Firstly please forget best practice, this is a mistake for you in a rapidly changing world

The trouble with best practice is you are looking at someone else’s practices and these are highly individual, made up of different groups of methodologies, processes, rules, theories, values and concepts. These together have provided that specific company a level of success that others – mostly competitors – begin to notice and just attempt to copy.

No, there is no such thing as best practices, only your own distinct practices, specific to your own environment, history and needs, you can’t simply pick up and plug and play, as one organization’s initiative is never the same set of conditions or positioning that others can simply copy.

We desire the “one-size fits all” as a comfort blanket. Many consultants love this request, as they do not need to apply the real skills of discernment, subject matter expertise and the difficult challenge of peeling away a client’s practice to understand how they can rebuild them to become unique, into a leading practice that cannot be copied. Here lie a true competitive component and so many organizations seek to apply someone else’s practice, so they can end up as “same” practice.

Moving from “Best Practice” to “Next Practice”

The digital transformation that is underway is becoming a very uncomfortable place. We are all presently learning a new practice. The past best practices are now a very poor playbook for the future digital connected world. We need to ditch much of the endeavors that make up a legacy of past practice, and think forward, to which the term next practice becomes the learning spot.

Finding your best practice is extremely tough, it is often a “blind” adoption as you never fully appreciate how one company arrived at this point, whatever is claimed. It is far better that you quickly benchmark assorted practices across yours and also different industries and then stop and reflect. You need to invest a lot in researching, seeking out understanding, and then experimenting with your own needs to develop your emerging practices for digital transformation, believe me.

Just take a look at the recent report I compiled on digital transformation.

This is a meta report I have written and was released this last week, on the recent developments in digital transformation. It offers a selection of key visuals and overviews from 14 reports, which in turn were shortlisted from an original data set of 140 reports on the topic, published over the course of the last years. The intention of this report is to provide data for orientation for people dealing with this difficult topic.

The report should give you an opportunity to find connecting points in the understanding of digital transformation. The link provided below takes you to an access sign up page. Do please note the statement “Just good stuff, no spam, unsubscribe anytime” to give you assurance the intention is to inform and offer useful content, they want to track the level of interest in the report. 

http://i.hypeinnovation.com/exploring-digital-transformation

I do encourage you to take the time and download the report, it should offer a good oversight and value into your own understanding of digital transformation but let’s get back to your next practice.

Forget the past, much of our roots need digging up and discarding.

No one can maintain the past, much of our systems are rooted in the 20^th century, in markets that were predictable and where supply and demand were simply managed to seek out the status quo.

We are facing such an unprecedented change and technology is re-writing the rule book in everything we are going to do. Many have argued it is a foundational shift and today we are struggling to articulate or codify the shifts. We seem to be moving from the world of complicated into the complex. It is hitting us in multiple ways, in scale, in speed, and in scope, across the whole organization. Technology and digital are changing the business dimensions significantly.

We are moving from “pre-connectivity” to “post-connectivity

In this report I have been compiling writing on the topic of Digital Transformation, I have been attempting to find these emerging and next practices. It has been a very, very deep dive into this subject and it is full of different views, approaches, suggestions and recommendations. In the report due out in the next few weeks I have attempted to ‘pick out’ those practices that take you towards a new thinking for digital transformation.

What I have not included in the report are these two wonderful paradigm shifts we need to take to grasp digital transformation. I believe these should stand apart as they form the new ‘common language’ we need to apply to move into a digital transformation.

It is the critical shift from best (past) practice into next (new) practice

The first contribution is from a short article I came across in my research written for information-age by Carl Bate, managing partner, digital strategy and transformation, Atos

http://www.information-age.com/digital-transformation-are-you-living-and-breathing-next-practice-or-best-practice-123458572/

This emerging shift in leadership techniques, from best to next practice, from pre-connectivity to post-connectivity, are shown here:

The practices of ‘best’ on the left-hand side are the very practices that have fostered industrialization and led to global connectivity.

The irony is that these practices do not naturally foster external and connected views, which are essential to working in the connected world that the best practices have helped create.

The second contribution into thinking next practice comes from a really promising book by David L Rogers called “the Digital Transformation Playbook”, recently published in April 2016, and he is offering a superb list of changes to consider as we move from the Analog to the Digital Era.

The Author offers a view on how digital forces are reshaping five key domains of strategy—customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. These five domains describe the landscape of digital transformation for business today.

Many of the fundamental assumptions are outdated and he is suggesting we move from the Analog to Digital era, with his chapters in the book to work through these. This I think is such “next practice” thinking to get us in the digital era mind-set.

