Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope of internally generating new products.

It opens up a host of possibilities, that can add significantly to a new service design, new capabilities and solving more complex problems.

In opening up to managing within ecosystems, you begin to see your ability to contribute and tackle societal problems within a collaborative system.

You can see new opportunities that can allow you to enter new markets that would have been impossible as an individual organization.

You begin to see the power, scale and strength of having the collective collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional thinking design. You go beyond the utilization of leveraging existing infrastructure, building on others’ specializations and leveraging through technology powerful new concepts to tackle increasingly complex innovation design.
We are all making greater connections within ourselves as we find and connect to our own “tribes” that all the different social platforms are providing. Crowdsourcing is another example that is offering huge potential to exploit as it can encourage much to forge, serve and grow whole new communities from a ‘simple’ beginning, building on real-time knowledge.

The future of collaborations can increasingly share previously idle or under-utilized assets. We are seeing the most valuable companies that are emerging today are largely based on sophisticated platform business models where ecosystems are vital to their health and global ambitions (Apple, Amazon, Car Manufacturers are all examples).

But be aware – the challenges are difficult to work through
Often this involves designing the architecture, platforms, construct new standards and be equipped to integrate and adapt different members of a community, who have something relevant to contribute. Managing this growing form of complexity is challenging old theories, boundaries, organizations and how they exist going forward.

Ecosystem innovation today is more about managing beyond the immediate known found within one organization’s limited focus of the world. The race is to gain advantage and often try to dominate and influence the future direction a market will take. This requires a broader perspective, a greater diversity of thinking by tapping into varying levels of specialized expertise.

Regretfully we are not yet fully equipped to manage these new innovation ecosystems. We need to think through a better emerging theory of leading or good practice. We need to advance the measurement and impact that ecosystems will have within advancing our innovation activity.

Measuring innovation in ecosystems has real differences

To start we need to measure innovation more on the following aspects:
Linkages – content and productivity of relationships, alliances, collaborations, interactions, networks, clusters and all the complementary aspects and assets deployed to do this
Knowledge engagement – the ability to attract knowledge into the organization, through greater content and value, through the people involved and the way we anchor and diffuse this new knowledge.
Intangible assets – increasingly people and the combination of their intellectual capital in knowledge, relationships and how they structure work will be the central focal point of innovation success.
Conditions for innovation – we need to develop the ability to ‘sense and respond’ to shifts in markets, from the competition and evaluate these changes in ‘real time’ and we will become far more reliant on data and analytics for this.

Connecting these four critical aspects becomes vital. As we learn to collect all this incoming knowledge (data-driven) this will then impact our own innovation programmes and require them to be more adaptive, dynamic and fluid. We need to recognize changing patterns, and then build in these reaction points to keep our own innovation activity staying ahead of the game.

Organising within Networks of Firms within multiple Ecosystems
The organization that envisages a changing world needs to organize around ecosystems to deliver on that vision to gain the leading influencer’s position.

Ecosystems require increased interactions within the community and need more tightly controlled activities to gain the synergies and effects from working within an ecosystem. Relationship management needs to keep focusing on enhancing, driving innovation and knowing how to adapt this within the whole concept. No easy task.

Ecosystems that ultimately produce new business models rest on a large capacity for agility within the participating organizations. Internal capabilities and competencies get highly stretched by the new dynamics taking place, you need a strong orchestrator of the ecosystem to manage these challenges and many cultural biases that can blind a ‘line of sight’.

Aligning partners on a platform needs-basis is very different from aligning them to just one organization’s needs. In the past we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process.

Today you can argue differently, why what you see as needed is not the best and maybe different from first envisaged, and it is better and evolutionary but demands more change and disruption internally. It allows for more breakthrough innovation, greater challenging of the existing status quo and often taking organizations out of their existing comfort zones.

As we think ecosystems, we need to think differently

Think carefully through any move to join innovation ecosystems, they do have a high, immensely attractive return, if managed well; they are nearly always disruptive to the existing markets and highly valuable to the participants. There also is a big ‘but’ here, since the pathway to get to that ‘success point’ is full of potential risk and immense ‘spent’ energy.

Watch out for those “burning platforms”
Burning platforms will be all around us, as we continue into the age of disruption. To counter this we must welcome the new era of global collaborative innovation where we will be learning the abilities to move between different ecosystems, collaborating at different levels of participation, to extract completely different forms of innovation value that advance our growth prospective.

A suggested way we need to think about building ecosystems

One recent report I was reading from Deloitte, based on some of its recent analysis, suggests that we need to consider and recognize where ecosystems and the platforms will help us. They suggest we begin by answering these initial questions that I have adapted and extended:

1. What makes up the critical capabilities for minimum viable transformation to participate and learn about this shift taking place to understand and participate?
2. What needs to evolve in the enterprise strategy and especially where platform thinking comes into play, to radically alter the innovative offerings that are not available as a stand-alone organization?
3. How can we liberate the internal potential of resources, stored knowledge and latent assets so as to tackle harder challenges that can transform an industry and who can help in this?
4. Finally living in a changing world of blurring boundaries, and uncharted frontiers, how can we participate in different ecosystems of learning and value that can transform our competitive position and provide us with a substantial leap?

In Summary
The ecosystem, through the use of technology, the cloud and a diverse set of collaborations will increasingly become the mainstream for innovation inputs, accelerants and delivery value.

We need to prepare for it, experiment and become involved in different offerings. Platforms, strategic partnerships, and new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and learning to deliver through this requires a radically different innovation system of management built around adapting and changing ecosystems.

Innovation will move from being based on incremental innovation, all designed in-house, into bold, collaborative offerings, cutting across today’s established industry boundaries, pushing out across different innovation frontiers, participating on a variety of platforms and extracting in different ways across multiple ecosystems.

This will open up the whole need to re-evaluate the governance, the risk management and the resources needed to operate in this new innovating world. It is going to demand a very different set of disciplines, processes and design.

Are you exploring this new innovation dynamic of platforms and ecosystems yet? You do need to get into a position to experiment, test, exploit and explore in limited ways to learn and adapt.

It is even more dramatic in change than moving from closed to open innovation, it will challenge much that was only recently established to be radically redesigned and altered again.

The post Innovators – are you thinking about Ecosystems? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The new combination is the new connections through people and things (IoT) that we can achieve a new innovation potential.

We will obtain increasing more powerful insights that have the real potential of being turned into new innovation outcomes, through the connected businesses we are presently needing to build. This can generate new value and business propositions.

Today the virtual world of digital is moving much faster than the physical ‘enacted world,’ of turning insights into actual innovation activities, through the innovation pipeline. Our innovation systems are lagging significantly behind. We need to radically redesign them and bring them up to date, fit for managing innovation in the 21st century.

The whole discovery to final execution, is for most organizations still a very fragmented, often disconnected system. It is highly reliant on manual systems with people often disconnected from the real innovation engagement making decisions on inadequate data or insights.

We are failing to leverage all we have gained from our innovation understanding over the years. We have this ongoing inability to adapt, to connect the innovation system through the use of technology and growing value networks, so as to provide the integration, the dedicated resource and accountability to deliver successful innovation outcomes that our customers require.

Successful outcomes are certainly possible, from a well-designed innovation management system brought up to date, adaptive, flexible and responsive, if we apply the time and effort to conceive and construct it.

It is still managed mainly through a linear process of stage-gates and investigation / validation to decide to move on or not. I can’t see this continuing to work in any efficient or effective way in such a digital hyper connected world, where insights flood into the innovation engine room, expecting the same ‘hyper’ response and delivery outcome result.

We need to address this incompatibility, we need to integrate and harness the innovation management system and bring it completely up to date and integrated in design and function.

In a series of posts I have been arguing that innovation management needs to radically be redesigned, based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services to highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently through technology, driving the design and response capabilities where platforms dominate and transformation becomes an ongoing process, to constantly evolve the business model, so as to seek out constantly changing market opportunities, in agile, adaptive and fluid ways, for successful innovation outcomes that meet those real customer needs.

Mashing up for explosive change
I recall reading that up to now, each digital technology change was a separate era of change, to absorb and adapt towards, yet today we are facing something seemingly different, a collision, a whole mash-up of disparate technologies and systems, that seem to be heading for such an explosion of change, a post-digital transformation.

This merging of cloud, big data, social, and the internet of things is becoming the new system of discovery according to some. Others call it the crossroads where the post-digital reality of bringing together the cloud, mobile, interconnected devices, data analytics and embedded intelligence are pointing us to a hyper-connected world, less tomorrow, more speeding towards us in the here and now.

Digital matters, in its raw innovating power and its potential business impact

I think digital is clearly a transformational phenomena across much of today’s existing business. The unique combining of the cloud, big data, social streaming, the internet of things, mobility, the industrial internet, are all making this the time for new growth opportunities through this digital economy and the radical overhaul of the activities to realize the benefits.

The enterprise integration will need to be constantly evolving, adapting and become highly agile, it will totally redistributed, decision authority will move more rapidly towards evolving business models and distributive decision-making, to seize breaking opportunities far more quickly than in the past.

Business models will not stand alone, they will interlock in intelligent ways, to benefit from scale that becomes the essential need and greater appreciation of sharing services, jointly working towards common outcomes.

These strategic connections will open up different partnerships, opportunities for shared cost of new channel developments, separate value propositions driven through common back office services and increasing requiring a platform management to manage these.

We are transcending traditional industry and product boundaries
The dizzy array of strategic choices will totally disrupt existing business models if they are right in their design.

