end up in results that break down and so deliver results totally different from their original intent. As we grow out our collaborations into ecosystems the need for a common language becomes even more vital. For example:

• Often misunderstanding occurs, even though we initially thought we had communicated well but those that receive this often apply different interpretations that confirm their personal views,
• There is always this risk that others often apply subtle nuances and variations built on their experiences or understanding on how ‘something works’, and it is within these different readings we can suffer costly errors, extensive delays and wrong end results in the final product or service delivery.
• We suffer significant inefficiencies because we don’t pay enough attention to ensuring the correct meaning is well understood, we simply believe our way of thinking is the only way it is conveyed to be understood, and as we all know, this is often far from the reality. Context and Communications are kings in my opinion.
• We need to seek explicit language and context to allow innovation to do its final job, of delivering a valuable new contribution that builds on the existing and meets new market and customers’ needs or the jobs-to-be-done.

Innovation becomes highly constrained if we fail to find that common language, that common purpose, the understanding of the right context and ended up providing something that was not as good as it could have been, or we simply veered completely off track, on the original insight. It somehow got lost in translation, in applying individual meaning. Translation is one of those keys that can unlock so much within innovation but often it just simply goes the other way and gets “lost in translation”

To apply a common language, we need to invest in its practice

The more we practice and move towards a common understanding of innovation, we are moving towards clarifying and reconciling, as best we can, within the constraints of what common language or context offers. We give innovation a greater chance to succeed. A common language enables greater transparency, clarity in accountability through its definitions; we achieve greater collaborative dialogues and meet more concurrence than without this move towards a common understanding.

So much of innovation is piecing together many fragmented pieces, strands of knowledge that can be unstructured can be very ambiguous, yet requires sound judgment. Innovation builds on shared experience and the quality of its interaction points. The more we learn to collaborate, the more we begin to share experiences, the more we achieve a growing common language. We need to bring together increasingly the parts that growing specialization, our limited grasp of all the complexities that can influence a decision. We need to constantly reconcile incoming information with our own language of understanding, so we need to strive towards improving the common parts surely?

I think as we build a common language we need a certain learning rhythm.

This is where absorptive capacity can come in, as it offers a structured way of building our knowledge understanding and fits within this. Absorptive capacity has the different steps of acquiring, assimilating, transforming and exploiting but these need a clear sequence, structure, and commonality to their approach, to gain the lasting benefit.

A common language of innovation working to a common end cause also allows for a knowledge learning repository to be built up, so all can potentially prosper as their starting point to innovate, as they learn from past experiences and insights. Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something

Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something enhancing.

A bedrock for building and sustaining innovation is a common intent, language, and context

Forming a common language should be the bedrock for how we set about innovation. It cannot be silo driven or developed to fit one individual team, unless you want stilted results with incremental innovation being most likely as the best you can achieve most of the time, within this ‘constraint’, as we increasingly need to reach out and learn to collaborate

How we go about our communications, what and who you can connect with and your level of innovation engagement, do matter significantly. It is the ability to find the common identity, a real unifying sense of purpose that sends positive signals to all involved and those interested parties, often external to your ‘inner’ innovation process, to engage fully.

A common language can change much within innovation. Can we find the investment time to build this into the work we need to do? We should. It is in all of our future collaborating interests.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

The post We are in need of a common language for innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

“To be agile” is often a badge of honor.

It conveys your flexibility, nimbleness and your ability to be adaptive.

Agility is today going far beyond just being responsive,it goes into constantly adjusting and being versatile, modifying to meet rapidly changing conditions.

Yet this often seems the very opposite within many of our organizations and the very people employed within them. They seem rigid, inflexible and determined to stay ‘resolute’ to the established ways and routines built up over years.

They love stability, it is their bedrock but equally, they do need a greater fluidity to their performance and structures as well.
The challenge is to keep the stability but to build around it a more agile, dynamic set of capabilities. Today this stability is your platform, your backbone, the anchor points you need to return to but it also does mean the need of being far more ruthless on jettisoning the legacies and some of the hierarchies that have built up.

So why is that?
Many of our established organizations are often caught up in legacy systems and procedures, hierarchies, structures and process descriptions that can often trap them in rapidly changing market conditions unable to respond.

