A growing reality might be that many people will be forced to stay at home until a vaccine is found, due to their risk of infection. Travel might become off-limits for many.

As we come out of the present crisis, we need to look at our social engagement and influencer profiles as we need to engage with the world differently. We will be in a greater world of virtual management, earning our “daily crust” from what we do at a distance.

This crisis period has become even more dominated by Social Media. What can this teach us?

What is being pushed towards us is overwhelming. We presently see the significant ramping up of webinars, @home advice, those multiple suggestions to fill our time but, is it making a real difference to you besides filling time?

It has one real problem. It is others talking to you. Your voice is missing most, and you need to be heard more than ever. You will need to begin to drive your significant engagement, not rely on others but your views and opinions!

All of this activity is being pushed towards you; you need to now organize yourself to “push back.” This is a time where you need to be seen and heard. You need to stand out and be recognized. This is a time for your social engagement.

It can be a time of significant distraction or time of thinking about what will help each of us to re-orient to a different set of realities and futures.

Are we ready for it, or did you merely ‘park’ your life on hold in these lockdown weeks? If we need to learn anything, it is simply that the world is going to be VERY DIFFERENT, so we need to start re-engaging differently.

How can we all be more productive now in what we do, learn, and get ready? We have become a “virtual online world,” and social media skills become increasingly relevant for each of us.

The changing world for Organizations- not physical events but becoming reliant on on-line and digital delivery

Many companies are struggling to keep themselves in ‘plain view’ to help continue their activities and shape the emerging needs when ‘lockdown’ or economic activity begins to return in the coming weeks.

The previous reliance on showcasing their latest products or technology will be less at physical events but in digital environments through a range of social mediums. They will be forced to ramp up their own social media present accordingly and many are badly prepared for this.

What about you as an individual, how will you be seen as “differentiated enough” to be part of the solution, not part of the problem? How can you be seen as leading and supporting your organization’s need for a “share of presence”, to step up and be seen as someone that could engage, amplify and influence others?

None of us remain unaffected from these unprecedented times

As we all re-evaluate our changing world there are realities that we all facing in this global crisis. We are about to meet some harsh realities that will mean we are all scrambling to rethink, to reposition ourselves to regain a new momentum after our economic lives have been shut down as well as our physical ones.

“Striking a balance between allowing economic activities and keeping controls tight enough to prevent a rise in infections “is likely to be the optimal strategy until effective vaccines become widely available, despite the fact that control policies, including social distancing, behavioral change, and public awareness will probably be maintained for some time”.- Guardian Article

We are about to enter a very different business and social world, where the name of the game will be to hold onto what we have got and fight for survival. We need to regain some level of control to balance our lives, as we feel that cold economic wind, one that will be blowing on us all. Will we find our income lost or that feeling that what we have known or achieved now seems all under threat? Possible, very possible.

A different business landscape could mean significant disruption to many of our own activities, all the way through to perhaps the end of this year, yes, the whole of 2020. We are facing a year of significant change in how we manage, prepare, interact, and provide value to others.

We are entering a highly fluid and rapidly adaptive world.

We are not returning to the old normal, that has gone, buried in the last few weeks. Where will our attention go, where will our creative energy be channeled, are we adaptive enough to make a switch, this is not a time for efficiency this is a time for being highly creative and very innovative. We all need to become far more “highly” creative to sense, respond, and react to very different marketplaces, to find our place within these.

The shift must be swift and decisive for each of us.

We must put on hold or totally abandon our past plans and goals. We must look to a  more ad hoc, opportunistic future to survive and respond. We can’t afford to be passive; we need to become personally engaged.

This is not just a wake-up call for the self-employed, or daily workers, this is about to sweep in and take many sitting in organizations.  Those that receive a regular salary perhaps about to face layoffs, downsizing, extended furloughs, and being told about all resizing that will all be very much in Corporate leader’s minds in the months ahead.

We need to recognize the economic tsunami coming towards us.  