The whole world of communicating, transacting and designing all the different negotiations and products that meet the immediate needs of the customer makes this the “digital business era”, where constant redesigning and orchestrating the parts will keep it at the forefront by a constantly evolving set of combinations and leveraging a network of diverse capabilities.

It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where ‘people, things and their business offering’ can come together for mutual value based on the unique combinations of the different technologies available.

There will be a constant evolving evaluation of the assets both internal and externally that make up this digital world (people, the business and things) that will take this out beyond the control of one company, into a system within a larger system to make it work at a constantly evolving speed and gain adoption. Innovation will certainly not get any easier; it will be faster, more demanding and a heck of a lot more risky.

Innovation is caught up in this transformational change.

To be an innovator, you are always restless but the present structures and frameworks that innovation operates within have been often highly constraining and heavily reliant on manual operations. Innovation as a system has often conflicted within the approaches taken by our organizations.

The quest is in finding different approaches to allow the human side to shape, interpret and extract the value not just in what they want to see but through different lenses

The balance in innovation activity is changing
What needs changing is the innovation process to accommodate these changes that are occurring all around us. We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.

It is through this combination of people and ‘things’ connecting into our businesses that we will be able to extract new observations, to give us insights that can lead to completely different innovation opportunities.

Huge amounts of data can be interpreted through specific algorithms but these will have to have set very clear parameters set within them, for them to be of any worth on what we believe is needed by our customers, for delivering successful innovation outcomes.

The real need is delivering a new integrated innovation engagement platform

Without doubt digital and physical operate at really different speeds. We need not just a new innovation management system, we need a modern engagement platform. We need to integrate and sync so many transaction and stand-alone systems that have been allowed to proliferate over the years to meet specific business needs.

The growing pressure will be demanded to find solutions that provide a cohesive and business-focused approach to the new social enterprise where we seek engagement at scale into a multiple array of communities and advocates that has data and innovation as its core.

The Need to Automate the Innovation Process

We still are very reliant on stage gate intervention points, often more due to dogma and imposed oversight by committees occasionally meeting.

Decisions are determined by the human, based less on hard knowledge or dynamic intelligence, often these have tended to be thinner on the ground to validate concepts and judgement becomes highly personal and reliant on (past) experience.

What can we change within this? There are leading practices to compare and contrast with but we do need to push this automating the innovation process further, in different ways.

How can we connect, enable and deliver better innovative outcomes?

There is so much to be realized, connected and enabled for the higher scale, richer, more innovative business outcomes but it is a massive undertaking that is only just being ‘kicked off’ by the current internet of things. It will eventually become the integration of everything but the disruption and realization of what needs changing is only just dawning on many.
We need to review organizational engagement.

Much has to change, be uprooted and completely revisited to begin to design a new digital and physical integrated innovation system.

The need to respond quickly to new business objectives

We will need to adjust our thinking on risk. Technology insights can provide a better mitigate risk, it can equally fine tune innovation but it can equally make it far more complicated. Massive amounts of data can complicate decision-making, determining the right decisions and next steps.

Technology will require opening up the present risk mitigation process to capitalize on emerging opportunities at greater speed and higher levels of compromise, to meet that emerging opportunity ‘seen’ requiring it to be turned into commercial offering quickly, so competitive advantage can be gained.

Managing digital knowledge that adds value and growth

Digital technology is about to become the precursor for all the changes we have put off for years within our organizations. We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster performance.

There are many issues both strategic and tactical to work through, to extract the rich potential from any digital transformation for new innovation growth outcomes

Digital is presently moving way ahead for the systems our organizations have presently in place. What does need changing to ultimately yield the innovation returns we will be looking for?

Expectations and reality needs resetting, the hard work is not ‘just’ in connecting the technology, it is its impact that it will have across the organization to be able to ‘react, respond and reorganize’ in very different ways from today’s practices.

We are dealing with a completely different set of mindsets, skills, procedures, governance, processes and responsibilities. To gain from the digital evolution taking place we need a robust, comprehensive and radical overhaul of much of what is going on within our organizations.

We need to begin to really think though this as a complete redesign – achieving a clear engagement platform for all to gain from

So in our need to achieve a greater engagement from everyone within our organizations we need to recognize the importance of having a ‘modern’ engagement platform available, a central place for scalable learning to take place, so we can structure the new knowledge and insights that is coming into the organization and manage this through a well-designed innovation system into a final execution of successful innovations.

Moving from ad-hoc approaches to an integrated, synergistic and designed for each organizations unique state for the innovation management process to perform in today’s and tomorrow’s world on a sustaining basis. One where technology is central to its structure, highly connected, highly adaptive and totally fluid in its response to meet the constant array of innovation opportunities, looking to have solutions applied to them.

Is there not a mounting case for designing a new innovation management system?

I clearly am convinced there is and it certainly can be designed today in my opinion.

What is involved in plotting out a new innovation roadmap, who is the lead orchestrator or the navigator in this and can we structure this design accordingly, to bring it into our organization sustaining innovation?

One that offers a system that is fully integrated, connected and compatible with the needs of the business to grow and recognizes the need to build a sustainable innovation capability.

One that can to capitalize on the innovation opportunities being discovered in new and different ways that need connecting and accelerating, into commercial propositions that meet customers’ needs?

I want to look deeper into these in the coming weeks to add some thoughts to this new innovation system design and where and with whom it fits.
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The post Technology leads, innovation exploitation is lagging first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

They become fixed, rigid and locked into their established ways, not adapting to the changes occurring around them. We often give up and leave, moving on to better places and challenges.

We seemingly are reluctant to undergo any transformation, experimentation or adjustment in our organizations until it becomes a matter of survival, then its often far too late.

Then it becomes a mad scramble to transform ourselves, often with damaging consequences of deteriorating performance, battling more competition that are sensing our weakness, never capable of returning to those previous highs.

We simply  hate adapting or adjusting, certainly on a constant basis, we resist any form of ‘greater’ transformation – why?

If we can’t adapt to changing times, we simply struggle to survive, that is the growing reality operating in today’s environment. Simply put companies ‘die’ due to their inability to adapt to change and transformation projects fail because the message somehow fails to register and never gets completed to the original objectives.

According to a survey by McKinsey in 2011, 72% of our transformation programs fail to deliver on their original targets. Also one out of every two of our top organizations in the Fortune 500 will be gone, history, dust, taken over in ten years, according to the OECD.

Unless we create a strategy to transform, how can we re-imagine our innovation processes?

We talk so much about “innovation is critical” today and in our future, but is rarely achieved.The confidence levels plummet as the pressure to innovate mounts, simply because the necessary components of delivering innovation are critically missing.

Innovation requires us to do something different or something new, to explore, where as transformation wants to make dramatic changes in the form, appearance or performance, more to exploit and capitalize on changing conditions. We are at a crossroads of determining if the management of innovation should change and if so, how.

I argue that innovation management needs to radically adjust and will be based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently through technology where platforms dominate and transformation becomes an ongoing process to evolve the business model, so as to seek out constantly changing market opportunities, in agile, adaptive and fluid ways, for successful innovation outcomes that meet those real customer needs.

In this fourth post of an extended series I explore the potential for changing the management of innovation, this looks at transformation, our willingness and capabilities, on being capable of “moving towards a new way of managing innovation”

This does require a transformation of how we design, structure and bring together all the relevant part of the innovation process. This requires technology to be central to this different thinking, alongside a radical shift in how we see innovation. I refer back to my evolving hypothesis above of where, why and how this innovation management needs to shift.

Can innovation and transformation combine and work together?

We hear far too much about the need to transform and change. We do need to get a whole lot fitter in our innovation understanding to transform it into a more robust, sustainable process.

Firstly isn’t Change and Transformation the same thing? Well, not really.
Change = to make or become different (often includes more or better). This is where incremental improvement resides. Most of our innovation activities reside in this change space, fooling us, tricking us to believe we are “making real change”, whereas we are just pushing ‘things’ along.

Transformation though is = a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance. This is where breakthroughs live. This is where innovation needs to go to counter the fundamental shifts going on in our markets, to really drive and thrive in an increasingly hostile environment.

Yet both transformation and change bring new possibilities into reality.

Both require thinking that is broad and expansive, with a strong sense of curiosity and discovery.

Unless we refocus our current management approaches to both be transformation and innovation, we will continue to face losing our competitive edge. Needlessly defending and spending our capital on the position of yesterday, not looking to seek out and transform to seize the new positions or opportunities that are occurring in our rapidly changing world.

Adapting the business model to the needs and desires of the market

There is a real shift for adding greater value within innovation occurring. There is this growing recognition that product alone has good value but it is the power of combining this with a range of services, by designing this into specific business models and solutions, that deliver on the needs of the customer.

I was reading an interesting article from LEADing Practice® posted on the iGrafx site who offers a set of process design, analysis, optimization and management capabilities . LEADing Practice® performed a study (not sure when) to uncover the obstacles to achieving innovation and transformation. 1,765 CEO’s and 2,936 business leaders representing all major countries and industries were surveyed.

In this article they were suggesting that most successful companies’ focal aspects of innovation are on new value, revenue and service models, while transformation is centered on cost, operation and performance.