Also today our organizations are falling behind in their innovation, it lacks a level of boldness or degree of novelty. They have honed their incremental skill-set right down to keep the core intact, to allow the business to keep moving along to a steady, comforting beat.

Those that follow this incremental path are often rewarded the most, they never want to ‘rock the boat or challenge the status quo” as this provides them the expected financial rewards in the year-end bonus.

The organization is structured so the measurement and rewards cascade down so all are nicely aligned. Everything is controlled, it has rules yet when disruption suddenly arrives, it will watch out.

Stable worlds are brilliant but they never seem to stay that way

Now, this alignment is great in a stable world where the market is simply moving along at a steady pace but what happens when a sudden usurper suddenly appears on the horizon, determined to take away all that you felt was rightly fully yours. Suddenly the world changes, you become far more aware, tuned in to the changes that have been going on, for sometimes a long time, all around you.

Suddenly what you had become comfortable with is about to become a straight jacket. You feel constricted, trapped, and blame the bureaucracy for allowing this to happen. You crave some agility, some freedom to do things differently.

The problem often lies in the simple fact the muscles have ossified, frozen into the given routine that kept you happily moving along but not greatly stretched or extended, apart from meeting certain deadlines, responding to the constant stream of regular and predictable requests.

You become alert, you tune into lean management, having a start-up culture, and you seek to move beyond the boundaries, you are encouraged to think out of the box, you are asked to imagine the unpredictable. It is such a shock to the system. Organizations go into cardiac arrest; they are placed in the critical ward desperately hanging on through life support and self-dependency.

This then calls for some radical solutions that open up across broader communities as you are suddenly fighting for your very own survival, to stay attached and connected, to open up and engage, watching helplessly as the very life of all you have been part of is drifting constantly away until you radically embrace the changes required.

Life does not always need to be like this

The health of our organizations, of each of us, is judged far more by this ability to adapt, move quickly and seek out new ways of doing things. We all need to seek out that badge of “agility”

The power of agility has been suggested as quickly becoming what amplifies the power within today’s management practice. It is exercising those organizational ‘muscles’ that can distinguish those that are more agile and adaptive. So what are they for us to practice? Also, what is the associated outcome?

If we take a really useful guide produced by McKinsey, taken from their article “Why agility pays”  it does offer up many of the factors and associated outcomes that allows agility to flow within organizations. Ones to put in place to make us more agile and adaptive.

Some of these practices may already be in place but it is viewing these through the agile lens, it certainly does shift the dynamics of ‘being agile.
Adapting to agile is not easy; it is really painful for many

Many of our slow-moving organizations need to change their game. Here are some initial suggestions:

The quality of the interactions you are participating in, and the engagement practices being undertaken can change by spending considerably less time on one-way dialogues or presentations, this can make a huge difference, you spend the time actually listening to each other, and you are adapting within conversations.

We need to think more of providing an organizational backbone that we build upon as our stable part, that acknowledges both our continued need for stability but it needs increasingly is looking for ways to ‘add on’ more dynamic capabilities.

We need to think of dual designs in some ways that equally exploit and explore. We need to have greater confidence in the use of the cloud for processes that are kept up to date, responsive and crowdsourced for relevance to your needs.

We also need to take hold of all of the constant re-checking, re-working and clarifying all that is going on in many organizations and stop this time-delaying tactic that often hurts the business caught in this analysis paralysis.

This can be replaced by the lean principle of “good enough” often overcoming this sense of slow response. We need to develop these habits of simply testing it, experimenting with it, prototyping it, so it ‘tunes’ increasingly to the market needs for you to then rapidly scale this up. Being adaptive and quickly learning, then translating the value potential into real meaning.

The fourth one is acting quickly, the ability to move fast. The constant striving between keeping the organization on the one hand stable to manage all the ongoing activities yet increasingly making it more dynamic and responsive, exploratory, means certain parts need to be far looser, allowing a more free-flowing, nimble and quicker decision-making mechanism to prevail, pushing the “empowerment to act.”

