Within these two posts, I want to provide my thoughts, bridging the present and pointing towards a better design thinking future, one that in my opinion, is urgently needed.

These two posts are not intended as a mapping of the present DT landscape, they are reflective posts coming from what I researched.

The ‘product of my work’ itself is presently being worked through to be available as an e-book in the coming weeks. It has not been easy and often I found a level of confusion that kept forcing me to dig some more and I’m still not sure I have the answers, perhaps just lots of open questions. I think design thinking seems presently fairly messy and I feel is in need of a complete reset.

The intent of the e-book- direct link here ( design-thinking-improving-potential-innovation) is to offer a practical, direct takeaway of design thinking, more of the present practices and then where it is possibly heading. I tried to go linear, gone circular, gone holistic and at times ballistic and sought out tactical and strategic design, recognizing how its orientation has moved through product, service, experience, business model and is lifting design into new ways of orientation at tactical and strategic levels.

As I found out from my research, there is an awful amount of “noise” and “hype to work through to find the past, present and future positions of design thinking. In summary, I think design thinking is undergoing a revolution, a certain maturing but it is littered with a very messy, highly competitive present.

I would suggest that design thinking is a current ‘burning platform’ and the term ‘design thinking’ is so loaded it might need to be reworked under different banners to allow it to evolve but it needs to be restated and deepened in its skills, practices, and methodologies.

I certainly get the impression that there is an immense interest in design thinking as being a valuable contributor to being part of a solution within organizations but for the majority of interested parties, it is difficult to sort through the good from the bad in design thinking. Often you miss that certain clarity of knowing where DT can contribute, what it all means to achieve better solution outcomes.

It needs to break free of the magic ‘black box’ and evolve into its promise of being increasingly important to use, open and transparent in what it can achieve and its limitations. It is to balance this out and point to the need to be integrated with other skills, capabilities, and methodologies that tackle real, often complex problems within organizations.

So part two of my reflective summary:

Design thinking becomes the best friend to innovation, strategically and tactically.

When DT is applied to business or social issues it is by making creativity logical, you have its power of contribution, it can transform our innovative solutions. Design thinking is a highly creative problem-solving approach with a toolkit of methods but more a specific mindset where adapting is constant. By doing the same just over and over again brings the same results or dampens the potential to spark different ideas and solutions. Design thinking as something far too prescribed ‘dulls’ the process.

There is hope, actually, it is well beyond a glimmer, we are seeing design thinking recognize it needs to step up and take design thinking into a more strategic position. This will mean that design thinking will change in the future, into a greater, fuller “thinking” mindset that can be applied to these more complex problems at an organizational level and contribute this creative thinking to numerous challenges organizations are facing today. It needs to evolve, otherwise, it simply fades away, into the background of being just ‘helpful and useful’

Where Design Thinking Can Earn its Place

Where design thinking makes its contribution is through a good understanding of the users, making sense of ambiguous information, reframing opportunities, ecosystem conceptualization, prototyping to fail early and often. All this adds up to a creative process. Creativity is one of the key essences contributing to innovation.

Much of DT is working in a parallel space with many different paths to work through broad phases of investigative work. This makes DT seem “fuzzy, ambiguous and strange to many who are more trained in being analytical, often with backgrounds in science and engineering. It is bringing a degree of art and creativity to science and rational thinking. This combination must constantly search for a common language.

The need is for deeper immersion, for synthesis, for conceptualization, for constant evaluation, for exploring prototyping and it is seeking the right combinations that help blend all the different thinking into those valuable solutions. This is why DT can stand alone but is better in a broader system thinking approach. It can be so simple to tackle a specific customer problem, product design or service need, no question, where its design lies in its four elements to work through: of define, create, refine and repeat (as optional but likely) to eventually move towards a winning solution from the work of the combined thinking. The point is today organizations are asking for more out of their design thinking to tackle complex issues as well.

The constant danger is these different “open” steps or stages are equally a strength but also a weakness. For so many, these steps seem so insufficient and unconnected to their past reality. It is the need to connect this all up, to show it is real, it is the intuition, chaotic, divergent, naturalistic inquiry form and we need to offset our current more linear, sequential and reductionist inquiry mindset, so dominate in organizations today. Design thinkers need to tack on this challenge.

Lastly here, as complex problems become ever-louder in need to solve at both tactical and strategic level we must recognize their root causes are:  “often multiple issues, all tangled together, often hard to identify the critical parts and more than often hard to extract from the effect as solving one part often can worsen another or have greater consequences. Breaking up complex problems is tough as they are dynamically linked and deeply nested” (Quote from Chris Lawer in his paper on design thinking and healthcare)

Strengthening our thinking through processes.

The strength of thinking needs to be constantly working at creative blending a design and business thinking,  each time that will need to be different applying different techniques and frameworks. We need to move from that ‘one’ correct answer, often blindsiding us, into the many solution possibilities that take innovation out into new realms of solutions that meet a more integrative thinking that connects ideas more to customer needs.

It is that search for involvement from the diverse voices of users and inventors, it needs to be analytical and intuitive, it needs a blend of deductive, inductive and adductive thinking and that needs huge space and time to allow the thinking to work through. This divergent and convergent thinking, to zoom out, zoom in and connect all the diversity within the thinking and design of the ultimate solutions. The ability to connect, to manage this is the ‘art’ of the design thinker leading the facilitation process.

We often lose sight that if we lack customer or outcome focus we are more likely to fail, and if the construction and framing of the design thinking are not well stated it simply becomes a failure potential before any investment is made.

We move from consuming the idea of design thinking into a deeper participation as it synthesizes our thinking by allowing us all to have imaginations, thus feeding the roots of creativity that leads to innovation that tackles those complex issues we all face. We get equipped to bring all those cross-disciplinary thinkers together to break down the problem in a human-centered design construct.

Presently we are in the middle of this change, seeing how it evolves.

As I have finished in my e-book, I really feel design thinking is about to evolve. I feel I’ve not captured that change sufficiently but the e-book was constructed as more to assist in current DT understanding giving a background to why we need to change within the framing, so it built on a better understanding of the foundations of design thinking.

Within the e-book, currently in the ‘production works,’ I have taken the work of two different design thinking consultants or organizations to ‘cast’ out design thinking into a possible future. They offer more upstream strategic design thinking or take the view that that design is increasingly circular. Both are trying to shift the current race-to-the- bottom narrative you see in many design thinking suggestions into more strategic and broader system thinking levels, recognizing the need for greater change to tackle a growing complexity and mounting frustration that design thinking can’t stand on its own.

One is the collaboration between Ideo and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, focused more around the concept that design is increasingly circular.The Circular Design Guide is a collaboration between the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and IDEO

The other is Humantific who are taking design thinking out and forming it around a more robust set of thinking methodologies, way beyond ‘just’ design thinking but more into “sensemaking” through these different approaches and framing and methodology techniques.Humantific takes a  hybrid approach that looks to integrate the best of human-centered design thinking, strategic problem solving, and information visualization.

Pointing towards a future.

That future can happen if design thinking wants to evolve itself and I think we would all want that, it needs to move beyond its current present often caught up in a “fad” and “hype”. We need to develop it out and put it to use as more advanced problem learning capabilities, that challenge the desire for quick, handy “quick fixes” and think more deeply in strategic design terms to achieve better, more sustaining outcomes. Today, many of the outcomes get ‘push back’ as they did not account enough on the broader context, the system impact, they defined the challenge in far too limited ways and the results were limited, even though their was a lot of creative energy.