To quote from the article “It’s no coincidence that when talking about successful companies and their ability to adapt to change, that they are achieving both innovation and transformation by applying both best and leading practices in appropriate domains of the business”.
“Best practices are transformative and should only be applied to non- core competencies that don’t effect differentiation – they are purely about meeting the market standard. These lend themselves especially to cost and operating models, which are not made up of core competencies. Leading practices are about doing things efficiently, but different – innovating. They are how they create value, deliver service and generate revenue and growth.”
“While best practices are tried and true methods that can and should always be applied, leading practices are methods of adapting best practices to situations that require a difference – this is a key differentiator”.

I needed to pause for thought on this as they are suggesting transformation and innovation are separated on their focal aspects. I’d never broken them up as specifically as this as I always saw this as the two sides of the same equation – the front end (value, revenue, new value propositions) and the back-end ( managing costs, operational aspects and the broader performance of key stakeholders) but both working towards a common goal- transformation through innovation.

I am a great admirer of Alex Osterwalder and the work his team over at Strategyzer are doing around and applying the Business model canvas into designing new models that have innovation and transformation as part of them. Does this article raise a new way to think about the design of the BM.

I actually do need to think about the linkage of transformation and innovation through the lens of the BMC some more, based on this article.

I do have a certain ‘crankiness’ around best practice – it is often a killer of your innovation

I do get a little cranky on this ‘reliance’ on best practices, most of our organizations like to gravitate towards. I totally agree for innovation it is actually the art of “learning practices” that emerge as ‘leading practices’ but these evolve often in highly unique and different ways. Often that is why innovation is hard for many, as they often fail to recognize the uniqueness within its makeup for them and take the existing practices, to simply copy.

Best practice is where everyone seems to want to go, the lazy and mistaken route to transformation and ending up at a point of no differentiation as everyone is also attempting to get to this point of best (existing or past) practice. It is leading practice, exploring, keeping it still efficient but different that you move towards a real competitive difference. I call this far more the ‘emerging practices’ that are working on the parts that add value, service and new revenue. These are often highly unique to individual circumstances, individual organizations and their market conditions and position.

The article stirred up my thinking at least, reaffirming my own beliefs on practices, on the increasing importance of the business model design in all we do and think. When we want to innovate, we should look at the transformation impact and this suggested allocation has sharpened my thinking, although parts of the article I’d debate or want a deeper explanation. Still take a read.

The experimental model is replacing the rational choice model

Rational choice is the familiar one where we set ROI’s, KPI’s, establish clear milestones and expectations from new projects or innovation. We are driving towards predictable outcomes. Is innovation by its unpredictable nature on time, always defensible and predictable? If it is then we are back in the land of incremental innovation where risk gets delegated down and we keep informed only to ‘what we think we know’ not what is changing. We lose so much by approaching innovation in a ‘prescripted’ manner.

The experimental model is far more the place to be in today’s uncertain and rapidly changing world. To succeed in today’s networked economy, businesses must participate in dynamic, evolving networks of diverse organizations based around platforms and ecosystems offer the fertile ground for collaboration and transformation.

And while such networks can be difficult to navigate, they offer companies the opportunity to evolve their business models, deepen skills and knowledge, expand into new markets, and scale operations. To experiment we limit risk, we learn through engaging in market understanding, validating needs, we adjust our model, then we rapidly scale, keeping competition lagging.

For companies seeking to reinvent not only their products but their business models, minimum viable transformation allows for rapid iteration on the unknowns of a new business model. This MVT thinking comes from Deliotte University Press and partly from one of my favourite thought leaders, John Hagel III. It builds on the initial work of Eric Ries and his minimum viable product thinking within the lean startup thinking methodology.

For companies seeking to reinvent not only their products but their business models, minimum viable transformation allows for rapid iteration on the unknowns of a new business model—anything from minute changes to operational processes to full restructuring of the go-to-market strategy. At its core, it’s a strategy for gathering validated learning about individual business model elements, then assessing how those elements interact and combine to form one cohesive strategy.

Based on the minimum viable product and lean start-up philosophy you are replacing internal intuition with the learning to iterate around your learning about market factors and what is valued and needed as innovations and adaptive business models.

The experimental model with the MVT thinking contains the risks down to more manageable levels; it allows you to explore market needs far more and exploits new learning by delivering and adapting ‘as you go’ and then scale.

You are combining the power of transformation and innovation.
Transformation and innovation are combining as your new agenda. To achieve a growing understanding of the kind of decisions companies want to make then we must transform ourselves on how we undertake innovation, to lead us out of average performance into a more radical, robust growth performance.

We must envisage, invest and lead and this will come through adapting far quicker to different business models, use new technologies and its powerful connection and analytical capability, so we can critically evaluate the operational process and engage with customers in all possible ways.

Innovation is far from static, it should be highly dynamic, it should be adapting and adjusting, it should be highly fluid. I’ve written on this need for fluidity as we are facing this considerable discussion around changing structures and models to become more adaptive, agile and fluid, to react and deal with this increasing turbulence occurring all around us.

Summary

We need to react and become more responsive, becoming more adaptive to changing environments and business challenges, that are often unknown, unexpected, or not yet explored or exploited.

Shifting to a different change model to meet the changing market conditions and customer needs will require a high level of transition; it needs us to transform our innovation management practice

A further white paper “Why innovators need a new change paradigm” takes this need for transformation even further, by looking more specifically at emerging models and the competencies required to react to this change in these more ‘fluid’ ways.

To achieve this different state, technology is central. My next post in this innovation management journey discusses why “Technology leads, we are lagging”

The post Our inabilities to adapt needs changing. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are moving towards a new management of innovation where ‘greater’ collaboration is fueling new business models built on platforms, formed around ecosystems of communities with vested interest, contributing and extracting value.

Today and in the future, the value is created outside the individual company and not within. It is far more working as a constellation, drawing from an evolving network effect seeking out combined solutions from this design.

This third post of an extended series on my thoughts on “moving towards a new way of managing innovation” that explores the potential for changing the management of innovation, this looks at the significant value of platforms and ecosystems.

We need to find a new way of doing things differently around innovation and its management.

This is based on a relationship-based, networked designed concept built for collective activities. Relationships where shared value leads to a value creation that no one single organization can provide.

This requires open collaboration and an environment seeking mutual promise from individual input, contribution and extraction, delivering an integrated set of services and solutions being constructed on the platform from a sharing of knowledge, for delivering into evolving value propositions, all benefiting from, both collectively and individually

I am proposing in this series a view that innovation management needs to radically adjust and will be based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently through technology where platforms dominate.
Moving towards an even greater openness

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from being closed up and having an exclusive internal orientation to innovation solutions, into ones that are having a far more open stance, more collaborative, open to external ideas and thinking. We are searching for more collaborative innovation combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’.

These dialogues within the ecosystem, influence and shape each other, they alter the terrain, they compete and collaborate, they share and create resources, they co-evolve and adapt to new understanding, becoming increasing dynamic and interconnected, due to the recognition of mutually building value is greater than individual solutions.

The greater the collaboration improves chances of creating even greater value, finding solutions that are unique, radical in design that customers rate and seek out to resolve their needs.

The value of being involved in a dynamic platform offers the provision of constantly building and increasing the value of the services and content found on that platform, it continues to evolve and improve.

It proliferates, is dynamic and constantly evolving where everyone contributes, everyone benefits in a shared ‘commons’ but within a unique entity offering sustaining competitive advantage, solving complex problems but providing individual needs and returns.

Shifting towards many to many (m2m)

This shift to collaborating on a many to many platform is offering us extra acceleration that is needed to improve our innovation performances in radical designs that can significantly change existing market spaces from concept to market delivery. The phase of “open innovation” connecting one party with another (one to one) is well-established. We are presently entering the phase of ‘many to many’ and the use of platforms to manage this is still in ’emerging practice’.

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay outside the organization’s domain of understanding. As we increasingly include the customer and their needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding.

There also seems that many organizations are presently searching for their new business models’ of innovation delivery or architecture. I’d say we are presently in a state of flux on adjusting to all of what this might mean, in customer and market offerings, as well as internally adapting our structures to the new forms required in these business model changes.

Loops are replacing the linear

Equally, we are constantly moving from managing in linear innovation processes and making these more adaptive, constantly looping back when new information or data is being discovered, increasing this knowledge and insight in highly dynamic, constantly evolving and informing ways.

We need to adjust and learn the value of platforms, about the power of ecosystems and be significantly open about partnerships and shared intellectual property to tackle far more complex innovation challenges.

If we set about to properly designed business platforms these create and capture new economic value and scale the potential for learning across entire ecosystems of resources and participants that can give new meaning to innovation solutions that tap into our needs and can be scaled and adapted constantly.

Adjusting to many different forms of external relationships

We are forming external relationships in many different ways as this increased diversity does matter to each organization for building different competitive positions in their innovation offerings.

We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services through new business models that would not have been enabled by only having the one organization attempting it. Collaborations are significantly adding value into the innovation equation.

Also we are seeing complexity rising considerably. The search for finding greater value is shifting even further, increasingly forming around innovation ecosystems, loose federations of vested interest, forming and dispersing when the job is complete.

So is ecosystem thinking part of your innovation make up? Let me offer some thoughts.

So why are business ecosystems emerging as a real competitive force?
As we begin to open up our thinking the concept of ecosystems will increasingly having a powerful effect on our future growth perspectives, as different partners will all contribute to this often ‘emergent’ thinking to increase the total sum of the value.

Our innovation exploration will become far more evolutionary and requires a completely different way to think and manage these ‘relationship contracts that are forming around a given concept of platform engagements.