Today it is all about managing the tensions, adjusting to the dynamics and being responsive at increasing speeds and flexibility. Yet it is also ensuring you have a stable framework that (in)forms your backbone, or compliments it.

One that allows you to quickly learn and see those increasing points of value as they happen, adjust to them and be responsive in today’s far more dynamic and responsive world in new agile and adaptive ways.

The post Making Agility Compatible For You first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I named my company Agility Innovation Specialists and at its core, we state that the value of this focus can offer a real “intensity in innovation” that we believe reflects today’s world of need.

We encourage you to disrupt the accepted, to constantly challenge the current ways and push into uncomfortable territory. We suggest you seek out customers’ unmet needs, and unexplored opportunities to give a new diversity to any thinking, and then we set about accelerating these ideas to fruition. Those all need abundant and constant agility.

Many of our business organizations continue to struggle with innovation and how to make it repeatable, sustaining and transformational. Often, it seems, the more large organizations attempt to become ‘agile’ the more they seem to achieve the very opposite, of rigidity.

Finding solutions to building agility is part of the necessary answer to achieving greater innovation solutions.

Our aim is to strengthen the core by building in increasing ‘waves’ of agility within your business and enabling a stronger set of sustaining innovation outcomes.

This comes over time, from this need to have agility, flexibility, and an open enquiring mind that looks to experiment and explore, making for an agile innovator this needs diffusion across the entire organization and that does take time.

I’m always looking to explore agility and recently came across the concept of “collective agility”

Then we have collective agility

I have been reading a good academic paper recently, one that I came across in my Big Data and Cloud research I have been undertaking. The paper is called “Collective Agility, Paradox and Organisational Improvisation” by Yingqin Zheng, Will Venters and Tony Cornford found on the London School of Economics site, under the department of Management.

Their point gained from studying GridPP and its part in the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LHC) where they observed a collective, agile and distributed performance rather than seeing ‘agility’ as small-group and deliberate systems development practices often associated with ‘agile’.

It got me curious. Here is my summary of their paper.

It certainly offers some pointers to managing in more agile ways in a complex and often disparate organization.

Collective agility is focused on the same objective: shared.
In terms of business, it means the mission is shared by all and this mobilizes each person in ways that I feel are trying agility to innovation in new ways, well for me anyway.

It is providing an environment where “unintended consequences” emerge, many positive, others less so, where random thoughts and ideas collide and through these exchanges within the community they form a “collective mindfulness” to solve these complex challenges.

Collective agility seems to require a loose coupling, not heavy structures or rules, encouraging a culture of improvisation and constant ‘tinkering’ that comes from not just intelligence, trust and pragmatism but from the knowledge that lies within the community.

Collective agility needs to have minimal structure, flexible planning, extensive communication and social bonding, all working towards this coherent, facilitated and growing feeling of making good sense (sense-making) through this coordinated but distributed network.

It is totally reliant on the interactions and attention to coordination to achieve this ‘collective mindfulness’

The big “ah-huh” for me

Collective agility is about accepting what is unpredictable and uncontrollable yet working within given boundaries, actively working upon seeking out improving performance and capability, to still perform in these circumstances of uncertainty.

Now for me, many organizations are grappling with uncertainty, volatility and unpredictable situations and resort to trying to master them in rigorous, highly disciplined ways.

This collective agility is suggesting we go the other way, we let go, hang loose but stay collectively focused by just reacting in agile ways. Does that raise some different thinking for you, it does for me.

We are seeking out improved performance but in really agile ways across a distributed community or network. Large organizations today are regretfully still tackling thorny problems in ‘given silo’s’ and this ‘collective agility’ thinking might open up our ideas about collaborating and co-creating in different ways.

It is in the combining of performances, that tackle issues in improvised ways but within a trusted and pragmatic way. It creative productive tensions, dynamics and motivating challenges and the group feel that ‘capacity for action’, motivated to combine, share and explore together to solve the problem.

Rules, structures and organized events often inhibit and feel contrived, the idea behind ‘collective agility’ is it is more natural even within the organization with established routines and strong cultures as they can bind, provide collective strength, as well as inhibit. It is seeking out the minimal structures, releasing the flexibility and bonding that can come from these routines and stronger cultures.

