The Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology requires investigation and engagement across the seven domains or components that make up the work mat.  The aim of any work mat discussions undertaken with executives focuses upon bringing out the parts necessary for innovation to happen and that needs an integrated approach and lasting engagement from senior management.

In a series of articles I will be looking at each of the seven components within the work mat to raise questions to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations determined to build a lasting innovation competence and structure.

I’ve already offered some opening thoughts on Governance and Innovation, for me one of the basic building blocks for innovation lies in creating the right conditions for an Environment to innovate.

So what are those environmental conditions required for innovation?

You can’t escape the fact having the right environment for innovation means different things to different people. It has general conditions, a ‘broad church’ approach that needs to be consciously set about to create the atmosphere that encourages and nurtures innovation.

The environment needs to be connected into the vision around innovation, it needs to offer many of the conditions that connect innovation in people’s minds, so it translate into “that fantastic place to work” or “I feel listened too, valued and making a contribution”. Innovation needs the right conditions and for your organization to foster a unique environment to prosper and grow.

The Environment offers the place, time and space to chase after those innovation challenges. It ‘creates’ conditions that inspire you, you want to be stretched both in mind and body to achieve something worthwhile, valued and making a contribution, turning ideas into winning propositions.

The environment needs to resonate so you can feel the buzz.

Increasingly organizations are recognizing the cubicles and boxes provided are killing creativity, reducing communications and creating the space for increased withdrawal. We are killing the meaning at work.

For innovation to work, we need to open up the minds, work hard at creating a physical space that is well designed, offering the opportunity for allowing engagement in. To achieve a certain association with a working environment makes people comfortable and wanting to be more creative, engaged and eager to take part.

We need to offer creative spaces, we need to let in light, and we want to offer back the “inner work life” that gives up the emotions, motivations and perceptions as suggested by Teresa Amabile in her co-authored piece “How leaders kill meaning at work.”  People need a sense of purpose beyond the mundane and it does come from the working conditions with the consistent actions to reinforce this, and this comes from the top of organizations.

Firstly we need to reflect on what innovation needs to overcome

• Innovation spans multiple time frames; it cuts across business disciplines and challenges the corporate silo. Every corporate boundary set up in physical space, in rules and regulations is already full of ‘yawning’ gaps for ideas and energy to flow across and close those disconnected gaps.

• There are considerable hurdles for innovation to overcome. The larger your organization the harder it is for innovation to flow. Executives need to consciously work on breaking down boundaries, challenge fixed mind sets,inertia or dogma’s and conflicting needs that lurk in each corner of the building or across the global organization.

• The ability to consciously encourage a positive supportive environment is vital. The ability to draw people in, to unite them over goals, priorities and their allocated responsibilities and how they are open and receptive are simply a daily task we need to work on, all the time.

Measures for the environment start with the ‘broad brush’ and then refine

• Executives through a ‘broad brush’ approach can define interactions, behaviours and resolution procedures. These generalizations become important; they give you the line of sight, the ability to measure your environment and evaluate how it is functioning. Your can begin to ‘sense and feel’ this.

• Organizations increasingly need to develop the conditions that allow people the collective abilities to react quickly and be more agile in their work. The ability to be authentic and get the true needs on the table, understood and shared provides closer association and part of any organizations greater alignment objectives

• Then you seek out the ability to create top down, bottom up combinations and where you work consciously to reduce the middle that is often blocking this.

• Finally, the combination of abstract levels for encouragement of fresh thinking and the ability to provide degrees of freedom to organize and act are important to build for the right environment conditions.

Structuring the conditions for the innovation environment

Organizations clearly struggle with complexity. Knowing where the knowledge resides helps unlock this. The growing use of centres of excellence can help here

There is an increasing recognition that knowledge management does need a system that structures it accordingly so people can explore its key phases to help them. I’ve written a fair number of times on Absorptive Capacity and its great value to managing the knowledge flows required for innovation. We need to acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit and our complexity needs to address these basic needs.

The openness to others both internal and external, needs creating the right open conditions to change, to exchange, to encourage that ability to act so as to capture and communicate opportunities that are flowing all around you, inside and outside your organizations.

A code of trust becomes so vital to creating the right conditions for an environment to innovate. I wrote some time about the two sides of an equation for shaping innovation. One was the environment and other was its governance. Governance must be explicit on trust and how it intends to foster and manage this. If you lose trust, you lose the pulse required for innovation. These two together offer the conditions to allow innovation to prosper or be constantly constrained.

The challenge is redesigning the new workspace

We are working far more at managing by exception and innovation aids this learning. We are working through the combining of vertical and physical worlds, we are extending beyond our own ‘working’ environment increasingly. Environments need to permit individuals to ‘craft their own ways’ through what they learn, how they engage, what they contribute. Our environment needs to embrace a more social one. Knowledge understanding and translation need the right environment to be allowed to flow.

We need to give greater recognition to the organizations intangibles.

We can so much easier relate to the tangibles within our organization. If you can touch it, you can measure it. Well you need to understand the intangibles make up far more of the value of our organizations, some up to 80% and also are essential to understand their source. Intangibles within our environment are made up of the attitudes, outlooks, our ability, space and feeling that allows for greater creative thinking. They make up much within our relationships, networks and connections to allow us to work or block us to feel frustrated.