In this recent report by RSA an action and research centre called “From Design Thinking to System Change”

“Great design doesn’t always generate impact. As we show in this report, innovations attempting to scale and create systemic change often hit barriers to change, sending them catapulting back to square one. We call this the ‘system immune response’. The particular barriers will differ dependent on context, but might be cultural, regulatory,  personality driven or otherwise…..

“Design thinking alone will not be enough. The core insight of this paper is that solving our most complex problems will require augmenting design thinking with a systems thinking approach as the basis for action”

I think this is our present problem with design thinking as outlined in the RSA report:

“In reality what happens all too often is that the route from innovation to scaling, and thereby systems change, is fraught with obstacles”…..and we create system immune response”

“The point is that scaling is usually far from a linear inevitability and the development of a product or service innovation may be just the beginning of a process of generating impact”

“While design thinking alone provides a compelling process for idea development, it fails to recognize that without due consideration of systemic complexity and power dynamics, even the best ideas can lie on the shelf unused, and thus without impact”

We fail to gain the impact we wanted or identified as we did not fully account for all the system dynamics and all that was necessary to make sustaining change. We end up often just moving the needle just a little and today, that is not good enough.

The recognition of change within design thinking is growing momentum

In a forthcoming online festival, called the Disruptive Innovation Festival organized on November 6^th to 24^thby the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, this might be interesting. They have three main themes. One of these will be on the Future of Design where you can join from anywhere for free, sign up by clicking on the above link.

To quote : “Design has changed forever. Rather than just creating a single product for a single customer, designers of today have a new challenge: to create better systems adapted to a world of connected citizens, unpredictability and digital disruption.”.

There is this increasing need to understand the systemic conditions, the interconnected dynamics at play, the impact on the value chain and the ecosystem, on the business model and understand the organization and societal conditions in which this problem and challenge plays out. These need this deeper thinking so design thinking can marry the impact and understanding these more complex challenges require.

Summary

Design thinking has become a major methodology, it is presently running ahead in the expectations of what it can deliver and does need to re-think on how it is going to take this concept forward. The (real) design thinking community is racing to catch up and respond. The challenge for it is it has multiple voices all offering a wide choice in the past, what ones will emerge to give us a different design thinking future?.

We are presently in need of “buyer be (very) aware” otherwise you end up with a result that does not do the job you had in mind or more critically did not help solve the problem in your or worse still your customer’s eyes. Investing time in knowing what you expect as outcomes mean designing the problem or challenge in far more thoughtful ways, before you embark is critical in any design thinking journey.

Yet be even more ready if it evolves in ‘sudden and amazing’ ways you never expected but to have a clarity of original purpose ever-present keeps design thinkers in that constant analysis, to then be able to embrace the synthesis.

“Holding the course” or “breaking out of the mold” both need the courage and a real trade-craft to systematically test and iterate concepts until they ‘feel’ right. To both ‘conceive and make stuff’ can be really exciting.It is so human-centered and that is what design thinking is all about. How design thinking evolves will determine its position in our innovating world.

Get comfortable with this thinking alternative and what it can potentially give you in tackling your challenge or problem. Also remember DT is increasingly needed to be a more worked at a system level, beyond ‘just’ product, customer experience or service level. This is where the future of design is focused and where much of the current confusion lies, we are in the middle of these changes and they are being worked through in multiple ways, it seems.

Part one of design thinking is here

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The post The limitations, criticisms and new pathways for Design Thinking – Part two first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This is part one of my thoughts that came out of investigating and researching design thinking Part two link is here.

In these two posts, I want to provide my outcomes, bridging the present and pointing towards a better design thinking future, in my opinion urgently needed.

The ‘product of my work’ itself is presently being worked through to be available as an e-book in the coming weeks.

The intent of the e-book with a direct link here ( design-thinking-improving-potential-innovation) is to offer a practical, direct takeaway of design thinking, the present practices and where it is possibly heading. I tried to go linear, gone circular, gone holistic and at times ballistic and sought out tactical and strategic design, recognizing how its orientation has moved through product, service, experience, business model and lifting design into new ways of orientation at tactical and strategic levels.

As I found out from my research, there is an awful amount of “noise and hype” to work through to find the past, present and future positions of design thinking. In summary, I think design thinking is undergoing a revolution, a certain maturing but it is littered with a very messy, highly competitive present.

I am suggesting that perhaps design thinking is a current ‘burning platform’ and the term ‘design thinking’ is so loaded it might need to be reworked under different banners to allow it to evolve as it equally needs to be restated and deepened in its skills, practices, uses, and methodologies.

I certainly get the impression that there is an immense interest in design thinking as being a valuable contributor to being part of a solution within organizations to tackle their tougher problems as well as those that need a level of creativity to move through in understanding.  For many though, I feel it lacks a real understanding of its value for the majority to sort the ‘good from the bad’ in design thinking or design thinkers, along with the what and where it can really contribute to achieving better solution outcomes.

It needs to break free of the magic ‘black box’ and evolve into its promise of being increasingly important to use, to balance out and integrated with other skills, capabilities, and methodologies that tackle real, often complex problems but more importantly, to be generally understood as a creative, human-centered methodology to get fully behind.

So part one of a two-part reflective summary:

I believe design thinking has a great role to play in contributing to solving problems and challenges, yet we have a series of problems to bring it back to a valuable order, we need to rein in the hype and the lack of a deep design thinking skill-set.

Far too many people are claiming to be design thinkers, after simply attending very limited “crash course” or “boot camps” and do not have the deep investment and experience to be true ‘design thinkers’. If this continues design thinking will fail in its potential to be a really good creative problem-solving approach.

Design thinking has raised a lot of expectations as well as its fair share of controversy. Why are organizations so caught by DT? Often it became the promise of having creative ways to solve solutions and work in harmony with all the rational thinking that dominates much of business thinking today, DT sounded so appealing, it quickly became “oh, we need some of that.”

The ramping up begins

So, the marketing of Design Thinking kicks in, looking to capitalize and add a real momentum. DT got heavily promoted. It quickly became simply sold as a process, just like Six Sigma, it became limited by those jumping on the latest concept not being true design thinkers, apart from attending a short course or two.

Then this new process became a little uncomfortable living alongside more established rational ones, it was difficult to integrate, so as this ‘new kid on the block’ struggled, questions started to raise their head on how does this compliment and add to all the efficiency and effectiveness that is expected around an organization’s dominating mindset. Most lost the plot that design thinking was different. It was so different, it was human-centered, not process-centered.

What was soon realized that extra “fuzziness” can sit uncomfortably in highly organized and rational structures? Design thinking was looking for those “leaps of faith” and lots of ‘being creative’, seeing failure and diversity was actually something akin to being hard to accept and conflicting in ‘being judged’. Fun and engaging perhaps but it needed to be separated and contained.

Organizations have come up against this growing recognition that there is no one “plug and play” system for design thinking.

When you are asked to be flexible, agile, willing to experiment and often fail, sometimes publicly, this can take you into some very uncomfortable territory. You might like the idea but will the boss? When you do not have a clear definition of design thinking of where and how it can actually fit, how it works or means, it continuously suffers from a lack of clear assignment, it makes it feel a little bit of an oddball.

