They are pressured for time, to think, to fully engage and these mounting pressures are simply squashing out the opportunity to explore, it is actually squeezing the middle managers’ ability to build a more flexible, responsive organization. Innovation is in direct ‘tension’ with much that is being undertaken at the middle management level.

Changing the focus can provide a different mentality and energy force
Flipping the thinking on capabilities around for the Middle Manager

• Primary becomes the base, not the pinnacle. What they do in efficiency and effectiveness remains as their primary capability – you don’t alter this, it is too ingrained. This can only change over time and through their inner awareness and recognition that innovation needs to be embedded, alongside the existing ‘fixation’ on efficiency and effectiveness.
• Don’t try to radically change, make progressive step changes. Efficiency and effectiveness clearly remain the inventory repertoire of solid capabilities so as you set about to build a new platform, based on innovation, it layers and interlocks

• You target selected critical capabilities to learn and explore. You provide the MM with a new clarity of the emerging critical capabilities they need to build up for innovation to become a more sustaining, more in-built core. These are the capabilities that will provide the greatest impact for sustaining competitive advantage, not internal in focus but external in all its orientation to become closer to the real customer’s needs.

• At the top of the pyramid are the core capabilities they need to possess. This cluster of capabilities is centred on the critical capabilities to make innovation main stream, to become a daily part of their thinking, their make-up, and their intent to ensure innovation happens and flows throughout the organization.
• These differ according to the role, area of focus and contribution but are ones connected to innovation – design thinking, networking, motivating creative activity, encouraging experimentation, offering a more safe-to-fail environment, seeking better and more rewarding outputs and outcomes from the activity generated.

The middle manager carries through connection and identification as facilitators

Middle manager’s tasks should increasingly become more about performing the role of connectors and facilitators, not the guardians and gatekeepers for the decision-makers. Their work should include the encouragement that everyone is engaged in innovative work.

Making sure everyone has a ‘sight-line’ and identification into their contribution for any organizational innovation framework so they stay well-connected and engaged. The art of communicating and looking to build new relationships constantly becomes the key.

We need to find that new high ground for middle managers to be seen as the real connectors and enablers and not the current view as more often than not the blockers on innovation in gaining access to the knowledge to help us do a better job.

We all need to think about flipping our thinking of what is needed in the middle of our organizations and it does need to recognize the middle manager’s position, one that is more under threat than ever, needs fresh thinking, it needs new core capabilities.

 

*****

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 Redesigning the organizations middle for a new innovation shape. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I often think of the parable of “The Elephant and the Blind Men” when I get into discussions about measuring innovation.

What are truths, what are the fallacies?  The parable implies that one’s often subjective experience can be true on your need, but not necessarily the other person’s view of their understanding of value.

You get, as the end result, a failure to account for other ‘beliefs’ or capture the real value and miss providing broader motivations to encourage the innovation elephant along.

Establishing the right metrics that motivate and yield the result you are looking for is sometimes a tough challenge. You should always start with the bigger picture, organizational needs and then design the metrics and cascade these throughout the organization.

This part of the series explores the Innovation Work Mat

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

Within this work mat series I’ve already offered some opening thoughts on the role of Governance and Innovation, and also the Environment for innovation matters to innovate followed by the innovating conditions for your Culture and Climate.

This is the fourth article aimed at deeper engagement and understanding of the connected parts within innovation management on Metrics and Motivations.

Raising some initial thoughts here.

We really struggle to describe, then measure and then find the right motivations and reward mechanisms and then achieve broad agreement, on something as important as innovation.

If we link metrics into the reward and compensation structure then we release all the energy, passion and anguish and these can serve in many contrary ways.

Linking compensation into all the competing motivations to manage and reward innovation activity is fraught with problems and can have many negative consequences.

Again my elephant comes back into view wandering around in your board room – it can disrupt everything as it charges after the results that it wants, trampling much that is good in its path.