We need a new plan. We need to get out there and present where we, as individuals, stand apart. We need to find creative ways to stand out. In many ways, social media has given us many of the tools and the abilities to shape our own futures, we are all on some level of “zero” or reset. We need to capitalize on our social contribution, we need people to see us and value this.

To be seen, we do need to communicate, or will we simply go back to being passive readers of other people’s thoughts and opinions? Or will we see this might become a “dog eat dog” world to climb back up the food chain?

Social media is in for a really very different onslaught of opinions, views, suggestions, appeals, and advice. There will be a very different set of winners and losers in marketing understanding and communicating their offerings. Can you position yourself to become active and engaged? We do need to get back out there and establish our presence.

What I think will not go away is the ones that position themselves in a new order of advocacy and influence. Emerging leaders or doers that offer an experience, not just “tweet” it on from someone else.

There is an urgent need to explore and experiment to determine your new “norm.”

All business activity has significantly dipped, in confidence and in the future, as so much is unclear, and regular activities are put on hold. Budgets and Resources will be reviewed continuously in this interim period of the remainder of this calendar year and beyond.

We all need an adaptive pivoting strategy that is continuously renewed. What can we provide in a world that is virtually online for some time and companies looking to re-engagement?

This is a time for the opportunity to develop new skills and communication capabilities in a world of changed expectations, where there is the need to act fast and decisively while maintaining flexibility in the face of uncertainties and making sure your views are heard.

Are you gearing up to a different world where you, as an individual, need to be seen, heard, and valued far more than ever before? My pivoting is very much a present work-in-progress, but I feel sure I am not alone in doing that.

The post We all need a different Social Media profile? Now. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Even if this is one month, two months, or longer, we need to become creative and innovative. We cannot be held in this “frozen state” for long without looking to become economically productive again. It may be in different ways, in new roles, or in transition until we have a higher “grip” of what we can achieve in a very volatile, challenging world.

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, believing everything is orderly based on efficiency, effectiveness, and doing what is necessary to manage daily. Well it is not, we are in chaotic and unpredictable times.

This, regrettably, is simply not good enough in today’s world as it has changed so radically in these last few months.

We need to look differently at so much, but all of that comes in “good order.”

Do you recall Kurt Lewin’s model suggesting there are 3 steps to work through as a model: Unfreeze- Transition- Refreeze.

Firstly we need to unfreeze the existing situation the world finds itself in. We need to find a vaccine, we need to test for antibodies and “test, test, and test” to know where each of us stands in this coronavirus world we now live in. The difference is not just life and death that many are caught up with at this very moment.

We all are caught in this world crisis; we are in as much disruption and uncertainty as is possible, and “we” cant’ allow this uncertainty to manifest itself too long. We need to return to some level of certainty.

Let’s look at some thoughts on moving from uncertainty back to (a degree) of certainty.

We need to apply our thinking so we can begin to unfreeze, transition and refreeze

What does that mean? There are plenty of techniques to help in this, but I have taken innovation as the focal point as we all will need to become creative, adaptive, fluid, and flexible to changed situations. So to name a few:

We need to firstly unfreeze.

1. Burning platforms-  we have the most significant crisis this world has faced, as we have so much more dependency than in the past. At present, there are far more of those “burning platforms,” Burning platforms are potent drivers of strategic change. They are what happens when there is a real and immediate crisis, we are faced with difficult and challenging choice. Your choices might be irreversible and have a high risk of failure.
2. We have all been shaken out of our comfort zone.  What will help us unfreeze and capitalize on some rapidly emerging and “breaking” opportunities? Are we looking for these or staying immobilized in fear?
3. Provide your own proof points that the present situations you are facing are threatening- that cold hard evidence
4. Restructuring deliberately to force change into ‘our’ system in our thinking, in our habits, in our expectations
5. Revise and adjust past goals and visions to rethink immediate objectives- how do I/ you move forward?
6. Unlock and seek out opportunities to learn, to be trained in new thinking, different techniques and methods
7. “Nothing comes towards those that wait” we need to expect rewards far more on measured outcomes based on your own creative and innovative activities.
8. Recognize that many of what your previous contributions made do honestly make up the past, not so much the future of what is needed to be achieved, based on a very different understanding of growth and wealth creation.

