There is this consistent need or pressure to grow, yet that specific needle stays stubbornly stuck in low growth numbers, even with all this innovation talk and desire. Why is that? We know you simply grow a business by choosing a mix of investing in innovation, merger, and acquisitions or releasing your resources into more profitable activities. Innovation as a dedicated activity still sits uncomfortably within many organizations.

To try and catalyze growth, companies undergo perennial reorganizations, often to revitalize themselves. According to a Deloitte report, 50 percent of companies are undergoing an organizational transformation, yet only 11 percent think they will succeed. What’s worse, 70 percent of transformation programs do fail. In these failures, we only seem to continue to layer on complexity as a further stop-gap measure.

It is no wonder we’re growing increasingly pessimistic about making a positive change to a different transforming model within organizations. Without innovation taking a more leading transforming role, most of our established companies will continue to struggle to break out of their existing approach to business. Far too many are mired in a past business mindset.

One basic argument is that no matter what we do to undertake change, we seem stuck in the Industrial Age of the last century. We claim we are in the innovation age, one where a digital transformation will finally transform us, yet it remains elusive. I recently came across the below illustration of the struggles we seem to be having, in changing our companies from the industrial age to the innovation age. It depicts much of the constraints around how people are still working.

Source: www.swarmvision.com

What is holding this innovation age back?

To start, we face strong countervailing forces that restrict our abilities to break out of our past to move towards a new way of working. Pursuing old business paradigms of how a company should be run is not helping us.

Is it because of this traditional way of working, designed into the company, that we are all becoming disengaged and disenchanted with what we do? We’re often left feeling powerless to influence the type of change that we want to see, to release our creative juices and not simply to make those quarterly reporting numbers or get caught up in constant cutbacks when they don’t meet market expectations.

We are increasingly facing very different competitive pressures. This is a very “VUCA world” – the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of general conditions and situations we operate within. Pressures are not just external. We often bring them upon ourselves, as we were not anticipating, investing, and looking to build a different type of business. We fail to invest in foresight and insight, continually not adapting and adjusting our organizational skill set around a more agile, adaptive, highly responsive innovating and creative organization.

Every time we begin to call on innovation, we face negative forces. These are the ways we still wish to judge business – on its short-term results and its ability to limit risks. To give returns to shareholders that safeguard their investments. To achieve this, we look for maximizing efficiency and focus on the continued extraction of value from our core. We talk about investing in the future, in making adjacency moves, and in encouraging risk – but is that really the case?

For many, risk management has never been seen beyond the protection of the status quo. This attitude toward a risk-containment approach restricts innovation. It is actually limiting or even sacrificing the future by not investing in all the aspects of growth, especially bold explorations of new growth avenues. They fail to invest in a clear, distinctive capability of innovation capacities, that is fully integrated within their organization. Innovation stays outside the current core.

I am not proposing we abandon the need to protect our investments and to provide a reasonable return for investors. Instead, I’m suggesting more of a conscious shift where we focus on building more effectiveness, extracting more synergies, and exploring greater growth options.

Can you imagine having the same number of people involved in innovation growth as we have that manage the finances of a business? In most companies, we have small, dedicated innovation teams of five to 10 people trying to take on this Herculean task of growing a business through innovation. They are reliant on engaging others, focusing on their specialized areas to hand over their time to innovation. This is often above and beyond their daily job responsibilities.

Approaching innovation in this highly constrained way is simply not a recipe for success even though in recent years we have been trying to make the subject of innovation more attractive by tempting people to join in and participate in multiple ways.

Extracting innovation has become very complex

Let’s all agree that we live in a complicated world. We are continually witnessing growing threats all around us. Competitors are disrupting – even ones who were not around 12 to 24 months before. We see mergers, closures, or once great beacons of industry shrink before our eyes due to new alternatives. I have in mind here GE and the dramatic restructuring pain it is currently going through. We feel increasingly unsafe unless we happen to be one of those sitting in a technology-related business where growth has been extraordinary in recent years (e.g., Apple, Alibaba, Amazon).

But first, when you think of innovation, what comes to mind?

Source: European Commission

In “Opportunity Now: Europe’s Mission to Innovate,” a 2016 European Commission report (a mere 360 pages long), the author makes this point:

“Innovation is also more complex than ever. Complexity, chaos, and non-linearity have been seen since the 1970s as the defining features of our age. But still, our advanced societies find it hard to make robust policy for a complex innovation system.”

We should always start by recognizing innovation as a complex system. As the report defines, a complex system is a place where:

• no one can have a complete map of the actors and forces at play,
• the system’s behavior is not simply the sum of the behavior of those parts,
• feedback loops surprise us and change the behavior of the system,
• the system is “autopoietic”: behaving in a self-driven way and not just in ways we have yet to understand.

The report also questions, quite rightly, that having a pipeline theory as too simple. The author suggests innovation is not like a Roman aqueduct, designed to allow water to flow; instead, it’s a “muddy pond,” rich but obscure.

That is not a comfortable view for business leaders determined to limit risk, maximize resources and be consistent to extract efficiency and be fully effective. Innovation flies in the direct opposite to this need of corporate design. So, we have become highly creative for innovation to be allowed to operate under the same roof as these efficiency and extraction rules and regimes.