David Rogers sums up the change we are all facing from digital transformation

“We live in what is commonly referred to as a digital age. An overlapping ecosystem of digital technologies —each one building on those before, and catalyzing those to come—is transforming not only our personal and communal lives but the dynamics of business for organizations of every size and in every industry.

Digital technologies are transforming not just one aspect of business management, but virtually every aspect. They are rewriting the rules of customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. Responding to this change requires not just a piecemeal approach, but a total integrated effort—a process of holistic digital transformation within the firm.”

The key is to look forward and recognize past best practices are just not relevant today. We need to look forward and seek out those “next practices” that are emerging and explore them for what they mean for us, not for others. They are, or will become the (golden) keys to unlock the future common language of digital transformation, something we all are needing to learn.

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their agreement, I have added this to my own site.

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The post Please forget best practice, it is all about next practice first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Is this tapping into the increasing desire to be part of creating something new, to grab back the engagement needed, that sense of identity and a growing sense of ownership?

Large organisations sense they are missing out on radically different business opportunities and cast their envious eyes towards the young start-ups, not just coming up with original ideas to solve existing problems and pent-up needs, but seeing the work as potentially disruptive to those managing in the existing space.

This start-up and entrepreneurial spirit are making many senior executives nervous and they want to find ways to harness this within their own organisations, and thus the intrapreneurial movement has been born and is growing fast.

It is tapping into an internal need for everyone involved, to innovate in different and more radical ways. Partly we are seeing a restless younger workforce who want to break out of restricting and confining jobs. They want to find more meaningful ways to contribute, to engage, to find ways where they can be impactful, not just in their careers but in making something happen, that is different and better than the existing.

Driving impact, delivering to scale

Intrapreneurs within large organisations can tap into the amazing ability to drive impact and deliver scale. Starting up a business from scratch is really tough but the high level of failures run at nearly 90% and to emerge from spending 24 x 7 for two or three years may have enormous experience and learning, but it can totally fail in delivering this urge for impact and contribution.

Being part of a larger organisation operating in this intrapreneurial role takes away some of the heavy issues faced by start-ups but replaces these with an equally onerous set of tasks.

Equally beside this younger generational need, those a little older turn to their legacy and sometimes decades of work within their organisation to want to attempt to change part of the culture and deliver some of the ideas that have been ‘frustrating them’ over time.

For the organisation, it is recognising that it has the chance to unleash the talent that lies within. If they can create an environment for some to have a higher level of autonomy, of being creative and getting this clearer sense of meaning, it can help invigorate and renew much that large organizations grapple with daily – the stifling of initiatives, seemingly slow-moving cultures and not seizing on all the opportunities that the market and customers are looking for.

The challenge is in the structure and format and character of those Intrapreneurs

There is no single way to do intrapreneurship. It needs a significant amount of attention, commitment and determination. Each design perhaps is unique to fit individual circumstances.

From the organisations point of view, they need to set up a clear, distinct, more than likely separate business practice that liberates people to build upon their emerging entrepreneurial personalities. They need to build the walls and fences so as to protect the ideas, support the work in progress, nurture the people involved and allow for a higher level of patience to see a return coming ‘down the line’.

The individuals wanting to take on this intrapreneurial role need to think through how to serve the interests of the organization in different ways that break with the existing and normal, learn to exploit and explore all the inner relationships to advance their work and learn to adapt constantly as they go, as they adjust to failure and building upon a series of successes.

The antibodies that lie within any organisation are waiting. Those that fear change and those that feel threatened, jealous or protective of their turf being trampled on. The ones who will want to frustrate, exhaust and determine a pathway towards project death by any means are a constant threat. Intrapreneurs and management alike need to be utterly vigilant in attacking these antibodies if they really see value in promoting this intrapreneurial culture.

The mountains that are needed to be climbed to unleash that Intrapreneur spirit

It all starts with belief, pure and simple. A belief that having Intrapreneurs working within organisations will make a difference in the innovation work needed, and then identifying and encouraging those able to take this task on. Somewhere in this conviction, you can see ideas that can be translated into successful outcomes by unleashing this intrapreneurial spirit. These ideas need to be bigger ideas, perhaps radically different, not the everyday stuff where the organisation should have already set up an innovation process to ‘grind’ these through to successful outcomes.

This needs to send a powerful signal that the official licence to change has been granted, and better support for innovation and growth can partly come from deploying Intrapreneurs. It announces this as a parting of the ways from just the “busyness of business as usual” by exploring new ways to seek out the innovation that can be different but clearly, needs to be managed differently.

So what is different and what does that mean to whom?