You are left wondering who executes this and how it might be applied and implemented at scale. What answers to what, what links into what? Yet it feels useful and needs to be more embraced for its creative value. So, the short answer is to give everyone a short exposure and let everyone embrace design thinking as the creative avenue for all to explore. It suddenly gets broken down so it can be repeatable, a step-by-step process. Then easy, we all become suddenly design thinkers, or are we?

Then we get the “let’s systematize this” into a familiar, easy to use and follow process

Organizations suddenly turned design thinking into a linear, often gated, by-the-book methodology and suddenly it is not true design thinking anymore, it becomes just another too linear, too slow and not as bright a way to be ‘so creative’ but hey, we are design thinkers, that’s not bad, is it? The dominating thinking about ‘process’ suddenly starts to screw up the ‘freedom’ within true design thinking. It quickly became boiled down to aiding and supporting the incremental innovation.  It loses its real powerful edge of harnessing creativity to solve problems in highly imaginative and insightful ways, it becomes just the encouragement to help thinking along.

Design thinking so often then gets reduced down to supporting small project-related work, happily working at the periphery of the organization, it becomes simply a friend to incremental innovation and change. Leaders start to ask a question about all this design thinking ‘hype’ and began demanding far more from a design thinking process to tackle their complex problems.  Then it is suddenly “Huston, we have a problem.”

Enter the need for a new design thinking way that is emerging.

Design thinking can play a richer role and be a more powerful contributor to bigger problems but it needs to evolve and be seen in a wider context and not seen as specialized, narrow and limited. It can connect to a wider universe of problems and complexity of design itself, over the centuries has broken out of past confines. Design thinking makes us all design-conscious if we allow it too. It is the human-centered design that can draw out the best of our thinking if we do allow it too.

DT encourages us to abandon the linear thinking and keeps us constantly undergoing that looping circularity as the accepted process and that needs resetting mindsets significantly.  DT to evolve in all our minds, away from those past experiments limited to narrow, linear paths of design thinking understanding is highly liberating, sometimes scary but deeply satisfying when you truly break through a complex problem.

We need to connect multiple thinking, diversity and different experiences that so often diverge initially to then collectively find the path to converge, in a common understanding, to translate the combined creative thinking into real action, achieving valuable outcomes.

There is a different pathway ahead, otherwise, Design Thinking in its existing form alone will fail.

Design Thinking will not be evolved if we step back from this wrong path that many have been following in recent years, it will get pushed back and sink into the background, occasionally turned too, in a world far more dominate and schooled in detail-orientated highly rationale process methodology and thinking. Design Thinking can be increasingly integrated towards business and becomes both stronger in the human consciousness for process and culture contributions.Yet to get to this point there is this need to firstly, go back to the design thinking drawing board.

Design Thinkers should restate their value proposition before it becomes too late, to deepen the techniques and avoid moving out of their specialized role of being great facilitator to connect others to thrive and build solutions. Otherwise, there is this risk that DT fails in its real potential as a real creative process to search out imaginative solutions that DO solve complex problems. It is up to the design thinking community to come together on this, as today it is a real mess of conflicting message and extremes, some offering snake-oil solutions, others keeping design front and focused from experience, exploring all the design thinkers options and honing their practice.

Design Thinking should be seen as a specific creative, human-centered process all our thinking should pass through. It needs a new lifting up into both tactical and strategic design thinking.

We need to allow the ‘creative flow to emerge’

Design and good well-trained design thinkers are ‘schooled’ to be naturally creative thinkers, that is their space. They need to extend their toolkit of methods and tools to produce new value through the approaches they undertake. They thrive in the ambiguities recognizing in growing complex problems there will never be a concrete set of predictable answers.

Design thinkers work through the messy and unpredictable business, so typical of innovation and discovery doing analysis and synthesize to push more those unpredictable, surprising creative outcomes. To achieve this DT cannot be a prescribed step-by-step detailed process, it simply passes through stages, loops back when needed and moves forward when it ‘seems’ right.

I recall one comment I read: “thinking does not convey action”. If constructed well, through experienced, trained design thinkers have the ability to draw out all the diverse thinking present, through a fuller inspiration, ideation and implementation mindset. It can offer a creative pathway that promotes a messy, sometimes conflicting, failure allowed, ‘full on’ set of emotions, to energize and tackle complicated problems.

The search is even more centered around strategically connected value creation

As we all are faced with the task of solving more complex problems that are strategic in need, it is for design thinking to step up and become more a key component on how to ‘do’ this. These as relating far more to the customer needs, to solving organizational challenges or market challenges and those more ‘knotted problems’ that corporations and society are grappling with. The ability to extract from design thinking methodologies can significantly help in the future.

Today what is being increasingly demanded is to solve more complex problems in creative ways as essential, then design thinking needs to work in harmony with many other thinking skills to make its contribution.

It certainly needs to mature way beyond a ‘one frame thinking concept’ to achieve this, to be central to finding solutions.

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The post The limitations, criticisms and new pathways for Design Thinking – Part One first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Recently I was asked to complete a review of digital transformation, to gauge where it presently is, to take a look at the leading emerging practices and ‘professional ‘wisdom’ and turn these insights into a report due out before the end of the year.

There are many innovation implications in this digital transformational journey that hold my increasing attention. For most of this last twelve months I have been increasingly tracking, researching and responding to supporting clients need  about digital transformation, so I was happy to take this on. Little did I realize how this digital transformation has become a flood, a torrent of wisdom, many offerings different, often varying views and advice.

The more I deepened and intensified my investigation there came this overwhelming feeling that it is getting a real overload on those wanting to understand this digital transformation that is occurring. It seems no industry or business person is going to be immune to this transforming impact yet we seem to be facing such a deluge of advice. Picking it apart requires the stamina and focus of a long distance swimmer, the same commitment I think will be needed for this digital transformation journey

So I need to pick it apart. Not easy but a challenge.

A digital transformation does mean going back to so many fundamentals. We need to create a digital transformation strategy, a clear roadmap and build the business case as it is going to be, well, umm……..transformational.

I do get a distinct impression there is no randomness in this, it does need to be well thought-through. It is not like downloading one app, or simply moving some items over to the cloud, assessing its value and purpose and how it currently fits, and then simply dispensing with it if it does not meet our need. This is about having a viable business in the future, based on digital as we have this overwhelming, nagging feeling all our current business models are under threat.

It is no more just the smart, nimbler upstarts threatening us, it is coming from all directions, at speeds that seem to increase the rate of change constantly. Those of us burdened with a legacy system and a management holding onto the past glorious days then your days seemed numbered. This is going to require a significant investment in energy, focus, and resource commitment.

We do need really different thinking. We need to ‘up our game’ in boldness of leadership and the totally, utterly unshakable belief in innovation, exploring new business models, grappling with all the available assets inside and outside the organization being pulled together in new digital ways, exploiting all the technologies as they ‘break’ and evolve. There seems no more “wait and see”, it has become “learn and experiment fast”

Where to start?

