behaviour changes and innovation - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Seeking fresh winds and new directions

@paul4innovating — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:05:17 +0000

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.

Ignoring the power of choice within change is dangerous

Constructing a climate for any transformation is hard. Our cultures are deep-rooted; we resist those winds blowing into us “full-on,” well beyond being reasonable or smart enough to avoid them before they confront us. The Chinese proverb below gives us a clear choice: “to build walls or build windmills”

When an organization decides to change its culture, set about constructing a different climate or environment so innovation can thrive. But there are so many steps to work through, so many obstacles to overcome, bridges to burn, habits to undo as well as construct the path of understanding, of recognition and providing the building blocks to this.

So often the top organizations keep delivering their message from the top, they so often fail to listen to the message from the bottom. Change is often resisted simply because the organization never takes the time to really listen to the views of the very people they expect to simply change..

Context is the vital ingredient often never told for innovation.

Often we hear “location, location, location” as the mantra for the real-state property. What should the mantra be for innovation? For me, it is “people, people, people” followed by “context, context and context”. We have often heard (and it is totally right) that innovation only happens through people. Everything else – systems, processes, structures, incentives and investments, sets the context that defines how people approach their jobs.

Context not only sets the stage, it gives us the reason to go and find the tools to get the job done but it is ‘our’ people who need to be motivated to go find them and apply them.

The power of context also refers to the conditions and circumstances of time and place for combining new ways to make a shift, a new understanding, perhaps to make the organization more sensitive to the need for innovation, to help fully support the people to innovate.

Context is powerful but only in the hands of knowledgeable people.

So to make the change we need context – the understanding of why we need to change and what we need to do with it. Then we can begin to think of the climate and eventual culture we want to have so as to achieve the change.

These actions shape behaviours that alter perceptions, establish themselves within the larger social group that change is directed towards, it alters the ‘norm’, opens up new possibilities and pushes the established boundaries.

Innovation is very fluid; we build systems that often impede it.

I kept a reference but I can’t recall who wrote it:

“An idea tends to be very fluid, and without context may be hard to evaluate or even consider. Certainly, any culture that discourages ideas will produce few, that rewards people for complying will not promote challenges and make the necessary breakthroughs business require today in new and different thinking. Having systems that minimize risk will also minimize innovation and risk-taking. Structures built to control only impede the very interactions that innovation thrives off of and restricting the movement of ideas will completely undercut the capacity for innovation”.

So companies need to put a great amount of attention on the context that will allow people to work clearly and effectively and provide the vital enablers that contribute to making this happen.

This power of context is something we are extremely alert or sensitive to, and when these change and we don’t understand why, we often just stop innovating, or being productive and often become disinclined to be creative. So making change for reasons that are seen as not clear to those involved stops people from doing their job of making innovation happen.

Context may be the arbitrator of success but people are first and foremost, hence why my two mantras are both critical “people followed by context” that are inexplicably linked for successful innovation but these should always be placed in the right order and recognition; people come first, context follows, innovation flows from the combination and you have the best chance to bring about positive change.

Actually making change for innovation is a lot harder.

Let me explain: Innovation, however, doesn’t work in many of our normal processes and procedures. Yes, we constantly attempt to squeeze all our innovation activity into a well-designed process but so many of those more radical innovations just cannot fit and we are then forced to ‘kill them off’ as the system rejects them.

We block any chance of making a radical change if we remain slaves to the pursuit of structured innovation alone. We should find ways to become flexible, more agile, and more ready to work with ambiguity and find the ways and means to challenge the consistent process for innovation.

Transactional processes have their context embedded in them, they are often just repeatable. Innovation, on the other hand, needs to attach context to every idea or concept, it needs to be moulded, shaped and aligned to the greater purpose, it is constantly unique and challenges the mindsets looking for simply efficiency and effectiveness.

A lot of innovation is actually not repeatable as it relies on creativity, discovery and intuition to overcome specific obstacles, all we can try to do is make them as efficient and effective as we can.