Today’s particular trend of focusing on short-term performance can limit innovation significantly and has innovation consequences.

Let’s look at metrics and motivations with greater connected awareness.

At the end of the story on the elephant and the blind men, a wise man was passing; listened to all the different views of why no one could agree on what they thought the elephant was like. The wise man then replied “All of you are right; you were touching different parts of the elephant so the elephant has all the features as you all said”

Metrics and motivation can really make innovation happen

The value of the measures lies in resolving these eight different questions: 1) are they clear and simple 2) are they relevant to you and the central issues 3)are they timely in what can be achieved, 4)are they credible to the stakeholders involved 5) do they relate to the importance of the goals or trivial, 6) can we act upon them 7) are they consistent to the strategic message and aligned, and finally, 8) are all the investment in these measurements and motivators to capture and analyse, seem sensible and affordable, and lead to real impact in aiding innovation to achieve the goals required.

We do need to focus on the future innovating purpose surely?

The innovation links to any measurement system I would argue should point towards the organization’s strategic need and the innovation outcomes required. Within this there are broadly three parts: 1) knowing the organization’s future-orientated vision and the general direction that innovation needs to take, 2) along with the strategic carriers in types, priorities, functions, the indicated mix of innovation activities and then 3) the growth gap that exposes the organizations’ challenges, so as to bridge these knowledge and resource gaps.

These can build innovation capacity today for future innovating outcomes as they are focused on future work to be done.

For me the output intention of the Integrated Executive Innovation Work Mat should be driving the business case for how innovation contributes and offers the what, where, when, and why within the communications for others to be mobilized into actions and build out build upon this strategic working document.

Then we set about communicating it to the organization

I have written before about the cascading effect and communicating value that can support this. Then our metrics begin to cascade down to bring people, the process, and the innovative design of inputs and outputs turn into successful alignment outcomes can come into play. I’ll broaden out my thinking on this area in the next post.

It is within the leadership of organizations to become intimately involved in what is important in innovation for their organization, otherwise, we are back to the elephant and the blind men. All others simply believe they have the answer. Leadership needs to really engage in where it ‘expects’ innovation to yield its results and then ensures it links reward to this set of outcomes.

So what does success look like?

We should start with the ideals that our innovation activities should be pervasive, to be sustainable and we need to deliver clear business results mapped to known and potential unrecognised customer needs as our primary incentive points.

We need to layout the building blocks to ‘group’ management and employee identification with what is innovation success. It can begin to motivate all the stakeholders involved. This gives us the opportunity to evaluate appropriate resources, provide the workable benefits related to learning, encourage the identification of problems and encourage the identification of solutions and set about communicating to all involved the understanding of what success can look like.

Building the innovation metric and motivation scorecard there are hundreds of measures you could bring into anything; the skill is you need to find only the right few that focus upon the results you really need achieving. They need to somehow “talk to each other” so they are mutually reinforcing and all involved are pulling in a similar direction.

What gets measured should connect and matter – an example

I like one I came across some years back, by Cap Gemini, which firstly suggested you define what innovation was going to be about. Their example was “a robust creative process that turns out very distinct outputs with significant impact in the market place” and then worked on a scale for assessing the degree of innovativeness on a three-dimensional grid of Impact, Distinctiveness and Creative Process.

This then becomes the measuring and motivation barometer tied to the strategic need of an organization of what is expected out of innovation. That sort of complete picture can only come from the senior managements full committed to “wanting distinct outputs of significant impact in the market place”

I think Bain & Co offered also a really valuable performance measuring framework.

This framework offers a really good structure to begin to measure and link the organization. I think it can stimulate initial thinking well.

(click to enlarge)

There is a case for approaching measurement differently through the intangibles that make up most of our capital.

Measuring attempts need to take into account the many intangibles that make up innovation and make them tangible. Understanding the relationships within our intangibles allows groups to benchmark, diagnose, allocate resources, inform others and compensate employee’s efforts through their ongoing knowledge learning. The understanding of our intangibles is for me vital to crack.