We have come up with multiple ways to exploit innovation. It can contribute to the business model, explore the margins, undertake core renovation work, experiment, and prototype, and be completely new to the world. But it always seems to be divided up in different parts of the business. I often feel innovation activities within companies are a continuing set of experiments, needed but not systemized, fragmented in its potential energy by this underlying need to keep it under control and to minimize risk and feel exposure.

Are we dissipating innovation resources or recognizing that one-size does not fit all?

We are fragmenting much within innovation. Is this good or bad for the longer-term? “The Ten Types of Corporate Innovation Programs,” an article was written by Jeremiah Owyang, founder of Catalyst Companies, provides a terrific list of possible types of innovative programs to consider. But by adopting too many, you fragment and possibly dissipate your innovation resources. Owyang offers a good description and examples that make this a highly useful reference point. Which do you undertake or are actively considering?

Many others are emerging beyond these ten types, where “open” sets the tone for building creative spaces, in lab designs or investment by different avenues of VC funding, internally and externally.

To begin with, these ten types of corporate innovation programs form a good starting point to consider what works for you. Which strategies can push innovation further down or out of the company and help move the growth needle for your innovation program? Check out Owyang’s description below.

The Ten Types of Strategy for Corporate Innovation Programs

 1. Dedicated Innovation Team

Corporations often start with staffing an innovation team within the company of full-time employees dedicated to developing the strategy, managing, and activating innovation programs. These leaders are experts at internal communications and are change agents.
Example: MasterCard, Hallmark, and BMW all have innovation teams dedicated to new business ideas, as does Nokia. Learn how Nokia’s innovation team works here.

2. Innovation Center of Excellence

Innovation can’t happen in a single group; without broader institutional digestion, new ideas will falter and fall. Some corporations are setting up cross-functional, multi-disciplinary groups to share knowledge throughout the company.
Example: Various retailers and consumer packaged goods companies enable this. Read: Creating the Physical Space for Innovation

3. Intrapreneur Program

Rather than rely solely on external programs, internal employees – dubbed “intrapreneurs” – are given a platform and resources to innovate. These programs invest in employees’ ideas and passions to unlock everything from customer experience improvements to product enhancements and full-blown internal startups that are then launched from within the company.
Example: Adobe’s Kickbox program is widely recognized as the leading program. Read: Exploring the Intrapreneurial Way in Large Organizations

4. Open Innovation: Hosted Accelerator or Corporate Incubator

Hosted inside a corporate office, large corporations invite startups to embed at their physical locations and provide them with funding, corporate support, and other perks. This brings innovative startups inside a large company for everything from overnight hackathons to long-term programs. Other variations include online open-innovation programs that request – and often reward –ideas from the crowd.
Example: Allianz Digital Labs in Munich hosts startups, and GE Garages enables startups to partner.

5. Innovation Tours

Frequently inspiration comes from outside, not within. Corporate leaders tour innovative organizations, companies, and regions to discover trends in various industries, learn from speakers, meet partners, and be inspired as they immerse themselves in innovation culture.
Example: European-based WDHB and Nexxworks tour executives in Silicon Valley and beyond. See an example of an innovation lab tour from the University of California San Diego here.

6. Innovation Outpost

A dedicated physical office, such as in Silicon Valley or wherever innovation happens in their market, staffed with corporate innovation professionals whose job is to sense what’s occurring in a market, connect with local startups, and integrate programs back into the corporate HQ. Some of them host partners, events, and startups, thereby spreading the function to Internal Accelerator programs. An Innovation Outpost is typically managed by employees – unlike an External Accelerator, which is run by a third party.
Example: Swisscom, Vodafone, and Nestle have opened Silicon Valley outposts. Read Evangelos Simoudis’ blog for insights.

7. External Accelerator

Corporations partner with third-party accelerators to provide sponsorship and/or funding in exchange for relationships with startups and integration opportunities. Corporate innovation professionals often embed themselves in Accelerator offices, fostering relationships with local startups. These External Accelerators are run by third parties – unlike Innovation Outposts, which are managed by employees.
Example: Plug and Play, Singularity University, Rocketspace, Runway, 500 Startups, Betaworks, and more.

8. Technology Education, University Partnership

Corporations can tap into new graduates, early-stage projects and companies, and the network of an established educational institution. In addition to traditional universities, there are new private versions opening up that are dedicated solely to technology training, like Galvanize and General Assembly.
Example: General Assembly, Galvanize, and most tech- or business-focused universities.

9. Investment

Many corporations place bets among the startup ecosystem, with both small amounts for early-stage startups and larger amounts of corporate funding that yields market data, creates opportunities for follow-on investments, and blocks competitors.
Example: Intel Capital is a leader in direct corporate investments.

10. Acquisition

Rather than build innovation from the inside, many corporations acquire successful startups and then integrate. While often expensive, the startup is often already successful, and the acquisition can help the startup scale further.
Example: As one example, Dollar Shave Club was purchased by Unilever for a reported $1B.

Source: Jeremiah Owyang. Some additional links also applied where relevant.