Intrapreneurship has to be established as a specific system that can be set up and provided to those wanting to take on a different challenge. It needs to become a solid part of the strategy for innovation otherwise it is quickly seen as ‘just another experiment.’ This would fail to attract the right type of person; it signals a lack of commitment, so those budding Intrapreneurs stay hidden in the woodwork or looking to leave, so as to break free to pursue their personal goals and dreams, even taking away the emerging blueprint to disrupt the very firm that has given them this understanding.

There are many enablers to make this transition happen. The most critical are deep management support, creating a culture for entrepreneurship to thrive and knowing the type of people that can make this happen. The quality of any ideas, the mandate that goes with that idea and the funding and milestones needed to be in place and the clarity of failure and what that means. Each of these becomes a critical enabler to make this concept work.

So then we need to consider values, personalities and the operating conditions.

Firstly not everyone can simply become an intrapreneur you have to possess a certain resilience and toughness. They need high levels of tenacity, this mental toughness and commercial zeal to drive through the concept they are working upon. The optimism, staying ready to adapt, be flexible but also the underlying ‘steel’ to be assertive, creative and determined to push something through, to overcome the many barriers and resistance that comes with exploring more radical innovation.

They must continually make the business case, negotiate and navigate around the system to achieve their ends and that often requires a deep knowledge of the many ‘ins and outs’.

They need to forge their business community, building the identity with what they are undertaking, reaching out to the network both within and outside the organisation. They need to unpick and unlock resources that bring additional ‘scarce’ skills to help, and just fostering this underlying culture of resilience needed both personally and within the project management.

These attributes need nurturing and supporting and this is where a clear sponsor comes in. This person needs to provide ‘air cover’, needs to help the intrepreneur to navigate through the obstacles thrown up within the parent organisation and ensure there is always a high level of trust as the decisions and progress are being made. It becomes more reliant on relationships, not processes being put into place. The job and the relationships need constant engagement.

The shared belief is based on two essential points; as innovation is a discovery process the people involved in finding the solutions are as equal to the ideas they are pursuing. It is toughest at times of setback or failure; it is being agile enough to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty and making a change, even when change is painful. It is about dealing with measured risk and returns.

So to intrapreneurially tango you have to have a clear mandate

1. To ensure the team has degrees of freedom to create, design and innovate
2. The mandate that they can question and challenge the existing mould to achieve success
3. Knowing the break points to being commercially courageous against being foolhardy, to know the confines of risk but the chance to grab a real opportunity
4. To find the ways to keep all involved energised, incentivised and focused on the prize, the opportunities and the contribution to the goals
5. To keep informing, to make the work transparent and open for others to contribute, help and support.
6. Knowing the difference between timely updates and keeping the head down just that little longer as the breakthrough ‘ahh’ is just around the corner
7. Design in consciously the methods and ways the organisation sees’s the value and the alignment
8. Be constantly aware that performance will be judged, more than likely under a harsher spotlight than for others and recognise what you are working on is commercially critical and decisions will often be based on pragmatic, rather than opportunist or idealistic criteria. Live with it as part and parcel of the job.
9. Consciously stay out of the everyday stream, even challenge if this should go through a typical ‘stage gate’ process as it is really hard for most to understand what makes up a great idea and that it is not a linear process but an iterative one, full of loops, failures, experimentations and revalidating and retesting.
10. Make sure the governance is highly dynamic and agile, trading off the progress of insights, learning, discovery and experimentation in a journey that recognises iterative and flexible decision making that favours adaptation and informing. Making sure there is a right to make mistakes as long as people learn from them and they were contained within the confines of the risk profile.

Intrapreneurship offers the potential of being a vital part of your innovation strategy

As organisations seek growth they need to encourage higher levels of impact. Those that take the route of becoming an intrapreneur share in this desire to build something that has a valuable contribution and impact.

To take on this challenge requires a different mindset and most probably set in a ring-fenced environment. One that conveys flexibility and agility but a need for pace and speed, have higher levels of risk-taking and a clear realisation that failure is part of the learning, a commitment level sometimes beyond ‘belief’ and simply don’t take existing procedures, barriers and established rules of engagement as a reason not to do something, they are true ‘bunker busters’.

In summary

More and more value creation is coming from start-ups, they search for dynamism and points of significant competition, to deliver those more radical, sometimes disruptive solutions. To overcome the built-in risk-adverse and general slowness in large organisations, intrapreneurs need amazing energy to ‘push the obstacle and barriers’ out of the way and still stay ‘fixated’ on the opportunity to bring it to commercial fruition.

Not an easy task but one that is running in parallel to the entrepreneur outside, demonstrating they can deliver on a dream and opportunity that does make a clear contribution and impact.