The when what, who, where and how collective agility is performed

According to the authors, agility can be learnt through ‘learned improvisation’ where some established tools are dropped or removed and some ‘surprise, risk and wonder’ are allowed into the exchanges.

The atmosphere of experimentation, trust, shared goals and emotional bonds provide for confidence to grow, in sharing and learning from made mistakes, as it contributes to the ‘higher’ cause of what the community is tackling within these tough problems.

The group grows in its ‘sense of pride in working and searching for a higher cause and is even willing to undertake unpopular tasks to move exchanges along. The motivation grows through this collective agility.

We often recognize improvisation and agility are more easily performed in small groups, jazz improvisation is often used to relate to this agility. The key is often the ambience and this can equally come from building out bigger communities to perform and exchange (notes)

The final thought is agility requires a mental attitude “to let go of control” to interact, to improvise but to seek to keep that sense of cohesiveness of constantly wanting to work things out, working consciously to keep moving forward towards the higher task.

Art and science fuse.

The authors suggest science becomes more like an art- visionary, experiential, passionate, agile and emergent. I’ve written about art and science before, see here “Renaissance comes from combining art and science for innovation“, so I can relate to this need to bring these two often separate practices into one again.

As I was working through this paper, replaying the conceptualization of ‘collective agility’, I liked the comment within the paper “agility for us is an expression of what people do or achieve, rather than what they might do or capabilities they hold”

Then another important part of this paper is managing the Paradoxes
They also bring out Paradoxes and provide a helpful table of these seemingly conflicting ideas or paradoxes to build ‘collective agility’ in understanding. These are based on:

1) The paradoxes of learning: “as we struggle between the comfort of the past and the uncertainty of the future which are fundamental to the process of innovation, transformation and sense-making”. Learned improvisation and reflective spontaneity.

2) The paradoxes of organising: “reflecting tensions between control and flexibility, formal and informal, integrated and differentiation denoting an ongoing process of striving for an equilibrium of often opposing forces”. Planned agility and structured chaos.

3) The paradoxes of belonging: “we strive for both self-expression and collective affiliation”…but also being “self-driven, intelligent and creative people, yet they also have an acute appreciation that success relies on collaborative effort”. Collective individuality and anxious confidence.

They finish the paper by offering useful tables highlighting some key organizational practices that help to make this collective agility work through these paradoxes.

We are constantly searching for agility to perform innovation

Agility is linked to change. Change is constantly throwing obstacles in our way. We are urged to be nimble, to react quickly, and to tackle challenges in new ways. Developing agility allows us to be in a constant ‘state’ of recognizing nothing is seemingly staying the same.

If we are feeling those around us, are all working towards the same goals, then we feel less inhibited, we may not like change but we gradually accept it. If others are reinforcing the necessary change through this ‘collective agility’ it can become a source of new hope, new discoveries, and a place for opportunity, with real excitement, full of possibilities

Gaining that critical sense of collective identity missing from many in our organizations.

By knowing “we” are collectively all working towards the same purpose, constantly having the progress mutually reinforced, allowing for clear debate but being pushed and moving forward, being allowed to freely exchange within a common purpose in ‘collective’ ways, then we are certainly are moving towards a more fluid, organizational agility.

This collective agility might alter the ways we can tackle tough problems and work in volatile environments, which then can yield in collaborative ways, solutions that are more radical and breakthroughs in innovation, something we should all be striving to achieve.

Certainly, this does offer some interesting thoughts to take collaboration and co-creation further through this collective agility concept of greater improvising.
Save

The post Building Collective Agility for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today we face unprecedented change; organizations are being hit on multiple sides, often by a bewildering set of forces to make them feel the immediate need is to go back into themselves, to be more inward than looking out and being open to facing the future. There is this feeling today of being battered. Organizations are feeling the full force of the winds of business and global change.

Stopping, reflecting and then moving on.

Organizations are grappling with how to navigate through an unprecedented set of early 21st century challenges. How can they adjust to a more open and transparent world, a more fluid and adaptive one, that needs to be replacing the one we have been operating within all of the last century? One that seems to work no more as its very foundations seem to be crumbling. Organizations are in a period of relearning and understanding these ‘new’ forces at work.