As we tap into all the expertise up and down the value chain we will become far more aware and will need to explore all the depth in thinking, contributing and making available through extending our connections in deeper and broader ways.

Knowing how to adjust, accommodate and shift our thinking requires us to become more agile, finding new ways of connecting and working.

A single industry focus is in decline

Opportunities exist everywhere. We need to look well beyond our own industry to evaluate different perspectives, seek out the potential of different concepts that can be adapted to our own industry.

Many companies are exploring the value of becoming involved in a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries to build new communities that have the capacity to transform existing environments.

A new battle ground of organizing ecosystems and providing platforms

As an example, let’s take the “battle of mobile devices” has now become a war of building the better ecosystem. It is not one single product it is chasing an increasing share of minds, preferences, changing habits and tastes and to achieve this ‘paradigm’ shift the search is on for forming the ecosystem that can deliver this ‘transformation’. This is coming through apps, technology, different value propositions built into a platform of offerings that combine through your mobile device.

Another example is the Autodesk facilities at Pier 9, in San Francisco which includes a cutting edge digital fabrication lab, a woodworking shop, a metalworking shop, a 3D printing lab, laser cutting and printing capabilities, an electronics workshop, a commercial test kitchen, and an industrial sewing center as well as smaller specialty project areas, all highly linked into technology and services.

This is allowing for start-ups, small and medium-sized organizations are given even more chances to bring their concepts to life and finding the opportunity to compete with larger organizations through this approach.

The combination is helping you to create real functional end-use parts with additive manufacturing, production processes and software applications all in a one shop environment.

In the car industry, consolidation is forcing a collaborative rethink. Sharing core platforms is driving commonality and global flexibility. There is this industry push for more universal regimes to drive down costs, guarantee quality and standardize the production and supply chains.

This approach is cutting across suppliers, extending collaboration between traditional rivals on this need to contain costs and variance and extend global reach. It has enabled a significant shift on redefining competitive positions closer to customer needs by focusing on distinctive propositions, less on car assembly (since industry reliability has universally risen by applying industry ‘best’ practice for much within the manufacturing and production of cars).

Also one outstanding example is Saleforce.com as a platform manager, today positioned as the customer success platform, where they offer a trusted enterprise cloud app platform for building and managing all your customer relationships. Today Salesforce is powering innovation in sales, service, marketing, community, analytics, apps, and more.

Stepping out is stepping up

Today there is growing realization that thinking ecosystems can allow us to have a new framing of possibilities and offer us different mind-sets that tap into different and diverse relationships, partnerships, alliances and collaborations. This was unthinkable until recently, without the enablers to make these connections through technology and more open platforms where you can come together and collaborate.

Also the positioning of platform thinking is another. To quote, I believe from Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor at Boston University “products have features; platforms have communities“.

Today we are realizing that the growth and value lies within communities, we see Uber owning no cars, Airbnb bring ‘idle’ real estate into places to stay, and Facebook creates no significant content itself, it just provides the space (platform) for others to build and extend their communities as part of their social strategy or simply a place to go and keep in touch and aware. In all three of those examples, platform users represent the origin point of the product or service.

What the companies we are valuing the most? Take a look all are based largely on technology with platforms where the ecosystem thrives through the exchange, interactions and collaborations they provide. Google, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba along with GE, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, Oracle.
We are equally searching for ways to democratize our business model’s today, one way is through crowdsourcing that can represent the future true value of the platform investment by others joining, creating and providing additional new value.

As we embrace “all things digital” and connect between ever-increasing communities, we will tap into and rely far more on a wide partnership of contributions. We are significantly recognizing the limitations of our past products and services, this way of innovating is on the way out, and platforms are the ‘in’.

In summary

The increasing value of participating in ecosystems allows for large and small organizations to create, scale and serve markets in ways unthought of previously. The ability to interact and co-create in increasingly sophisticated and novel ways on platforms opens up new opportunities.

These ecosystems form a bond of shared interest, of recognition and purpose which quickly becomes established as the new ‘commons’ in sharing and contributing and the platform management organizes and shapes the value for all involved to ‘extract’ their share of the innovation solution.

The future of successful innovation management is managing in the cloud, on platforms and through ecosystems. These are radically altering the way we need to manage our innovative designs.

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Publishing note:  Part of this blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished this as part of an extended view on my own site to bring this into this series.

The post The innovating power of ecosystems and platforms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are also witnessing such significant erosion of long-standing practices, and established boundaries between suppliers and customers, you get this feeling that everything is blurring.

This is part two of an extended series on my thoughts on “moving towards a new way of managing innovation” that explores the potential for changing the management of innovation.

How can the innovation process capitalize on all the changes we are undertaking at present in new ways, in broader engagements and collaborations, to deliver more effectively on the promise within our innovation potential?

Well I would suggest we do need to refocus

There is a very strong case we need to rethink the whole management of our innovation activity, as innovation is failing to deliver on its potential promise in the current ways we are attempting to undertake it, highly constrained and under-resourced.
We need to integrate product, service and business model innovation as a very basic must, so we can get closer to the demands within the marketplace necessary to succeed today, where customers are buying outcomes that they value, that fit their particular needs.

The ability to sell solutions that deliver the required outcome is a shift that is extremely challenging and needs a more radical thinking in my opinion on how we value and manage our innovation practices.

We need to find a new way of doing things. I would suggest that it is based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently.

I have already started to lay out a case for significant change in my first post “Shifting Radically the Innovation Business Model” suggesting the innovation consultant has to redesign their role, position and service offering, to stay relevant within any management of innovation.

Producers of innovation need to transition radically into a different innovation delivery & design structure.

The radical changes we see occurring all around us requires radical responses. Our business organizations have relied on familiar practices, most established and still stuck in the last century, of driving internal efficiencies and effective practices to the exclusion of adopting a more fluid and adaptive approach that continually adjusts to today’s more consistent changes.

Our organizations are far too rigid, still ‘wedded’ to their tangible investments in land, materials, and labour focusing often exclusively on the financial capital part delivering on the short-term returns only and not fully grasping or experimenting with any new framework that is being born out of the digital age, one that extracts from all the capitals that certainly contribute to innovation in such significant ways.

There is this new set of challenges confronting us. We all feel the need for speed as the pace of innovation quickens, as we face shortening life cycles, greater competition and growing market pressure.

We are being pushed to look increasingly outside our own organization to seek the multiplier effect, to tap into different scale and diversity, and learn and quickly adapt from others.

We are suffering this ‘blurring effect’ as different, often novel business models in their solutions, are cutting across through past traditional borders, combining different value propositions that are totally disrupting and eradicating established positions, in record-breaking time and no one is immune to this ‘disruptive effect’

We are facing some challenging times with our structures, organization designs and the relevant internal skill-sets, all facing significant challenges and rapidly becoming ‘not fit for purpose’ in this challenging business environment.

We are holding onto the tangibles as our point of value we measure and not understanding the real ‘power’ within our intangibles to invest in them at significantly higher levels.

Far too many of our business organization are trapped in the past designs, old business models and product only orientated solutions that fail to excite their customers, who are increasingly becoming restless and demanding solutions to their unique needs, far more ready to abandon established brands if others deliver on those needs.

The shift to intangibles within the digital age

There was a report written in 2013 entitled and under, “The New Normal: Competitive advantage in the digital economy” written for the Big Innovation Centre, an initiative of The Work Foundation and Lancaster University.

This was rightly suggesting that the real sources of value creation and competitive advantage in the digital economy lie in fluid and constantly evolving the intangibles. We still are failing to come to grips with this, to understand its force and position in today’s thinking.

Technology or digitization has been such an underlying catalyst to this shift going on.

They see through their research, that the increasing digitization of economic activities has improved the detailed measurement of business activities (which aids better strategy formulation and positioning), enabled faster and cheaper experimentation (which fosters organizational ambidexterity and increases the likelihood of spawning innovations), facilitated the easier sharing of observations and ideas (which allows for the capturing of insights and learning from network members), and increased the ability to replicate innovations more quickly (which improves transaction cost efficiency).

These they suggest are the dynamic ‘factors’ of the digital economy, and must be harnessed in addition to the conventional factors of production, if firms seek to not just survive but also thrive in the new normal.

They are also outlining in this report,that  there are seven intangible sources of competitive advantage and are in effect, interconnected and complementary. The real sources of value creation today and gaining competitive advantage lies in fluid and constantly evolving intangibles, such as firm strategy and positioning, radical innovation and first mover advantages, intangible resources and competencies, organizational ambidexterity, network effects and externalities, transaction cost efficiency, and relational optimality.

It is the smart configurations, unique to each organization, of applying several or more of these intangibles that will create the new value in product and services and drive an even greater business model innovation change, to gain and sustain the competitive advantage.

The thinking they suggest requires a new ecosystem paradigm shift, needing a reinvention of the business model. I would suggest on the very way we manage innovation.

We must recognize our existing approaches to innovation need radically changing.

Why? What do I mean here? We seem to be failing at an awful lot.

Take a look at this list, far from exhaustive but it covers many of the problems we still face on innovation management. Opens a PDF file…..                      A selection of the causes that presently that are still holding innovation back

We are failing to address our failures in innovation. We need a radical transformation.

It is becoming clearer that organizations acting alone or in restricted collaborations are certainly not ideally placed to capture the opportunities available. They are often stifling innovation. The open innovation attests to that, it has helped but it is failing to be the radical catalyst for exceptional growth.

