How do we set about engaging with all these different voices surrounding innovation?

Have you ever worked with the three horizon framework?
It is really useful for managing your innovation activities, drawing out the often conflicting voices within the organization on how to take innovation forward. The approach can unlock you from just being caught in the present, to one of envisaging a future that then allows you to begin to build different capabilities, competencies and capacities.

Find out more here and here and here on the three horizons or within this blog site put “three horizon approach ” into the search box. You will find  I have provided a considerable overview in different posts’ thoughts on the 3H thinking and why I place such value in it for innovation’s evolution.

The 3H framework offers a perspective that accepts the need to both address the multiple challenges that occur in the first horizon, foster the seeds of the third and, allocate appropriate focus and resources to manage the transitions from one to another.

What makes the model valuable to innovators is that it ‘accepts’ that competition is restless, markets are evolving, and that change is a constant. The three horizons approach offers the methodology for constructing plausible and coherent innovation activities projected out into the future. It looks for emerging winners.

The 3H not a planning tool; it is providing a valuable evolutionary perspective that dialogues can be formed around, so decisions on where to focus and what resources to apply can be based on a more plausible and coherent set of activities projected into the future, searching for emerging winners, those that can potentially change and challenge your existing business but evolve it in clear ways.

The 3H is a dialogue mechanism to help frame the evolving journey and allow you to move towards it in a better-structured way.

The need is to discuss the challenges in horizon one and nurture the seeds of the third. It is not an either/or, good/bad discussion. You need those robust discussions to form fresh perspectives. The key is in listening out and becoming adept at managing these conversations between the ‘voices’ of the three horizons.

The three voices that need to be in the same room

• You have the voice of today, the voice of the manager(s) responsible for delivering todays result that are more concerned with managing the existing, maximizing returns and keeping the organization going efficiently and effectively.

• Then you have the second voice, the voice of the entrepreneur, the one eager to experiment, try out new things, explore and extend, accepting some aspects will not work

• Last we have the third voice, the voice of the aspirant, who is looking to build a different vision, believing in different, more pioneering ways and visualize things in their ‘mind’s eye’, far more aspirational they often seem on the first take to look to be totally incompatible to the reality of today.

The different voices involved can be highly engaged, all wanting to add their perspective, you need to listen to them. You need to search for common ground, growing recognition and sometimes realization, that these are not so much separate voices, but actually ones that can all be combined, to provide a far greater outcome when they can ‘see the same future’ but through their own specific voice.

It is the combination of these different three voices that need to come together and help frame the innovation journey. It is by applying and using the three horizons framework and its methodology you can draw out and advance better outcomes for your future innovation activity.

There is this powerful need to look toward the future

Based on what we know today and what we can set about building and exploring, does hold the exciting promise of the future. Look out of ourselves offers a more rewarding prospect. Valuing the often conflicting voices around us or even seeking them out provides for richer promise.

We need to keep reflecting upon what is dominant, prevalent and seems to be pattern-changing, as these positions are constantly shifting. Scanning the horizons and what is simply all around ‘us’ offers those ‘pockets of the future’ to invest in, explore and experiment, to be open to change, to shape and prepare for, to become far more “future ready”.

Initially these pockets of the future may seem a long way off, often just really weak signals, but are indicating different, perhaps far more radical and perhaps disruptive changes for our organizations to re-equip for. The earlier yon can spot and organize for changes ahead the greater the chances of building the different capabilities and competencies these are more likely to need.

Technology clearly comes to mind with wave upon wave of change is crashing against the established rocks, beginning to weaken the existing structures and form new ones. Innovation gains from this constant flow, if you are ready to receive it.

Change does come from different experiments and explorations

It is partly through the treatment of innovation, feeding into the system a rising wave of future innovations that alter positions. Staying stuck in ‘just’ incremental to serve the existing conditions in the market seriously constrains you for the future, you stop growing, exploring, being curious and experimental.

You need to encourage experimentation, testing, prototyping, accelerating the learning and then being ready to scale what holds promise and abandon what seems not to.

For this, you need all the voices within your organization seeing the future, so they can consciously work towards it, even when it might seem vague and not fully clear. The 3H framework draws out discussions, it helps project into the future.

Just always remember, the present is already in decline.

Look out, do not stay locked in.

Entrenchment limits your options to break out, as much as you might feel it needs defending, as it’s providing your present-day core yet it is ‘holding you hostage’ not able to break free and embrace the future in the planned ways you can achieve.

The post Are you engaging with all the different voices around you? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have found that narratives are becoming increasingly important to explain ‘things’. I’m re-learning this ‘art’ to tell a compelling story.

Our stories can combine much, communities can identify or reject, we can begin to explain complex stories by presenting a well-designed narrative that presents the arguments. It can explain the connections and outline the issues, both in terms of risk and opportunity.

I think business narratives will become essential for our organizations to use to explain where they are and what they see as their future.

A good business narrative should fill a real knowledge gap

Organizations by making this move to open up, to spend more time explaining their ‘fit’ in the world will gain.  Those that stay closed down, secretive and selective in what they reveal will continue to ebb away and not valued as important for our future.

The business narrative is argued as the way to seek increased identity, allows a broader community to enact, to extract better cues for their sense of identity and offer a better way to draw them into this greater sense of identification.

I wrote about visualizing the innovating future through narrative reporting here and placing the business model as central to this narrative movement here.

We are in a constant state of being adaptive

We live in such a fluid world where we are all being forced constantly to be adaptive. It seems nothing is standing still and if it does it simply gets knocked down. We are all learning this new practice of being nimble and increasingly adaptive. Part of the growing complexity we all are grappling with daily is in the multiple voices that are competing for our attention.