We seek to encourage open expression, to challenge strange and often those many constraints in our working conditions that need challenging and resolving to either thrive or die. These are invisible walls to the naked eye but can be as permanent as any walls or the things we can touch. Much within our make-up is very intangible and implicit and needs to find space to grow, be valued and be demonstrated in explicit ways. I’ve written before about the ‘nested effects‘ of knowing all our capitals.

Giving responsibility for innovation to everyone

Lastly, I wrote finding space for growing innovation and it brings me back to setting up the general conditions for the environment to innovate. These statements of intent have real value: We need shared responsibility for innovation, we need to encourage knowledge as a central task, we need to work on being ‘collectively conscious, knowing our space and beyond for contributing to innovation. We need to foster respect for others knowledge and expertise and we need to become increasingly adaptive.

The environment we must seek for innovation needs to provide the ‘dynamics’ within our organization’s social fabric, to allow the conditions we believe in too simply flow. Getting those general conditions established allows innovation to take hold and become our future culture.

The post The environment for innovation does really matter first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Most of us that have travelled on the undergrounds around the world are well used to the announcement as a train pulls into the station of “mind the gap” between stepping off the train and the platform.

The reminder is to make us aware there is a gap and we need to be ready for this. We need to be consciously aware.

Innovation nearly always suffers some form of “mind the gap” and yet we tend to ignore the obvious and stumble into these gaps or fail to recognize them completely. These ‘gaps’ comes in so many different ways and guises.

We are in a need to constantly “mind the innovation gaps”, these are everywhere.

Firstly innovation is meant to bridge the growth gap found in organizations, it needs to have clear plans to manage the core, seek out new adjacencies and investigate the white space opportunities for making up the growth plans, so as to meet the strategic goals and aspirations of the organization. Often the resources are not allocated to all three of these, it is often left to the same team to bridge the gaps and more often than not, they fail. We also fail to think across different innovation horizons and not allocated dedicated resources and the time to each of these.

Our leaders have within themselves a real innovation gap as well. They spend less of their time on being involved with facilitating and guiding innovation than is ideal in many organizations, and this is often why we get such disjointed, underwhelming innovation results. Our leaders want innovation but fail to recognize they contribute significantly to having this innovation gap on required performance because they are not as engaged as they should be. They fail to put in their personal legwork and leave it to others. I am a real advocate for having in place a clear well-articulated innovation framework from the leadership of the organization

We have gaps in the current enabling innovation practice, these are either not integrated into the organizations or piecemeal, rather held in silo’s and pockets of knowledge, that don’t achieve the organization connection needed to get the ‘full force’ of momentum from the innovation efforts.

We lack gaps in how we reinforce innovation, in how we integrate it into our organizations and alongside all the other systems. We have gaps in the way we construct our cultures and environments for innovation to thrive. Far too often it simply struggles to survive. It stumbles from one innovation event to another, lacking a sustaining approach.

We have generation gaps in understanding and practices. Far too often the middle managers within organizations fail to bridge the gaps of understanding. How we can create a better common affinity as it would help to close some of the knowledge and communication gaps if it was consistently recognized and worked upon. Diversity of opinion or approach should be valued.

We have such an innovation gap as we often lack a common language within organizations to reduce misunderstandings, to extract all the necessary synergies that innovation does require. This lack of a common language is for me one of the biggest gaps to why innovation does not achieve its true potential. Far too often innovation is pulled in multiple directions and used for personal agendas. We mix up these personal ambitions and so ‘mess up’ the true potential of the innovation. We need a more transparent environment where a common goal can be seen and all can collectively work upon.

Then we have the performance gaps,where the impact of the innovation efforts are less than initially stated, the impact expected falls short or the execution was lacking. All can be serious gaps often understated or understood. Metrics often have yawning gaps that fail to capture the true value of innovation.

My last one is the gap of simply just knowing. What does actually happen? Innovation is often argued as a mystery, it needs to be left to chance, it is full of serendipity, and it is constantly dealing with the unknowns and untested. Yet there are so many gaps in this view in my opinion to be challenged and challenged hard. We need to consistently work at understanding the mechanisms, often the combination of random events and pursuing knowledge that matters that collide and give us breakthroughs, and the events that suddenly come together to give us advancement on the existing.

There are so many innovation gaps that we fail to resolve and just leave unresolved.

We have to work at it. The amount of training, of repeating routines, of practice, of incremental improvements often makes the difference between a good sports-person and a great one. We need to be well aware of our performance. Innovation needs constantly working upon, improving, in striving to understand what actually happens. The more we work on improving the performance and reducing the gaps the better.

Innovation relies often on interactions between a wide diversity of interested parties. It is structuring these interactions and exchanges of knowledge that gives us not just the new production of products but into the value adding areas of new services and new business models. We can extend our thinking beyond immediate challenges into broader social and economic challenges to bring more meaning into our innovation activities.

We need to bridge the gaps of what is truly important in our lives.