So are you tapping into this real momentum behind the idea of Intrapreneurship within your organisation? Are you seeking out validated learning?

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission, I have added to my own site as well.

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The post Exploring the Intrapreneurial Way in Large Organizations first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Three years back I took a view on what to focus upon in my innovation activities to meet client needs, they did seem to make sense at the time.

In many ways, I was fairly happy with the outcome, as many of the places I would put my required but limited resources behind, in providing a depth of understanding, were highly relevant, topical and needed, so were good spaces to offer my thinking, advice and solutions into.

Fast forward these last few years and I often wonder where that focus has actually gone – the focus has been a little ‘bounced’ around but for good reason, I feel, yet, it needs a fresh re-calibrating on my approaches going forward.

Innovation has been rapidly changing and much of its basics have been swallowed up by some defining issues that have raced up to the top of the innovation agenda and it is right to respond to these.

‘Breaking’ practices or new methodologies are much harder to master and advise upon, to determine clear positions and propositions.

This certainly involves investing a lot into getting a certain clarity and perspective, through researching constantly, finding fresh insights, sifting through comparisons, discussing and exploring them, so as to eventually determine the value to specific challenging environments and different organisational maturity levels.

Not only that, it is how to related these to different market conditions, so as to offer thoughtful advice to a broad audience of practitioners and leaders within the corporate world. This advisory world on ‘breaking practices’ is necessary yet often undervalued.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding. Many of them have been utterly enjoyable to explore.

There are so many thinkers, experimenters and explorers contributing, that it makes innovation a terrific space to be part of, it is always evolving and challenging much already established but it means a constant attention to understanding it, sifting through often conflicting voices, translating the new practice that others, time-starved, can then appreciate and can relate too, and then see how they can deploy this into their innovation structures.

The ‘lead- lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within organisations and get the necessary ‘buy-in’.

Recently I felt it would be useful to complete a re-assessment to recalibrate my position.

A good starting point was to go back and see what I have been writing about in the past three years. I often write down and capture my initial thinking, then it evolves through different steps, experiences to consolidate my thoughts and work through what I felt was my position on a given subject. It gave me a clearer set of possible outcomes and an essential foundation to build upon.

There is this constant, pressing need to absorb, synthesise and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovation thinking.  My focus has been to blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of my innovating beliefs as well as contributing to building innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, my key focal area.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

So increasingly as I looked back I noticed that I have been providing different sets of posts that were more reactive, reflective and responsive. Sometimes taking stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult, you do need clear anchor points.

Often we were missing the constants required to ‘set in place’ innovation, those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation but recognising the essential basics that are constantly needed, irrespective.

The basics of innovation still form around building engagement, leadership, involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve. Then that constant investment in people, networks and relationships, that need to come together and, finally the structures, systems and governance that are flexible enough to make what we work upon as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitive and exploratory, to end up with great new ideas, things and finally, winning successful concepts.

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

The shifts taking place has been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. how it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs and then we need to reconstruct our innovation thinking so as to gain from this transformation occurring all around us.

Also, there is this growing concern, actually it never went away,  perhaps more enforced than ever today, over the issue of ‘risk and return’ as innovation becomes increasingly complex. As we push to increase the need to push for breaking out of many of our incremental innovation mindsets to tap into real growth opportunities, the pressures continue to build. More help is needed here to make these more of a robust risk / return structure that ‘accounts’ for all the uncertainty in new innovation development.

We seem to be stumbling towards breaking out our innovation activity in more radical, distinctive and adaptive ways. We are certainly treating innovation differently, depending on the sense of opportunity and the desire to work towards the solutions these need. You see progress but it still seems maddeningly slow as dedicated innovation resources are still very ‘thin’ on the ground.

Other real changing forces influencing innovation

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period, have come from a greater explosion of Lean Management principles and incorporating Design thinking into our work. Both being rapidly embraced within our organisations, large and small. How these are fully integrated remains a challenge for most.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around, the continued onward movement of crowdsourcing and all the variations (or derivation’s) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’, combined with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much,

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks, that need deeper capture and translation to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products  and rapid experiment and design. Then we have the growing value of experimental labs and establishing ‘pockets’ of entrepreneurs-in-residence, both have increased in focus.  We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before our innovation concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well beyond the “how” into the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it still seems. Speed is dominating at present then “Scale” and  the constant worries over the”Execution” of the new value proposition.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean? Reacting to this in new framing ways.

