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

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

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

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

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

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

We initially chose change over transformation.

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

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

Change always feels painful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What might help flip the odds?

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

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

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

We are facing unprecedented disruption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To radically redesign the approach to innovation that today is constantly occurring in ‘discreet parcels’ of innovation activity within organizations. It is this ‘selective’ approach I certainly believe needs changing.

To achieve this I believe the middle manager in organizations needs to make some significant changes within their perspectives of ‘how’ innovation must fit within the design of their organization.

This will allow them to achieve a fundamentally different organizational state than many seemingly need but perhaps are stuck with existing designs at present.

Perhaps they are not seeing a different perscribed pathway to take- the innovation pathway suggested here http://bit.ly/dnCj1m and built upon here http://bit.ly/ikgR4f can serve as thoughts

Innovation in organizations does need fresh perspectives.

Jeffrey Phillips argues in his recent blog that “middle managers need new perspectives, new skills and new directions”. “We need to unfreeze the middle so the rest of the organization can adapt and change. Only then can innovation become what is needed it to be”- taken from his blog: “From smooth and steady to rough and ready”.  (http://bit.ly/OVsuX)

The question is how to unfreeze what we do today and relearn?
A good proven body of work has been built around psychologist Kurt Lewin’s suggested methodology that identifies the three stages of change that are still the basis of many approaches today- Unfreeze- Transition-

Refreeze.

Much of the fear in innovation lies in ‘what is appropriate risk’ not just for the individual but for their organization. We are ‘’creatures’ that still want to go back to being safe, so we can feel we have a handle on events to experience that sense of control we always seeingly search for. We normally do not like discomfort except in ‘given’ intense periods when we are being challenged or threatened.

The difficulty is you cannot maintain this ‘heighted’ threat, we seem to always (eventually) revert. What is needed is not to simply return to a former state but to replace that ‘state’ with a more appropriate platform of operating than before, built more on innovation for our future well-being and security.

The problem today, is that our world that we would love to be stable and be comfortable within, is being challenged more than ever. We need to find different positions of comfort to survive and thrive, innovation is in my opinion one of these.

The problem is innovation in itself, can be uncertain and often risky. I would argue though that this can equally be a new position of stability, if you seek to master innovation and know its strengths and weaknesses intimately.

If we remain in our present states, then what I suggest as a ‘frozen state’ remains, we default back to what we know, based more on repeating patterns based on efficiency, effectiveness and doing what is necessary to manage on a daily basis.

This, regrettably, is simply not good enough in today’s world. We need to change and in my last post I offered a number of approaches to structure this around change approaches (http://bit.ly/xfHWMM)

We need to make some real, significant effort to push ourselves into learning to ‘master’ innovation. We require both ‘push’ methods to get this moving- the organization sets innovation learning as a distinct goal for instance- and we need ‘pull’ methods to keep any momentum going until it instils itself as the new norm we identify with and get a different sense of yes, comfort, within ourselves over innovations critical position.

Lewin suggests 3 steps to work through as a model: Unfreeze- Transition- Refreeze.

Firstly we need to unfreeze the existing core.

There are plenty of techniques to help in this that have innovation as the focal point. To name a few

1. Burning platforms- create a crisis or agree there is a real crisis
2. Challenge the comfort zone and shake things up
3. Provide proof that situations being faced are changing- cold hard evidence
4. Restructuring deliberately to force change into the system
5. Offering fresh goals and visions for innovation as formal corporate objectives
6. Provide opportunities to learn, to be trained in innovation techniques and methods
7. Shift the rewarding metrics to outcomes based on innovation activities
8. Recognize that many of the existing contributions made do make up the past, not so much the future of what is needed to be achieved, based on growth and wealth creation.

Then we have to make a set of transition points.

These are the fuel to keep the innovation engine nourished and moving in the new innovation pointing direction.

1. Inspire the organization to achieve some remarkable new things to change the existing conceptions.
2. Provide internal and external stimulus in coaching, inspiration talk’s, providing an innovation knowledge site.
3. Set about an organised training and education programme for innovation understanding that this moves in steps of learning.
4. Re-educate by exposing more within the organization to fresh alternative thinking, both with your industry or in other sectors that you can ‘take and apply’ appropriately.
5. Offer open spaces, and ‘safe’ environments to learn and experiment, to trial and sometimes fail but learn from these moments the positives and re-apply them.
6. Establish innovation champions to be the support team to ‘go to’ for advice.
7. Push beyond incremental innovation by slowly turning up the heat so it gets more visible and noticed. See my blog on different dominant designs of organizations http://bit.ly/zdUhKp
8. Learning to take first baby steps, followed by improving the pace within innovation activities by using different experimental, prototyping, piloting methods and approaches. Grow the confidence and talk of the learning from any failures along the way to improve.

Lastly, we look to refreeze the ‘state’ into a new innovative one.