Encouraging change has one very powerful empowering step

If you encourage a certain readiness, willingness and ability to want to transform – then you must devolve power down to the individual to experiment, create, develop, to test, and then they will want to innovate.

They need to engage and identify, innovation derives from a concept in someone’s mind, who puts this into a context that others can relate to and out of this beginning comes the wish to develop and deliver this idea or concept into a final innovative product or service.

It is not the mechanical systems or processes that innovation often requires, it is the intellectual effort from the people wanting to engage in what it changes for them and those that benefit from something better and different.

Encouraging the forces, let them run free

Let those winds blow but do be ready to seek out all those within your team to harness the full forces of this change, to fill the sails that give you that momentum to move forward and pick up speed. If you lack the coordination of effort, when it is needed, and show poor commitment and enthusiasm, you create a real drag on performance.

You can often anchor and constrain the initiatives, you subject ‘forces of real negative tension’ that pulls in the opposite direction, holding everything and everybody back and eventually those full forces break free and run wild, ending up being totally out of control and all the creative energies are dissipated and going in all directions.

Remember we all need the provision of tools, encouragement, the time and space to adjust to change, to experiment and adjust, to become more comfortable, to validate a better course of action or way. We should always give liberally out the tools to do the job, but explain their purpose. We need to create the time to experiment and get used to what this means, keep adjusting and learning from the experience.

Focus constantly on the training and support always needed, you will surely lift any performance.

Finally innovation needs ‘team performance’ it struggles in isolation, it needs framing, context and dialogues to spark and evolve, and yes, always give praise and encouragement on any journey of change, lots of it. It soothes the pain of uncertainty, it strengthens the resolve to make the efforts.

The post Seeking fresh winds and new directions first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The sharks that prey are arriving a lot earlier now

@paul4innovating — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 11:26:16 +0000

Change is all around us, it is accelerating not abating. Do you feel you are trapped, encircled and just a little concerned.

You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market and situations changing constantly and moving faster than ever. ‘Much’ seems to be closing in on us.

We do know we need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we are really beginning to see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin for adopting change.

One that is characterized by sudden, even violent success or an event, some moments of brilliant dominance, followed by a dramatic change in conditions as others have spotted the same opportunity and you hit a rapid decline, the race to the bottom of competition constantly negating one another.

Market are segmenting, the life cycle is shortening or having an even longer tail of dealing with slow decline and constant erosion of any competitive position. The sharks are arriving even earlier and in a greater need to show their dominance.

It does seem “creative destruction” is a central force in many of our activities. Activities where innovation is continually replacing not just in products and new services but in designing radically different business models, searching to replace less adaptive competitors in the marketplace at faster rates.

Adoption is far earlier, the pace of change is quickening and from this, the competition is responding in new ways, often surrounding the new innovation with their version, built on often a really ‘fast follower’ principle to keep in step, and throttle off any different adoption, knowing what it costs to have to win this back over time if it can at all when it switches.

The life cycle is becoming even more important to manage in all of its stages, as its traditional shape I feel, is radically altering. It is coming faster and fading away quicker unless you manage its parts very specifically.

The VUCA world is a brutal place to operate in

Some are arguing we live in a VUCA world, full of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. I remember one phrase in a great book to read “Moments of Impact” written by Chris Ertel and a wonderful associate of mine, Lisa Kay Soloman.

They regard this period of living as the VUCA world, as “one that is a little like those thrilling rides you find in amusement parks but just not all of them are fun!”

These “change forces” are making many organizations and the leadership a little weary and wary, they seem to ‘double down’. They become risk-averse, defensive and determined to ‘weather it through’. They might be hanging on tight, simply believing but the force of change requires a very different set of beliefs and will whisk them away if they don’t adapt and change.

Shifting from accepted to adaptive – embracing new ways to innovate.

The changes that are occurring all around us are those sudden switches from the predictable markets that are creating interruptions to that constant reassuring rhythm of the one, three and five-year business plans. Suddenly this ‘process’ is getting challenged by novel, agile, adaptive concepts stealing the growth out of ‘our’ markets.