Then we have to make a set of transition points.

These are the fuel to keep your innovation engine nourished and moving in the new innovation point of your direction.

1. How can you inspire others to achieve some remarkable new things to change the existing situation?
2. Can you act as the internal and external stimulus to others in coaching, inspiration talk’s, providing ideas, offering creative thinking, sharing with others to build different and valued new value, someone will buy or invest in.
3. Set about your own organized training and education program, understanding that this moves in steps of learning, so take this in stages of absorbing the lessons and then find creative ways to apply them.
4. Re-educate yourself by being more exposed, not staying in denial, to stimulate fresh alternative thinking, both with yourself and in areas of a business opportunity that you can ‘take, adapt and apply’ appropriately.
5. Offer open spaces, ‘safe’ environments to learn and experiment, to reach out and exchange with others. We all need to openly discuss within our “trusted networks” but also rapidly extend that network fast that we need each other. Each of us will need to experiment, to trial, and sometimes fail but learn from these moments the positives and re-apply them in new ways and lessons discovered. Be highly adaptive and flexible here.
6. Find your “innovation champions” to listen too and to learn from. Ones that can provide you the support environment to ‘go-to’ so you can relate and identify with. Just listening to others and their experiences can give you rapid insights.
7. Push beyond incremental creative innovation by slowing turning up the heat so it gets more visible and noticed. Start not slowly but announcing yourself to the new world and what you offer has some real depth of thinking behind it.
8. Learning to take first baby steps needs to be followed quickly as you need to keep improving the pace within your activities by applying the techniques of different experiments, prototyping, piloting methods, and approaches. Grow the confidence and talk of the learning from any failures along the way to improve. But keep reiterating like mad.

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. In today’s world that is to secure reward, economic and regular work

1. We need to burn any bridges to ensure there is no way back to the old ways, where old dreams were based on those past days and reset these in new future-orientated ways, that are realistic and others can identify with.
2. Make sure you achieve the ‘show me the money moment’- your evidence stream of work activity and success.
3. Keep the focus on being ‘relentless’ and focusing on the future and why being consistently creative and innovative is an essential part of this in increased activity and performance and your sustaining value.
4. Keep returning to the ‘rationalization’ of this, re-evaluating and adjusting it to what you have learned, so each action is a validation of a path being traveled that gives you scale and scope to recovery, contribution, and offers your economic engagement.
5. Make sure rewards are aligned to any new ‘innovation’ ways, sometimes trading different forms that put food on the table, protect your family, and gives you various levels of economic bargaining points.
6. Build all the efforts over time, they will come by being determined, focused but highly adaptive.

Passing through these three learning stages

Unlocking any persons creative and innovating potential always needs to pass through different learning stages. Focus on  your ‘unlocking’ point in each of these three phases we all will pass through.

Do not let yourself by frozen in the past; we must all find ways to “unfreeze so we can pass through the transition phase and be well-prepared to “lock-on’ to new opportunities and then freeze these.

My final piece of advice is these are highly fluid times; we will continuously see shock and disruption, so keep a constant need to “unfreeze, transition, and then freeze until you need to do this again.

Eventually, we will get to a reasonable state of ‘freezing’ of feeling we are in a new norm.  Presently this is totally out of your hands in when the crisis is over, but your job is to rapidly pass through these phases to make your change and get you equipped early enough for a very different set of challenges in a new world, post Coronavirus.

****My next post relates to the Cynefin framework focusing on moving from disorder back into (some form) of order, we need to repurpose our lives beyond them being simply “on hold.”

The post Working through the current disorder we find ourselves in first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In this period of such disruption, we do need to hang onto our beliefs, objectives, and goals, both short and long term. We are at a real point where we will be reshaping our economies, it is unlikely we will return to the ‘old’ normal.