After some initial spurts of additional growth it seems to simply settle back into being ‘simply part of the established norm’ and is often simply supporting the ongoing incremental performance. Can we go beyond this?

A radically different orchestration of innovation – highly networked
In my view, we must go way beyond “open innovation” as we practice it today. There is a real need for a broader ecosystem approach that taps into a constellation of diverse and specialized players that all come together around a particular challenge, collaborating to deliver growing complex solutions that offer real growth value for the client.

I would argue this fits within a constellation of partners all working towards delivering innovation that is highly valuable, radical, disruptive and distinctive. A network of highly vested ecosystem partners all working towards a common goal on behalf of the organization that holds the principle intellectual property as the founding partner.

An ecosystem arrangement with a multitude of agents participating in resolving complex challenges, sharing their individual knowledge, pooling their collective expertise, working in a collaborative creative environment, of a platform design where the development and commercialization of the process is established. Where it is mutually understood on who shares or owns what, and working on creating real value creation that delivers on the expertise and passion-infused into this.

These clearly needs orchestration but we have to think perhaps differently on who this orchestrator might be. This is the subject of a future post within this discussion.

The need for a radical design and more collaborative exacting solution-driven innovation

Value creation and value delivery are proportionally coming from those that provide a real service to customer needs, and design their business models to be highly adaptive and flexible.

This requires this growing ‘constellation or network’ that provides specialized experience, advice, information, assurance, infrastructure and leasing and far less reliance on the traditional need of owning physical goods, all working within the specific innovation ecosystem and platforms designed to facilitate and collectively solve bolder innovation issues and challenges.

This I would suggest calls for a very radical ecosystem of design consultants and a partnership of vested stakeholders that work within an innovating hub. They collaborate and build the unique ecosystem required that provides the value delivery system to manage this.

My thinking continues in further posts around this theme of creating a greater collective engagement to deliver on the innovation promise in radically different ways, moving towards a different innovation management system than we have at present.

The post Moving towards a new innovation service model first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have been spending some significant time questioning the current innovation business model, from both the customer’s (clients) perspective and the innovation consultants’ one.

Now we all know not all things are equal, many companies have invested significantly in improving their innovation capabilities.

Many of these have been heavily reliant on outside help in achieving this position yet all the effort has led to limited returns for many and still a work-in-progress.

Yet far more of our business organizations are continuing to really struggle on their innovation activity for a whole host of reasons that seem never-ending, disappointing in end result and stuck in management quicksand to ever really change.

For me, the process and management of innovation really does need to be definitely questioned.

Perhaps we are in urgent need to change the very dynamics of how we undertake innovation.

In my research I certainly felt also the innovation consultant is struggling. They might be in the wrong place for their service offering. Also countless studies on companies’ innovation performance are indicating the ‘needle’ of improving total innovation performance is stuck or gradually being pushed up with a lot of effort, questionable reward.

We are failing to push the needle into dramatically improved innovation performances.

Surely this is the time for a more transformational change in how we conduct our innovation business?

The innovation business failure that lies within our companies continues.

If we take a current example, Jeffrey Phillips, over at Ovo Innovation has conducted a practitioner’s survey, in what the people who are actually “doing” innovation are actually thinking, to compare this with what the leaders at the top are feeling is happening.

It seems a significant yawning gap is apparent but not addressed. In summary, on the results gathered so far:

“The results so far suggest that while innovation is a key strategic focus, it’s still taking time to filter down to a day-to-day activity, frequently losing out to other priorities. The front end in many companies is poorly defined and much of the innovation work is incremental. Many of you worry about your internal innovation pace and losing out to competitors and new entrants. Innovation failures are frowned upon and few people have a chance to develop new innovation skills. Over two-thirds of those who responded felt that their company was failing to innovate at the same pace as competitors and new entrants, and almost 75% of respondents felt that they’d accomplished less with innovation than was possible within their organization”

I would say a depressing picture but in many ways ‘par for the course’ in what I feel also. Surely the innovation model within our business companies is indicating that it is not working, it is a broken innovating business model. It needs something radically different to occur.

The innovation consultants’ dilemma

The consulting industry is currently caught in the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, written about by Clayton Christensen. Christensen shows how most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. His answer is surprising and almost paradoxical: it is actually the same practices that lead the business to be successful in the first place that eventually can also result in their eventual demise.

The consulting firm has become fairly caught up in a specific transactional business model with their clients and that is progressively not working as well as in the past.

The struggle is to find a different, sustaining business model and one of the keys must lie in the relationships between client and consultant. Constantly relying on outside help has considerable danger as the knowledge often does not reside inside and the employment of the consultant gives the needed expertise and experience that often never gets transferred or embedded. This might be great for reoccurring fees but not for all that is required for internal strengthening. It simply pisses the employee off.

Clients have been progressively attempting to change their reliance on outside help by employing consultants within the organizations. Many large organizations have their own internal consulting teams deployed to offset external needs and bolster their internal capabilities.

I personally find this solution has not worked as well as intended, as they, the internal consulting team, over time, get sucked into issues detracting them from being the internal force of change, desperately trying to influence the leadership but eventually ending up as being allocated specific projects as project overseers or implementers. This reduces their impact and has erosion of influence over time, they become simply part of the furniture, caught up in the ebb and flow, like everyone else.

So the innovation consultants needs to change – why?

I get the distinct impression the focus of most innovation consultants is still locked into product innovation or improving the process of the pipeline / portfolio, the idea generation and project execution model. It is not evolving into broader services or accounting for the transformations underway at the clients end.

Are the innovation consultants reacting to the massive changes in information asymmetries occurring and proving solutions to these? There is this growing redundancy of idle assets that are struggling to be reconfigured to take on new challenges and new purpose and failing to be agile, flexible and adaptive.

The significant shifts deriving from technology change and digital disruption are not yet being translated into new innovation processes, frameworks or methods to extract the value of speed and unique insight and translate that out quickly into new products and services.

The exploding position of mobile use and growing engagement opportunities with customers and other vested stakeholders this can offer is yet to be fully embedded into the innovation process.

There is a ‘heady’ mix of change swirling around the clients and are they being resolved with the outside help as much as they can. I’m not talking here of the technology consultant, I am asking is the innovation consultant as up to date on all the changes going on to improve the innovation process?

Equally are innovation consultants engaged across the whole innovation process, or participating in ever-increasing specialized niches of discreet work? Are they as influential on the internal innovation process or just simply providing the necessary resources on a ‘as and when’ need, due to resource constraints at the clients?

Are they as ‘tuned-in’ and expert enough to be of value to specialized internal groups, working on their part of the innovation process or equation? Does the innovation consultant have depth in their own bench strength to provide ongoing value to their clients?

Can innovation consulting firms step up to the plate and deliver differently?

So I feel the business model mostly worked in consulting firms is broken. It is not in step with the changes going on. It seems ‘steps behind.’ It still wants to focus on the product, product idea generation, and the product pipeline and product portfolio as the main focus point.

I think this is rapidly a focus of being in the past and new business models need to address the service provision far more.

The relationship with clients has been firmly in the transactional approach. They worked on specific problems, reviewed, recommended new designs, sold and delivered these and moves on (and out) of the clients.

Today the real value is not so much in transactional work but building longer-term relationship work. The idea of imposing solutions that fit their own capabilities and activities is missing the mark, I believe, in offering customers distinct, tailored solutions fulfilling their unique needs.

To get to this point, consultants will need a far more networked approach on who they are tapping into, drawing down from an array of outside specialists to deliver the right mix of activities, and expertise. It will lie less in-house, more recognized as specialized, contracted out to work within the solution delivery, seen to resolve the client’s needs.

This will require a more ecosystem approach, drawing in those who share in creating, resourcing and designing solutions, that deliver to specific customer needs.

We need to accept that innovation is a complex system; it is not any more delivering ‘boiler-plate’ solutions.

Redesigning the consultants business model

For this to work consultants need to think through their existing business models and construct these far more towards a service provision that delivers more exactly to customer needs.

Any new business model needs to focus on finding the real overarching value that the client wants from the service provider and what they can deliver.

I believe it will be less transactional and will enter a richer- relationship partnership, that makes the consultant far more accountable to deliver on this, in all its forms but more ‘vested’ in the outcomes. The key becomes knowing exactly the value proposition.

Also any new consulting model needs to deliver less on outputs and more on real measurable outcomes, the value delivery part. How this needs to be constructed, to make it specific to unique client challenges, yet scalable in different client work taken on, so as to defray the costs and attract the partnership value into the ecosystem of value partners so as to sustain and nurture what it offers, as leading-edge and highly value.

One that is constantly adding, so it continues to push in how it evolves and keeps attracting the client to participate, with all its connected value, providing a value proposition that delivers innovation in radically different but highly rewarding ways.

To achieve this the real skill becomes the building up of any existing value proposition and reconfiguring it to create a more appealing and valuable value proposition and offering a better value delivery system to deliver on this, through an ecosystem approach.

My plans to evolve this thinking
I have been working on these in my own mind over the recent weeks and I plan to share some of this thinking in the weeks ahead. I have structured my thinking (so far) into six parts.

At present, I’m still mulling over how to deliver on these as separate posts or some mixing and matching up to bring this all together..

The six parts planned at present are: 1) the further case for building a new innovation service model, 2) the role of the navigator and orchestrator, 3) transformation- what does that really mean and its impact on whom, 4) plotting this out on an innovation road map, 5) structuring the innovation accordingly- between whom and where and finally, 6) technology is leading and we as innovators are lagging, the time to retake this ground for delivering real customer value.