Lost increasingly is that feeling of being predictable, offering incremental improvements as the sure-fire way of running a business, year in, year out.

Innovation in the hands of a few has changed, it is so much more than incremental, it is radical and destructive and it’s coming at you earlier than ever, grabbing that early majority as it adapts, pivots and often blows away your ‘crafted’ design through combining a more radical solution, spotted and understood from real, early customer engagements.

Today we are far more on this quest for novel insights and much of what we will increasingly do will be transient. We are seeing much that was seemingly enduring is being challenged, even ripped out and replaced.

It is often an environment that has become a ‘feeding frenzy’ of the experiment, change, adapt and go back in and ‘attacking’ the assumptions of the business value proposition to find the ‘sweet spot’ of customer needs and why they see the value.

The “reassuring” generic statements are even more hollow than before

We might still hear the reassuring sound of those generic statements from the established incumbent of “focusing on our core assets”, “providing solid shareholder value”, “having clear target markets”, focusing on “reducing low yielding businesses to release value and drive up our stock” and the favourite by many “vested” C-level individuals announcing the latest “driving up our share price by a well-designed buyback program.”

All these ‘generic statements’ are often masking a deeper story in many organizations not at ease with themselves, at all. These reassuring statements make those on the outside feel some level of short-term comfort and stay invested but if you scratch the surface just a little, there is an underlying sense of panic. If you push too hard, and ask difficult questions suddenly it all becomes a little uncomfortable. Yet our large, established organizations are highly vulnerable to attack from their inability to adjust quickly to changed conditions.

These statements are just covering up the serious cracks appearing in the design process for new products. It is the failure not to embrace the changing management practices of working within far more lean principles, deepening design thinking, seeking out crowd-sourcing and collaborative networks, that push hard to fully understand customer engagement and challenging the business models to eventually end up with new value propositions that alter the existing market state.

Often the traditional practice organization is simply adrift in the water and others are circulating around them working through this new way of business thinking, avoiding old practices, thinking and approaches that really benefit the incumbent, often not the customer and their real needs.

The new leader within all of us needs to arise

Leadership when it wants to change for innovation needs to encourage a new set of principles so as to draw in everyone to the change process, so they can collectively unleash the potency to create the climate for creativity, innovation and eventual transformation, in a rapidly changing environment and culture that wants this change – it is liberating for individuals.

There is a lot of new thinking showing positive results and the ‘traditional’ management team or business needs to open up too much of this new thinking and find ways to adapt it and bring it in-house.

We must break out of our traditional thinking and ‘swim’ far more rigorously out of our dangerous holding patterns, to break away from the pack we get caught up in, simply accepting current practices and approaches is our only answer.

We must be bolder in where we go, in risks, in thinking, in our innovations, and in the actions we take.

When the wind of change does blow we must adjust

When the wind of change does blow and it is in every corner of every organization, it really does deliver a ‘punch’ of complex variables to manage, we do need to be ready to make the ‘required’ changes.

These ‘change winds’ influence the processes running through the organization as they are challenging and probing what is in place, they are looking to raise the creativity, by adjusting and changing the norms, making new activities work experimenting and learning.

Then you have to set about how to construct and design a more deliberate process kit for managing innovation, one that is more fluid, adaptive and agile to changing conditions and knowledge, and finally, the setting about addressing the environment and cultures needed to create more lasting conditions, so as to embed the change and establish the new (innovating) order.

Being alert, being adaptive, ready to break out and forge ahead

We are surrounded by all these sharks, hungry, constantly circling, looking for easy or ‘fat, complacent’ prey. If we are not alert to the dangers all around us we will certainly suffer. Are we the hunter or the hunted? We need to decide.

We must constantly adapt, wanting to make the change, even if it is uncomfortable, otherwise, we can so easily be swept away, at the mercy of others more adaptive.

