We all value those times when we can slip away from our desk, from the computer or phone and just simply step outside.

Some do this because of a necessity of topping up their nicotine levels or finding a few moments for having a chat, others just simply want to step away, relax a little and freshen up.

Another reason to get out of the office is when it comes to thinking differently within the business, going out  to seek out different, often radically new ideas. This offers the chance of seeing something completely differently, by being simply aware and open to new possibilities, detaching yourself from your own (comfortable) environment .

Steve Blank has a famous rallying cry of “get out of the building” as part of the Customer Development Manifesto, to turn the initial hypothesis into real customer needs through gathering hard customer data, outside your office, validating it to the real world outside

By applying a set of development principles where combining rapid iteration, making constant pivots, becomes central to a business model’s customer discovery and validation as facts, hard valuable ones, as these are often only found where customers live and you must go there repeatedly to achieve those minimal viable products that validate your assumptions.

How often do we come up against a problem or challenge that can’t be resolved by sitting at our desk, we have to go and look elsewhere? The trouble is we tend to go to the familiar places; those tried and tested norms, the expected answers that have been well developed as our industry solutions and established as the features our customers expect. We immerse ourselves in our category as we know it as the natural place to start.

Yet we are missing a huge amount if we simply stop there and apply the common solution, we miss the real chance to challenge and deliver solutions that can become game-changers or can shift customer perspectives and needs in uniquely different ways.

Going cross-industry

Have you noticed nothing seems to stand alone today; it is now more connected, more dependent on others. More and more companies are breaking out of their industry box, forming radically different business models, delivering products, services and processes all seen outside their industry and found they can be applied within theirs.

Industry borders are blurring, there are increasingly smaller, agile and highly disruptive companies working to change the existing into the new preferred. Established players that continue to choose the familiar are at increasing risk of missing out.

The whole concept of cross-industry is to seek out new ideas

Cross-industry investigations develop our abilities to ask different questions, combining elements that might not be expected without a more open mind, finding new innovation patterns and then testing concepts through new customer validation techniques such as Steve Blank’s customer development process. Cross-industry discovery is growing in its importance to innovating differently.

Take a look at these examples at http://www.crossindustryinnovation.com/15-examples/ showing some clever ways to jump-start your thinking by drawing analogies and transferring approaches between contexts, beyond the borders of your own industry, sector, area or domain.

We need to grow our ‘art’ of questioning far more today. Questioning is becoming a strategic asset, just take a look at these Thirty What-If Questions to rethink your future.

The art of this questioning is constantly asking the “why, what if and how” so as you can begin to discover the applicable innovation pattern that can be transferred from another industry into yours for a radically different product, service or process.

There is a really excellent book “Not Invented Here- Cross Industry Innovation” written by Ramon Vulling and Marc Heleven that came out in May 2015, and to support this, they have a dedicated website where you can find a terrific reference site that they have compiled to help you jump start your cross-industry innovation efforts, to enhance your products/services, processes, business models, strategy & culture. Enjoy the ride!

Their 101 Cross Industry Super-Sites is superb to delve into and be inspired and amazed at all the approaches of cross-industry approaches moving from one industry to another.

The ability to work abstractly

Can we separate our established thinking thought from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances and suspend judgement and seek out the novel, different connections? It is the power of seeing the distinct differences in innovation possibility that can translate into that radically different product, service or process, finding the applicable innovation pattern that can be applied to your industry. Developing the art of always posing the question of “what this could become?” requires a new lens of perceived thought.

It is applying a conceptual or a more theoretical approach, having an open mind to see patterns and connections not normally applied within your industry but can become radically different to explore.

Then in turning these into a hypothesis that moves this idea into the customer validation process and then you can unleash your lean management process of building prototypes, experiments and iteration, to take this “out of the building” for that empirical build and customer testing built on constant validation and testing, blending radically different ideas with customer needs.

Often this is the toughest work as you have to strive to overcome the mentality of “not invented here, so it won’t work for us”. Turning “yes but”….into “yes and” is hard. Changing established perceptions is extremely hard but potentially very rewarding. It can give you a real competitive advantage by translating what you learnt in applying analogies to solutions that solve your customer problems.

Begin your journey by simply just stepping outside

The crucial need when you begin this journey of “just stepping outside” is knowing what the innovation question or challenge you are trying to solve is really about. Do not mistake this with simply looking to extend your existing product, this is asking about innovation that can be radically different:

• What are the main issues your customers would love to be resolved?
• Can you list the existing best practice, clarify its desired effects but does it meet the real needs?
• What inspirations can you glean from another industry to arrive at a “next practice” that gets closer to the real needs?

So as you search across industry you are framing the questions into “how do we”: adapt, enrich, customise, take one element and apply this, expand, learn, experiment, modify, fuse, blend or play with that alters our thinking. It is like knowledge building blocks (think Lego) that connect together.