We actually do need to refreeze but in a more responsive, proactive, agile way – with clear innovation intent to achieve an end goal. For instance, the goal of being seen to have a set of clear competitive distinct positions, recognized and acknowledged both internally and externally parties and then, measured in clear ways that added value that is seen in results, not just talked about as a ‘future promise’ based on present planned activities.

1. We need to burn any bridges to ensure there is no way back to the old ways, where innovation was talked about but not enacted upon
2. Make sure you achieve the ‘show me the money moment’- your evidence stream of innovation activity and success.
3. Keep the focus on being ‘relentless’ and focusing on the future and why innovation is an important part of this in increased activity and performance
4. Keep returning to the ‘rationalization’ of this so each action is a validation of a path being travelled which encourages certain actions.
5. Make sure rewards are aligned to the new ‘innovation’ way, place rewards into the mid-term as much as the short term, often called golden handcuffs but valid in institutionalizing change through innovation.
6. Build all the efforts over time into the very social fabric of the organization and make the middle manager responsible for engineering and designing the innovation mantle needed to be worn by all.

Passing through the three learning stages

Unlocking the innovating potential within organizations always needs to pass through different learning stages. The middle manager lies at the core.

Focus on this as your ‘unlocking’ point and establishing a way to build in the necessary competencies and capabilities in a well thought through innovation development programme and process surely can allow innovation to take hold?

Until we approach innovation in a clear, methodical learning way, innovation, that deep capacity for innovation, will never fully ‘take hold’ in organizations as the middle of the core remains frozen in the past of efficency and effectiveness only.

We do need to change the innovation middle core.

The post Shifting paradigms, refreezing the organization for innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The chat was framed around a set of questions here (http://bit.ly/Awvh5E ) but basically the premise of Jeffrey’s thinking was “can it be possible to shift from business as usual (BAU) to innovation business as usual”?

He suggests that one of the most significant challenges for innovation is the fact that many firms have spent years, if not decades, creating business models and operating processes that are exceptionally efficient and effective but neglect the essential part that innovation plays.

Equally the middle manager is so focused on the delivery of short term results through effective organization and pursuing efficiencies they have little ‘slack’ within the system to learn and build innovation into it.

I would possibly argue the very people that we are expecting to manage the ‘dynamics’ within organizations, the Middle Managers, are seeking the very opposite- doing everything possible to keep it as stable and consistent as it can be.

So how can this change?
Change is the word. If you accept the premise of BAU and Middle Managers holding back innovation, then we need to contemplate change, a more radical agenda of change. Jeffrey in his book goes some of the way in offering up different solutions to this but I think we should think deeper and harder, around a fully fledged innovation change management programme.

Let me offer some thoughts.

How can we move the needle and tilt it more towards innovation? I can think of five immediate ones  to contribute to this debate that would significantly advance the change called for in Jeffrey’s book.

1.       Core competencies need to be changed
Recognizing the middle manager holds the organization together, they are the glue that connects the organization with the leadership and enable the ‘forces’ to flow. Lets turn their existing core competencies on their head. The mix of primary, critical and core capabilities that are the measuring point for the MM’s new core competency set.

• 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 remains 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 a clarity of the new and emerging critical capabilities they need to build up. These are the capabilities that will provide the greatest impact for competitive advantage, not internal but external in all its orientation.

• At the top of the pyramid is the core capabilities they need to have. This cluster of capabilities is centred on the critical capabilities to make innovation mainstream, to be a daily part of their thinking, their make-up, and their intent to ensure happens. These differ according to the role, area of focus and contribution.

2.  We need to focus the middle manager on different learning concepts
Peter Senge comes to mind for rethinking his work for establishing an innovative learning organization. His five main characteristics are system thinking, personal mastery, mental models, a shared vision and team learning. In (brief) summary these are:

• Systems thinking. The idea is to introduce a distinct innovation system thinking approach as a conceptual framework that allows people to study innovation as bounded objects that make up the innovation ecosystem, that needs to be in place within their organization. Over time it will help measure the performance of the organization as a whole, and of its various components, and the organization rewards on the ‘whole’ not on selected parts. This shifts the ground for middle managers to manage within.

•  Personal mastery. The commitment by an individual to the process of learning is known as personal mastery. This is their part of the core capabilities they need to be seen as making a direct contribution to the competitive advantage the organization believes is its set of goals. The workforce can learn these more quickly once identified, and applied them, so it is therefore important to develop a culture where personal mastery is practised in daily life, based on clear capabilities needed to be practised.

• Mental models. The assumptions held by individuals and organizations are called mental models and these are seeming, stuck more in the efficiency and effectiveness ones at present. To become a learning organization, these models must be challenged. We have to guard against the individuals and middle managers that tend to espouse theories, which are what they intend to follow, and theories-in-use, which are all what they actually do. Also over time, we must shift the organisations ‘memories’ which preserve certain behaviours, norms and values. Existing unwanted values need to be discarded in a process called ‘unlearning’ and allow time for new learning and maximised through applying ‘triple-loop learning.’