Within my numerous posts responding to breaking practices, I have wanted to capture the changes occurring. What is clear, we are seeing a growing momentum towards more ‘collective’ agility, higher fluidity,  adaptive enterprises with a growing mantra of adjusting, exploring and quickly responding, to the needs seen in rapidly changing markets and equally across our shifting customer base, to service present and future needs, bringing together a growing interplay around innovation, offering a fluidity in its perspective.

This we have termed the new interplay surrounding innovation and centres around the interplay in three essential change points we need to focus upon. I attempted to capture these initially in this post a visual of nine primary components as the framing point to gather around. The final point of change in emphasis has been on measuring innovation, we need to shift to successful and ultimate outcomes and rethink our measures, in my view, on a new innovation balance sheet thinking.

There has certainly been a lot of innovation change, requiring fresh thinking and this has been the main reason why I have responded accordingly over the past few years.

Even with all this advancement in innovation, you do have to stop and ask are we just layering on more content, more complexity than organisations can honestly cope with?

Are we any clearer about what we do and why and how and where we do it?

We often skip over the basics, ignore that many that need to understand innovation within our organisations fail to understand its parts, its process and its different timing. We still lack a common language of understanding and this is still holding us back. In many ways, it is ‘freezing’ much to move innovation forward strategically.

I feel the most important contribution to building a common framework of understanding and through this, a common language has been in the work Jeffrey Philips of Ovo Innovation and I collaborated upon. This has been in determining the importance of alignment between innovation and the strategy of the business and formulating an approach that engages the leadership into establishing the vital innovation connections needed to be put into place. This we called the Executive Innovation Work Mat and makes the critical connections required for innovation to have a clear corporate identity and offer the conditions to build and thrive from this framework.

Our continued failure to manage risk correctly for innovative concepts

Then, the one really big elephant always rumbling around in the board room is how do we manage risk. Risk management for innovation is still a really uncomfortable area and we often fail to appreciate the ‘risk differences’ and due to this, many promising ideas for innovation investigation or progress get ‘canned’ because it is hard to make the returns, in our obsession with hard numbers, especially in the early stages, to meet the corporate hurdle rates. The risk management for innovation needs urgently addressing in far more imaginative ways, to allow for greater innovation activity and exploration to contribute into a greater growth phase than we currently are struggling to provide.

Do we still have a rotten innovation core? Possibly…….I think yes, well, it is still immature.

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet and this is my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, one that needs fundamental addressing that innovation has a rotten core until you peel away these layers and fix the basics.

Fixing the basics comes back to much within my initial focal points that I worked through some years back. The trouble is I do so often get worried that a reoccurring theme gets a little, dare I say it, boring.

Yet if we do not fix the foundations it might seem boring to keep going back to resolve these but the fundamentals of anything, including innovation, is getting these built on a solid platform, otherwise, it becomes a very expensive vanity ride for many. So should I feel guilty, worried or concerned by continually reverting back?

The attraction of riding the new wave

Like most caught up in innovation I do get often caught up in the wave of new innovation, actually, I love it, it keeps the passion burning brightly in discovery, curiosity and intrigue, in learning, experimenting and exploring, as these are often the clients need to understand and evaluate against.

Yet it does seem to me many innovators within the business organisation do simply miss the basics within their own thinking or organisation and fail to fix these. They keep moving on, restless, wandering the innovation plains looking for these new feeding grounds but are they just feeding themselves, or actually failing badly in feeding all those ‘left on the reservation’ that make up the larger organisation? Not securing their futures by sustaining the innovation forces, seeing innovation as their personal adventure and not a sustaining organisational one?

Those that do pay attention to the basics in innovation and its management become so much better placed to be the disruptors. Why, simply because they have their people’s engagement and identification as central to their innovation activity, they know the basics, they have experimented and learnt, they make the connections, they get it, work it and shape it. Just like the potter at a wheel, innovation is like clay, temperamental; it has a tricky relationship of the shaping, defining, applying lots of practice to get just right with plenty of practice and some ‘learning’ from failure.

So am I cresting or riding the waves? What is the difference?

So perhaps many of my past messages or focal points are as relevant today as when I drew them up, yet as we continue to introduction improved methods, different approaches and more adaptable and flexible practices, my biggest fear becomes an increasing reality that many executives are simply not any clearer on how to manage their innovation.

Cris Beswick founder of thefutureshapers, put it nicely to me a couple of weeks back: “because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge so senior teams are somewhat paralysed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need”

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’  innovation is well understood, often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, to forge a pathway for others to understand. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new. Blending practice.

I hope I can keep attempting this translating and embedding innovation practice, I keep trying, yet it is for other people to judge if this has paying value to their innovation understanding. I believe it does.

* This post was updated and amended on 12th July 2016.

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