There are so many examples on this cross-industry site to get the ‘juices flowing’. One I had not come across was in the use of the Ten Types of Innovation, explained recently in the post Using the Ten Types of Innovation Framework by building up a terrific tactics overview produced here as a wallchart that lends itself to cross-industry questioning and potential application framing.

Finally, we have to allow time to explore Micro, Macro and Mega Trends

There are so many trends to tap into and explore by having this questioning hat on. If you can lay your hands onto a trends map that could inspire you so much the better? Just reflect on how the digital culture, globalisation, individualism, rising aspirations (and deepening discontent), our access to information, urbanisation, health and wellness, climate change and corporate leadership are all triggering points for making a change in something we can influence.

We all need to be constantly seeking ideas from these trends, many can often come from exploring cross-industry examples By becoming aware through a more enquiring mind, might allow us to see its applicability to our situation or push our own thoughts even further.

Stepping out of your own (narrow) industry perspective can allow you to see with very different eyes  on how others are tapping into these changes and seeing new possibilities and this can lead to cross-collaboration opportunities or the ability to reach out, across an industry, exchange and explore thoughts that can be potentially applied back in your business with a part detachment, part connecting mindset.

Summary

At a time when companies need more radical and game-changing innovation, so as to be able to meet the challenges facing them, one of chasing growth, fending off increased competition and having industry borders increasingly merge, we need to find ways to jump-start our innovation efforts in radically different ways.

By drawing analogies and transferring novel approaches gained in searching across different industries and then by placing these into the specific context of your customer needs we can begin to develop new products, services and processes differently. This can be achieved by making those different connections and constantly be asking questions to frame and explore other industry solutions into ones that have real potential to your specific needs.

It is working towards a “next practice” by breaking existing patterns and norms that can radically alter the thinking and change the game. By stepping out into the unknown and exploring in places you usually would not have been, investigating to solve your problems, part of this discovery comes from giving increasing attention to cross-industry innovation practices.Many unexpected ideas can be applied to your solutions, ones that might become game-changers or offer radically different solutions that can also dovetail into delivering on those often initially hidden customer needs.

Your “just stepping outside” in your thinking and exploring may be the beginning of a real game-changer and might take a little more of your time being away from your desk and it might be highly valued that you did take the time in new products, services and processes.

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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 Getting out of the Building, Going Cross-Industry for Seeking Out Radical Ideas first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

“To be agile” is often a badge of honor.

It conveys your flexibility, nimbleness and your ability to be adaptive.

Agility is today going far beyond just being responsive,it goes into constantly adjusting and being versatile, modifying to meet rapidly changing conditions.

Yet this often seems the very opposite within many of our organizations and the very people employed within them. They seem rigid, inflexible and determined to stay ‘resolute’ to the established ways and routines built up over years.

They love stability, it is their bedrock but equally, they do need a greater fluidity to their performance and structures as well.
The challenge is to keep the stability but to build around it a more agile, dynamic set of capabilities. Today this stability is your platform, your backbone, the anchor points you need to return to but it also does mean the need of being far more ruthless on jettisoning the legacies and some of the hierarchies that have built up.

So why is that?
Many of our established organizations are often caught up in legacy systems and procedures, hierarchies, structures and process descriptions that can often trap them in rapidly changing market conditions unable to respond.

Also today our organizations are falling behind in their innovation, it lacks a level of boldness or degree of novelty. They have honed their incremental skill-set right down to keep the core intact, to allow the business to keep moving along to a steady, comforting beat.

Those that follow this incremental path are often rewarded the most, they never want to ‘rock the boat or challenge the status quo” as this provides them the expected financial rewards in the year-end bonus.

The organization is structured so the measurement and rewards cascade down so all are nicely aligned. Everything is controlled, it has rules yet when disruption suddenly arrives, it will watch out.

Stable worlds are brilliant but they never seem to stay that way

Now, this alignment is great in a stable world where the market is simply moving along at a steady pace but what happens when a sudden usurper suddenly appears on the horizon, determined to take away all that you felt was rightly fully yours. Suddenly the world changes, you become far more aware, tuned in to the changes that have been going on, for sometimes a long time, all around you.

Suddenly what you had become comfortable with is about to become a straight jacket. You feel constricted, trapped, and blame the bureaucracy for allowing this to happen. You crave some agility, some freedom to do things differently.

The problem often lies in the simple fact the muscles have ossified, frozen into the given routine that kept you happily moving along but not greatly stretched or extended, apart from meeting certain deadlines, responding to the constant stream of regular and predictable requests.

You become alert, you tune into lean management, having a start-up culture, and you seek to move beyond the boundaries, you are encouraged to think out of the box, you are asked to imagine the unpredictable. It is such a shock to the system. Organizations go into cardiac arrest; they are placed in the critical ward desperately hanging on through life support and self-dependency.