Are we fragmenting our innovation activities or applying a solution to a specific problem?

We do have to guard against “simply” adopting one type of innovation over another. It needs a deeper understanding of what we want to achieve, and then we seek out the tools, methodologies, and solutions. Diving in and experimenting has some value, but some clarity in what you want to build in innovation capacity makes sense first.

If we apply one approach, we are in danger of “shoehorning” innovation to fit a program. Maybe we are then not allowing the idea or innovation we had in mind to evolve in its own way – in its natural path. Perhaps we are only responding to a top-down pressure of fitting initiatives into that same pattern of seeking efficiencies that fit within an organizational design that will eventually choke innovation.

We need a new call for change based on a focused innovation mindset

For the majority today, we are at this countervailing point where innovation is in need of breaking the impasse. We need a different, more holistic set of solutions to manage innovation.

What I want to look at in a series of articles in the coming months is how we can manage risk from innovation differently. How can we build and accelerate different corporate innovation programs? How can we begin to re-equip our talent to build their capabilities and capacities and to recognize that we can design innovation differently to engage in innovation in more transparent, more structured, and more open ways? How can we design our programs more purposefully?

There is a call for finding more methods and approaches that are open and scale well. We need to reset the baseline of innovation through knowledge, collaborations, and building capabilities. We need to build networks and systems designed for this explicit innovation purpose. Let us finally separate “extraction” from “exploration” in the design of companies. We need to strip away complexity within the way we practice innovation today and connect “it” all up in a new innovative design.

***This post was originally provided for Hype and has been republished here

The post Why Are We Making Innovation So Complex? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I named my company Agility Innovation Specialists and at its core, we state that the value of this focus can offer a real “intensity in innovation” that we believe reflects today’s world of need.

We encourage you to disrupt the accepted, to constantly challenge the current ways and push into uncomfortable territory. We suggest you seek out customers’ unmet needs, and unexplored opportunities to give a new diversity to any thinking, and then we set about accelerating these ideas to fruition. Those all need abundant and constant agility.

Many of our business organizations continue to struggle with innovation and how to make it repeatable, sustaining and transformational. Often, it seems, the more large organizations attempt to become ‘agile’ the more they seem to achieve the very opposite, of rigidity.

Finding solutions to building agility is part of the necessary answer to achieving greater innovation solutions.

Our aim is to strengthen the core by building in increasing ‘waves’ of agility within your business and enabling a stronger set of sustaining innovation outcomes.

This comes over time, from this need to have agility, flexibility, and an open enquiring mind that looks to experiment and explore, making for an agile innovator this needs diffusion across the entire organization and that does take time.

I’m always looking to explore agility and recently came across the concept of “collective agility”

Then we have collective agility

I have been reading a good academic paper recently, one that I came across in my Big Data and Cloud research I have been undertaking. The paper is called “Collective Agility, Paradox and Organisational Improvisation” by Yingqin Zheng, Will Venters and Tony Cornford found on the London School of Economics site, under the department of Management.

Their point gained from studying GridPP and its part in the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LHC) where they observed a collective, agile and distributed performance rather than seeing ‘agility’ as small-group and deliberate systems development practices often associated with ‘agile’.

It got me curious. Here is my summary of their paper.

It certainly offers some pointers to managing in more agile ways in a complex and often disparate organization.

Collective agility is focused on the same objective: shared.
In terms of business, it means the mission is shared by all and this mobilizes each person in ways that I feel are trying agility to innovation in new ways, well for me anyway.

It is providing an environment where “unintended consequences” emerge, many positive, others less so, where random thoughts and ideas collide and through these exchanges within the community they form a “collective mindfulness” to solve these complex challenges.

Collective agility seems to require a loose coupling, not heavy structures or rules, encouraging a culture of improvisation and constant ‘tinkering’ that comes from not just intelligence, trust and pragmatism but from the knowledge that lies within the community.

Collective agility needs to have minimal structure, flexible planning, extensive communication and social bonding, all working towards this coherent, facilitated and growing feeling of making good sense (sense-making) through this coordinated but distributed network.

It is totally reliant on the interactions and attention to coordination to achieve this ‘collective mindfulness’

The big “ah-huh” for me

Collective agility is about accepting what is unpredictable and uncontrollable yet working within given boundaries, actively working upon seeking out improving performance and capability, to still perform in these circumstances of uncertainty.

Now for me, many organizations are grappling with uncertainty, volatility and unpredictable situations and resort to trying to master them in rigorous, highly disciplined ways.

This collective agility is suggesting we go the other way, we let go, hang loose but stay collectively focused by just reacting in agile ways. Does that raise some different thinking for you, it does for me.

We are seeking out improved performance but in really agile ways across a distributed community or network. Large organizations today are regretfully still tackling thorny problems in ‘given silo’s’ and this ‘collective agility’ thinking might open up our ideas about collaborating and co-creating in different ways.

It is in the combining of performances, that tackle issues in improvised ways but within a trusted and pragmatic way. It creative productive tensions, dynamics and motivating challenges and the group feel that ‘capacity for action’, motivated to combine, share and explore together to solve the problem.