Firstly we do need to recognize technology is inseparable in what we doing, going forward. The blurring of our lives, of the breaking down of the different old industry demarcations, the blending of government, corporate and social engagements is giving increasing voice to each of us as individuals, all happening due to this exponential set of connections. I sense from many this is ‘epic’, exploding and life changing, with all of us simply learning to adapt and adjust.

The choice of apps, platforms, the number of connected devices is teaching us new ways of communicating, learning, interacting and extracting different value and needs out of the technology available which is all constantly evolving.

How does a large business keep pace with this exponential connection? Where is the starting point or the necessary change inventions one needs to bring in to understand the gaps and fill the voids, can we back-fill as we equally move forward?

The past business decision was based on evidence, validated and justified, it sort of evolved at a steady pace. The sheer scale and impact of how technology is evolving at increasing speed will need a massive mind shift.

Although each organization is having so many competing priorities, the gap between how it is organized today and building these required digital capabilities is getting wider, unless you work through this transformation plan in a clear, purposeful way. It has to begin  with a ground-up approach, small experiments that can quickly be scaled up or revised. It needs very hands-on engagement throughout the whole process.

A key need of this digital transformation is going to be asking the question of how can we build in ‘greater agility’ and what is presently stopping us from achieving this. Then it is the agility to achieve better response times to customers needs, to respond to market changes quicker, to translate insights into knowledge and then into the product and service innovations that meet ever-changing needs.

It is recognizing and then facing up to your present ‘pain points’ and the key competitive places that agility, digital understanding and translating this into outwardly facing outcomes will significantly improve your abilities to compete, in often volatile markets. It is shortening the time between understanding and reacting and this is where digital transformation offers both the ‘return’ promise or becomes the threat.

Forming a strategy, roadmap and business case needs real considerations

There are many considerations, each organization will be different. Yet all have a common need; the recognition each organization needs to develop its digital capabilities, organization-wide, not stuck in some IT department. It is a total company-wide set of activities that are affected. It is developing the digital capabilities across the organization by transforming the culture, the people’s digital skill set and the structures to get into sync, not just with newly defined organizational goals but also consistently adjusting to the rapid pace of change occurring in the marketplace, aligned to customers evolving needs.

The critical first points to address is the lack of something, be this the resource to undertake such a task, a lack of digital talent residing in the organization or digital savvy, the ability to make this a corporate priority and not leave this to limited pockets of divisions, functions or channels. It needs this powerful syncing and top-level focus and support.

Then we need to encourage and expand the risk appetite, in rapid experimentation and learning, to accelerate the infusion of digital talent, enhance the understanding of soft skills and the art of collaboration, in new teaming, in-goal and process identification and solution solving. Also in developing greater fluidity in structures, exploring and identification with the needs of new solutions to keep ‘feeding’ this back into the evolving roadmap. All of this needs to establish a new digital rhythm to encourage the flow of knowledge and understanding, to feed back into evolving solutions that will take time to develop and embed.

Then you face all the potential barriers that need early identification. The need for alignment across the organization, the ramping up of skills, breaking down those silo’s to stop any efforts from being disjointed, establishing different metrics that reflect this digital transformation journey and show proof of adoption and usage spread, constantly adjusting resources, building the new digital culture and finally, keeping the lights on in running today’s business, as you undertake this transformation. No easy task but one that needs a complete re-engineering,ending with a redesigned organization, fit for the digital future.

A very different type of orientation – a digital core reliant on the edges

So it is recognizing that digital transformation is multiples of connected intermediary goals, learning by doing, adjusting and evolving. Yet the critical change is this might be internally driven but it must be driving to a very different outwardly engaging result. The changes at the core, need to be totally connected to the outer edges of the business due to this hyper-connectedness. This shifts responsibilities to a more decentralized environment.

It is transforming to offer customer experiences, to engage deeper with multiple stakeholders, to make sure the last mile of the external engagement which are all operating at the edge, are the points in value understanding, so then it gets processed in the core where this more agile internal process responds, adapts and adjusts constantly.

The need for interconnecting both the internal world with the external world is partly why we are seeing such a high level of attention to platforms and managing in ecosystems, both in enterprise and broader systems of ecosystem thinking.

Finally, one book written by David L. Rogers “the digital transformation playbook” offers a good read covering this complex subject. He has broken down his view of digital transformation into these five handy yet critical focal points: For each domain of customers, competition, data needs, innovation and value he is suggesting these five strategic themes of: 1) Harness customer networks, 2) Build platforms, not just products, 3) Turn data into assets, 4) Innovate by rapid experimentation ad 5) Adapt your value proposition (constantly).

In summary

Digital transformation is about undertaking a systematic journey, built on interim building steps, to adjust to the learning and response. The reality is this is a long transforming journey that will take years to undertake for many established businesses that need to shed legacy, adjust and reorient their resources, processes and thinking to adapt to this connected world.

Going digital will need strong governance and leadership, consistent technology integration, a growing digital literacy for the operations, processes and all involved to enact change in roles, systems and supporting model.

Lastly, to achieve a different result that provides a return for all this undertaking and effort will mean ensuring the customer journey, the touchpoints and the experiences meet the customers’ needs, not those internally imposed ones, build on the business expected needs.

Value will be driven by the market and the customer, not top down but bottom up and this will need a very different orientation to innovation through platforms and ecosystems to build communities of common purpose.

The future will be driven by communities of vested interest, that keep evolving, adjusting the value proposition constantly, to meet the constantly evolving customer needs, and that will need a highly fluid, agile and adaptive organization, working in multiple structures, adjusting in evolutionary ways, reliant on everything digital.

Digital transformation is truly transforming for all of us.

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The post Swimming along a road in a flood of digital transformation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We all sense this pressing 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. The question is how much and how far can we go?

Organizations are facing increasing a dilemma in how they organize and manage within their systems and structures.They are being forced to deal in increasingly complexity and environmental turbulence and ‘adapting the appropriate response’ remains increasingly a difficult one to master, within the existing regime they have in place.

On the one hand the value in stability is still essential; working within specific routines and practices gives a clear ‘path dependence.’ This stability allows for efficiencies and effectiveness to be constantly at practice, constantly building the problem-solving processes, to master tasks in complex environments to resolve ‘known’ problems in ‘given’ ways but this relies on this stable flow and that is not the case of much of what we have to handle today.

We are being challenged more and more on this efficiency and effectiveness focus. It is often not working to deliver the results. We are missing a new way of working.

We increasingly have this dilemma of needing stability but trying to build increased fluidity.

Stability and fluidity- how can both work alongside each other? They are opposites yet we need both to thrive in today’s world. Many theorists have suggested, of having in place the ‘ambidextrous organization.’ This would need organizations to design their organizations in their structures, people and processes to either be focused on ‘being efficient’ or being ‘change orientated’. An increased level of duality. The mindset of exploiting or exploring but can we have both, I certainly think so, it mostly depends on what we are about to do to get this mental picture of which frame of thinking should dominate but not be exclusive.

I have been drawn to this ‘dual’ system of ambidextrous as it helps resolve one of the consistent stumbling blocks for innovation to ‘take hold’ and evolve. Innovation is constantly fluid, needing to be adaptive as we learn and adjust to new learning and this is constantly requiring a very change orientated approach. Often innovation comes up against a rigid system and for many “just seems not to fit”

Innovation struggles as it often remains outside the prevailing system. Innovation constantly challenges against the dominant mindset within organizations, who like the idea of innovation but are mostly measured to drive efficiency and effectiveness, keeping highly focused on the short-term performance as their role, reward, advancement and key to ongoing career success, so innovation ‘sits outside’ their domain of focus.