Although we feel trapped in the present, worried over daily events and what they might mean, we must look beyond, we do need to look towards the future, to recognize there are challenges ahead but equally opportunities.

There is undoubtedly a time to find ways to come together. In recent years communities have become more polarized in their opinions, political positions, and choosing what to believe it. It is getting hard as truth is getting “blurred” more with this, often in such conflicting news.

A fact none of us can ignore is the planet, our world is undergoing significant change, and this is so much human-made. We can’t seemingly escape from daily occurrences of floods, famine, disease, and fires.

So far, 2020 has been a terrible year, the bushfires of Australia, the floods across many countries, the lack of rain, and the general “stirring” of mother nature. It seems mother nature is fighting back; it wants to bring the planet back into a balance.

One of our most significant challenges is to stabilize global mean temperatures.

To get to these goals of stabilizing global temperatures, we must stop the emissions of CO2 in our activities. Stopping CO2 emissions needs us, collectively, to look at our current energy services, our industrial production methods but also our land use and agricultural practices. In short, we have to redesign everything to approach zero net emissions of CO2. We have set ourselves the date of 2050 to achieve this, at present, we are already lagging on this.

We face some real challenges, so much of what we do is difficult-to decarbonize. So much of our economic activity, generate emissions that are unabated, as we have built our needs around energy services that have been utterly reliant on fossil fuels over generations. Fossil fuel is the big emitters of all greenhouse gases, and we have become reliant on it as our source of primary energy. Our energy sources need radically changing to building our future on clean energy, generated by fossil-free energy sources.

We cannot merely rip up what we have; we must come (quickly) to terms with those long-lived infrastructures built today, for better or worse, as these will still shape much of our future over these next critical thirty years. We must find imaginative solutions to adapt these to reduce emissions or be reliant on fossil- generating sources.

We need ingenuity in our thinking

We have to get to a net-zero emissions energy system as quickly as we can. For that, we require ingenuity in our abilities to break through present seemingly difficult barriers in technologies, and this calls for breakthrough innovation.  Over the next thirty years, we need to strive towards this net-zero emissions energy system or certainly get as close as we can. The “baseline” of 80% reductions by 2050 is the minimum target, but that requires nearly the same amount of ingenuity in new technology, with the possible “lag” to 100% as likely to be more to do with scale and deployment. Once you get past a “tipping point,” the momentum takes over.

The importance of innovation is across the board.

Innovation is required in all areas of research, development, demonstration, and deployment, to have equal focus. The challenge we presently have is that much of the specific technologies still need to be validated as we have many of the solutions already at hand. The issues are the future placement, configurations, and scaling beyond their present position is mostly the uncertain parts. Often the question is how and when do we undertake the changes and identifying the costs associated with these. When do we ramp up and scale in a competitive marketplace

Regretfully we are still in the chase for “individual defining technologies” that give a competitive advantage.

This chase to be different, to dominate, is partly needed but has to be balanced with a global, urgent need, not merely personal gain. We are dealing with global issues. It will be a finite number of solutions that will eventually emerge the winners. As we still are needlessly chasing incremental improvements or providing convincing business cases, we are losing significant time in energy solutions. We need to shift our validation into implementation and then refinement, through innovation.

What we need to have clarified are some primary objectives and clear pathways for all to work towards.

This pathway design needs to state a robust, reliable, and affordable net-zero emissions energy system in clear stages of transition, say 2029, 2039, and 2049. These are not just “desired points”; they are essential points. This period, up to 2029, must be all about researching, developing, demonstrating, and successfully learning from the deployment and scaling up. In any innovation process, these “proof points” become “go / no go” decisions. The question of who makes those calls becomes a real focus of determining at the next COP26 meeting, to be (hopefully) held in the UK in November 2020.

The innovation process becomes a clearly defined and well-disciplined one; it has to be.