• Shared vision. The development of a shared vision of the place that innovation occupies. It becomes important in motivating the staff to learn, to relate to, to create those essential common identities of the value of innovation’s contribution and their distinct contributing part in this. This sharing and identity give real focus and energy to learning.

•  Team learning. The accumulation of individual learning constitutes the last aspect, of team learning. The value of the middle manager in bringing people and their contributions together is vital, this is done in efficient and effective ways but also in increasing experimentation to understand and find the ones that often just seem to work. This needs structuring for encouraging boundary crossing and openness for both shared meaning, and shared understanding.

3. Working the innovation learning ‘muscles’ through the three learning loops

So in our new learning, we recognize the value of the three learning loops- the first loop, the single one is reinforcing what we do,

whereas the second loop or double loop is learning through increased insights what we can do, what is possible, what and who can contribute to ‘our’ advancement of innovation in establishing a competitive advantage in these two ways, increasingly open exchanges.

The third loop is the real learning loop- the one where innovation takes hold, where the establishing principles, capabilities and competencies goes beyond insight and discovery- the beliefs in what we should be- our triple learning set of loops.

Moving from a certain static, predictable level to a more dynamic one where innovation thrives. This is the multiple conversation loop, built on enquiry, one feeding off another, a more open (innovation) approach and allowing these to evolve, often in seemingly unstructured ways.

One of the best visuals for reinforcing the loops is shown below. Again it is by Peter Senge and I use it a lot in any change programme. It is where you are heading too for innovation to become part of the BAU or in Jeffrey’s parlance of “innovation business as usual”

So the middle manager has to think through a new agenda for innovation change and the organization has to ‘fully’ provide the necessary support and structure for them to move towards this (radical) change in their managing within the middle.

4.       My forth contribution is applying a coaching framework

I wrote about this in a recent blog (http://bit.ly/zrzJc1 ) on “the value of having an innovation coach”. In this I offered the four stages we all go through in changing behaviours that I really believe can be applied here specifically.

• Unconscious Incompetence– this is often a self reflection stage where the person, in our case the middle manager, reflects and draw out areas of incomplete knowledge on innovation. These become the agenda to learn about and need organization support.
• Conscious Incompetence– From these reflections you gain insights, you begin to explore tested tools and techniques, you begin to frame new references that are relevant, you begin to explore and experiment, the middle manager encourages others within the organization to do the same.
• They look consciously  for growing confirmation that it has real value in contributing to advancing innovation towards competitive advantage.
• Conscious Competence– As you begin to ‘grasp’ differences this enables experiences to build up so a middle manager can do what he is good at, look at the alternatives with a growing confidence and some ‘matching’ begins to occur and you see an emerging path for innovation action beginning to emerge from this.
• Unconscious competence– the final part where the impact of what has been learnt, understood, investigated and explored has a real personal impact. It seeps into the make-up of the person and changes there ‘going forward’ behaviour. These comprehend the value of  innovation meaning differently than their original perspective and build their personal core competency levels. These become their clustering points of contribution and expertise as the way they will manage innovation going forward as the increasing value ‘gels’ for them and it integrates more and more into the existing efficiency and effectiveness mindset to move BAU into Innovation BAU .

5. Lastly I still enjoy using the ADKAR methodology of change

In any change we pass through different aspects, the building blocks for successfully navigating any change. For instilling innovation as part and parcel of the day-to-day, working within an organization and ‘radiating’ from the middle manager this is achieved, but only over time and in clear steps.

The ADKAR methodology was created by Prosci Research back in the nineties. Effective management of the people dimension of change requires managing five key goals that form the basis of the ADKAR model .

ADKAR is simply the acronym for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. These are the elements of the the most fundamental requirements for anyone to succeed and maintain change. Once you identify the first weak element, you have identified the resistance to change.

Therefore, these elements cannot be reordered or skipped. You need to move from one to the next once understanding has been fully established along the ADKAR escalating model .

• Awareness of the need to change
• Desire to participate and support the change
• Knowledge of how to change (and what the change looks like)
• Ability to implement the change on a day-to-day basis
• Reinforcement to keep the change in place

This model tries to attack the root of the resistance, in this case establishing innovation within the day-to-day working model of the organization.

What really gives this model the edge is its emphasis on individual change and each middle manager has different needs, innovation competencies and understanding to learn to embed in them, the change needed. Change is often seen very differently, person to person.

So these are my 5 thoughts to contribute to embedding innovation into business as usual.

Until we approach innovation in a clear, methodical learning way, it will never fully ‘take hold’. Building innovation capabilities and competencies is where I hang my advisory hat- no shame in that- and we need to recognize the value of having a more structured approach to tackling this.

Otherwise, we all remain frozen in perspectives (personal), in implementing ‘parcels’ of innovation skills that are not ensuring innovation has a holistic approach from vision, through a mission to its delivery. We suffer far too many ‘frozen innovation moments’

The post Unfreezing the middle, seeing a different innovating prospective first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.