There is no question we all need to keep moving but it is striking out with a far bolder plan to leave the ‘sharks’ behind. Let them look for the late majority or laggards that are not spotting real change occurring, occurring all around them, to become the new ‘feeding ground’.

You, simply go really hard after the early adopters and majority that determine the ones that thrive, knowing what it takes to survive and that is based largely on innovating like crazy

The post The sharks that prey are arriving a lot earlier now first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Opening Ourselves Up to the Innovation Mashup

@paul4innovating — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 09:32:31 +0000

Sometimes some things come slower than others, and then they suddenly rear up and hit you, opening you right up to completely new ways of innovation.

We don’t make all the connections we should; we are too caught up in our little world, beating our existing drum, drowned out by its own noise, to step back and appreciate something new is really happening.

Recently I was investigating one strand of thought and then bingo! Something else leads to something else and the rest, so to speak, becomes history.

I’ve been reflecting on the new era of innovation and opening myself up to exploring alternatives, different thoughts, discussions and viewpoints.

Underlying this is a growing sense of my convictions, still partly forming, malleable but trying to drive certain ‘stakes’ into the ground to keep testing and improving on a hypothesis or two; that innovation and its management definitely have to change, and fast!

Of course the cloud figures in this as a whole new different way to orchestrate innovation. More on that at another time as I need to get into some more robust discussions with one or two others on this and expand on my own position a lot more.

My recent ‘bingo’ moment was as I was listening to a round-table discussion within GE and its lighting division with a panel of outside thinkers. Beth Comstock, Senior Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer was chairing the discussion, so it will always stay lively and stimulating and it did not disappoint on that. Her throwaway line at the end of the panel session was “Perhaps the headline here is the Big Data Mash-Up”.

Mash-up? So am I missing a certain beat here? Or does it fit into my thinking

This started me off – Mash Ups, Ecosystems, Platforms, Big Data so how about the Big Mash-Up to help the necessary Smash up?

So off I go on one of my walkabouts, needing to plug into mash-ups a little more.

Business jargon is drawing more and more from our software and computer worlds. We have seen lean, agility, scrum and a host of others entering into our business practices in broader ways than the original application; the principles are being extended out.

So what is a mashup?

In web development, it uses content from more than one source to create a single new service, displayed in a single graphical interface. It works if it is fast, easy to integrate and has clear application interfaces that allow this to happen.

The original term of mashup, according to dear old Wikipedia, comes from British – West Indies slang, meaning to be intoxicated or a description for something or someone not functioning as intended.

I like this as it is the way many of our companies are reeling from all the disruptive changes swirling around them. Also within music, it is used when we remix and combine different aspects of music or song from one vocal track to another.

Thereby ‘mashing them’ together to create something new.

So why do I feel the innovation mashup is coming?

The main characteristics of a mashup are combination, visualization and aggregation so as to make ‘it’ (whatever it is) into something more useful, for personal or professional (or organizational) use.

We have a fair number of mash-ups going on already; in business, mash-ups to reveal actionable information, consumer mash-ups that can come through our browser interfaces (maps and info) and data mash-ups that provide new, more distinctive web services.

I’m not going to get into all the technical stuff on this, let alone the challenges but as you read about the taxonomy structures I start thinking innovation taxonomy. Don’t ask me why but I do.

Let’s smoke a little more here (I’m kidding) and think the Internet of Innovation

We have been digesting the internet of things, the internet of everybody so we need to push this a little more and ask “can a comprehensive vision of how this set of events around digital, data etc., alongside our physical needs, be translated into returns for a business wanting to engaged in greater, more valuable innovation”. These will come from platforms and connect everyone.

I hold one additional thought here “virtualizing the core business” and extending this beyond the core, to deliver innovation faster and better by orchestrating its parts to architect the future, based on responding to real needs and extending those existing deliverables that continue to provide value.

We need to manage innovation in more real-time, we need to dramatically improve the process, we need to pull together often the disparate knowledge, we need to inform better, we need to place what we are doing into a greater context and we need greater predictive decision-making.