Getting this right is increasingly important as the intellectual capitals are being recognized as the real value creation intersections. Establishing the metrics that focus on generating valuable innovation also helps extend ambition and future goals, pushing future innovation strategies as you grow in confidence and understanding of these dynamics.

To end we go back to avoid the story of the Elephant and the blind men.

By taking the integrated approach through the work mat, senior leaders can  offer strategic guidelines into the measures and motivations, by laying out their beliefs and expectations from innovation. They can’t afford to leave this open-ended, just being hopeful, innovation activities need essential alignment.

If we continue to allow the ‘blind men’ to offer their separate opinions and then decide in isolation of the bigger picture, they ‘see’ only their part of the elephant.

I believe if you put in place that critical strategic innovation document, wrestled out of engaging across all the work mat parts, the metrics and motivators can ‘form’ around this strategic intent. This can drive innovation performance.

Seeing the whole picture is the team sitting on (at) the top, directing the innovation elephant along its journey to the destination where they want it to go. Metrics and motivations follow as the path is clearer to measure and travel. We need those wise men to clarify this.

The post Measuring and motivating the innovation elephant first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I describe innovation as very much like a tropical rainforest, needing constant fresh attention, similar in its management,

There is my need to cut down certain trees, clear away a lot of the floor covering to allow the sunlight in and permit those ‘selected innovation trees’ to be allowed to grow stronger.

We all have those times where we need to choose, to pursue clearer pathways we believe are better for us. To be more selective in what we do, to be more focused and hopefully achieve a better, lasting result that hopefully offers a more satisfying set of outcomes, to both clients and to ourselves.

Within this comparison I am presently making of innovation being like a forest, I really began to see so much more of a connection in what is happening around innovation that it can be compared to understanding a tropical rainforest. There are many comparisons, let me outline some of these here.

The ecosystem within the rainforest is also needed for innovation to work effectively  

Firstly I would argue that innovation, to be managed well, needs to operate like an ecosystem, the same as a tropical rainforest. Ecosystems to flourish need to experience critical feeds, in the rainforest this is high average temperatures and significant rainfall.

Well, innovation to thrive needs equal attention; it needs a real focus, above average and significant attention to be well maintained.

We argue for diversity within our innovation teams, in our thinking, in our environment and that is no different from the high levels of biodiversity in tropical rainforests. We need this ‘richness’ of thinking, of approaches, of discovery.  We search constantly for ideas, we experiment, and we are subjected to change. We are always looking for that certain something still undiscovered.

Innovation is often under needless threat

I’d argue innovation within organizations is often ‘highly threatened’ due to conflicting pressures and in our rainforests, this is the large-scale fragmentation due to this constant human (failing) intervention and habitat destruction.

We make changes within our organizations to achieve short-term results not reflecting enough on the longer-term consequences. We force out our talented people and can cause a certain ‘extinction’ of the contribution they made to a more balanced vibrancy within the system.

Managing the different strata or layers always needs careful management

Rainforests are divided into different strata or layers with the vegetation organized into a vertical pattern from the canopy top to the soil. Each layer offers a unique biotic community containing different plants and animals adapted for life in that particular stratum. This is so much like our organizations, organised in hierarchies, each dependent but equally each independent to carry on.

We have the forest floor, most of our workforce occupies this position, yet this floor receives only 2% of the sunlight and needs to constantly adapt to survive. I think that does seem like many organizations in their ratio between top and bottom in pay, in understanding direction and contribution.

There is this focus on simply surviving ‘day-to-day’. There is always a certain decay taking place, not helped by the dense strata above. It is a place that is tough to thrive well but it is critical to all the above.

Then we have the understory, the middle managers that are between the canopy and the forest floor. It offers many shade-tolerant shrubs; it is the place that allows vines to climb into the trees to capture light.