Something needs to change if innovation is really important.

Yet the very essence of our stability in organizations is under threat.

There is so much change being undertaken, the growing call for quick improvisation and ad hoc responses all needs to take us away from those rigid processes into open and far more fluids ones.

The solutions of fluid, agile and adaptive are aiming to develop highly flexible and responsive organizations as an attractive answer to manage in more uncertain times as the way to move forward. The ability to make this very defining and shaping move in any organizations does seem very fraught with risk.

We do need to extend our thinking about fluidity far more to see how we can evolve our thinking more towards this fluid state, within ourselves and our organizations design.

To achieve a more organic fluidity, moving from hierarchies to networks, from formal rules and high levels of coordination into far more spontaneous interactions, improvised processes that resolved specific issues is one huge challenge. It takes time to learn and adapt to this as we all are ‘stuck in our ways.

The appeal of us constantly forming and dissolving project teams where far more lateral organization-wide communications take place is a set of real challenges but so highly prized and will be of increasing value.

Everything seems to be flowing faster and we do have to respond

We are seeing far more fluidity in relationships where the knowledge is flowing within, across and between organizations. The boundaries are blurring, that increasing fuzziness needs shifting our style of decision-making and solution finding.

There is also this growing sense that innovation knowledge is endless, unrelenting in its flow into us, if we care to open ourselves up to it. It never stops but simply shifts from one stage to another, hopping from one idea to another, requiring us to loop back to be re-evaluated and think the implications through.

We are increasingly recognizing that the old linear processes are not working, the need for fast results gets stacked up in this type of process. Our reaction times need speeding up, our learning and adjusting is a constant, all along the pipeline development process and requires a higher level of fluidness to deal with it. We have to adjust to this increasing demand forced upon us.

We are still struggling with the dominant linear logic of much of what we do in organizations, and often this constrains innovation, restricts us to provide radically different business models and limits our abilities to change fast enough. We are learning to be far more adaptive in our learning but this is constantly meeting up with resistance of this linear logic.

There is this nagging feeling of relentless destruction or disturbance, the very opposite of the stable equilibrium we seemed to enjoy in the past. Those that become capable of managing the constant change and disequilibrium will thrive.

We must face this paradox of fluidity and stability.

Those growing conditions of uncertainty and complexity also need boundary building, identity formation and problem solving architectures that are stable and can provide replication of essential actions or activities. We need to seek out and maintain yet constantly challenge to “undo” and redesign.

So can we find competencies that would help embed a more fluid way of working?

We need to look for or deliberately design into our thinking the following:

We are all becoming far more digital, fluid and fast, we are absorbing and responding at faster rates and we are adapting to a constant, multifaceted world of connections, systems and knowledge that need piecing together, un-stitching and re-stiching to combine up into different ‘wholes’ and needs to solve specific issues and challenges. So what is needed?

• To get there we need to be far more nimble, we need to learn navigation skills far more, we are increasingly assignment driven, less exploratory in many things, and technology is taking on this role.

• We need to become increasing agile, iterative, be experimenting, and constantly determined to execute to drive our results and value-add.

• We need to seek empowerment, focus on delivery and collaboration outcomes far more resolutely.

• We need to grasp the make-up of value creation and why innovation is becoming new business models in its potential.

• We need to establish within ourselves and the working environment we work within, this sound conflict resolution pathway and strive for authenticity and trust within the ways we operate.

• Lastly here, a real willingness to seek out diversity, to be visible, and be wanting to have this constant entry and exit to project and challenges to drive our personal satisfaction and worth up.

Finally, we should examine characteristics or factors that create barriers for fluidity

Our over reliance on past models – when the near future closely resembles the recent past, relying on existing models to determine appropriate actions and investments is rational.  Instead companies must assess the amount of change and to recognize the need to ‘let go’ to reduce the reliance on existing models that are constraining future performance in a fluid world.

Change proficiency/capability – in most companies, people receive training and develop skills based on their specific roles and responsibilities, but rarely develop skills that actively encourage, enable or accelerate change without it being instigated form a higher level. We cannot expect companies and cultures to change frequently and capably if people don’t have the skills, capabilities or proficiency to change effectively and be empowered with the mandate to investigate and recommend.

Preferences for stability over change – people, organizations and cultures prefer stability to change. Change is uncertain and demands new learning and new expertise, while stability reinforces existing knowledge and skills. Over time, the desire for stability leads to inertia and active resistance to change. Companies must create a preference for more change, reducing inertia and building change capabilities. That “making change constant” needs enactment.

Focus on short-term profits rather than longer term viability – Since change is uncertain and distracts from efficient day-to-day operations, and there is an ever-increasing focus on short-term profitability, change always takes a back seat to efficient operations and short-term profits. Longer term viability suffers because of an over reliance on an increasingly out of date business model, infrequent innovation and a lack of change capacity. This shift in corporate mind-set and shareholder need is becoming an imperative to finally change. It is stopping long-term growth, mortgaging our futures.

In summary

We need to relentlessly challenge and push out our own boundaries and knowledge and adapt these to be designed to exploit constantly. We need to be increasingly fluid in how we ‘go about this.’

We need a new mantra of “adapting, exploring and simply responding to the need seen” in rapidly changing markets and across our customer base – past, present and future and within ourselves, on how to cope with this increasing need for agility and this fluidity we all need today.

The post Achieving a Level of Fluidity in Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The opening post is entitled “the interplay surrounding innovation”. Please take a read

Our opening argument revolves around the recognition of change as part of an interplay

We argue that we are failing to manage the different and multiple interplays that are constantly taking place when innovation occurs. We are often ignoring them and failing to extract the best or optimal value out of the innovation we are introducing. The change effect is often being ignored.

You can download this whitepaper on this site within my newly created “Insights and Thinking” tab on this site.

In this paper we discuss the dynamics and focuses of its impact on all three constituents involved when innovation occurs; of the customer, the market or industry itself and the innovator itself. We used the “lens” of the three horizon model to demonstrate and frame the interplay between innovation, business models and change.

We are providing a series of posts on this through Innovation Excellence in the coming weeks which build from and on this White Paper. We both feel this has far more to explore in practices, frameworks and thinking and we hope you share this view, as it builds.

We initially chose change over transformation.

Clearly the emphasis is to encourage transformation to meet the unrelenting disruptions going on all around us makes sense. I certainly believe we have to become far more comfortable with change, before we attempt anything transformational and that in itself is not easy at all.

We seem hard-wired to resist change until we are forced to accept it and that is a real pity and loss within ourselves. We need to see a change in different ways, through the lens of discovery and learning, and then we transform.

Change always feels painful.

Change is notoriously hard to achieve both within ourselves and especially in organizations. The reality is we want to resist change, it makes us feel uncomfortable, often raising the fear of the unknown. We form habits that we find hard to shake free of.

Often we invested a fair amount of time in learning, it then becomes even tougher to start unlearning but that is what we must do, unlearn, to then open up our minds to relearn. We worry about are we losing something of value, is the change going to feel better or just increases our insecurity even further.