Social platforms and having available the so many easy tools to participate are everywhere.  This has liberated these millions of voices wanting to express themselves. Cutting through these competing voices to sort out those that are relevant to you or the ones that will move you to action are tough. We need to go one step further.

We all feel the effects of this ‘sucking of time’ out of our days. We need to build a greater sense of connection, understanding the broader connectivity to put ‘things’ in context.

The story or narrative will increasing make the final connection and cut through this growing distraction noise. Getting more focused on the context and explaining this through a good narrative or story is becoming essential to go beyond ‘just a connection’ into prompting real identification and even action.

Anchoring ourselves through stories will help us regain that lost middle ground.

What we need to do, is anchor all these seemingly competing voices into our stories to explain where we are, where we believe we should be going and what, as we presently know it, will help us get there.

Learning the art of good narratives is becoming essential to tell our story and its place to help reduce conflicts and misunderstandings and help us all to navigate a little better in this more complex world.

We can tell these organizations stories in so many compelling ways, through the business model, and through sustainability reporting. A well-structured business narrative can offer the organization vision, it can enhance communication, it can highlight where the organization is critically capturing knowledge and putting it to work.

We need to spark more.

Narratives can spark our thinking in how this can encourage innovation and growth, so as to build a growing sense of community and identification, of engagement and identification. As new knowledge comes into us we need to increasingly sort it, to identify the relevant ‘tags’ and assign them in importance to us, our community and to the broader context.

Mastering the business narrative is becoming critical, in helping to connect the innovations we need to build our future and these need to be more connected by the power of the story.

Moving beyond just the sound bite or tweet

Our lives must move beyond the ‘sound bites’, they give us a feeling of engagement but this can be fleeting, lost in microseconds, we need to gain a greater sense of community and that comes from connecting the fragments of a story and piecing them together to give more lasting meaning. We need the ‘greater’ context, not just fleeting moments.

Business leaders need to practice the art (and science) of describing aspects that might be complex, into good narratives so we can identify with these and recognize ways we can contribute and support.

The post Describing the future by using the business narrative first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today we face unprecedented change; organizations are being hit on multiple sides, often by a bewildering set of forces to make them feel the immediate need is to go back into themselves, to be more inward than looking out and being open to facing the future. There is this feeling today of being battered. Organizations are feeling the full force of the winds of business and global change.

Stopping, reflecting and then moving on.

Organizations are grappling with how to navigate through an unprecedented set of early 21st century challenges. How can they adjust to a more open and transparent world, a more fluid and adaptive one, that needs to be replacing the one we have been operating within all of the last century? One that seems to work no more as its very foundations seem to be crumbling. Organizations are in a period of relearning and understanding these ‘new’ forces at work.

Those of us on the outside – those investors, stakeholders, non-profit organizations, researchers and students of organization dynamics –  want to force this greater openness, to understand more of what is actually really going on inside our organizations, institutions and governments by the seeking out of transparency for greater understanding through constant ongoing engagements.

Organizations must resist being drawn in and simply press on with their outward engagements

Organizations certainly are at a defining crossroads, to go inward would be disastrous. They need to be outwardly facing and more forward-looking, more open on explaining their business models and strategic designs by discussing these more openly in risks and opportunities will draw people in, and is that unhealthy, I don’t think so?

A real opportunity is for organizations to grasp the greater knowledge that lies outside, by listening and absorbing is becoming a watershed moment for change, that we are in the middle of trying to understand. We are grappling with what technology is providing us in big data and all these dialogues of information flowing in.

I don’t think we can just ‘manage it’, organizations have to become highly adaptive, swift and nimble to seize what it is signalling to turn it into our economic or knowledge gain, time and time again. This is radically challenging the organizations command and control structures. At present, everything is becoming adaptive.

Much is not prescriptive, we are in a period of invention

Engaging in consistent conversations with customers, with stakeholders, with lobbyists or protectionists, looking to push for faster change is highly challenging and full of mixed signals for organizations, ones that are built on order, hierarchy and chains of command.

Yet being open is a far better place to stand and defend, to listen and respond, to adapt and learn how to change. Stakeholders value dialogue and honesty far more today, there is far less acceptance of denial and avoidance

This new more open organizational form, being sought outs through new networking, gathering new knowledge, absorbing this and then transform it into new combinations that all become our new innovation source, lies in our abilities to translate all these different signals arriving into our organizations.

The integration and interconnectedness that defines our time

Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, talks of the “breakneck pattern of integration and interconnectedness that defines our time, bringing with it tensions in economic sustainability and global interconnections”. What is driving the new way of thinking and behaviour needed in the ‘hyper-connected’ world requires new mechanisms need to be found to address challenges that can no longer be addressed in the isolation of one institution or jurisdiction.(source:www.theiirc.org)”

Today, organizations are forced to embrace different realities, caused by recent economic and political events leaving a growing sense of unease. Technology, social exchanges, a more global interconnected economy make everything seem either immediate or at an increasing distance, out of our hands. The reflecting part, the time to consider has been eroded, we have lost the middle ground to muse and ponder. Today we seem to simply ‘react’ or ignore and simply move on, because of this we starve our thinking and often loose context and meaning.

Making sense of our world

The art of sense making is how people make sense of the world in all its complexity and seemingly consistent uncertainty in order to make (better) decisions. We are presently seeking out plausible explanations to much that seems complex at so many different levels of society.

The problem seems to me, it is not unfolding in the way we have been ‘conditioned’ to understand it. The time-space of how we are moving from the past, through the present into the future is hard for organizations and us as individuals to understand. Equally as the speed, scale and complexity seemingly keeps growing it threatens to overwhelms us. We need to master ‘sense- making’ to try and put these into a new context.

revised 1st March 2014

The post Facing the future or staying locked in the slow lane of the past? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.