Anyone who has felt the ‘full force of the wind’ will know the feeling of how hard it is to keep on your feet, to stay determined to stay upright and true, to hold the course, whatever happens.
When you feel the force of change running through the organization, you tend to have that same sensation, to resist the force with all your energy. It is often really hard to let go, the environment was something you had become used to, you accepted and become resigned to its weaknesses and constantly exploited its possibilities or even possibly the other way round.
Firstly the sharks are circling
Change is all around us, it is accelerating not abating. You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market, and situations changing constantly and faster than ever. We do need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin.
For a big majority of us, open innovation is now well established, it is part of our innovation furniture. The quest for many, today, is the search for richer engagements, possibilities, and exchanges. We need to move beyond the existing boundaries and go deeper into the collaborative space.
I regard collaboration as the active ingredient, the yeast that allows our ‘daily innovation bread’ to rise. Getting all the parties ‘gathered around’ puts increased vitality, energy, and commitment to working together on a project or idea.
As we learn to reach out and collaborate, exchanging perspectives and our different thoughts, it is in these interactions, in the many exchanges on-line and off-line that we move towards a real sense of achievement.
It is the very act of ‘ring-fencing’ we have constrained innovation. We then can limit risk, as well as we are constantly separating it from the center of the company, even though many of us try to push it back towards the core.
Innovation remains separate for the clear majority of our companies even today as it is full of unknowns and question marks. Top executives just do not like the sound of this, so they seek to ring-fence innovation. One where they want to contain it, to try to tame it, so it can mirror their (mistaken) believe that our world is one of order, control, and stability.
Instead of embracing that the real world is actually an innovating world, full of opportunity, for those prepared to take a greater risk, will have much to gain. Regretfully we still see many companies operating with a 20th-century mindset. Thankfully the pressure upon companies to innovate, to get their growth back, is getting a very tough place to operate in today without tangible demonstration of innovation being realized. There is this need to “embrace” innovation. If not, rapid extinction is occurring for many that choose to ignore the sweeping changes we are witnessing in the business world, where more open and technology-driven innovators are connecting and collaborating. Those companies that only halve-heartedly attempting change are fearful and still want to “box” innovation in. A transformation where innovation and technology go hand-in-hand does have to be utterly full on to succeed!
Innovation pathways – a way to map out your strategy needs adapting.
I found time to finally sit down and listen to the discussion that occurred between Haydn Shaughnessy and Colin Nelson some time back, on the Hype webinar “How Companies Address the Disruption Challenge” and I thoroughly enjoyed it
There I was penning my notes as they discussed between them their different views on how they saw this world where disruption is becoming part of our daily lives. I took a lot of ‘takeaways’ from it and I’d encourage you to find the time to listen to it. Also, it prompted me to register and download Haydn’s White Paper written for Hype entitled “How companies address the disruption challenge”
If disruption is a new force then pathways give you options to respond
You can’t escape the reality that having the right environment for innovation means different things to different people. What we should be all able to agree upon is that the environment for innovation houses many of the conditions that connect innovation in people’s minds. The environment needs to be connected to the vision around innovation, it needs to be translated for each of us to relate too.
The environment provides the right growing conditions for your organization to foster its unique environment to prosper and grow. Deny those growing conditions and any innovation initiative is going to struggle and eventually die from the lack of the essential feeding of its roots.
We are constantly nudged towards understanding the needs of customers through the jobs to be done approach. So why do we still seem to not achieve this ‘higher purpose’ of providing solutions to customers’ needs?
Predictable growth has run its course as we live in unpredictable times; we need a better way to identify ALL those unmet needs that our customers have. That need comes from knowing the “job which needs to be done”. We need to sharpshoot to hit clear targets, we need to become a lot more explicit in our knowledge of a customer’s unmet needs, and they need to make the connection of that need with our product (or service).
We need to map the jobs and generate desired outcome statements that are specific and of real interest to the customer, not our list of multiple ideas generated based on where we are or what we think we know. We need to build the hierarchy of customer needs.
I wanted to depart from just focusing on innovation within this post. It is getting at me. I continue to read similar entreaties, it seems almost daily. Is this a symptom of a current malignancy or something that is going to be part of our future business lives?
We are extorted to disrupt our enterprises before someone else does. The constant threat of both known and unknown competitors could simply attack tomorrow. It is in our ‘complacency’ that we will be reduced down and lose our competitive advantages, even face extinction.
There is so much disruptive power being harnessed that we are all facing an exponentially more complex and challenging environment. Are you buying into this story of doom and fear?
The typical linear and often siloed mindset rapidly has to fall away when it comes to measuring and metrics within companies. The measurement of inputs, throughout and outputs needs to become far more focused on delivering speed and scale potential.
The outcome economy which is emerging has many implications within it and how we measure and value these will become increasingly important. Companies will need better data to calculate costs, evaluate their potential value, and will be modeling far more the risks, and tracking the factors required to deliver within any outcome-based value promised.
The Cynefin Framework by David Snowden, through Cognitive Edge
A good framework seems to grow, it becomes integrated into your thinking and application. You see increasing possibilities to apply it. One of these for me has been Dave Snowden’s Cynefin.
I also increasing apply the Three Horizons framework as well.
Both allow me to organize my thinking and provide options within any multiple evaluations to begin or shape thinking going forward. Both attempt to break down a growing complexity we all find in our word today.
One, the three horizons, attempts to sketch out our thinking about today’s world, of where we are and what we need to do to keep it going in a hopefully orderly state, and then looks to forecast out the changes we need to move towards, in a projected future and then identify the needs to get there. It passes through three horizons of today (H1), the near term (H2) and the longer term (H3).
You will find much of what I have written about on the three horizons story, within my “insights and thinking“ tab (shown above) and look for the applicable section. Equally, you can put into the search box “three horizons” and many posts will come up to explore this, if you are curious on its value, position and our need, to use this on a more consistent basis.
The Cynefin framework provides a wonderful way to sort the range of issues faced by leaders and us all, into five contexts, defined by the nature of the relationships between cause and effect. Dave Snowden has been explaining these consistently for years. Four of these five are; obvious (formerly simple), complicated, complex and chaotic states and requires us to diagnose situations and then to act in contextually appropriate ways. The fifth one is disorder, often overlooked or not fully appreciated. It is when something is unclear, it is in a disorderly, highly transitory state and needs to be rapidly stabilized into one of the other four to give it a more orderly state going forward.
So why do I see this Cynefin framework as growing in importance?
Many organizations are struggling with their metrics and ways to measure the progress and success of their business, and from this writer’s point of view, their innovation, it gets caught up in plenty of unintended consequences, to put it mildly.
Firstly, we are still locked in the old paradigm of thinking this is an industrial economy where we set about measuring inputs to innovation (R&D expenditure, capital investment) and then focused on the intermediate step of throughput and then outputs (publications, patents, end products). We also perceive innovation as an activity within just one company – viewed as linear, with considerations for services more of an afterthought (like ‘bolt-ons’). Production systems remain the driving force.
Today, the world of innovation is completely different. We need a far more open set of resources (many outside our own company) to enable innovation.