The level of failed change or transformations undertaken has been put at somewhere between 70 to 80% in falling short on the initial targets or aspirations that drove change. The value generated from change often falls below the expectancies visualized when the organization embarked on the change program. So why do we put ourselves through this level of pain, disruption, uncertainty and potential risk of failure?

We do get caught up in interchanging change and transformation and believe it is the same.

It is not! In my research on change, I altered my own understanding with a range of thinking I explored.

Change tends to focus on making the existing system better.
You use this as your framing point and the level of efficiencies and improving effectiveness is judged as the success or not of the end result.

You actually are ending up with a reconditioned model of your past as you have mainly dealt within the boundaries and constraints to make this (often) well-defined shift in the way things have worked.

Transformation is a different matter. You are attempting something far more radical and disruptive.

It is aiming to reinvent the organization, and significantly challenge and change the practices that are in place. It places far more at a higher risk as it is more unpredictable, iterative and often a series of experiments to learn and adapt. It often feels you are entering the unknown as it can become a real process of discovery, experimentation and adjusting execution.

Transformation is far more dynamic and far-reaching. It is often looking to design for the future as you release the shackles of the past, bound up in existing processes, behaviours and thinking. You are looking to invest far more as you learn, clearly more radical new business models would have this ‘transformational’ effect.

Both change and transformation need to deeply understand the “as is” and those committing to make a change or transformation need to share the goals and understand the reasons for undergoing such a conversion from the existing state to a different one. There are considerable risks associated with both.

What might help flip the odds?

I would argue that most change or transformation initiatives attempted are far to piecemeal, they address only certain known parts and fail to address the ‘whole’ that is actually affected by the change.

Any change program needs a far more holistic approach than often we give this, we get caught up in the project management, we focus too much on one side of the change equation and either get caught up in the people side or favour the structural side of processes and functional design.

Undergoing any change required dramatically rethinking the reasons for this, the effects this will seem to have on the operating and business model. Will the effort yield a more positive result?

We are facing unprecedented disruption

Externally we are seeing increased volatility, complexity in regulations, the impact of geopolitics, constant pressures in public spending and shifts in demand, the digital disruptions and social media influences forcing a greater need to dialogue with stakeholders, customers and new entities and finally, our employee base is questioning and demanding in unprecedented ways.

All of these are having a significant impact on our organizations and they have not responded and are often stuck in those past times where these forces of real change were simply not built into the system.

Equally most organizations are losing any significant competitive advantage as the competition has intensified, the design and adaptability of others to challenge the existing incumbent is being made easier through the internet, reducing global barriers and high level of mobility, operating often at much lower operating costs, free from legacy.

The final imperative for change comes from our present poor levels of growth and innovation.

Innovation requires managing differently, to function and yield those higher results we would like and this becomes part of the dilemma within organizations. Yet innovation is also badly constrained because change is not considered as having this symbiotic relationship with innovation.

Innovation being designed and produced are mostly new to the world (or should be) and these confront customers, markets and the innovator themselves in making change.

The higher the scope of impact of innovation the more we do need to address change yet we can’t often grasp the nature and amount of change that the innovation unleashes. We should think about innovation and change together.

This is where Jeffrey and I are focusing our thinking at present

Change is all around us as a constant-  we need to simply get used to it
We can’t escape change; we can’t transform ourselves without a clear holistic model of its impact across the whole organization.

Change and transformation require us to be dynamic, constantly exploring, adapting and learning, it cannot be refrozen as was the thinking of the past. Nothing is stable; we need to build it as fluid, agile and constantly adapting through our learning.

We need to generate a far more highly dynamic environment, one where we are constantly being challenged and seeking out answers through discovery, experimentation and constant execution.

We need to become excited about change, each of us becoming innovation change leaders.

Change today is about building a change capacity that is constantly evolving.

We need to see change as pursuing new opportunities, exploring different horizons and thinking. We need to become far more energized in trying out new things, in experimenting or prototyping, to learn and advance.

We must retool ourselves as change not only leads to transformation but it will allow us to explore all the interplays we can find within and around innovation and those can lead to great things.

To obtain the White Paper you can go to my insights-thinking page, where you can download or view the paper “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change”

The post The ongoing challenge is making change our constant first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In the past twelve months or even more, I think there have been some exceptional reports and thinking coming out of Deliotte’s group   on business issues

These have been from their dedicated practice centers, their University Press and the Deliotte Consulting LLP, mainly from the US practice.

I would regard their thought leadership as close to the top or even at the very top of any of the big consulting firms.

I’ve certainly gained some richer understanding as I am sure many others have and for me Deloitte deserve significant praise for investing in their thought leadership thinking.
I have been reading their interesting views on different aspects of business redesign through their varied and detailed reports that have included: “Work environment redesign”, “Employee engagement”, “Board practices”, “Developing effective governance”, “Integrated reporting for M&A’s”, “Field guides to practical IT, “Tech fusion for CIO’s” and recently a broad report around “Business Ecosystems”.

I’ve always followed closely the Deliotte’s Center for the Edge on their pioneering work coming from the likes of John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Tamara Samoylova and Duleesha Kulasooriya and all their research team.

They really do push the boundaries and thinking to prompt us all.

Here I just wanted to firstly publically acknowledge all this great work but to pick up on one part of a report, of 150 pages, that suggests the “CIO as chief integration officer”. It pushes the CIO role into a far more prominent role, which makes total sense.

The CIO needs to become the Chief Integration Officer.

As they rightly point out in the Deloitte Tech Trends 2015 report, as technology continues to transform existing businesses and their business models, the CIO is evolving rapidly into a key for integrating these significant changes occurring into the core of the business mission.

As the report suggests the CIO can not only be the connective tissue but the driving force of intersecting” all that is needed to work in this connected world.

Business strategy and technology cannot be separated, they need to be constantly harnessed and balanced as never before, in feasibility, resolving complexity and managing all the risks associated with the changes unfolding, leveraging all the potential of the existing with designing and exploiting the disruptive aspects coming daily at a business.

The level of collaboration and cooperation between all C-Level executives to the CIO is absolutely essential to respond in dramatically different ways than the past, it needs to radically be seen as a collaborative partnership not in adversarial ways, as often in the past.. IT has such a transformation role to play but it has to firstly ‘transform’ itself.

Overcoming political resistance and organizational inertia is critical for the CIO, starting with his own team

The following was a shortened checklist of suggestions offered for the changes that are needed to be brought into the CIO’s thinking, to dramatically alter the dynamics and perceptions of his role and contribution and that of the central technology group, from initally getting their house in order and then being recognized as critical to shaping the business future:

* Work more like a venture capitalist by adopting a portfolio management approach.

* Provide visibility into the IT “balance sheet” for an understanding the assets and how they align to strategic priorities in projects, hardware and software, data, contracts, vendors and partners.

* Organize assets to address business priorities by striving for operational excellence by mastering that capability by delivering on what is needed and then that moves the needle to earn the right to help shape the business transformation.

* Focus on flexibility and speed to advance agility, responsiveness, being adaptive in experimentation and innovation.