Those of us on the outside – those investors, stakeholders, non-profit organizations, researchers and students of organization dynamics –  want to force this greater openness, to understand more of what is actually really going on inside our organizations, institutions and governments by the seeking out of transparency for greater understanding through constant ongoing engagements.

Organizations must resist being drawn in and simply press on with their outward engagements

Organizations certainly are at a defining crossroads, to go inward would be disastrous. They need to be outwardly facing and more forward-looking, more open on explaining their business models and strategic designs by discussing these more openly in risks and opportunities will draw people in, and is that unhealthy, I don’t think so?

A real opportunity is for organizations to grasp the greater knowledge that lies outside, by listening and absorbing is becoming a watershed moment for change, that we are in the middle of trying to understand. We are grappling with what technology is providing us in big data and all these dialogues of information flowing in.

I don’t think we can just ‘manage it’, organizations have to become highly adaptive, swift and nimble to seize what it is signalling to turn it into our economic or knowledge gain, time and time again. This is radically challenging the organizations command and control structures. At present, everything is becoming adaptive.

Much is not prescriptive, we are in a period of invention

Engaging in consistent conversations with customers, with stakeholders, with lobbyists or protectionists, looking to push for faster change is highly challenging and full of mixed signals for organizations, ones that are built on order, hierarchy and chains of command.

Yet being open is a far better place to stand and defend, to listen and respond, to adapt and learn how to change. Stakeholders value dialogue and honesty far more today, there is far less acceptance of denial and avoidance

This new more open organizational form, being sought outs through new networking, gathering new knowledge, absorbing this and then transform it into new combinations that all become our new innovation source, lies in our abilities to translate all these different signals arriving into our organizations.

The integration and interconnectedness that defines our time

Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, talks of the “breakneck pattern of integration and interconnectedness that defines our time, bringing with it tensions in economic sustainability and global interconnections”. What is driving the new way of thinking and behaviour needed in the ‘hyper-connected’ world requires new mechanisms need to be found to address challenges that can no longer be addressed in the isolation of one institution or jurisdiction.(source:www.theiirc.org)”

Today, organizations are forced to embrace different realities, caused by recent economic and political events leaving a growing sense of unease. Technology, social exchanges, a more global interconnected economy make everything seem either immediate or at an increasing distance, out of our hands. The reflecting part, the time to consider has been eroded, we have lost the middle ground to muse and ponder. Today we seem to simply ‘react’ or ignore and simply move on, because of this we starve our thinking and often loose context and meaning.

Making sense of our world

The art of sense making is how people make sense of the world in all its complexity and seemingly consistent uncertainty in order to make (better) decisions. We are presently seeking out plausible explanations to much that seems complex at so many different levels of society.

The problem seems to me, it is not unfolding in the way we have been ‘conditioned’ to understand it. The time-space of how we are moving from the past, through the present into the future is hard for organizations and us as individuals to understand. Equally as the speed, scale and complexity seemingly keeps growing it threatens to overwhelms us. We need to master ‘sense- making’ to try and put these into a new context.

revised 1st March 2014

The post Facing the future or staying locked in the slow lane of the past? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Can you imagine the CEO sitting opposite the consultant, explaining the organization’s present difficulties to regain growth.

They explain no matter what they are doing through the existing practices and the assorted business approaches they have taken for many years, they still seem to be ‘treading water’ or even losing ground. They are beginning to worry seriously about their future.

The consultant has heard this already so many time before  across many worried organizations. He looks right into the CEO’s eyes and (sort of) snarls back: “You can run but you can’t hide”. This was a famous quote attributed to Joe Louis before one of his boxing fights back in 1946.That might get a CEO’s attention! We are in a digital transformation evolution.

The consultant quickly goes on to explain: organizations are running harder than ever yet they seem always caught out in what they do, other existing competitors are second guessing, anticipating their next moves and executing faster, new ones are constantly emerging.

The organizations ideas are just not gaining the traction; they just always seem caught out by others, more nimble, increasingly exposing the weaknesses. There is this certain time of recognition that much has to change, the organization needs to transform itself completely too firstly survive, and then hopefully thrive.