What we have working the innovation activity is ripe for disruption. Innovation and its management is mostly operating with the 20th-century model.

The move towards digital-physical mashups

Darrell Rigby of Bains & Co., wrote a recent article in the September 2014 Harvard Business Review entitled the “digital-physical mashup”. You could imagine that got my attention in my walkabout.

His view is we are in a period of upheaval, do we see technologies as a threat or a new pathway. The growing reality is digital has the real potential to destroy our existing positions in existing markets.

We see this with digital platforms, those who lean on physical assets to attack the incumbents, take Airbnb for example in its mattress and B&B challenge to hotels or Kickstarter for alternative funding. Value creation is being rethought in totally different ways and business models and being staged on platforms.

Now, what happens when you combine digital and physical? As Darrell comments, there is a growing ‘weaving’ of digital and physical worlds to come tightly together. He cites Nike+ that is giving more than 30 million customers tracking, sharing of runs, workouts and setting fitness goals as the shoe has a built-in sensor and can work with your iPod to see data on time, distance, calories burned and can all be synced back, compared for charting your progress.

Here we see digital sport emerging, the ones not embracing technology will suddenly have their market position erode (and fast)

Then we come back to GE and Beth Comstock’s throwaway line “the big data mashup”

GE when they decide to move into something, tend to do it big time. They make “big bets on big things” according to their CEO and Chair Jeff Immelt. Big Data Analytics is one of these exploding for them. They have housed this under “Industrial Internet” and GE Predictivity TM for asset and operations optimization.

This will come from these analytic insights, through the use of sensors and other technologies in aviation, rail, oil & gas, power generation, wind, power distribution, healthcare, mining, water and process technologies, lighting and manufacturing from machines that are self-aware interacting with other machines and their human operators.

The collecting of data is impossible to manually analyse but if this can be translated into insights through analytics and big data management techniques, visualization and dashboards techniques, that can manage complex machines, save labour, downtime, direct resources and reduce costs it certainly opens up the thinking.

GE’s estimates could be as much as $20 billion in wasted deficiencies per year. Further opportunities will simply occur as this gets understood more as it gets rolled out.

Wikibon analysts believe the analytics market will be worth more than $47 billion by 2017 and Gartner reckons the rise of the Internet of Things will propel the global IT industry past the $3.8 trillion mark by the end of this year.

I can certainly see this as a valuable and seemingly ‘big bet’ sandbox to go and play in and GE is doing this on a strong execution platform. They already have scale, they are just scaling this more into a different business model and value propositions.

Big Data is coming of age, can we handle it?

Big Data is going to certainly drive IT spending in the next few years, yet it is its translation that promises to be within the value extracted, on how we interpret this through analytics, insights and what it then yields in improved productivity, new product designs and service offerings. It all signals a very healthy set of new innovation activities in new products, services and through new business model designs. The fusing of digital and physical for new opportunities is upon us.

So are we seeing the groundwork for a new industrial age where innovation will increasingly play even more of a part, one that needs us to focus on the data, our people and the whole architecture, where the ability to collaborate, exchange, network and decipher what is coming towards you in meaningful ways to turn insight into commercial opportunity seems beckoning?

So is our current innovation systems fit for purpose?

So real-time comes up against old-time innovation processes – something will have to give.

So there is a whole new world of possibilities, a mash-up of the cloud, data, analytics, digital/physical combinations, and real-time activities all crowding into the existing innovation pipeline, manually being cranked along. No, something needs to change. We need to really begin to dump these legacy systems for manual innovation and really step back here.

The BHAG for innovation is needed here
We need to take a very different perspective on the innovation process. We need a greater visual control across our organizations; we need to build a completely new end-to-end innovation management system on a platform approach.

We need to collect and aggregate more knowledge, information and data than ever, the complexity will simply grow as we connect more the digital and physical worlds and innovation is being expected from this fusion.