We are presently wasting much of our innovation efforts on incremental improvements to keep existing limping along, keeping fossil related vested interests to take us away from that ultimate goal of a net-zero emissions energy system by 2050.  So much defense of working on “bridging” while we work on the future is partly laudable. Still, it is like the smoker’s lobby; it takes us away from ‘addictive behavior’ from the (inability) ability to move beyond the fossil versus renewable energy arguments in this case.

When there is an argument that fossil fuel is needed, then innovation needs to invest to break that down. At present, we have some very hard-to-abate (overcome) areas of aviation, long-distance transportation and shipping, production of carbon-intensive structural materials such as steel and cement, and then pharmaceutical and agricultural needs. These sectors need solutions that change the present dependence on fossil fuel burning for the feedstocks or the necessary generating high-temperature heat that come from coal or gas.

Shifting energy sourcing in the Industrial sector

Today industrial companies produce 25% of our GDP, but their emissions also account for about 28% of global greenhouse emissions. We must find ways to (totally) decarbonize industrial activities and our transportation systems. Today as in the future, cement, steel, ammonia, and ethylene are commodity products where cost is the decisive factor. The willingness to pay more is not there and not for the foreseeable future, and any new solution has to ‘account’ for this reality.

When we know the broad working parameters, then the search for innovation works.

When we have a set of targets to work towards and improve upon, we have a better chance of innovation that builds on the existing in more productive and inventive ways; that is, innovations task, in a nutshell.

We need to continually recognize that the energy system is undoubtedly complex. We need to build out our knowledge. The more we know about the economics and the highly integrated industrial or network processes or systems, the better for knowing how innovation can improve on the existing in productive and effective ways.

We need to ‘account’ for the recognition of longer lifetime (initial) decisions within the energy system or have a greater appreciation of what those costly refits or rebuilds, gives more significant consideration in new technology and time scales.

We need to energize the debate and bring innovation to the fore in offering ‘compelling’ solutions

Innovation must have a compelling business case that recognizes the factors that inhibit change and offer solutions that improve on the existing.

What we must do today is energize the debate, seek out a clarification of the pathway forward. How we make, move, store, and use energy that continually drives us towards the net-zero emissions target by 2050.

To do this, we must avoid the innovation emissions cul-de-sac.

If we continue to “turn towards” fossil fuels as the only viable option, we will never get to the net-zero emissions by 2050; We are caught in an innovation cul-de-sac. The limits of our current technology and the needs of the developing world we presently seem utterly reliant on fossil fuels. Carbon-free energy is not just our goal; it is our needed objective and mission. We have promising ‘pockets’ of discovery, validation, or resolving scaling obstacles. What is not occurring fast enough is designing the new energy system in scale that addresses the climate challenge. We must push towards a different energy future based on renewables and clean energy. No ‘u-turns or dead-ends, lets map our innovation to a carbon-free energy system now.

We must resolve the barriers to deep decarbonization.

Our innovation focus should be well focused on this- “to decarbonize” as the central innovation focal point. The role of innovation is not just in providing technology solutions but to design consumer propositions, develop market designs, business models, and system solution in definition and design.

We need innovation to drive change and behavior.

Unleashing innovation at the focal point of decarbonization (of everything) moves us towards the goals of net-zero emissions. We need to offer a deeper understanding of how the different parts of the energy system need to interact, and that requires a “whole system approach.” This massive undertaking towards decarbonizing the world needs us all to change our habits and present behaviors. We are in a time of reflection, as we look towards a different future we must change the way we value and appreciate what is around us.

The need is to bring innovation to the fore in the energy transition.

We need to recognize if we are aiming for Net-Zero that this narrows the pathways for the future energy systems and what gets installed. Net-zero leaves little slack or counter-argument, and it is decarbonization that is the focal point.

My contribution, however small, is to raise innovative thinking in the energy transition

I have increasingly been building my energy understanding and slowly knowledge sharing, initially through my dedicated energy transition posting site https://innovating4energy.home.blog/ with a tag line of “a transition in all our lives.”