What the consultant is recognizing is the need for change the CEO certainly needs to consider, one that gives a more focused approach on all aspects of digital and what it might provide.

One that is a massive transformative one, as the current approaches seem to be running flat-out, all the time, twenty-four by seven, yet this is not helping the organization to stay competitive as everyone else has got them in their sights, sensing their vulnerabilities. They are missing new options to transform their business. New innovation options through digital knowledge.

Then the consultant discusses how does the CEO break out of the constant current ‘dog fights’ he is constantly embroiled in and constantly reacting too, that are equally sucking up most of his top team’s valuable time?

We are close to a future that will work very differently from the past.

The consultant begins to outline some radical options. Yet he starts with yet another famous boxing quote “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” by Mohammad Ali. Mohammad went on to say: “His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see. Now you see me, now you don’t. George thinks he will, but I know he won’t”.  Perhaps the CEO is already running for “cloud” cover.

The emerging world coming out of the clouds offering digital revolutions.

Welcome to the world of digital opportunities that technology is bringing in an array of possible solutions, that the cloud is enabling faster than we can individually absorb. We need to see the value of connecting the digital pulse into innovation through new business models, its all around us.

We often look at fast-moving start-ups, jealous they are not burdened down by legacy systems, outdated policies and entrenched silo’s.  Yet fast growing companies are not limited to start-ups, there are growing stories of organizations becoming more nimble, highly focused on core areas and being extremely innovative.

They are rapidly learning to capture and translate the emerging business benefits faster and turning their organizations into better innovation machines. These changes are stretching across many different industries.

One missing transformational key for nearly all organizations is embracing digital that combine social media, mobile technology, analytics and embedded devices to change customer engagement, radically alter internal operations and adopt different business models.

The need for recognizing this is down to the leadership drive and recognition of the considerable changes already under-way affecting all business activities.

The CEO really does need to exercise their leadership if they see a radical transformation as necessary as they will face obstacles all the way. This will call for strong transformational management intensity which is hard to sustain without outside help and expertise as many close to the top will be themselves dramatically impacted.

There are really important times for that  need of external help

I am beginning to see one external consulting company make an impact as they have re-invented themselves.

The one consulting company throwing its considerable hat into the digital transformation ring is Capgemini Consulting and well worth exploring how they are setting about this.

They argue digital change is with us all in business but to bring about the changes they are suggesting you have three change ‘intensity’ points that need addressing to bring you to a realization that something radical has to replace the existing.

These intensity points for necessary change are based on being open and honest about your abilities to manage the transformation taking place within your business sector, as going ‘digital’ is equally needing to be worked through across all business sectors. There is a need for a more cohesive set of solutions to this.

Capgemini outline here their thinking in this short video clip of digital transformation and where they can help support this. I think it provides a useful understanding.

They argue that being absolutely clear on the transformation, having a well thought-through roadmap towards this transformation is essential and this is being driven by three drivers of change as the need:

 1) Understanding, really understanding the customer experiences going on and what is needed,

2) The level of internal transformation that needs to really take place and

3) The extent of the business model changes you must make.

The key question is “how do you want to use technology to transform yourself?” Then it is driving the answers to the new business outcomes you decided were needed. To make this ‘transformational’ these will not be less than approaching this with a highly radical solution that evolves the learning, step by learning step.

A recent set of reports from Capgemini discusses much of this digital transformation need and their approach to this

Some of the critical steps suggested by Capgemini  I thought I’d summarize here:

• Capgemini talk about your ability to “absorb” and “adapt” and these come by putting in place a strong transformation management set of capabilities, that align the digital efforts under a common vision and coordination structure and set about engaging the organization in making this a reality.

• This ‘transforming’ approach needs a clear vision to frame the journey and result in people’s minds of how the organization will be different in the future and why that is seen to be important. This vision also helps people to understand what former assumptions may no longer be valid.

• The value of ensuring clear digital governance is in place is equally essential to deploy effective investment rules and make sure there is effective coordination mechanisms to keep the transformation moving in the right direction.