Fusing the parts, forming the bigger picture

We need to give up on ‘hard end of line’ measures and metrics (so anti-empathy) and go into analytics far more, for driving innovation along its new process constantly at its point of need (note that), embrace data, seek and design new deployment models like cloud and mobility, merge the architecture design of the innovation process onto a visualization platform, seek out those that can contribute both inside and outside the organization.

We need to orchestrate, and provide stunningly different user interfaces (beyond the Excel spreadsheet please) that can come into you wherever you are, tailored to the individual’s role within the innovation development process.

We need to make it highly adaptive, so at a particular time to make it flexible as an on-demand need, drag and drop knowledge into your space to make it hugely dynamic full of interactions, modular and capable of being extended within our more elastic (flexible) enterprises.

A future full of collaboration built on real-time and valuable insight

The future will be collaborative, full of mash-ups to make innovation happen. Innovation management needs to be in the driving seat of changing in response to the next revolution of digital and physical that is ushering in the next era of innovation.

Who is going to take up this grand challenge or is innovation just going to be lagging behind again as efficiency and effectiveness remain as the big brothers dominating the organization’s thinking ‘block’?

We do need a whooping big innovation mashup. By all indications, what is coming towards us we certainly will need some big innovation mashups.

The post Opening Ourselves Up to the Innovation Mashup first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The value of having an innovation coach.

@paul4innovating — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:55:06 +0000

Behavioural coaching is big business, by having your personal coach alongside you when you are making a significant change in your role has been invaluable to many executives.

Equally in having external support when someone is either stepping up in the organization or making a significant change in their responsibilities has recognised value to that person and to the organization to manage the transition.

There is significant value in employing an innovation coach in my opinion, let me explain why here.

The growth of the innovation coach
I predict innovation coaching will grow in its recognition, value and importance in the future. Why?

There is a growing sense of urgency around the need for innovation to solve our growth problems. This quest for seeking out growth and new opportunities continues to raise innovation consciousness.

We all are aware that part of the barriers to better innovation adoption come from our existing and constrained mental models, so when you introduce the need for greater innovation you introduce multiplicity- you get challenged more, and your current framework of ‘business as usual’ gets disturbed significantly.

What is called for increasingly is a far more open mind that allows for opening up and gaining greater connectivity on a host of different levels.

The more we connect, the more we see innovation potential.
Having available an experienced innovation coach can be supportive, and informative and provide a greater understanding of how innovation ‘all fits together’ and where it can fit (or not) within what you currently do.

The end result is shifting the thinking, merging what you have with what you have been introduced to so as to deepen the essential understanding of all that makes up innovation.

Any innovation approach I suggest does follow ‘classic’ coaching steps or phases.

Coaching for behavioural change needs to be brought down to the personal level- the recipient needs to relate, let new information pass through his knowledge lens and see the new fits for himself.

What simply does not work is if this was seen to be imposed- they will eventually be discarded and then a person simply reverts back. The person needs to go through four stages of personal awareness.

You go through four stages

Unconscious Incompetence– this is often a self-reflection stage where the coach and the person receiving the coaching simply reflect and draw out areas of incomplete knowledge. You raise them from being unconsciously there.
Conscious Incompetence– From these reflections, you gain insights, you begin to explore tested tools and techniques, you begin to frame new references that are relevant, you begin to explore and experiment. You are looking for growing confirmation that it has value.
Conscious Competence– As you begin to ‘grasp’ differences this enables the exchanges between coach and person being coached to look at the alternatives with growing confidence and some ‘matching’ begins to occur. These new conscious understandings begin to become relevant and within the discussions, you can see an emerging path for action beginning to emerge.
Unconscious competence– the final part where the impact of what has been learnt, understood, investigated and explored has a real personal impact. It seeps into the make-up of the person and changes their ‘going forward’ behaviour. These see different patterns, they comprehend innovation meaning differently than their original perspective and these ‘new’ competencies enter and become more automatic, unconsciously simply occurring, as the way to manage innovation going forward as the value ‘gels’.