We must support innovation and explain that its deployment is working to cover the whole portfolio of low carbon energy conversions for electricity, as essential. The ultimate objective is we stay always focused on moving towards a net-zero carbon energy system, dominating final energy use in 2040 to 2050 eventually, or have n unstoppable moment as the only supportable solution in town by Governments, investors, and market players.

We need to clarify core actions, determine pathways of future ambition, and recognize some of the “costs to pay” in society. Industry investors will have measures that place higher costs or “force” social change.

Good Innovation can be the catalyst for this energy change, but it needs to establish its position in any shift to net-zero emissions. That is, innovation must become “front and center”.

The post The Energy Transition Needs A Structured Innovation Process first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The expectation ‘bar’ needs to be raised from those practicing innovation, I feel the constant need is for those working within innovation; they have this real need to raise their game significantly. Innovation needs organizing but it also needs a better understanding of its contributing parts.

Learning and Education should always start with us.

The earlier we learn, have open interactions and form linkages, the more we will be ready to advance innovation into what it must become: a discipline highly valued for what it contributes with in terms of wealth and growth potential. Our knowledge becomes a powerful enabler to building out our networks, we are valued for what we know.

We need to find the determination to underpin the capacity for innovation, lying within us all, and that comes from knowledge and education through collaborative learning. So what is your capacity for innovation really like within your organization? Is the learning required for innovation set up in structured ways or left to individual learning and experimentation?

Do either structured or informal ways feedback into the organizational learning system to benefit others? Or is the knowledge gained just left ‘resident’ in the person, not being put to that greater use?

Knowledge exchange is the way forward but we need to avoid the easy paths.

Organizations need to move well beyond their lazy reliance on best practice comparison and they need to find better ways to explore emerging practices. But that takes many into the realm of increasing uncertainties, and most people and organizations are not trained for this exploration and experimentation.

It is easy to copy but we often fail to recognize all the context, all factors that went into making it that one specific organizations good practice, and I guarantee these are not yours!

Best practice does have their comparable uses, but it is your focusing on your own unique issues and needs, that you discover your emerging methods within your own organization is the area to focus, for learning and wanting to improve into those that make your practices really work. Then applying, experimenting and learning from novel practices that provide growing confidence in creative thinking.

Also give some thought for the next practice, those practices that prompt reinvention, they unlock barriers.

New practice gives us all the chance to start such totally fresh thinking, they challenge existing paradigms and move you towards considering new business models. We should always look beyond ‘simple’ improvêment and push out beyond existing thinking into new thinking, that ‘see’s’ things differently. It can radically alter your thinking and enable a breakthrough that provides a new ‘strand’ of value.

Organizations constantly anticipate risk by reducing all the variables within risk and play safe with just being incremental. Is that wrong? No, partly but yes far more! We are in a very volitile world, we need to contain risk but we need novel practicies to deal increasingly with these new complexities. Yet as long as we have our reward systems geared to short-term performance, while we measure leadership success the way we presently do, and the shareholder just expects consistent dividends as their part of the (current) equation, we stay trapped in only offering the predictable. We need to learn differently so as to quickly mobilized and force change if it does not meet this immediate aim of resoving barriers and problems we seem to be coming up against (constantly), we head down the wrong path if we stay on the existing one.We need to venture out and be ready to explore, learning and knowledge contribute to us seeking out new experience where we gain within ourselves.

We are not sustaining our organization and we are not advancing ourselves either, we are destroying much in our current approaches if we do not explore and experiement. We do need to focus more on the competence-enhancing not competence-destroying aspects and that comes from learning and acquiring new knowledge and fresh insights.

We need to re-balance the “risk and opportunity” to push our use of new knowledge into fresh innovation that ‘advances’ on the existing. To recognize the difference, we need to encourage knowledge to be ‘freely’ exchanged, and then provide the environment to encourage a re-educating on ‘seeing and exploring’ new possibilities that allow us to grow.