• Getting that essential engagement in this vision and fostering a culture of change is never easy in any transformation story but this must be one shared to give the vision the reality it needs. The level of re-defining, challenging existing practices, especially in IT related ones are significant.

• There is a need to structure a new collaborative balance between the CIO and business executives. This is where the CEO needs to work hard to achieve this new set of working relationships at the top, where nearly all will be caught up in these changes.

• To begin this transformation Capgemini argue that you must put the organization into motion as early as you can.  To have in place a wide array of digital channels for continuous two-way communication channels between the leadership wanting to enact change and the organization. This can include broadcast, web, video and social networks to break down the hierarchy and ensure the correct message is going out not sabotaged by ‘vested interests’.

• The organization needs to encourage, explore and identify changing practices and what these opportunities can bring in faster response times, greater understanding of value recognition by customers and the opportunities to deliver innovation that matches the expectations or unmet needs discovered.

• Clearly anything transformational has many aspects to consider but you need to be absolutely certain you have the right skills available, bridge the gaps and coach existing personnel in exploring and experimenting on the different digital channels to gain experience and growing insights. All these can be in rapid sprints iterate and improve with the learning from these being open and honest.

None of this will be easy but the CEO today is recognizing he has to rip up the existing structures, rid himself of the legacies of the 20^th century and define a new set of business models, those built far more on agility and responsiveness and finally, focus the innovation capacity in highly focused, intense ways to ‘absorb and adapt’ quicker than the competitors.

Capgemini is shaking a few trees and will be interesting to watch for digital solutions.

For me, we are seeing Capgemini embracing digital transformation in far more open ways as consultants, in their thought leadership pieces, their clarity on their site and their own focused view of their own future, channelling their growing expertise on where they core business lies. They themselves are perhaps living at the edge of discovery.

 I sense they are ‘walking the talk’ themselves and presently very focused, moving away and gaining clear distance from many existing consulting firms, still intent on adding more one-stop capability just when the business world needs intensive focus on tough issues, and digital is certainly one of those.

Innovation and technology need to combine more, digital transformation will matter in this for sure.

This digital transformation space that is transforming before our very eyes the shapes of the future organizations to adapt around new challenges that technology is bringing into the business value generating equation that drives innovation and the growth.

The post The transforming tide in digital for innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Social demands will inevitably increase as nations are being confronted with budgetary constraints, increased deficits and mounting debts to resolve.

Social needs will become more pressing and innovation, social innovation, will increasingly explore opportunities to extract ‘more from less.

Innovation can play an increasing part in resolving social challenges that are increasingly confronting us.

Starting a new movement on social innovation in Europe

Recently I became a member of www.socialinnovationeurope.eu . I certainly feel this is going to offer something exciting and vibrant. It is a growing community of thinkers, creators and innovators with the knowledge and skills to change the way we face Europe’s most pressing issues.

Contributors to the site will take a strong hand in shaping the direction of social innovation across Europe, breaking down silos and raising a unified voice. I need to find my own part in this, as there are multiple ways for contribution, which I’m still presently figuring out.

Social Innovation Europe (SIE)’s online hub present aims are to become an indispensable resource providing the latest information on European social innovation. It will feature interviews with prominent innovators, case studies of successful ventures, the latest research, and in-depth analysis from the leading thinkers in the field.

Why do we want to address social innovation even more now?

Social needs are now more pressing than ever, they will regretfully get worse before they get better. The combinations of the recent global crisis, the economic shifts from the West to the East will increasingly reduce opportunities and increase the social dimensions that will need to be dealt with. We are in social strife with unemployment challenges, ageing and climate change that all have growing stress on declining revenues in the West.

As our financial resources are getting more limited, new solutions must be found. The short term fiscal stimulus packages and bailouts have alleviated the short term but we do need to provide new innovative solutions to pressing social demands that will occur in increasing ‘waves’ over both the short, medium and long term perspective.

Social challenges are actually innovation opportunities

The challenges are tough but should be viewed as potentially new opportunities for economic and social innovations to take place. Providing solutions that are high in quality (or high enough), beneficial and affordable to the needs of the users requiring these, and that can add hope and provide value to improving their daily lives.