Then link the potential of tomorrow to the realities of today in the following suggested ways:

• Create a deliberate mechanism for scanning and experimentation
• Rapidly vetting and prototyping new ideas and optimizing for return on assets.
• Build a culture within the team and those associates that encourages failure by learning
• Think big, start small, learn and leverage fast and then scale quickly
• Collaborate to solve tough business problems
• Tapping into diverse thinking, assets and entities
• Actively engage with business peers to influence their view of the CIO role
• Focus on delivering on the promise of service predictability, reliability and efficiency’ as and when’
• Serve as the connective tissue to all things technology, linking the various initiatives
• Advocating platforms instead of point solutions, keeping adaptive and flexible
• Design continuously the architecture and its integration in optimal ways.
• Deliver ‘prime time’ to the business units the security, scalability and reliability.

Grabbing the present and future opportunities that technology is delivering

The role of the CIO and the IT organization under him or the designated person needs to rapidly change from those past perceptions of being remote and restricting the level of change that was required by the business unit to just do their job as expected.

I don’t think the suggested change list outlined above is bad for the incumbent CIO to think through and decide how they are going to change and be seen as embracing their own change.

The ownership of a digital strategy is somewhere where the CIO can be and often is accountable for and needs to show a decisive position on that embraces all the present and future business needs.

It’s design touches increasingly on every corner of the organization, increasingly in mission-critical ways and its capability to deliver on time, in the right way is absolutely essential.

Technology needs to be elevated from personal, sometimes entrenched positions, into a comprehensive plan, recognized for its grasp, perception, understanding and knowledge of what the business requires.

The managing of this really vital strategic asset, one of establishing efficient operations that can effectively do their job but equally lay in the foundations for the organization to respond to breaking and planned opportunities to grow the business effectively, as and when required is no easy task, it needs deep understanding and be conducted in a highly collaborative environment.

It is the CIO who needs to step up and take on this challenge as the chief integration officer but he needs his colleagues to see he has at his disposal the tools, structures, solutions and architecture to deliver on the promise.

The friction of the past has to be put well-behind all, as the organizations future is even more at stake than ever. Deloitte suggests in this report that: It is for the CIO to firstly, put his internal technology house in order, then really leverage the advances in science and emerging technologies, to drive innovation as the growth enabler and finally, re-imagine their own roles to focus less on technology management and more on the total business strategy for what is needed.

Solving the moment, delivering the future

There has never been a more defining time for the CIO to step up and fundamentally deliver on the promise of technology, by connecting an organization and aligning its parts into a cohesive whole.

One that leverages ‘all things’ available to take the business forward in strategically valuable ways as well as operationally effective ones, to grow its sustaining value in how it functions, responds and adapts in our rapidly changing and challenging world.

The post The challenge for the CIO is the fusion of business and IT. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Can these be valuable and be associated to the portfolio situation within an organization’s need, in seeking different viewpoints of product or service change?

Opening up our thinking to change can drive our business offerings very differently.

Often within these drivers, we do need to explore what is the underlying force behind them, it allows us to pause and think. As you think through what these different change drivers on what it might mean to extend your new product or service developments, these can prompt radically different and imaginative solutions to consider..

Using the different drivers can give you new insights into your innovation activities plus also can prompt significant changes to freshen up your innovation portfolio.

They are certainly a good place to start to get the creative juices flowing even more.

It is worth constantly working around different drivers of innovation change.

Periodically I would suggest you work through each of these and see if this changes your thinking or approach and you can then see a different angle or opportunity that might emerge that changes the thinking.

So let me share my opening nine identified drivers for innovation change:• Emotional Drivers – as we learn, dream, create and get into a ‘free’ spirit, it often opens up our thinking. I sometimes associate heroes and champions or relate to recognized mentors and facilitators and look for what makes the emotional connection, then I ask: “can I use this or be inspired by them” to drive something within my innovation activities or not? What triggers different sentiments, warmth, excitement or feeling?

• Social Drivers – The more we seek interactions, they become (or should become) meaningful and enduring. These connections allow us to think and relate, deepen the association.

As we also seek out others’ accomplishments, can this trigger ideas, principles or actions that we can apply in what we are doing. What can we offer that meets different desires, and aspirations, prompts dialogues and might reflect for instance, a more caring and sharing viewpoint. Drivers that make us more socially relevant and connected.

• Technology Drivers – These tend to be better leveraged and understood, in collaborative methods and techniques, ones where we can demonstrate, and connect the physical and virtual world, that moves us to better, clearer, even faster transactions. Technology is a really powerful enabler of innovation if you tune into the four fast-moving disruptive forces of social, mobile, cloud and analytics that are all driven by an explosion of data and fuelling a new era of innovation for many.

Imagine if you can harness technologies application and ‘raw’ power, there becomes a higher chance of finding the needle of useful innovation insights that lie within in the binary haystack. As you learn to analyse and sort these technology drivers, can give you new insights into different trends, patterns and needs, that might even radically alter the meaning within your business and how and what you offer, with even new business models emerging from the evaluations.

• Environment Drivers – these become critical. The more we encourage the right environment the more we create a culture that others can relate to. A climate that encourages, and underlines the determination of bringing in diversity, collaborative and distinctly different behavioural patterns that encourage even more to join in, relate and participate in generating ideas and solutions. By providing a welcoming environment you can drive growing awareness, trust and shared understanding that builds a very powerful set of innovation drivers if the Environment thinking is right and tuned in to the world of what needs to be reflected within your products and services..

• Measurement Drivers – We are all familiar with the classic input, process, outputs and outcomes we strive to find measures for, good or bad. I tend to look for measurement in the knowledge that is being driven through an organization in its absorptive capacities of accessing, anchoring and eventual diffusion. If we measure actual utilization or assimilation then can we explore these in deeper ways to draw out the aspects that make up both tacit and explicit outcomes.

We also need to keep focused on time-related activities, speed of innovation to market as well as project deliverables and make different connections on what this might possibly mean. Measures can drive change if they are well thought through and connected, both to the business need and more importantly, to the individual’s own understanding of its relevancy. Make your measurements more dynamic, less static by ‘seeing them differently’

• Marketplace Drivers – Today it is all about speed and pace, accessing the changing conditions and pressures coming from the marketplace. The a constant need in understanding the rate of change dynamics to work out your fit in new innovation offerings.

We need to become far more tuned into pattern recognition, contexts of the forces at work. We need to appreciate the rivalry and competitive hunger. Above all it is figuring out the customer’s unmet needs and non-stated ones, so all these market force complexities can be worked through in your mind and ongoing evaluations.

Tuning in to the market forces gives an abundance of new thinking to work into your products and services.

• Design Drivers – approaching issues and challenges with more of a design thinking hat can help identify a number of hidden drivers. The more we experience and experiment, the more we tune into the power of stories, narratives and experiences. This heightens our awareness the more we practice looking ahead.

Equally looking back it can reveal much more in our designs and what made up our thinking (at that time). Fashions and traditions, how we work today, how we worked in the past – and how different in the future – will influence much in our innovative thinking. We need to open up to experiences far more.

We need to look for improving flows and reducing barriers, making different combinations of potential richness and innovation promise, we need to focus on function and form far more, that more human-centred need and always look for improving the degrees of freedom and ease of purchase. For example, working towards the ‘one-click away’ concept for our customers in making their transactions easier.

• Rational Drivers – Organizations survive by their rational drivers, be this strategic architecture, management systems and innovation processes. Those processes and procedures are where you are always looking to achieve and drive execution and results through improving productivity and creativity as well as working constantly at clarifying the interventions, controls and monitoring.