Moving towards a new way of doing things.

It is based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into a highly valued network partner, exploring innovation across all options and instead of delivering on discrete elements; it is managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently.

Let’s see where I go in this in the coming weeks, hopefully somewhere of future value, so as to shift our innovation thinking to exploring new solutions to improve on its mediocre current performance.

How can the innovation process capitalize on all the changes we are undertaking at present in new ways, so as to adjust to a different world of ushering in greater ‘engagement to deliver on the innovation opportunity’.

The post Shifting Radically the Innovation Business Model first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I really do wonder where it is all going inside the business organization.

Consulting has become a huge business dealing with our global and local organizations and governments.

Just take a peek around the board room doors, just who are all those strange faces, bulging muscles, huddled in meetings with the boss? Ready to take on the world.

Following on from my recent post on “the value of the visiting consultative fireman” this further post explores the external reliance on the consultant our organizations have become accustomed too. It got a little long, my apologies for that.

‘We’ seemingly can’t live without consultants.
They are now competing constantly for those semi-permanent, year-in, year-out relationships with companies willing enough to pay millions of annual fees for help and advice.

It is all about repeating the consulting / client engagement across the entire business in as many different ways as possible.

Consultants are necessary or so it seems for any big decision in our global business organizations as the employment of consultants helps ‘sit behind’ the recommendations made, the often billions about to be spent, for them to validate, investigate, recommend and then rubber-stamp your decision.

Who will fire you for bringing in a respected global brand like McKinsey, a few perhaps but not many?

You wonder if the executive within our large corporations would be allowed to sneeze without the consultant stepping up with the handy handkerchief or latest prescribed medicine to easy his/her discomfort.

Consultants seem to underpin decisions everywhere and today are equally asked to execute on these, as the resources within our business organizations or government departments are ‘far too thin on the ground and busy just keeping what we have going”.

Consultants are not just recommending the changes but being highly paid to make it happen.

Scale, scope and size are needed today to be a global consulting player
In the words of McKinsey on their website: “We strive for world-shaping client impact” where they then claim their “scale, scope and knowledge allows us to address problems that no one else can.”

They suggest “we bring out the capabilities of clients to fully participate in the process and lead the ongoing work”. Really I’m not sold on that one. At McKinsey they claim to “hire as many MDs, PhDs, MAs and JDs as MBAs” and well that just must be why business organizations fail without them isn’t it? Yawn.

The ever-growing big numbers of ‘boots on the ground’ to deliver solutions on client’s needs.
So much of McKinsey’s ability to ‘land’ work and secure ongoing work is due to McKinsey’s famous alumni network where more than 20,000 former colleagues connect with each other and with our firm.

It is a juggernaut in consulting support ‘within’ our organizations, highly interconnected into the very heart of our business organizations, to secure acceptance and validation of choice.

Of course, they still have to deliver otherwise next time it might get harder.

Today McKinsey has 17,000 employees and 9,000 of these are consultants. Others offering ‘pure’ consulting equally are sizeable organizations. BCG has 9,700 employees and 6,200 consultants, Bain & Co 6,000. A T Kerney have 3,200 with 2,300 consultants, PA Consulting with 2,150, Bearing Point with 3,350, Roland Berger with 2,700 consultants, Monitor Deliottes with 1,500 and the emergence from the combining of PwC’s consulting with Booz & Co into Strategy& with around 3,000 employees makes for a formidable array of business consultants to call upon, when in need. Let alone the countless smaller, more specialised ones below these global players.

Then you briefly look at the jaw-dropping numbers employed at PwC of 184,000 due to their tax and advisory services, Deloitte 203,000 employees, Ernst & Young have around 175,000 and making up the big four is KPMG with 155,000. These make up the ‘muscle’ within the International management consulting firms.

Then as we move into technology we get Accenture with 280,000, CapGemini with 131,000 and we have IBM, Hitachi Consulting. It goes on and on.

Consulting is a huge, big business utterly dependent on generating repeating revenue
We knew that, didn’t we? The combination of Credentials, Reputation and Size cultivated around the consulting brand has become intoxicating for business organizations.

They seem to simply not live without the consultant being ever-present. They can’t let go, surveys seem to be recently indicating the need to bring more consultants in to solve their problems.

Consulting is an integrated big business, designed to extract the numbers, be indispensable.

Spending on consulting can rise (and fall) dramatically. For the large consultants their constant focus on communicating the value they add and differentiating themselves from competitors is vital.

While there is this ongoing pressure among businesses to keep head count low it is stimulating growth for consulting firms, the ones constantly providing the research of global volatility, uncertainty and the need for constant vigilance.

The very consultants that argue for a lean approach to be flexible and ‘reactive’, ready to seize opportunities, with the consultant’s help.

No wonder headcounts are kept low with the very ‘solution masters’ whispering in your ear all the possible doom and gloom from their latest research and global surveys. Even if businesses did relax the head-count restrictions it seems all the brightest, not necessary the best, are locked up in the consulting company, happily moving from one different challenge to another. Why would they join one firm and become part of the permanent furniture?

Moving down and across the consulting food chain is essential today for all involved.

To feed these large ‘fee guzzling consulting beasts’ the larger management consultant firm not just search for the ‘big whale’ projects that might have $20 million and upwards in price tags to complete post-merger activities, they often bring them to the board room table. With the recent merger frenzy re-entering the Pharmaceutical scene these fee’s if you land the ‘whale’ become huge.

The shift to combining strategy and technology, the challenge to redesign total system structures is requiring each consulting firm to make their own ever-increasing bets on where to focus. The growing shift is to more operational work, the move away from ‘pure’ strategy work, is redesigning the consultants into more ‘one-stop’ solution providers.

The lower end of fees, below half a million dollars for a piece of work is nothing today, this is becoming table stakes to play at the big consultants table.

Consultants are charging $2+ million for a stand-alone study, constantly looking to turn this into the $15 to $20 million total system redesign. This requires having the infrastructure available internally for these more broadly based assignments.

Fee’s are clearly on the rise as mega-mergers and risky projects drive the numbers up even more.

The ‘rub’ of repeating money
The ‘rub is’ that these designs have to be repeated and repeated, to earn the profit margins expected from the investment in those initial up front solutions designed for one customer.

‘Suddenly’ these are turned into global solutions that meet the ’emerging’ shifts in trends to make this a global movement of the many seeking the latest practice.

The solutions suddenly become the large ‘big tent templates’ for repeating revenue as many more clients are needed to be found where this ‘trending’ redesign will help meet this new business imperatives outlined by, oh yes, the same consultants as a must have.

The profit comes from as much as you can ‘repeat’ to ensure you don’t keep reoccurring those dreaded origination costs. The consulting business model requires this repeating even more today than in the past.

It simply has too, with all the employees on the books made up of all those very bright “MDs, PhDs, MAs and JDs and countless MBAs” all expecting their bonus to be better than previous years.

I wonder if we are having the conflicts of vested interest in consulting as we have been witnessing in banking with the ‘dual’ chase for big bonuses driving our decisions?

The huge consulting bandwagon rolls on and on
Without doubt consulting companies are working exceptionally hard on their overall reputation, culling the consultants that don’t perform to prescribed formats and time lines, seeking to accelerate those that do constantly perform.

To support this consultant firms are investing in deepening experiences and exposures into different clients to wring out more projects and ‘drive’ the revenue they need.

They are working really hard on improving their tools/techniques, adding in thought leadership and innovative thinking, improving their reports/presentations into more visual feasts.

They are certainly highly conscious about the results they are delivering as just standing outside the door is the alternative consulting company, just itching to be let in.

Is hiring the outside consultant totally addictive?

I think the use of outside consultants is for ever growing. Consultants are operating up and down our business organizations today. As Organizations have shrunk their resources right down and are still certainly very reluctant to employ new people this will continue.

The pay-off is for whom? Call in the six-pack abs-solution man

Consultants have a great advantage over their clients; they can provide their solutions with new understanding, they are the feeders of “best practice” that magical potion waved over you providing you engage me to ‘reveal all’.

They are constantly working out to keep in shape to help.

They have the equivalent of the six-pack abs as the good looking solutions.

Also they are not only ‘solution fit’ but they are provide the surgeons, doctors to nurse you back to health using their solutions for you to keep your body stable as long as you don’t go off their life support system.

This allows you still the opportunity to be able to take on the physical challenges of everyday life in your stride focusing on the efficiencies and improving the effectiveness, moving the flab around, leaving the consultants with the real challenges, the heavy lifting as they bring in the ability to deliver on this.

The consultant offers the solutions to keep you lean and lacking in in-house resource

They provide the solutions to make sure any spare resource (or fat) is quickly eliminated so you can continue to gaze at the solution abs pack of the consultants, simply because you never had the time or real determination to get into the shape to manage these challenges yourself.

The leaner you are, the more dependent on the consulting supplements to keep you going. We are back to the semi-permanent dependence we crave for as ‘we’ simply don’t have the talent or resources to call upon whereas the consultant has plus the ‘revolving door’ experiences.

When the consultant leaves the building (if ever)

With this prevalent “leave it to others” more often than not when their solution abs consultant leaves the premises, all you are left with is the leftover pizzas and flat cokes from all those late-night burns the consultant put in to complete the required data crunches and show to you, their perfect solution.

Thank heavens they are only one phone call away or is it simply one floor below away, working on different problems you always seem to have, to adapt the business to the global forces at work?

