I believe Innovation is becoming overwhelmed by all the changes we are applying into innovation activity and its management.

I would say the IM system is under even greater strain from the shifts coming from the multiple applications of technology, new approaches to design and modelling as well as all the necessary engagement and touchpoints.

Yet we are still expecting this deluge of change occurring to happily move our innovations through that past established, often manual processes, we have presently in place. I think not.  We are deluding ourselves, that all is well.
There are such changes occurring.
There is an increasing need for ecosystems, platforms, the greater use of analytics, big data and reliance on technology are all crowding in on innovation delivery.

The emphasis on thinking through new business models, combining design thinking, lean management, customer development, prototyping, experimenting outside the lab, collaborating with clients, finding different partners, the different exploitation of research techniques, are all breaking out in different forms and combinations, radically altering our approaches to innovation.

Also collaborating and networking are far more essential to innovation exchange, be this in the early idea forming stages but increasing in the development and execution of innovative solutions.

Partnerships are diverse, delivering on the need of the job-to-be-done. Orchestration is increasingly playing its part to manage all the assets and knowledge coming into play. There is a significant amount of change occurring around innovation and its management.

I have suggested in past posts that we all need to think differently, to act differently, to treat  innovation differently:

innovation is based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services, into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently.

Can we continue in this “steady as she goes” by simply rearranging in this case the innovation portfolio to adjust to the latest insight, well no. I think we are simply just fiddling with the deckchairs, incremental changes as the innovation ‘ship’ plows on, into more treacherous water, underestimating the hidden icebergs that cannot be appreciated until something happens.

Overload, inadequate resources, systems and structures all lie under the surface but still, we press on regardless.

Innovation is heading for its own Titanic moment.
Are we addressing all the significant changes going around innovation?
It seems incredible to us today that anyone could believe that 70,000 tonnes of steel could be unsinkable.

Yet, when the New York office of the White Star Line was informed that Titanic was in trouble, White Star Line Vice President P.A.S. Franklin announced ” We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe the boat is unsinkable.”

I can hear the CEO of today making a similar comment “We place a lot of confidence in our innovation, it is critical in the way we will grow our business and take us forward, we are well-positioned to grow” I don’t share their (blind) faith.

Looking back, it was the beginning of the twentieth century and people had absolute faith in new science and technology. They believed that science in the twentieth century could and would provide answers to solve all problems.

The sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic shattered much confidence in science and made people more skeptical about such fantastic claims.

Does innovation sink under the weight of so much expectation

Are we going to sink innovation as the twenty-first century takes our beliefs in technology and science into new areas, without the necessary understanding of how to manage this, when so much of our understandings of how to physically manage this, are lagging?

I feel we can go on foolishly believing innovation will simply cope with all that is coming towards her?

It is perhaps “unthinkable” for most, our innovation will simply cope. Why not, I mean we have the technology and the internet to keep us caught up in the moment. Yet we are falling further behind on the people side of managing innovation and balancing risk and reward. Our processes, systems and structures are inadequate to deliver on the expected innovation promise.

Is the internet and our growing reliance on all our connections required for managing today’s business for innovation insights, services and understanding, we just might not be seeing the size of the ‘hidden’ icebergs?

Unless we change course and plot a new route for managing innovation we might have some very uncomfortable moments where we will simply sink, flounder or await rescue. Who is actually steaming to the rescue of our ‘creaking’ innovation systems?

*first published on LinkedIn

The post Sinking the unthinkable first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Well some of us do, but sadly most tend to become risk-avoiding because of the environment they are in or have been associated with for long periods, where avoidance rubs off, it seeps into the soul.

Many enjoy being simply ‘passive’, avoiding anything that smacks of being ‘proactive’; it is safer to be ‘reactive’. Innovation and heaven can equally wait.

Putting it simply most people and organizations are just afraid to take risks and this fear takes over and drives their choices. Innovation is certainly something that suffers from this fear of risk.

Organizations miss critical opportunities, individuals fail to speak out and argue for a given change or innovative idea. We can simply stop growing, to want to become something more, we take the easy option, we avoid risk.

Reducing innovation to the lowest common denominator.

How often have you felt all the risk mitigation has been taken out of the innovation concept you have been working upon, for it to emerge as a pale reflection of the original idea? Often I can hear.

We need to be reminded that innovation is the act (risk-taking) of introducing something new (creativity) that adds potential value. By reducing the risk we often do not produce something better, just simply an alternative to what is already out there.

Minimise the risk, strive for certainty, avoid the awkward questions, and just keep the head down and toe the line.

Our organizations talk about the need for risk but don’t walk the risk path.
The understanding of risk will always have associated with some fear, discomfort and resistance and that can be an uncomfortable place to go.

The whole ‘act’ of letting go is never easy. It is the ability to manage the risk that reduces its fear. It is through experimentation we gain our best learning, we actually are forward learning as we are accelerating our knowledge.

Surely the more we attempt something different, proving or disproving it makes for exciting work, we become motivated, curious and want more, providing there is an encouraging environment to experiment and explore.