This then calls for some radical solutions that open up across broader communities as you are suddenly fighting for your very own survival, to stay attached and connected, to open up and engage, watching helplessly as the very life of all you have been part of is drifting constantly away until you radically embrace the changes required.

Life does not always need to be like this

The health of our organizations, of each of us, is judged far more by this ability to adapt, move quickly and seek out new ways of doing things. We all need to seek out that badge of “agility”

The power of agility has been suggested as quickly becoming what amplifies the power within today’s management practice. It is exercising those organizational ‘muscles’ that can distinguish those that are more agile and adaptive. So what are they for us to practice? Also, what is the associated outcome?

If we take a really useful guide produced by McKinsey, taken from their article “Why agility pays”  it does offer up many of the factors and associated outcomes that allows agility to flow within organizations. Ones to put in place to make us more agile and adaptive.

Some of these practices may already be in place but it is viewing these through the agile lens, it certainly does shift the dynamics of ‘being agile.
Adapting to agile is not easy; it is really painful for many

Many of our slow-moving organizations need to change their game. Here are some initial suggestions:

The quality of the interactions you are participating in, and the engagement practices being undertaken can change by spending considerably less time on one-way dialogues or presentations, this can make a huge difference, you spend the time actually listening to each other, and you are adapting within conversations.

We need to think more of providing an organizational backbone that we build upon as our stable part, that acknowledges both our continued need for stability but it needs increasingly is looking for ways to ‘add on’ more dynamic capabilities.

We need to think of dual designs in some ways that equally exploit and explore. We need to have greater confidence in the use of the cloud for processes that are kept up to date, responsive and crowdsourced for relevance to your needs.

We also need to take hold of all of the constant re-checking, re-working and clarifying all that is going on in many organizations and stop this time-delaying tactic that often hurts the business caught in this analysis paralysis.

This can be replaced by the lean principle of “good enough” often overcoming this sense of slow response. We need to develop these habits of simply testing it, experimenting with it, prototyping it, so it ‘tunes’ increasingly to the market needs for you to then rapidly scale this up. Being adaptive and quickly learning, then translating the value potential into real meaning.

The fourth one is acting quickly, the ability to move fast. The constant striving between keeping the organization on the one hand stable to manage all the ongoing activities yet increasingly making it more dynamic and responsive, exploratory, means certain parts need to be far looser, allowing a more free-flowing, nimble and quicker decision-making mechanism to prevail, pushing the “empowerment to act.”

Today it is all about managing the tensions, adjusting to the dynamics and being responsive at increasing speeds and flexibility. Yet it is also ensuring you have a stable framework that (in)forms your backbone, or compliments it.

One that allows you to quickly learn and see those increasing points of value as they happen, adjust to them and be responsive in today’s far more dynamic and responsive world in new agile and adaptive ways.

The post Making Agility Compatible For You first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In recent years our innovation understanding and its management have significantly changed, due to numerous factors that have been happening. These have been advances in technology, methodology or design- thinking and we do need to stop and think about how we could do ‘things’ differently by asking “what is possible?” This should be asked not just on each occasion of an innovative concept design but within the total innovation system, we are presently operating under.

Perhaps by asking three critical questions on “what is possible?”  we might produce better innovative answers (and solutions) than simply not bothering to, at least, scope out the real possibilities, where we can miss so much.

The aim of asking is to reduce the constraints, free up resources, leverage the techniques available, and equally, push the boundaries of your thinking to want to generate “great” innovation, not just the mediocre, incremental stuff, so often produced and labelled “innovative” that we end up doing.

We often fail to ask three critical questions before we embark on innovation. They may not eventually fit or work together but they do enable you to see what is possible, what is desirable and what is then that certain dose of business reality we all need to work through.

Asking these questions offsets that attitude of simply accepting the established approach from the very beginning..Speed, scale and agility are required and many of our existing innovation practices do not adapt to these increasing demands.

Lets take a look at each of these three questions above.

What are we capable of?

With the incredible array of frameworks, solutions, technical applications and design options, we are becoming far more capable to innovate than ever before. How we engineer and design our solutions will determine much of the ‘ability to innovate’.

We are very capable to push our design thinking and quickly turn our conceptual blueprints into a reality, through the smart use of cloud technology alongside being selective in the enterprise software we need, and ensuring we have an innovation backbone of a clear process that can be adapted constantly to the ‘needs’ we require to achieve the best result.

Today nothing has to be rigid or protected, we have to encourage and find a certain freedom to adapt, adjust, pilot and experiment within our innovation ‘system’ as the very solutions we desire are in constant in need of adaption from fresh learning.

The ability to utilize the cloud, use the increasing range of rapid software prototyping, agile principles, and full stack, cloud based platforms we are getting closer to game-changing business technology solutions you are able to develop, build, test and iterate a solution.