Don’t tell me it can also be different- not possible

Sorry Mr Faithful employee, just get back to your everyday work. Innovation, oh forget that. We have no time for that; we are plotting the next big thing alongside our consultants.

No, look, I mean there are no merger drama’s, complex wheeling and dealings, it is based on too many intangibles, innovation always seems to have long development processes or complex testing procedures, ending up with mixed results. It is best you stick to the incremental stuff and leave me and the big consultant to manage growth, we know best.

“We will simply buy in innovation success” Oh yeah really!

Talking of different innovations that can take place within their organizations (disruptive, radical, reverse engineered etc) makes many of those sitting at the top of our organizations have an uncomfortable feeling simply because the big consultants don’t also seem to have the answers to this innovation stuff. Surely if they don’t we can’t possibly!

Understanding the ability to field genuine experts that can be highly valued and focused, well there must be a catch in that surely?

Thankfully today that genuine expert still offers the ‘sweet spot’ for innovation. It is a place for the small, independent, highly focused consulting person or specialized teams that connect the many necessary ‘dots’.

Yet getting top management’s attention or sign off is getting harder to achieve, when the big consultant likes to show his growing muscle mass, attempting to cover off the innovation bases as well.

Presently many of the bigger consultants still seem to have little true understanding of the underlying dynamics needed for internally generated innovation, those solutions than can equally lead the growth, if only they were given the same amount of attention at the top.

Equally the timeline for this can be long, solutions are often unique and much is often not repeatable, this goes against the business model mostly found in bigger consultants.

Thankfully innovation is one of those last frontiers that still mostly come from within when it is given the chance and the limited external resource that can help facilitate this.

The post That sheer consulting muscle hopefully delivering global momentum first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

These thoughts have covered the topics of suggesting different consulting models, exploring the shifts taking place in consulting and where consulting can contribute.

Then I offered a post late last year under the title of “client engagement- full of whipped cream and lumpy gravy?”

So in this post I will reflect and look at the visiting fireman here, the ones I experienced in the corporate world. I still believe they are far from endangered species.

Consultants hold a specific fascination for me, they come in all shapes and sizes, offering a bewildering array of solutions for your business.
For many clients, consultants have become ‘totally essential’  yet for others a necessary evil.

Today with far less resource within our business to call upon and coping with increasing pressure on time there is also this total reluctance to employ someone on the books, it is better to bring it in on an ‘as and when’ basis.

Keep it lean and mean, charge it off against that years operating expenses, don’t bring it onto the longer-term books.

Mostly the consultants knowledge leaves when they do
What comes in and what leaves gives the value to you in you applying their knowledge not just the consultants solution. Often this knowledge understanding totally ‘fails’ to reside or be absorbed as ongoing learning.

Partly it is not so easy to transfer, especially to those that are too busy to learn it!. We often miss this critical point of transference and we continually bring in consultants time and time again, actually for the majority of seemingly ongoing work, the repeating part we should be resourcing from inside but never seem to get around to recruiting or convincing others of the need.

We also never pick up the rhythm and real understanding how the external expert connected all the dots differently from you and we then fail to copy down the important notes to recreate the understanding. Many time I had to ‘catch myself’ on one particular slide, fascinated how that was put together, failing to hear the message behind it.

Have you also noticed how the outsiders always give us those ‘bells and whistles’ we fail to hear within our own immediate surrounding although it was there for us to see but we were too busy to find it, so we simply let others at potentially a higher end cost.

Experiencing the different visiting fireman
In this post I wanted to recall the visit of many visiting firemen when I was running various country operations in different parts of the world for a handful of global corporations.

More than one organization called outside expertise “the visiting fireman”.

There to help fight the fires, hose down the areas of critical combustion, recommend the essential fire fighting equipment and escape drills you will need from their experience.

I had experienced three types of visiting fireman in corporate life.

There were three general types; the regional fireman, the corporate fireman and the outside consultant one. Can you relate to these and the mixed emotions they can give you?

Are visiting firemen important to your business?

Yes I expect they are, they can make the real difference between ‘dosing the fire early enough’ to bringing their expertise and resources to bear, helping in managing that crisis or difficult problem you would be unable to resolve without the outside perspective, contribution or support. Yet they all seem to leave one holy of holy messes. There is always some form of re-building to take place from these consultations.

Often I think we all need to ask questions on the value of consultants. Would ‘things’ fall apart without the required dose of consulting medicine? Do they come into the organization, create havoc and then move on? Or do you value them as essential, as you quiet simply do not have the time or resources and expertise ‘in-house’ and they help ensure the delivery alongside you on what is needed within your business?

There are three groups of ‘visiting fireman’ associated with large organizations.

Do these ring any bells with you? These were my experiences and maybe yours are somewhat different, managing in specific operating structures. I spent more of my corporate career tackling difficult operating conditions, often very thin on resources, battling volatile market conditions. Now that does seem like today’s operating world doesn’t it?

I tried to remember some of these ’emotions’ when I then became the visiting fireman myself, in all three different types I will mention here
The first firemen was coming from the regional support group
These seemed to announce their pending arrival sometimes weeks in advance to fit their crowded agenda of moving from one type of regional or global meeting to another.

Or they were suddenly ‘dispatched’ to handle growing issues. That sudden crisis where they ‘must’ be seen to be on hand, Then we had the Sherpa type preparing future visits, fixing the lines and ropes for visitors from ‘on high’ trying to influence your agenda or shape your presentation.

Lastly arriving just a week or so before the key yearly strategic discussion meetings, so as they could be better prepared to fully participate in the discussions to catch up and ‘form’ their opinion. You had to watch the hose on this one, its power and potentially disruptive force coming from multiple sources based on the latest intelligence gleaned on these simple fact-finding missions.

They came sweeping in offering detailed advice on their specialized area, be that marketing, finance or product development. These tended to be the most difficult discussions, as they were pushing often their personal agendas, holding back a critical element of the corporate agenda.

They often were believing what you were doing was going against company policy, general direction or conflicting with branding issues. I found much ‘creative friction’ in these visits from the regional fireman.

Ultimately you may have the final decision, or you thought you did,being responsible for the P&L but these visiting firemen could wreak havoc in the ‘whispering game’ back at regional group, prompting numerous conversations with the regional president to clear these ‘conflicts’ up. Most were short on specifics or detailed understanding, grabbing at potential ‘straws’ to be floated in the corporate wind.

I found this group of visiting firemen far less supportive than expected; they had enough understanding to be dangerous but could potentially provide those valuable additional insights or access to resources you needed.

These visits were the most difficult. These were closer inspections to see that the house was in good order and you were not a potential ‘fire hazard.’ It often was a fine balance between their contributing value and what they constrained. These visits often disturbed and confused the local teams.

The second group of visiting firemen, the corporate ‘big-wig’

These were usually the corporate executive vice presidents, the chief operating officer, the corporate legal beaver or even the CEO himself.

This was a visit where you polished your credentials and went through countless preparations and checks around the facilities.

They always had one or two of the regional group in close attendance at least; to point out areas they felt helped the ‘broader agenda’ that “facilitated” the discussions or messed the visit up completely by going off script and you spent the rest of the visit in ‘personal crisis’ mode.

These were times of real pressure where you had two to three hours of getting the message across on what was happening, what needed to be resolved, what was missing, what was the value of appreciating making further investments within the country and why it (and you) was relevant in their bigger picture of things.

Then off on visiting the multiple manufacturing facilities, you pray continuously that the plants would not come to a grinding halt at that precise moment. A ‘lightning inspection’ by this big wig where you always know the visitors will simply compare, suggest and sometimes to pick up on something that did not fit with their view but was totally out of your local context.

Or how they would become (briefly) misty-eyed and comment on “when I was running an operation like this”. These visits from the corporate fireman often were defining moments, often that career or future investment defining one rested on the ‘good visit’ deemed by all in the food chain that determined your career.

I always searched for the opportunities for one-on-ones with this corporate fireman where you got the deepest ‘transfer’ of their knowledge. Cutting out dedicated time from the encircling herd of ‘minders’ allowed for some terrific and intense conversations that become the real bond that cemented understanding.

These exchanges allowed for my constant learning of the mind-set of the corporate visitor and the value it gave to what you could contribute into the bigger corporate ecosystem.

These visits gave real moments of identity for the team that often drove it on for weeks and months after. These were also times when you could separate the personal agendas of the more frequent visitor with the corporate agenda, to ‘ground’ the contribution you could make to the corporate set of goals and tasks. These were hugely important visits by the corporate firemen and women.

Then we had the final group of visiting firemen, these were the outside consultant

Outside consultants were often brought in on behalf of someone else or because you needed some different perspectives or solutions. They break down into two types.

The first type is the ones that arrive to make an assessment on behalf of others always had that ‘air’ of real detachment. That ease of knowing what you don’t know but you would love to find out. They listened, they seemed to always take many notes, made countless photocopies that clearly supported their investigation and only gave away what they wanted to, then left.

These types of visiting fireman is what I regarded as always “short” on advice, even though they had such a potentially richer potential to offer me thoughts than I would benefit from. They were not there for that!

I had to work really hard to ‘draw them out’ by separating what they were there for and what issues they could offer me alternative thinking. It was in many of these conversations you gained some terrific insights on alternative practices, and possible avenues of investigation to help you.

Then the ones you were paying for, well not you but it is coming out of your P&L

Then the other ones, where you needed their expertise and the funds for this were to come out of your P&L. I never really seemed to work out this group, or extract the value I was expecting.