We actually do have the biggest innovation gap here. There is incredible room for organizations to bridge the social challenges of our time in health and welfare with innovative treatments, preventative solutions and diagnostics.

We also need to reduce the gaps in our existing education shortfalls, we need to protect our environment more, help in stress relief, age related solutions, working conditions, poverty reduction, in disease prevention and making basic essentials available to everyone (water and electricity).

Our business organizations need to connect far more to the social challenges all around us to help in reducing the inequalities or advance the solutions needed.

The innovation gaps are everywhere if we care to look.

Striving to introduce truly life-changing innovation that is needed may not be so possible for many of us but we do need to address the many innovative gaps we find in our everyday lives. Those that will support our collective capacity to initiate, absorb, support, organize, manage and exploit innovation in its many forms.

Often innovation is hidden in plain sight. We need to reorganize the DNA genetic code of the organization. We need to identify all the innovation impediments and gaps we can and work to minimise them.

We need to firstly stimulate innovation action – each of us needs to identify the gaps.

Hal Gregersen of Innovators DNA fame, suggests we can all build personal intent around the following: provoking questions, making observations, connecting and talking to a diverse range of people, being involved in experimenting to find better fits and finally connecting the unconnected. Just starting with consciously working on these would reduce many of the gaps that are simply around us.

As we are about to step off the underground train and hear the message “mind the gap” perhaps you should ask yourself “how can I lessen our innovation gap today?” Just keep calm and well-focused, determined to reduce those innovation gaps that are all around us.

The post Mind the Gaps in Innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The top line was only 26% of those surveyed believed their current organization’s leaders encourage the practices that foster innovation. This indicates a major shift really is needed in the organizational mindset to give innovation the chance to thrive.

The implications are nicely summarized by this statement from Deloitte’s Global CEO. “Innovation at the institutional level is needed to sufficiently shift an organization’s mindset to allow new ideas to truly emerge and thrive,”

The Deloitte Global CEO Barry Salzberg went on to say: “While our current business leaders can debate how and where to innovate, it’s clear how much importance our future leaders place on innovation—not just as a driver of business growth but also as a catalyst for solving society’s most pressing problems.”
DTTL surveyed close to 5,000 Millennials from 18 countries. When gauging the perception among future leaders about innovation and its impact on society, 84 per cent say business innovations have a positive impact on society, and 65 per cent feel their own company’s activities benefit society in some way.

For more information and to view the survey results, visit: www.deloitte.com/millennialsurvey

The critical message – can we wait or shift leaders aside who don’t get it?

“A generational shift is taking place in business as baby boomers, many of whom may have been wedded to the ‘old way’ of doing business, begin to step down from their leadership roles to retire,” said Salzberg. “Real opportunity exists for organizations to step up and create the conditions and commitment needed to encourage and foster innovation in their work environments. And there’s a tremendous upside if we get this right: we can better retain talent, remain more competitive into the future, and more positively impact society.”

The report provides a nice infographic here: http://tinyurl.com/autexyn

So what really catches my eye?
The one chart that stands out for me is the one that outlines the required provisions of innovation conditions and the present delivery “gap” in creating these to foster innovation.
Taking this as the make-up of many of the essential conditions it is worth listing them here

1. Encourage & reward idea generation and creativity
2. Provide employees with “free” time that can be dedicated to learning
3. That leadership encourages idea-sharing regardless of seniority
4. To promote openness and the freedom to challenge
5. Provide a commitment to successfully advance innovation ideas
6. Provide strong and inspirational (innovation) leadership
7. Have a clear vision of the future
8. Have a (better) understanding of the Millennial generation
9. Improve or expand use of internal social and informal learning (methods)
10. Encourage both formal and informal learning
11. Have a (real) commitment to a sustainable business
12. Provide (the conditions) and commitment to continued development
13. Provide (consistent) improvement to internal processes
14. Commitment to (consistent) and continual product and service improvements
15. The (vexing issue) of a lack of hierarchy

The ones highlighted in bold gained the highest responding as needed but this is a fairly valuable list to work from in fostering the ‘right’ innovation conditions.

The Millennials felt the purpose of business was to improve society, generate profit and to drive innovation. They overwhelmingly believe innovation is essential for business growth. They feel it is acceptable for business to profit from social innovation and those organisations that are (clearly) seen to be innovative will attract the talent

According to DTTL the findings endorse the importance of leadership and innovation and the impact business can have on society. This creates opportunities for business leaders – both individually and collectively – and for the long-term success of their businesses.

My initial thoughts triggered by this survey

Today’s leaders need to think very differently about their role and the expectations of business, if we are to capitalize on the opportunities that innovation can provide, simply by allowing these opportunities to be shaped more by the Millennial generation, sitting inside or collaborating outside their organizations.

For me, this survey simply strengthens my view that today’s leaders just don’t get innovation in the multiple ways they should: to enhance their business and to regain growth.

The generations coming up into leadership positions are not just aware of innovation’s importance but are being exposed and trained in all the different facets but frustrated those above “simply don’t get it”.

The issue is “can we really wait?” I don’t believe so.

The post Millennials see innovation differently from today’s leaders. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.