The rational drivers, if well set up, can make such a difference to being ‘in control of all the innovation activities or not and should constantly be challenged for redundancy or improving upon. Innovation Governance is a classic place for constantly working through the rational drivers and keeping faith in the decisions made and guidance given.

Having a rational opinion within your team has great value in keeping random thoughts more ‘grounded’ to the task at hand.

• Intelligence Drivers – The whole focus is on knowledge generation and recognition, in awareness, competencies needed and seeking diversity of interpretation.

The underlying collection of intellectual capital, our intangible source, needs to keep feeding in the knowledge stock to allow ideas, concepts and outcomes to flow. Ones that drive to transform intelligence into tangible outcomes are so important to yield fresh value and lead to improved commercial outcomes.

Sadly it is often under-appreciated and not allowed ‘it’s’ right amount of digesting time to allow all the connections to be made to piece together something completely different and potentially valuable in new innovations. Listening to different people’s views values intelligence.

Looking around these drivers of change can yield very different thinking, prompt different actions and produce different innovation results. Get your team to discuss each of these change drivers to unearth new innovation possibilities.

Why not go and give these a ‘team test drive’ in exploring, focusing on each of these individually. Ask what can they do to alter your current thinking on your approach to your products and services.

By getting into this regular habit of working around these different drivers of change will keep your innovation engine in much better shape, more in-tune to accelerate away with better innovation outcomes. These can be designed to stimulate and really trigger the imaginations, often with the result of you making some unexpected connections.

Finding new spaces that differentiate your product or service offerings as radically differently perhaps, that improve on the ones that are presently within your existing portfolio and development process. The end result is a significant improvement in both the quality as most important and also the number of your options, so new concepts can emerge from this exploration of the different drivers of change.

Perhaps you just even simply ‘drive away’ leaving everyone else just watching you pull away in new competitive ways, with you knowing where and why you are making real change within your innovation activities and what prompted this. Recognizing the need for different innovation evolution is a big part of the ongoing battle we are all needing to discover..

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and has been significantly revised. With their permission, I have republished this original concept by deepening the thinking on this within this post here.

I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Exploring the Drivers of Innovation Change first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Do I throw myself off the building or decide to listen a little longer? It really is forcing me to think.

Today it seems whenever I pick up a business book each chapter has a section on it.

Also, I seem not to be able to not fall over all the articles extolling its virtues, I mindlessly “Google it” and you can see your whole life flash before you, if you decided to investigate this seriously.

What am I talking about? 

Well, nothing other than Design Thinking. I know, most of you are so heavily into this you feel you might as well ‘flip’ over to the next article but are you, really?

Design thinking is a mindset

If we believe we can make a difference and even have gone that one step further, many never seem to get there, where we have an intentional process to get us to new relevant solutions that do actually create a positive impact. Then we are getting closer to that ‘magic point’ of transforming ourselves and those complex challenges, into opportunities to be designed and developed to make that difference. Now that would not be such a bad place to be.

Someone has talked me off the ledge, I give in and I want that embracing mindset

• One that allows me to be human-centred where empathy and understanding of others’ needs take precedence.
• One that allows me to be even more collaborative, where I can link my (great) mind with the views of others, those who can bring multiple perspectives into my own thinking.
• A place where optimistic thinking prevails, where you chase for solutions that overcome multiple constraints and the work becomes an enjoyable process.
• Finally, somewhere where it is allowed that you become ’experimental’, given permission to fail and learn from your mistakes. Why? Because you become resilient, you bounce back with different ideas, you seek out important feedback on them, and then you learn to iterate even better than before.

You are a work-in-progress of that forward momentum. You become an experimenter and this ‘magic pill’ called design thinking is all about learning by doing. You begin to believe and gain new confidence that new, better things ARE possible and you can make them happen. That gives you real optimism.

So I’ve come off the ledge, have you?

What will design thinking get you? The chance to be more involved in collaboration, one that permits me to be more creative to boost my confidence and where I can learn new ways to engage with others in a defined process and a process that will help me get unstuck, sounds like it is more fun than where I have been. Maybe somewhere near you, there is a Design Thinking AA group all chanting “one day at a time”.

So what does this Design Thinking process look like?

(Image source: IDEO)

So we need to start learning how to put this design thinking into more everyday practice

Design thinking really is ‘design doing’ or ‘design making’ than simply just thinking. It leads to the upfront framing before solutions are explored. The framing and solutions need to be separated. The pleasure of design thinking is it’s an iterative process, it wants you to experiment, build prototypes to develop your knowledge, go out and test them, talk about them and progressively validate the concept.

It brings ambiguity into a sharper understanding that eventually moves from all the divergence that initially surrounded it, into a growing convergence. It allows you to move from a concept or initial idea, through a number of working hypotheses, eventually into a final product, business model or service, that is not just new to the world but seen as valuable and an improvement on the existing solutions.

The great thing about design thinking: it’s evolving itself
We are relating design thinking to a great set of tools that can help identify and execute opportunities for growth and innovation. Darden Business School has been leading from the front in this, alongside Ideo and if we just consider ten of these, can you within your organization feel comfortable that you are actually applying these in your innovation practices?

These are:

• 1) Visualization
• 2) Journey mapping
• 3) Value Chain analysis
• 4) Mind Mapping
• 5) Rapid concept development
• 6) Assumption testing
• 7) Prototyping
• 8) Customer co-creation
• 9) Learning launches and finally
• 10) Storytelling

How many of these practices are you building into your innovation process to explore and exploit?

I’m very much into Divergent and Convergent thinking
You need both to explore and exploit the multiple possible solutions.

Divergent thinking is the ability and opportunity to offer different, unique or variant ideas adherent to one theme, while convergent thinking is the (eventual) ability to find the ‘correct’ solution to the given problem. You encourage and ideate many solutions, both possible and impossible, and then use convergent thinking to move towards a realizable resolution or solution.

I use this ‘divergent and convergent’ structure for many of my workshops, it allows for broader engagement and involvement and that eventual drawing together from this process. Once or twice you have to be nimble on your feet to move from one to the other but the discipline comes from timing these as shared spaces.

The focus becomes one on Validity

Seeking valid answers is the crux of Design Thinking. The process really is a “knowledge funnel” according to Roger Martin, ex Dean of Rotman School of Management. You keep ‘driving’ towards this eventual ‘validity’ by encouraging a future-oriented view. To think in the ‘future’ we do need to think differently, as most of our minds are caught up in the here and now and that tends to keep us locked in the status quo.

We need to design in a different mindset. Envisaging a future state is not easy, it requires observation, imagination and potential for configuration. We need to seek out patterns; we need to keep re-framing our thinking. Design thinking becomes an essential part of that set of abilities.

So to be relevant, you need design principles

(Image source: IDEO)

If we think about inspiration, ideation and implementation we already lift ourselves out of our everyday. What does it take to seek out and strengthen those higher-impact connections and relationships? What does it take to move beyond the existing and strive to define some more high-impact challenges, then how do we amplify the potential impact?

We need principles, and design thinking can allow you to follow a clear pathway to the realization of better innovation. Can you feel it is beginning to surround you too?

Jump but this time jump into design thinking, it might help you turn your ideas into those things that can really have an impact on your future and your organization.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.