Rules, structures and organized events often inhibit and feel contrived, the idea behind ‘collective agility’ is it is more natural even within the organization with established routines and strong cultures as they can bind, provide collective strength, as well as inhibit. It is seeking out the minimal structures, releasing the flexibility and bonding that can come from these routines and stronger cultures.

The when what, who, where and how collective agility is performed

According to the authors, agility can be learnt through ‘learned improvisation’ where some established tools are dropped or removed and some ‘surprise, risk and wonder’ are allowed into the exchanges.

The atmosphere of experimentation, trust, shared goals and emotional bonds provide for confidence to grow, in sharing and learning from made mistakes, as it contributes to the ‘higher’ cause of what the community is tackling within these tough problems.

The group grows in its ‘sense of pride in working and searching for a higher cause and is even willing to undertake unpopular tasks to move exchanges along. The motivation grows through this collective agility.

We often recognize improvisation and agility are more easily performed in small groups, jazz improvisation is often used to relate to this agility. The key is often the ambience and this can equally come from building out bigger communities to perform and exchange (notes)

The final thought is agility requires a mental attitude “to let go of control” to interact, to improvise but to seek to keep that sense of cohesiveness of constantly wanting to work things out, working consciously to keep moving forward towards the higher task.

Art and science fuse.

The authors suggest science becomes more like an art- visionary, experiential, passionate, agile and emergent. I’ve written about art and science before, see here “Renaissance comes from combining art and science for innovation“, so I can relate to this need to bring these two often separate practices into one again.

As I was working through this paper, replaying the conceptualization of ‘collective agility’, I liked the comment within the paper “agility for us is an expression of what people do or achieve, rather than what they might do or capabilities they hold”

Then another important part of this paper is managing the Paradoxes
They also bring out Paradoxes and provide a helpful table of these seemingly conflicting ideas or paradoxes to build ‘collective agility’ in understanding. These are based on:

1) The paradoxes of learning: “as we struggle between the comfort of the past and the uncertainty of the future which are fundamental to the process of innovation, transformation and sense-making”. Learned improvisation and reflective spontaneity.

2) The paradoxes of organising: “reflecting tensions between control and flexibility, formal and informal, integrated and differentiation denoting an ongoing process of striving for an equilibrium of often opposing forces”. Planned agility and structured chaos.

3) The paradoxes of belonging: “we strive for both self-expression and collective affiliation”…but also being “self-driven, intelligent and creative people, yet they also have an acute appreciation that success relies on collaborative effort”. Collective individuality and anxious confidence.

They finish the paper by offering useful tables highlighting some key organizational practices that help to make this collective agility work through these paradoxes.

We are constantly searching for agility to perform innovation

Agility is linked to change. Change is constantly throwing obstacles in our way. We are urged to be nimble, to react quickly, and to tackle challenges in new ways. Developing agility allows us to be in a constant ‘state’ of recognizing nothing is seemingly staying the same.

If we are feeling those around us, are all working towards the same goals, then we feel less inhibited, we may not like change but we gradually accept it. If others are reinforcing the necessary change through this ‘collective agility’ it can become a source of new hope, new discoveries, and a place for opportunity, with real excitement, full of possibilities

Gaining that critical sense of collective identity missing from many in our organizations.

By knowing “we” are collectively all working towards the same purpose, constantly having the progress mutually reinforced, allowing for clear debate but being pushed and moving forward, being allowed to freely exchange within a common purpose in ‘collective’ ways, then we are certainly are moving towards a more fluid, organizational agility.

This collective agility might alter the ways we can tackle tough problems and work in volatile environments, which then can yield in collaborative ways, solutions that are more radical and breakthroughs in innovation, something we should all be striving to achieve.

Certainly, this does offer some interesting thoughts to take collaboration and co-creation further through this collective agility concept of greater improvising.
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The post Building Collective Agility for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to think differently about innovation and why it needs complexity and adaptive thinking as part of its design.

Complexity within systems challenge us to think differently, it pushes us to think outside often our normal experiences, to confront and understand and then restructure, often the unordered, into a new order.

Organizations are in need of understanding the complexities within their systems far more.

Complexity within innovation is always adaptive.
The challenge with managing complexity is that it is made up of many shifting and connected parts, that form much around interactions and relationships. These new ‘connections’ are shifting and challenging much of our previous understanding, built often on past practice and entrenched thinking.
We need to think differently to generate fresh insights and new-to-the-world innovation and this begins by us ‘seeing’ the potential by unravelling the complexities involved. To seek a more radical innovation agenda you need to grapple with much within a complex system to yield the ‘promise’ of really new and exciting innovation.

Innovation is made up of many connected parts when it eventually combines and becomes one, the finished article or concept. You gain constantly from its combining power.

Innovation is highly dynamic (or should be), full of interactions and relationships where the individual and the collective whole, changes as a result of the experiences gleaned from engaging within the process. That is a complex adaptive system.

I wrote a piece a couple of years back, as my initial attempt to explain that innovation is a complex adaptive system. There is so much to add to this but recently I was listening to Dave Snowden from Cognitive Edge and this struck me as a great starting point for many.

David is regarded as an authority on the application of complexity theory to organizations, and I think there is so much to learn from following David and his thinking, I’d recommend it.