As I have suggested before “shaping ideas, taking risks, allowing experimentation, providing tolerance (of failure or debate), exploring the unknowns, all should be an integral part of innovation”.

Innovation is risk-taking so let’s embrace it, not just for the sake of taking risks where you can become addicted to the thrill but in constantly seeing the positive payoff within the risk, it needs to be appropriate and set against the ‘given’ situation and the learning in potential loss but recognizing the potential in gain.

The search is for meaningful contributions

There is so much negativity swirling around our organizations, a real detachment that is raising alarm bells.

Today’s workers are “neither empowered nor inspired to navigate the challenges faced by twenty-first-century organizations” according to a recent Deloitte report and commented upon here by Steve Denning .

As Steve observes in this article, as a result, creative, passionate workers simply don’t want to work in organizations with “clearly defined roles, organizational silos, and predictability”.

We are also in real need of better “inner working lives” and we need to look for ways to allow our people to become engaged, feeling part of something that allows for being more creative and passionate.

An environment offering somewhere that is seen as more productive, looking to build for future contribution and finding ways to be more collegial, working in teams on these experiments and explorations to learn and advance the innovation thinking. It allows us to grow from within.

We need to find ways for higher levels of risk tolerance. We push the ordinary back into the extraordinary and all of us what to be associated with those sorts of moments, those events that give meaning, purpose and pride to what we do. We need to allow risk in, so the risk can come and live with you.

Our leaders need to lead and guide.

When one hears that the leadership is in disagreement it tends to stop organizations from being adventurous until that issue or sticking point is resolved.

When it comes to innovation we do need to look to our management to manage option proliferation, resolve criteria disagreements, overcome stalled decisions, clarify rejections or discount new ideas before they are ‘fully’ formed

Those leaders assigned to lead innovation need to become more engaged, stop the limited participation and take the time innovation does require. Head nodding or ‘just’ talking innovation just does not cut it!

Commitment does matter, enormously, up and down the organization.
We need to recognize allowing risk is becoming the basis for a commitment to change

Wanting innovation requires the need to encourage the management of risk. Today we are in markets with slower growth, higher volatility and potential for disruption. Risk needs to be proactive, not reactive.

Equally the sentiment that we cannot disrupt our core needs some shifting in thinking as others are busy working on ways to do that to you at this very minute. Risk comes from not knowing.

We need to manage the ‘certainty of return’ by making the knowledge that comes from incremental steps of an experiment to validate an idea into a new innovation needs this consistently improving the business case.

That comes from steady ‘readiness-based decisions that prototypes or pilots put into the hands of the consumer or customer to explore around, will advance our knowledge, each time of the potential value and ‘seen’ worth of this concept over the existing ones in the market place.

Shifting our thinking can be gradual in learning

The effectiveness of risk assessments, capturing more and more external market data and attempting group prioritization certainly helps but in volatile markets this is not enough.

We need to develop those risk-mitigation steps to constantly increase confidence; we need to look more internally or with our partners at our capabilities to measure the controllable factors and events to keep innovation on track and we need to seek out individual stakeholders discussions to manage their unique concerns.

This is far more a shift to execution than relying on market attractiveness conditions alone.

Thinking about risk in those different and manageable ways to move forward and grow

We need to mitigate uncertainty by constantly reiterating known and unknown risks through these constant engagements in experimentation, prototyping, and piloting concepts. This needs to be in a more dynamic ‘management of the portfolio’ concept, from concept to commercialization process.

A place where risk-mitigation needs to be in-built all the way, to build knowledge as it ‘reveals’ itself. In innovation, mostly completely new to the world it is never apparent, you have to ‘tease ‘ it out on its value and contribution.

Everything simply cannot be available when you often just don’t know, you take small steps often to feel your way and build that knowledge up.

We need to understand our reach and ability to grasp

The ability to push on and find out, to stretch, to understand our reach and our grasp, does need some risk-taking but in thoughtful, measured steps.

Good innovation needs measured risk-taking and let’s learn the ways to allow our innovation to happen and get our passion and engagement back, flowing through the veins of our organizations.

We need a mantra of ‘build-test-feedback-revise’ iterations performing constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty. One that is far more agile, vibrant, dynamic, and flexible that applies a leaner, faster and more adaptive and risk-based approach.

The risk-contingency is about constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty.

We need to move forward with a degree of certainty but also perhaps a little fear.
How about this as an idea to explore?
How about approving some pilot projects and providing resources to have unfettered six-month periods with no rules and no reviews but at the end of this agreed period, ‘something’ has to be seen and tested by a customer.

Then you embed the learning and further scale
It encourages risk but in clear time frames and with a definitive result that advances knowledge and takes you closer to its future value.

You look for and encourage new perspectives. Is this that risky or is it perhaps allowing risk to be managed in new ways of learning?

We do need to rethink the management of risk for innovation.

New business growth is very different from business as usual but in all honesty, is there that much business as usual still around?

We do need to loosen up our thinking on risk when it comes to innovation, otherwise, our growth will remain limited, stuck in the fear of the unknowns?

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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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