I think my need and their agenda mostly with often prepared solutions beforehand often were incompatible. They never seemed to learn the full context before they were of fire fighting. In all honesty, I would reckon I got better value from about 25% of those I engaged. They seemed to come well-equipped though

I was recently reading on www.sourceforconsulting.com that only 27% of clients say that the value added by consultants exceeds the amount paid to them in fees when they completed one survey in the Gulf region.

I wish I knew then what I know now.

It is this group, the ones you engage with as consultants, employed by you that I want to spend some time on, in a future post. This will relate more than likely to innovation consulting, although I think most of the comments and observations can be generally applied to most consulting that is for sure.

Where do you feel about the visiting fireman, the expert or the consultant and how it work for you? Do you suffer from the many mixed emotions I felt?

The post The value of the visiting consultative fireman first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

So why did I call this blog post “client engagement- full of whipped cream and lumpy gravy?” Often both are ‘heaped’ onto the poor (final) solution found underneath the client- consulting engagement process. Both are layered on to mask the truth that the ones responsible don’t really understand how to make this process really work.

Managing innovation suffers from this an awful lot. We do need to understand all the ingredients that make up innovation, often we just try to’ top’ them off, failing to understand everything that needs to become part of the final solution.

I’m sure many of you have witnessed or been involved in poor client- consulting engagements. Often the root cause of poor end results within this process stems from a poorly structured engagement briefing process – my lumpy gravy.

This creates the effect of creating many problems in delivering back not the best advice or solution to the real problem, offering up the lashings of whipped cream to cover up the bland solution dish underneath.

The engagement process does still rankle for me as it causes many of the difficulties and tensions within the emotions that many projects seem to swing through –  trusted and distrusted — loved and despised — all in equal measure where many variations could be reduced with a little thinking and challenging.

Avoiding some of the pitfalls

So I thought I’d take a  look at some of the problems within the client – consulting engagement process that can mask what is really lying underneath.

Firstly we more than often than not, get the lumpy gravy served up from the client’s side. The client serves up the lumpy gravy as they want to cover up the problems and challenges they really have or  they even can’t describe it as they are not sure of the outcome they are looking for.

All they want to do, is to call in the consultant to get them to try and chew their way through the existing meal, hoping they can eventually sort out the issues, make it more palatable. They react and call for immediate help, rather than go back to the basics and think through the ‘connected’ issues. Let others sort that out and leave the consulting brief very open, cover it up with this lumpy gravy.

On the other hand, the consultant layers it on with their whipped cream. Those that are delivering plenty of whipped cream to make for a finished presentation that often has little substance but lots of sugar.

Hopefully also a little addictive and fattening so that the clients is always appreciating the finished effect, delivered in that final flourish, yet not really understanding what makes up the dish and asking simply for more.

So why do we have an engagement process?

Actually it is to stop the covering up of poorly conceived and hastily developed and deficient executed solutions without clearly thinking these through.

Often good innovation is never delivered on the plate easily, it is hard work. Often good engagement results are lacking, as the depth of understanding of the complexities are often ignored.

Often the trap is failing to have the right understanding, skills and application to be applied, leaving for just adequate end solutions offering mediocre and further erratic results. Sorry but that is it!

I believe through decent in-depth discussions pre-engagement we can achieve better results

Surprising this ‘decent’ pre-engagement often does not happen, and you can spend a fair amount of your time revising your proposal after certain discoveries.

The problem today is that caused by the pressure of time, as most the issues always seem to have a certain ‘burning platform behind them. The pressure is to quickly find solutions that fix immediate problems without the necessary depth of discovery to resolve the underlying cause.

I would strongly argue clients should invest in a discovery phase before everyone gets deeply involved in project structures, costs or possible solutions. Sadly the majority of clients are not prepared to pay for this, often believing their rambling brief, many times just verbal and often in snatched, scrabbled conversations is good enough. To be totally honest they are not.

On the consulting side, if you probe too much, early on, it makes the client uncomfortable when that should actually be the effect, as it brings out and confirms the real issues in potentially a better proposal. At least it can get you closer to the real issues underneath.

Sometimes the client suddenly is unavailable, they do not return the calls but by then you have either lost out because you were not the mind reading expert they expected as they are too busy fire-fighting and little time for putting quality time into their thinking.

So let me offer some of my favourites where clients serve up ‘lumpy gravy’.

• Briefs that are so limited that you have to spend inordinate amounts of time painfully extracting the real underlying challenge or issues. Often you lose out because you were not the mind reading expert, as they were really waiting to read the different submissions to decide on what they needed to do as they did not have a clue and were on a ‘fishing’ expedition.
• Another one is clients hand over such a short brief, pushed through to the procurement department and just let them go through the discussions and evaluations. The consultant can’t even talk to the eventual client.
• Then you have procurement who does their job of looking for the most economical proposal, leaving the eventual client often forced to work with that provider of services irrespective, eventually complaining of “that consultant was no good”- surprise!
• One other favourite is a reworked and passed around document, one that has been revised countless times by all internal stakeholders to make the end briefing result as exciting as flat warm beer – still just about enough strength but no character or uniqueness but it “wets the whistle” as we say.
• Often you experience  the one where the brief arrives months after it should have, due to this internal dialogue process being interminable. The client has that sudden fear someone above them is beginning to ask questions about this. Equally the year-end is coming up and the client races to turn the investment commitment into actual and push the consultant to reply within forty-eight hours or something as ridiculous.
• One more, is to take out the real issues; I mean who honestly wants to admit they have real issues?  Heaven forbid, that might be carer limiting if it gets out. Just offer a hint of excitement and flavour to the consultant and once they are ‘on the inside’ the client opens up, Caught often by surprise, the consultants scrabble to draw in additional resources, rapidly try to revise their solutions and get into renegotiation mode creating tensions and questioning for the broader stakeholders, making all go on the defensive. Not a good place to start any engagement process.

I can recall where one potential client deliberately ‘released’ a tender over a holiday weekend, opening the tender offer on Friday, late afternoon, with a cut off on the Monday – the holiday day. That way the number of submissions were significantly limited and his favoured one ready to be submitted, could be chosen by the committee, set up to review all tenders. That perhaps is a ‘lumpy gravy’ of another kind.

All these ‘lumpy gravy’ moments have real tension  within them, due to the lack of a well thought through brief.  Often so many with ‘vested’ interests enter the discussions all getting ‘stuck in’ to fix the lumpy gravy of a poorly conceived proposal.

As they say “too many cooks spoil the broth” and the end result ends up with blander, watered down proposals. Conflicts and issues are put off until later.

Examples of adding more whipped innovation cream back to the client.

• If you want to make everyone purr with contentment just keep throwing in “best practices” and “benchmarking competitors” or “evaluating market leaders” as one part of the topping off
• The other is laying out the ingredients of the innovation solution dish to make sure there is sufficient taste appeal such as “we provide a diagnostic” or “we believe in conducting in-depth interviews” usually triggers and ticks some of the taste boxes.
• When consultants receive a short briefing call, asking for help, the consultant ‘grabs’ all his pre-cooked solutions off the shelf or from the deep freezer and turns these into instant solutions and uses these to offer up quick answers.
• Then you get a number of consultants who have formulated their solutions before they even arrive at the clients for the kick off meeting and irrespective ‘drive’ solutions towards this but work very diligently to squeezing them into the solution box.
• Or, after a brief period at the clients busily gathering data, conclusions are made and with the on-site consulting team locking themselves away for a few days producing their ‘all singing and all dancing’ Power Point deck of 200 slides, full of the ‘mind numbing’ structure and process descriptors, leading to their conclusions with those all listening simply ‘blanking out’.
• How often does that growing sense of the consulting company, that was brought in, actually seems like they have gone beyond their own competence level and begin to ‘gain experience’ at the clients cost and famously ‘tap dance’. Whipped cream can cover much!
• The last one here, is the client only real reason in calling in another consultant was to clear up another consultants mess. That puts a really different spin on things and suddenly reputations are far more at stake. The new whipped cream might briefly foam up and then go flat as the situation was simply not really a recoverable one.

So the consultant has to often be ready with lashings of whipped cream to mask the content underneath. Sometimes a little honestly, which often is in sparing doses, might be a better solution. I’d rather lose an engagement than work in highly constrained situations where no one is eventually happy.

Clients, I believe value candour, some humility from consultants and a high level of transparency than often consultants like to project:  fully confident, the authority and masking the solutions with the pretence of perfection. Whipped cream can only go so far.

Avoiding whipped cream and lumpy gravy.

It is a pity, especially where we are dealing with innovation as it is often a messy process and this should be a clear recognized on all sides. Solutions need to be unique as no two situations are the same. Solutions often ’emerge’ through an open, sometimes highly experimental process that requires this collaborative approach, where client and consultant truly do work alongside each other, complimenting and contributing together. Here is where by really combining they can offer different insights for ‘emerging’ solutions that tackle unique distinctive challenge and learn from each other.

I like working through four principal steps in any engagement process. They all need working through really well – discovery, generation, conversion and finally, diffusion and acceptance. I adopted my approach from learning from others and provided a visual of this can be seen in a previous post.

Try to avoid the whipped cream and lumpy gravy within the client- consulting engagement process, it masks some fairly unhealthy outcomes if this is not managed well.

The post Client Engagements – Full of Whipped Cream and Lumpy Gravy first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.