Understanding complexity – peeling away some of its layers.
David recently gave a part talk on understanding complexity and how to manage it.

He offered these thoughts with my summary of what I heard as my add-ons relating more specifically to innovation.

If innovation is complex, we need to recognize and manage this. They make sense to me in the context of innovation and managing its complexity.

These thoughts from David are in explaining a complex system. They might provide you a better understanding of the complexity often found within innovation and help in your thinking about the implications through.

* Enabling constraints – without constraints you simply have randomness, you decide the level of constraints for the level of flexibility you are looking for (from innovation) and how much you are prepared for uncertainty. You need to strive for a ‘given’ coherence and place this within a structure.

* Complexity is highly sensitive to small changes (weak signals are too easily dismissed) – small things magnify to produce (over time) major impact. What seems trivial actually might be highly significant. Think new technology, it is often dismissed as you lack the skills or understanding so you quickly dismiss it.

Weak signals can provide the possible future directions you need to orientate around. Identifying the weak signals within the frame of the three horizon methodology, can trigger complexity of understanding.

* Granularity matters – if you make something to big and too connected, you can often struggle to adapt and find solutions. Getting the granularity right is key, so we can see the emerging opportunities and this often means we need to break the big ideas down a level or two, to seize perhaps multiple opportunities as well as allocate resources to ‘bite-sized’ pieces of work. It is from these smaller pieces of work you begin to piece the bigger ‘prize’ together.

* You need sufficient but not excessive gradients– the example David uses is the troubles within inequality. If we all had the same equality we provide little incentive for change, alternatively if we have excessive inequality you begin to get preconditions for revolution and potential catastrophic change.

So you need some gradient but not to much. For example everyone aligned with the same values might be a bad thing to do as it destroys variety, or diversity of opinion and conflict and that is unhealthy for innovation. Within any innovation activity some ‘creative’ tension equally can give that gradient.

* Proximity and connectivity can be managed – this is the who and what we interact with, we evolve through our engagements and interactions, these give us our cognitive structure. The key is defining who interacts with whom, not the outcomes. Relationships and networks need encouragement and managing.

* You need to shift from fail-safe design to multiple parallel safe-to-fail experiments – we need to stop trying to work out one (big) thing to get it right, we need to encourage anyone who has a contribution to make, a coherent hypothesis to be allowed to run with it, in parallel for other experiments in a controlled safe-to-fail experiment.

It is the patterns of potential success that evolves from all these experiments evolves and can ‘collectively’ reveal an emerging pattern or concept that ‘breaks the mould’, sees new solutions.

These can be evaluated in parallel to detect something new and value or presented to others so they can evaluate the emerging patterns of discovery to judge and take forward or not. This more discrete project thinking deploys resources better, gives greater agility and adaptability. You set out to stimulate evolutionary possibilities.

* The inherent uncertainty of complex systems means we have to navigate a fitness landscape of possibilities – You are looking for the evolutionary potential from dispositions (the inclination towards something, the attitudes and consequences) and the propensity (the natural tendencies) to give emerging patterns of beliefs, often called peaks and troughs.

Knowing your fitness landscape for innovation is important as I have previously suggest and laid out a possible pathway. You can use landscaping for capturing individual stories or needs to find solutions that are more relevant to those (their) specific needs. Jobs-to-be-done comes to mind here and mapping solutions to closer needs that derive from exploring real stories, through ethnography as an example.

Each of the above has significant innovation implications

If you treat complexity as something you must overcome, reduce it or try to ignore it, you miss significant opportunities within innovation. You can’t force it. To exploit innovation you need to manage it, coax out the possibilities, managing it well, not as simple problems but within a better understanding of a complex system.

It is deciding what complexity within the innovation design and then set about building and placing the right capabilities where they matter.

Avoid the “Business as Usual” Mentality for Innovation.

We cannot enforce ‘business as usual’ as the modus operandi for innovation to make it ‘fit.’ We are faced with the very opposite in today’s world, the need to ‘embrace’ reoccurring change.

We need to manage complexity within the systems and we do need innovation to exploit this to our advantage.

To achieve this we need to obtain as much diversity and non-linear structure in what we do to allow recognition of all the possible options. We need to move well beyond the obvious and move through the complicated, into the complex and once in a while cross over into the chaotic nature of innovation to extract all the innovation ‘juice’ possible.

We need to think differently about innovation and why it needs complexity and adaptive thinking as part of its design.

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End note and further reading: The Cynefin Framework of David Snowden and Cognitive Edge is most valuable to explore. I discussed this from an innovators perspective recently in this post that was describing the value of the Cynefin model towards innovation.

The post Understanding Challenges Within Innovation Complexity first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Firstly a very brief explanation of the Cynefin Model and why I find it highly valuable for innovation management.

Innovation has many characteristics of a complex adaptive system as I have crudely attempted to explain here.

The three primary states within the Cynefin framework are Ordered Systems (including Obvious and Complicated), Complexity and Chaos.

Order is split into two, as this handles a key difference in human knowledge between those states, where the cause and effect relationship is obvious and those where it requires greater analysis or expertise.