For example IBM’s Bluemix provides the ideal DevOps environment (great link BTW) for rapid prototyping, then building, scaling and integrating apps. Bluemix lifts you out of the past practices of working through rather rigid Enterprise solutions and protocols, it rapidly speeds up your innovation search and discover, validate and learn environment and can also scale and integrate.

So we should be asking of ourselves “what are we capable of?” To stay incumbered with a rigid system is simply denying yourself all the possibilities that can be achieved by having a highly adaptive and flexible innovation system.

The innovation concepts you work upon are constantly evolving, then so should the systems that support it and this needs a far more ‘hybrid’ approach than ever before.

What is desirable?

“If you shoot for the stars and hit the moon, it’s OK. But you’ve got to shoot for something. A lot of people don’t even shoot.” – Confucius

So do we ever ask ourselves what is truly desirable? So often we just accept compromise is inevitable and start with that position from the very beginning. I would argue strongly we don’t accept that. If we do we fail to ever achieve innovation that is truly a ‘breakthrough’ or ‘disruptive’.

We should have aspirations, as humans we need these. Innovation is no different. When we see a ‘real need’. either from the feed back from clients or spotted by ourselves in the market place or simply conceived in  your ‘minds eye’ we must fight to hold this in any innovation discussions that subsequently take place.

Being dogmatic is not the answer but bringing others to ‘seeing the same potential solution’ allows for advancing the initial idea into perhaps, an even greater solution

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Normal Vincent Peale

I know, I’m offering a lot of moon and stars here but it is far better to open up our thinking, lift up our heads, out of immediate solutions and see the possibilities that can become more within our realm of possibility. To really spend some time on the desirable, that aspirational place is where innovation becomes great.

I think we should always seek out this desirable point, scope it and shoot for the potential it can offer. We as humans need to work on the aspirational aspects, besides maintaining the existing, it gives us a greater sense of identity, hope and fulfillment.

For instance the human centered design kit offered by Ideo although written principally for the social sector, is  a full-color, 192-page book, the Field Guide that comes with 57 design methods, the key mindsets that underpin how and why IDEO.org believes design can change lives. The concept of human-centered design sets out a counterbalance which puts the human and social imperatives first and foremost. It can help drive a customer focus deep within a corporation and make this focus the heart of value creation.

What is viable?

This is the tough ground to travel through and over. Each business has a need, to grow, to add value, to beat or at least equal competition, or should do. The tough part is we are never starting as equals.

Some have ‘abundance’, others have a ‘scarcity’ of resources, of ideas, of seemingly building innovation capabilities that ‘deliver’. We are often required to find (and fight) for the optimal ground for much of what we do and often end up with the imperfect solution from the compromises we have to make.

Innovation is imperfect, we start with certain ideas or concepts and these over time and discussion seem to change shape, sometimes way beyond their original  simplicity or need. We do like to overly complicate. The larger the organization, the more we have to seek out, exchange, find solutions in a very imperfect environment. We hit that ‘certain reality’.

There is a real hope this tough terrain can be traversed differently than in the past.

In the Lean Methodology we are discovering the MVP (minimum viable product) as the process to travel through as we “Build- Measure- Learn” as the feedback loop. The quicker we enter the build stage, designed with the minimum amount of effort and least amount of time, this approach allows us to build prototypes, quickly test them, gauge and learn from them, we can then hopefully pivot into something better.

The closer to the needs of the market or client the greater chance of innovation success. We are then moving back towards the desirable to then push harder for our ‘engineered’ solution.

There is equally a growing push to take the principles of minimum viable product (MVP) to a higher level, taking transformational ideas through the same core principles for minimum viable transformation (MVT) of validated learning, rapid prototyping, frugal creativity enabling often the business model to be equally redesigned.

The combined thinking of Eric Ries and his “Lean Start up thinking” and Deliottes “Minimum Viable Transformation” is giving us increasing scope to hypothesize, test, learn, adjust and transform.

So our “what is possible” becomes even more aligned

By asking ourselves “what are we capable of?“, alongside “what is desirable?” with the “what is viable” through this MVP / MVT approach I believe the business need have far greater chance of alignment far more with all the potential innovation available.

The “what is viable” becomes richer, more engaging and closer to the two other parts of a solution needed for greater innovation delivery. One where we are capable of designing and engineering far more so as to deliver and have a more desirable end.

By taking the rapid changes occurring in technology (cloud, agile) and design thinking and leveraging the human design and customer need we are bringing a changing business environment of rapid iteration, experiment and prototyping into the very core of our innovation thinking.

These examples are changes where we can be exploiting far more the changing business condition, so as to respond and deliver in better flexible innovating environments.

An end so much closer to client and market needs and that leads to a greater potential for growth, surely?

The post Innovating: So What Is Possible? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.