To capture their light, this understory often evolves much larger leaves to capture more light (craving for recognition) and allows for the dropping of seedlings to the forest floor. I can relate to that for innovation and our organizations, can you? The understory or middle managers are crucial to the innovation ecosystem.

Then of course we have the rich canopy layer, which forms the roof, it supports the forest as it has the position to attract and support the diversity that is occurring. It determines this, it leads and others simply follow. In amongst this canopy is ‘the emergent layer’, which grows above the average but to meet this they need to be strong to withstand much.

So many of our rising stars get caught out by strong winds that suddenly blow in due to changes of sudden direction or misapplied  ‘habitat’ destruction (wrong decisions) and take a real tumble, unlikely to recover their former position.

All of these layers are reliant on the sun and the moisture within their soil for rainforests to thrive. Innovation equally needs feeding, by the leadership of our organizations engaging with its needs.

Innovation needs new resource minerals, new ideas, new discoveries, and new knowledge flows. If these do not remain fertile, trees are cleared, the soil gets exposed, leached, and it creates run-offs, exposing the erosion that changes the dynamics and vibrancy that innovation can provide.

Then we need to protect the native people of our innovation forest. Those specialized people who understand innovation are our hunter-gatherers that support others to reside and thrive. People, not technology, systems and processes make innovation work. They are the ones to give us the diversity to allow innovation to flourish.

There is always this need to understand our innovation experts, they can teach us much about the environment and what it needs. They can protect and nourish the plants, the birds, and the insects to thrive in a trusting climate; they can balance often conflicting demands.

Rainforests have different soil types, so does innovation

Soil types in rainforests are highly variable and it is the combination of several variables such as climate, vegetation, position, material and soil age that make up the different characteristics we can find. Innovation is no different – we have incremental, radical, breakthrough as well as focus on different types of innovation approach – for service, for business models, from a research-based or technology. Just take a look at the nine different ones I have suggested in the past and described in this collaborative effort some time back.

Rainforests are also reliant on nutrient recycling, so should innovation in our learning, in our evaluation of understanding our success and failures. What inhibited, what released, what accelerated, what aided our innovation efforts? Understanding what allowed us to perform provides for this recycling for sustaining and fueling future innovation efforts.

Then we have always the need for our buttress roots. These are like the buttress roots, my innovation button and threads that create a network for gathering, sharing and translating new knowledge. Today we require and increasingly rely on our networks to give us the sufficient and efficient uptake of innovation nutrients. The more we encourage these buttress roots we avoid erosion and maximize this new innovation nutrient we need within our organizations.

Rainforests can be dense and impenetrable, so can innovation

Understanding all that makes up innovation is like this dense tropical rainforest. When you reflect on the term a jungle or rainforest it has much ambiguity in the application of the term, so tell me doesn’t innovation suffer the same?

Is innovation unruly, it is certainly less advanced than many other functional activities we undertake in organizations. This is slowly changing as we understand it more, all its connected parts. We have allowed innovation to be overgrown with tangled vegetation, often too dense to hinder clear movements or progress?

I have suggested innovation needs to be dynamic; we need to become fit and look fully across the innovation landscape. It is our growing understanding of the richness within the innovation diversity that is both exciting to understand and challenging to navigate.

It is good to sometimes cut down some trees, clear away the undergrowth, allows the potential for greater growth and it does allow the sunlight in.

Sometimes, if you are not careful or selective, you can undermine that broader growth but we do have to increasingly manage within a complex ecosystem to strengthen the whole system.

Often we are needing to make ‘tough’ choices but these can prompt a sudden burst of new energy and then supports new growth activity.

So I’m making my own attempt at managing my own innovation ecosystem as I mentioned within my introduction of seeing “the wood for the trees,” attempting to strengthen certain aspects, methodologies or practices to grow what is more valuable, discarding what might be holding me back.

Let’s see if it allows for an even stronger set of outcomes.