Exploring a process of emergent discovery for innovation

Most innovators are working in and certainly are far more familiar with the ordered domains, for ‘obvious’ innovations that extend, enhance or evolve their existing products and services.

Equally, they understand their more specialised place and contribution to be growing in their comfort, in the part they play in the more ‘complicated’ domain, where expertise, dedicated focus and specialization are often required or called upon.

The real challenges come from the really ‘new’ in innovation as it becomes greater in new designs, changing functionality, different technology or significant improvements on the existing that involved greater research and development the more you travel around the cynefin framework.

Here within this ‘ordered’ domain, the innovation activities are a lot more predictable, and more straightforward in their management. This is more about being trained, using expertise where needed, applying skills, making appropriate decisions, having established structures, processes and measurements and then systematically working towards clear objectives.

When you move across into the ‘complex’ or even ‘chaotic’ domains this takes on far more new learning, more situational assessments, looking and combining capabilities to manage emerging patterns and knowledge, applying experiences, looking for diversity of opinions and searching for new wisdom or insights.

Expertise and experience, collaboration and relationships need significantly leveraging. You often diverge/converge constantly as you work through the potential answers. The mindset here is different and it is more one that is based on the detection. Innovation is far more demanding, pushing frontiers, exploring discoveries, dealing in a series of exchanges and recognizing emerging patterns to piece together as real ‘new to the world’ innovation activities.

Let’s describe the domains within the framework

In the obvious domain of order, you assess the facts, categorize them, and then apply established practice. The system is well set up and you work through this in very controlled ways, you tend to adhere to the practices, always looking to improve and apply best practices. You sense- categorize- and respond as your work through the approach. Most of our incremental innovation ‘sits’ here as an extension to what we have established and where most systems, processes, technology understanding and controls are already established, all we are required to do is manage within a defined set of controls (constraints).

The complicated domain is where you tend to need greater expertise, initially, you might have multiple answers to your emerging concepts and you need to work through a better cause and effect so all involved can see the relationships. This is often termed the “known unknowns”. You sense- analyse- respond. This domain requires degrees of expertise and investigating various options and working eventually through the trade off’s. If a decision remains elusive then perhaps you have a more complex issue.

In the complex domain, you need to really work to extract the right answers. This is regarded as the realm of the “unknown, unknowns” and where much of our organizations have to work. Why simply because situations and decisions are far more complex as much is swirling around in unpredictability and flux. You are looking for more for the emerging patterns and you should avoid the attempt to impose a course of action or place ‘increased’ constraints here, you should allow the pathway to reveal itself.

For innovation here, you firstly probe- then sense- and then finally- respond. A solution or breakthrough will emerge and then you can begin to impose growing constraints, looking to move unordered thoughts or patterns into more orderly ones to evolve into final or potential solutions.

Avoid imposing order too early as this can preempt the opportunities for these ‘greater’ patterns to emerge. Leaders need to set the stage, step back, allow patterns to emerge and then determine which ones are more attractive or desirable.

Design thinking works well in this domain, where you visualize, synthesise, create narratives, build on learning stories, and explore multiple prototyping and safe-to-fail experiments.

When you are faced with a chaotic domain, this needs a rapid response. Searching for right answers can waste time, this is the realm of the “unknowables.” Cause and effect are impossible to determine as no manageable patterns seem to exist, only turbulence, challenge and threat.

The need is to quickly act, gain an early sense and respond. It tends to be the domain for top-down decisions, there is limited time for seeking input in ‘normal’ ways. This is the space where you ‘impel’ or ‘impose’ innovation.

Run a crisis team in parallel with an innovation solution solving team. Have one team managing the immediate to manage constantly changing issues incoming and another team working exclusively on exploring doing things differently to move from this chaos back into complexity.

Your innovation solutions have to counter the disruption or move beyond but the toughest part is ‘getting others to let go’. This requires clear leadership and direct communications to attempt to impose immediate actions and re-establish order.

There is a fifth domain, shown in the middle and that is disorder, not knowing which domain you are in and we often struggle to recognize which domain we want to be in for innovation and this disorder stays with us, until we impose order, structures or clarity to the thinking. The Cynefin model is highly contextual for innovation in my opinion.

Finally, to complete the understanding, the Obvious domain is next to Chaos because complacency (the extreme of Obvious) can all too easily produce catastrophic failure.

Thus that boundary is represented by a cliff, or more technically a catastrophic fold. You can find yourself moved from an orderly, steady-state, the business that is obvious to you and then thrown suddenly into chaos, by the sudden change. You fall off the cliff.

Recognizing and applying the different practices to each domain

Another important distinction within the model is around the type of practices each domain seeks out. In the obvious domain best practice rules, you are looking to constantly improve the innovation activity with repeatable, efficient structures and processes. Whereas in the complicated domain it is the search for good practices, the expertise deployed should bring this into the thinking.

On the other hand in the complex domain, you are searching for emergent practices, as you clarify, evaluate, probe and sense.

Finally, in the chaotic domain, this is more the application of novel practice, as you are ‘reacting’ to numerous situations where judgement and experience are applied to find original solutions to tackle mostly unique situations where you are learning as you go.