The whole process can take time

This is partly the time available not just for the one-on-one sessions but the work that does need to occur in the in-between meetings. It could also take a few sessions, focused on specific areas before you pass from one state to another.

It needs significant investigation and work from both the coach and the recipient but increasingly more from the recipient as the understanding expands.

Current roadblocks can be deep

Innovation is sometimes just ‘skin deep’ but as you peel away that top layer you get revealed many aspects of personal bias or general ‘accepted’ perceptions. These could include an often surprising (to the individual) lack of their openness, and how he or his organization is so risk-averse.

As you explore the way innovation is currently conducted it never surprises me to talk of ‘just’ a top-down culture imposing innovation on the company and its employees and why this has never been effectively challenged.

Often you draw out that level of conservatism within innovation activity that is so often tucked under the coat of incremental only and the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ can change have never been fully considered.

Sometimes certain individuals can feel suddenly ‘empowered’ as the innovation champion can be seen by others that they are simply showing off and resisting any advances, believing that person’s knowledge is no different from their own, so they quietly resist- that needs addressing.

Then you can come across that ‘superior’ person who has become the ‘stage gate’ decider irrespective of knowledge.

Each of these all can come through to others as lacking reputation and not as respected for their innovation knowledge as they need to be. Coaching can change all awareness.

A structured approach is valuable

Going through a structured coaching programme for innovation can offset often these hidden barriers as well as bridge countless other unknowns. Working in a safe environment with a knowledgeable innovation coach can clearly help.

Sometimes the individual involved in that ‘rush’ of offloads, all their concerns may come out in a rush. Or often and more than likely, each layer of enquiry needs to be peeled away in gentle probing or sometimes by exploring different challenges of ‘what if?’.

That is determined by the skill of the coach as well as the willingness of the recipient to explore sometimes aspects that are at a real personal level of thinking. Each needs to trust the other.

Getting into a comfortable relationship between the coach and the person ‘looking for change’ takes time and chemistry. The higher up an organization, the more managing often sensitive discussions can become tricky.

Innovation Coaching has real value

Although this seems to be expensive to undertake, one-on-one coaching offers a lasting value to connect innovation far more deeply in the way a person and their organization ‘sees it’.

The importance, like all behavioural change coaching, is to create a safe but challenging environment so the recipient can take risks and learn. You as the coach find the balance between challenging through enquiry and supporting different thinking to draw out possibilities to gain new understanding from.

All the work is usually based on the recipient’s agenda, through a set of opening discussions you need to balance both personal learnings with organizational needs. These need consistent clarification and recalibrating as you go.

The coach’s role is to facilitate and collaborate.

You need to take care not to act like ‘the expert’ imposing a given view but you can explore options that the recipient draws their own conclusions and value from.

Avoid imposing and provide different thinking and perspectives so it becomes a facilitated debate that the recipient draws into.

Coaching is made up of a series of interactions

The ability to create meaningful interactions that connect people with ideas allows them to clarify and connect on the more important principles and critical issues surrounding innovation.

Having a real passion and depth of innovation knowledge becomes critical to navigate this often tricky road to discovery.

The value of a coach is he/she is both a catalyst and facilitator of individual development. The value is in looking to improve innovation performance within that person’s understanding so there is a distinct ROII (return on innovation investment).

Pause, learn and then move on with new innovation purpose and knowledge

Helping executives to first pause, then take stock of the significance of various innovation transitions, and help then determine the best way to proceed is invaluable.

Of course, this support is determined by the commitment, engagement, the given skills and scope as well as the person’s real interests in wanting to have a greater understanding of innovation.

It all requires available time.

Innovation coaching has a valuable contribution to make, in the right hands and with the right person.

It has a significant personal investment on all sides involved to achieve clarity, insight and returns for innovation to flourish so others can equally benefit.

There is great benefit from this more intensive approach and emerging internal expertise that will eventually come from within.

The post The value of having an innovation coach. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.