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Working through a kind of contingency theory of management

Julian points out different situations demand different kinds of management. To be effective, a manager needs to adapt to the demands of the situation. Managerial behaviour is mapped on four dimensions: bureaucracy-to-emergence, hierarchy-to-collective wisdom, alignment-to-obliquity, and extrinsic-to-intrinsic motivation.

The principles of emergence, collective wisdom, obliquity and intrinsic are newer ways of thinking about management. I must say I like these as I do his framework as a really good way to think about the approach we need to explore that fits with the strategy and the way we want to develop a business and its environment.

Innovation needs to exploit all the ‘opposing’ principles across the four dimensions

Taking Julian Birkenshaw’s thinking about this framework, my intent here is to offer it up as a more than valuable way to think about where and how innovation links into the management and direction of an organization, and what might ‘block’ it. To recognize the assumptions and beliefs on the ways we can work can help resolve some of these barriers to innovation.

You need to explore across these often opposing dimensions so as to build the business case for innovation that fits closer to the organizations accepted routines or recognize those that need to be challenged for broadening out the potential of innovation.

Recognizing how any innovation fits is partly appreciating these dimensions for the type of work and approaches needed to be managed, otherwise it can lead to growing frustrations.

The first set of principles is about managing across the activities, how they are coordinated.

The opposing ones are bureaucracy where more formalised rules, job roles, procedures and formal guidance tend to dominate. To a large degree the emphasis is on predictability, where initiatives can be stifled and you have less creativity and flexibility. It reduces autonomy. It might through this ‘bureaucratic constraint’ limit innovation to being more incremental as the outcome.

The opposite one is emergence, where there is a greater push for independence, higher autonomy. This will tend to led to potentially higher innovation that can become more radical, distinctive that allows for individual breakthroughs. The ‘feeling’ of independence tend to generate stronger team cultures but can become a little more chaotic and ad hoc to bring together in cohesive end results.

The second set of principles relates to how people are making decisions within the organisation

Many organizations ‘suffer’ from a heavy emphasis on hierarchy where authority and power dominate decisions. The higher you are, the more you are perceived as possessing greater expertise, or thought to have.

There is a recognition that  the clear pathway to the top works around clear accountability, handling decision-making and the organization of work in clear, distinct ways, striving for greater predictability.

The downside of this ‘clarity’ is that it does block initiative, stops a lot of upward communication and can easily affect morale, if managers are not really listening, just feeling they are the only ones capable to make the decisions.

The alternative is working towards a greater collective wisdom where people get drawn in to contribute to decision-making and feel it is a collective ‘problem solve’. This allows for the potential for having more knowledgeable people, valuing more their views and where you strive to meet this higher engagement and encourage a clear sense of identity.

There needs to be that constant ‘listening’ across the organization to gain greater insight. The downside is this can take a longer time for decisions to be made and works against you in times of crisis or where time pressures are critical to meet.

You can become more inwardly focused to achieve this ‘collective’ decision necessary and this requires a more demanding set of skills to manage well. Building on collective wisdom makes for greater potential for innovation.

The third set of principles relates to how people set and pursue goals.

The argument of having a clear alignment is that you are consciously working towards common goals set by the organization. The value of this sense of common purpose within teams across functions is that you can pursue a ‘tighter’ strategy that needs that significant coordinated action. Innovation tends to require this.

The problem can often be that this can have is the over-emphasis on key performance indicators, to measure this alignment progress, can become counter-productive. Often as  innovation is based far more on many intangibles this search for a constant measuring can become a problem.

This is where I have argued the value of the Executive Innovation Work Mat approach comes in, to actively seek alignment from having to work this out differently, where innovation is needed to  more central and clearly aligned.

The opposite is obliquity, the encouragement of deviation from a ‘given’ set direction, by encouraging more individual goals, that can be intuitively working towards broad overall objectives set within the organization.