 You achieve a greater depth in discussions and sense-making around different innovation needs using this framework

Cynefin thus contrasts how things are, with how we know them, with how we perceive them. The overall idea is that the more you allow these three to interact with each other the more likely it is that your actions with be authentic to the situation.

Cynefin goes well beyond a categorisation model that many try to use it for; it is about dynamic movements. So in the model shown above the prime dynamic is shown by the blue arrow.

Sometimes you can move between all four domains and this is shown as the green line (in the above depiction of the framework) and as innovation tends to be more in the complicated and complex space, you ‘operate’ more in these two modes.

So where does the model come from? Dave Snowden from Cognitive Edge. David is regarded as an authority on the application of complexity theory to organisations. David offers so much that is relevant to our work within or for organizations, to listen and learn from.

Innovation is complex and works well within the Cynefin model
I like this as a discussional and resolution solving framework for innovation, as innovation can move across and between complex or complicated at different times, if it is more than ‘obvious’ incremental innovation. It attempts to place orders into the often unordered.

New ideas of innovation emerge in the complex domain and are often dependent on the constraints you impose to ‘extract’ and ‘yield’ choices.

You ‘toggle’ from exploration to exploitation across domains. The more you relax the more constraints can allow new possibilities to emerge. You want to eventually bring the unordered more in control and become more ordered.

From time to time the dynamic within an innovation concept may have ossified in which case a reset is needed; a shallow sudden dive into chaos. You are looking to bring the innovation out of this chaos domain as quickly as possible and impose some order (or constraints).

Only when change is no longer significant is it shifted to Obvious (formerly Simple) as the domain where incremental innovation resides as it relies more on repeatable structures and established practices.

We need to recognize different types of innovation need to be managed differently

I believe truly new (to the world) innovation is in mostly the complex domain and should be treated as such, often we don’t. We need to start with very open minds and then bring the thinking down.

We try to apply our existing practices and experiences best suited to regular or incremental innovation, found in the complicated and obvious domains, where practices constrain the idea more than we often want but sometimes need, as the ‘demands’ are imposed. We start to immediately probe and do not take the necessary time to analyse. We reduce the potential for greater innovation impact in applying constraints.

When you look at the four domains described here think of incremental innovation for working in the obvious, distinctive innovation for the complicated domain, radical or breakthrough for the complex domain and disruptive innovation when it comes to the chaotic domain. Think disorder when you have no established innovation system in place, just expecting innovation to happen!

Each of the above has significant innovation implications

The Cynefin model helps determine the ‘type’ of innovation and its complexity and the constraints you impose upon ‘it’. Recognizing the complexity that can hamper the effectiveness to innovation is very different from our usual management of effectiveness and efficiency.

Innovation requires boundaries but it needs the appropriate thinking, analysis and probing, this framework provides the ‘mechanism’ to promote this.

You need to build flexible systems that adapt, are dynamic and responsive and need that bandwidth for innovation exploration. It is a series of challenges evolving to be exploited, not reduced or eliminated.

Using the Cynefin model allows you to begin to think about the appropriate innovation and what is needed in practice and thinking approach.

It allows you to begin to be prompted in what the possible constraints might be, to allow you or not to explore innovation in these different domains.

To exploit innovation you need to manage it, manage it well, not as simple problems but within a better understanding of being a complex system, to extract the most from the investigation and discoveries.

It is deciding what complexity your innovation might have within the innovative design and then setting about building the right capabilities and framing these appropriately, where they matter.

My endnotes: I have drawn from different material associated with the work and explanations of David Snowden and Cognitive Edge extensively.

My innovation interpretations are built on this growing understanding and by using this model in my innovation discussions, by seeing its value and power for myself and through others. I just hope I have given justice to this fantastic model here.

BTW– The name Cynefin is a Welsh word whose literal translation into English, as explained by David is “as habitat or place fails to do it justice”. It is more properly understood as “the place of our multiple belongings” or “a sense of place” It is pronounced cunevin. The frame’s intent is to explore the relationship between man, experience, and context.
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Is Innovation finally moving beyond the previous constraints and boundaries we have been recently applying? As organizations really start to ‘ramp up’ their efforts for growth what will this mean?

Today and in the future we certainly know that innovation is about open, inclusive, full of exploration and harmonization to extract the best results across all that are engaged within their organizations. Getting engagement up in organizations is going to be top of the agenda and innovation can be a significant contributor.

We seem to have really grasped and recognized the combination-effect that comes from the myriad of different linkages that is propelling innovation activity and bringing increasing confidence within the boardroom. Innovation is within all our grasps, if we really want to grab hold of it.

Let’s look at some of the possible top-level trends I think we might see in 2014

The good news is, we are finally seeing innovation maturing.

We are certainly seeing innovation has moved well beyond just products. It is exploring the value of combining or even separating services, changing value propositions on a more consistent basis and exploring new business models far more openly.

Organizations are far more open to the search for their future growth than before. Each avenue for innovation to be traveled will be explored far more in our innovation activities in 2014.

As growth comes increasingly back on the agenda for most organizations, it will come far more from exploiting through a greater organic growth approach. Yet to achieve the ambitious growth targets that many organizations are seemingly talking about, there needs to be a radical overhaul of internal innovation understanding and structures.