These can offer different combinations of business, government, and entrepreneurs different avenues to explore, that are both worthwhile and contribute to society but can offer valuable job and yes, profitable enterprises, and returns for investments made.

Social innovation means what?

Social innovation is innovation that is social in approach, in both the end result and the means of getting there. It offers new products, services and business model opportunities that simultaneously meet social need, that deliver more effectively than alternatives,(if there are ones) and most importantly, it create and builds new social relationships, communities and collaborations to achieve these ends.

They can make ‘us’ feel good by our direct contribution to enhancing society’s capabilities to act together to resolve part of the challenges we need to confront. Social interactions and vested interests need to be combined and as a direct result it generates a ‘social capital’ that builds in value by its activity and by its increasing movement up the experience curve.

There are barriers that will need to be knocked down to accelerate social innovation.

Like any innovation, social innovation has risks. It offers all the usual ‘suspects’ associated with innocation of good imagination, perseverance, overcoming adversity, shortage of funds and a continued optimism that your idea to create a product or service and its implementation, can and will happen.

There are some important differences for social innovation though.

Social innovation is far more a participative process, partnership forming, constantly identification seeking, that has more ‘scaling-up’ problems than business innovation and that is hard enough! You are confronted by more society barriers, which is often at odds with what you are trying to resolve.

Sometimes you meet a totally incompatible barrier that need that extraordinary leap of creative design to navigate around and that is where the model (social against business model) comes into play in analysing and resolving to overcome this. Social innovation does needs its own tools, techniques and models that today are somewhat lacking.

Equally, when you step more into the social innovation space you come up against a more traditional risk-adverse and cautious mindset unless the crisis is dire. The culture of administrators, their wish to stay with closed systems and often fragmented systems are tough to overcome.

The skills of many around you, wanting to help, can be more limiting in experience but often can make up this ‘deficit’ through their enthusiasm.

There is also the constant battle for funding through the scaling up from pilot or experimentation to larger scale (the social innovation life cycle) which can be demanding and often distracting, often taking you away from your primary task of resolving the social problem.

Scaling up seems a huge obstacle to overcome

In all I read and understand, the scaling up from that perfect local project into a regional than national one, is immensely hard. There are very few examples where the combination of coherence, comprehensiveness and broader outlook come together without significant changing of a workable local model.

The art of communicating, of diffusing the skills, knowledge, understanding of the key variables and the local experience are hard to often translate. Much in social innovation is intangible, more than business; as it is in tacit knowledge that often successful social innovation solutions are made.

How do you scale up a highly fragmented set of solutions when we lack more often than not the developed networks and the intermediaries that can assist?

Some of our established institutions like the Salvation Army can find major new roles to invent and work within, that provies the structure and need of networks, contacts and established infrastructure well established. Its mission and role emphasis might need to change to capitalise on this.

The three categories of social innovation

In a report, which has certainly helped shape this blog, on “Social innovation in the European Union” they are suggesting that you can schematically classify social innovation into three broad categories:

Firstly, grassroots social innovation that needs to respond to pressing social demands and directed more at the (growing) vulnerable groups in society.

Secondly, a broader one that addresses societal challenges where the boundary blurs between social and economic and directed more towards society as a whole. (My Salvation Army could be a clear example or the Red Cross or even the Open University)

Thirdly, the systemic type:  that relates to fundamental changes in attitudes and values, strategies and policies, organizational structures and process delivery systems and services. These include climate change, recycling as examples.
All three categories play a part in helping to manage and shape society.

Economic & Social Dynamism

There are many social challenges that will need creative and careful strategic framing that require innovation thinking. The pressing social issues will continue to rise to the highest political level and eventually ‘they’ will act, they will be forced too.

Social Innovation will then explode in importance when the combination of all our forces: government, non profit, business, communities and entrepreneurs all come together, as they have to, so as to resolve growing social problems through new innovative approaches.

We all need to first be aware and then engage in understanding the power and opportunity social innovation can provide and the part we can play.

Innovation can be a powerful enabler to many of the social challenges we are in need of facing up too.

It should be on everyone’s radar as it is only one ‘touch moment’ away from social issues that are all around us.

The post Renewing Innovation through the Social Innovation Agenda first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.