Again by offering a well-articulated and well-communicated innovation strategy that can be delivered in an organizing framework through this same Innovation Work Mat approach you can loosen certain controls and indicators, then promote the ones that allow greater ownership within the Strategic Innovation framework, that guides more than directs.

The balance has to be struck on coordinating efforts, clarifying issues through governance and engagement throughout the organization, one that is well communicated, actively reducing distance and bridging many disconnects surrounding innovation, that can happen with too much obliquity.

The fourth set of principles deals with how people are motivated within organizations

The higher emphasis on extrinsic motivation or form of reward is often the preferred route for organizations. It focuses on the ‘harder’ aspects, those quantifiable, mostly tangible outcomes that give clear measure of results.

There is though the darker side of extrinsic motivation by threatening the holding of reward unless certain measures are not carried through.

Organizations find extrinsic measures far easier to implement and monitor, yet increasingly we are feeling more dissatisfied and less engaged as they don’t tap into our inner motivations as much, as those that ‘just’ satisfy the general needs.

The tougher aspect is to offer up more intrinsic motivation. This tends to become more individual, it recognizes your specific part in doing a task, activity or project well. Intrinsic motivators are arguable far more satisfying but harder to manage.

Often the debate can hinge on perceptions of the job being done between the parties. Innovation needs to search out these intrinsic connections through recognizing individuals need motivation but these can come from again, providing a well-designed innovation framework to work from. It is of more importance to establish clear innovation goals that are far more ‘touchable’ and pertinent to our own working domain.

We need to work far more on  constantly evaluate innovation returns on each person’s contribution within their immediate space, using measures and metrics that are attuned to their  personal innovation activities, certainly beyond the ‘simple’ and broad ROI’s set by organizations. Sadly innovation doesn’t get measured this  personal way, yet it can be and is needed to be for a more ‘connected’ identification of what can make up collective success.

Applying your thinking to these dimensions and principles for innovation to thrive

The important points to remember here in these different dimensions is that you need to recognize the differences and what it might mean; you need to work through choices about how the work of innovation can be done against how it might end up getting done.

The principles offered here is not just simply a clear one or the other, a right or wrong, it depends on what you want to achieve and the level of engagement you are wanting from innovation.  Also how it can be best suited within the organization.

If your current situation tends to be more one sided than the other, then this might limit innovation engagement or choice, it might limit motivation and creativity. In using this four dimension framework you can begin to have a dialogue across the different dimensions. You can begin to discuss and become more active in making conscious change as they potentially might be inhibiting innovation’s contribution.

Clearly any moving from one principle to the other side needs to always link the innovation outputs to strategy and the environment you wish to create and that is a broader collective challenge, of managing change for innovation so as to improve its contribution, by exploiting fully across all the dimensions in thoughtful ways.

The ability to align resources and direct the focus of the organization is the role of senior executives. Innovation success starts with vision, engagement and commitment from these senior executives and then working through all the combining elements that make up innovation, so it can integrated these into a clear innovation framework that clarifies where innovation needs to strategically fit.

I have said it previously here: “Today, we face a different type of performance – one that is not ‘just’ dependable but one that is often unpredictable, one that seems perhaps more suited to innovation that outsmarts others in unique ways. We need to be predictable in performance but we need to deliver unpredictable innovation that wows our customers and the markets to achieve this.”

Achieving on this aspiration requires active, engaged management, working actively across all aspects of the innovation process to achieve this end of the wow!

We do need to constantly ‘work’ across these four dimensions of management practices and process offered by Julian Birkinshaw in his book, for greater innovation understanding. We need to be equally fluid, flexible, aligned and constantly agile.Watch Julian’s view of why Management is being more challenged far more today.

For me, especially where innovation is concerned, is that we need better organizing frameworks to manage within organizations to ‘extract’ the value within our people’s contribution.

This is by providing frameworks and the right environment to allow innovation to work well. In defined ways, well thought-through, with engagement from the top and across all management, that is being constant and fully aware.

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