Mindsets are ripe to make significant change, we can’t stay fixed in our ways in a far more agile and adaptive world, we are all facing. Cost cutting can only take us so far, being cautious and risk averse has longer term consequences. Organizations will finally make those efforts to established innovation as a competence all must learn and understand.

One innovation struggle is around ‘rigidity’ within the organizations.

Innovation requires a more fluid, adaptive and agile environment. This will require some significant changes within the approaches within managing within these structures and this takes a significant and dedicated approach to achieve.

The end result is changing the way people are managed and valued. There is a need to draw in, to engage, more open to diversity in opinion and thinking and increased emphasis on fluid teams tackling issues and challenges in unique ways, not through standard processes and approaches.

The shifts in innovation activity, seeking simplification

We are also seeing increasingly the disruptive era of simplification, which captures far more of the imagination and where the increased movement of future wealth generating opportunities lie by meeting targeted customer need.

These are not ‘layering’ on features that have been the approach of the past, this is stripping away and rapidly breaking these back down into targeted applications that do the job, we the consumer or client wants, often willing to pay a premium upon.

Complexity is also changing, taking out the pain for customers

Complexity should not be about customers having to work out how to understand something; it is using the smart complexity that sits behind the solution to allow us to focus on what we need to achieve, to then help us significantly deliver on our required needs.

Smarter searches, algorithms, designing your own options all are giving us the complexity we need. Simpler, interactive interfaces to do the job we wish to do, not forced to spend time learning and doing.

The continued exploring of the effects of reverse innovation and lean approaches.

Reverse innovation, jugaad or frugal innovation is where there is  a huge potential – still largely untapped in developed countries offering new avenues to real targeted growth.

What about the strong underlying movement in start-ups that is far more ‘needs related’ or serving ‘unmet needs’ through lean approaches and customer development techniques.

These are so much better understood than the approaches in the past, of simply cruising along for opportunity with a vague business concept.

Sharpening the minds, changing the mindsets.

Everything has become so much sharper in why we have to focus our minds down, it is far more on what and where innovation can give us the next growth opportunity and that comes from all the diversity we can muster.

Managing in the global innovation space is no different; we can get far more quickly at answers on a global basis than at any time in the past. We are learning to tap into this global knowledge in different ways, it needs a dedicated focus and understanding, to find the unique mix that suits your needs and knowledge accessing and translating and then we are closer to the solutions that have the global unlocking key.

The increasing value of data – its collection and understanding

We are using the ability to engage, to explore and exchange through a variety of social mediums, we can collect and interpret larger amounts of data than ever before. Collecting this data is the easier part, interpreting what it all means is a lot harder.

We will continue to improve our abilities to find the patterns, the trends, the underlying meaning of what this data is telling us. Then we get into decisions from this new understanding.

We will need to have far more adaptive, agile, responsive organizations that can quickly pivot to seize on these opportunities. The skill sets for managing data will become more established, discussed and quickly adopted as emerging practice.

Revisiting past practices

All of what has gone on previously needs to be revisited and in many cases reworked through new practices, new systems and new measures. Organizations are coming rapidly to the point of needing to be innovation re-engineered to make the sizable changes they must achieve to ‘allow’ organic growth to deliver.

We are forced to look harder for attracting growth into our business and innovation can provide this force if there is the commitment backing the rhetoric; the one of needing organic growth to be the primary driver of over the next five years.

Re-engineering the existing innovation is not a bad place to start, maybe in 2014 the innovation renovation movement might come more into force.

Innovation needs positive translation in its management practice

I am sensing a really positive shift in innovation practice. It does seem to have gone up a notch or two in its maturity and adoption within our organizations in recent months.

Can you feel the changes or are we still at the intent stage? Are organizations fully commitment to what shifting to an innovation emphasis will mean? Or are we only at a recognition stage?

Of course, there are significant sets of issues needed to be addressed to really allow innovation to drive growth. Organizations need to consider very radical shifts in approaching innovation and its management to gain any momentum, so intent can meet these organic growth ambitions as suggested?

Innovation needs to become fully integrated into organizations

 Innovation challenges much that is presently established within organizations, there is potential higher risks, significant changes required to be enacted within the organizations, with a whole raft of different competencies and capabilities are to be learned to extract the ‘promise and value’ from the innovation needed.

I predict the next twelve months will advance innovation understanding significantly

For me, in the next twelve months will be seeing an increased level of activity around innovation. The difference will be it will be at a much higher, strategic level to begin to re-equip organizations differently.

What will decide if this is a reality or just C-level rhetoric? C-level management is deeply worried over the alternatives of facing further low or no growth prospects, staying risk-averse or recognizing finally that the operating conditions need to change to search for real growth and that comes through more radical innovation.

Organizational innovation will have to change fairly dramatically to regain the momentum most organizations need and have lost for far too long. I think the focus on strategic innovation thinking will emerge stronger as we enter 2014 to give innovation that dramatic push, the ‘magic’ tipping point.

A collection of thoughts from recent observations and research.

The post Heading for 2014, will innovation change? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.