New Knowledge helps us relate to change, we can see more of it coming and are ready to absorbing it.

As the challenges we are all facing today seem to be coming faster at us, increasingly far more complex to decipher and then re-evaluate, then often we wonder how we should respond. To achieve faster response we certainly need to educate the organization more than ever to open up, to explore, to experiment and search for new knowledge understanding.

We need to absorb more, we need to encourage learning more especially to pursue innovation. We need to actively set up learning ways within our organizations to establish their abilities to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), to assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends.

Can we recognize that choosing the tougher pathway of building our own distinct capabilities, learning block by learning block, is the right one to follow? This allows us to build capacities that are ours

Finding our own way relies mostly on us to find the answers, our answers to our problems to solve. We grow by seeking out our knowledge that we need to progress,  as it feeds our minds to find out unique ways to contribute and share.

The post Seeking out knowledge that feeds our innovations first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Time takes on a different meaning; we are cutting out those (unproductive) meetings, the train, car, and flight times, and we have the luxury to do what?

Well, it is offering us that luxury of actually having time to think and reflect. Now that is dangerous as it takes us off our ‘chosen’ treadmill of pursuit.

I was pondering some thoughts around the quest for growth, the demands for change, and the need to become nimble, agile, and more dynamic in what we do. We crowd out our days and never stop to reflect.

So I started to think a little more. Now that can be dangerous, and I am not too sure it gave me answers, just more questions. My starting point was the endless journey of innovation.

We seem to be confronted with an endless journey when it comes to innovation.

We continuously want to change what we have, even when it patently does the jobs we need ‘it’ doing.

There is this nagging feeling of chasing for relentless destruction or maintaining disturbance with new products, features, updates, or adjustments. Often products and services never have time to settle, and the shift to ‘greater’ adoption can take place, we instead return to making change.

Change that simply meets a budget requirement, a belief it gives us a competitive advantage, in this constant update chase we are all caught up in. We seem in ‘pursuit of destruction,’ and arguably, this is wrong on a planet of limited resources. We are indeed a throwaway society.

Much of our quest for change is caught up in the search for new products. If we don’t have these, this will limit us in new growth. New growth is not just new products or services, it can also come from deepening the value of the existing, but that takes a shift in our current thinking.

Would shareholders reward us as highly, if we just extended the existing? That would be kind of boring, right?

Yet, are we getting so caught up in this chase for change?

We deliberately build into our systems the following mantras or ways we should work:

• As we are all becoming far more digital, fluid, and agile, we are absorbing and responding at faster rates, and we are adapting to a constant, multifaceted world of connections, systems, and knowledge piecing, so as to combine up into different new solutions. The outcome must be new products or services as a result, right?
• To get there, we are seeking out new ways to be far nimbler, so we need to learn different navigation skills and become far more assignment driven, less exploratory in many things, and relying on technology to take on this role. We sit back and interpret the results. We need to cut out the time-consuming parts as they make us look inefficient, but do we learn or just dependent on what our data provides us, do we have the time to deeply think, applying human intelligence to artifical intelligence?
• As we feel we are becoming increasingly agile, iterative, experimenting, and continuously determined to execute to drive our results and value-add, we simply focus on delivery and collaboration outcomes far more resolutely but do we fail to deepen a lasting relationship, in our determination to achieve the final result needed?

Yet with all this push to become different, we stay trapped

We fail to change the fundamentals. If we don’t change these all the energy as individuals, we deploy to be seen and valued as nimble, fluid, and agile have such limiting impact. We still seem to be trapped

We still have an over-reliance on past models – when the near future closely resembles the recent past, relying on existing models to determine appropriate actions and investments is rational, but it traps us, never to wriggle free and break out.

Given the increase in the pace of change and the amount and impact of innovation and its impact on business models, it’s evident that the near future does not resemble the recent past, so we must challenge and change these past models but do we, are we brave enough?

Do companies make the necessary profound assessments on the conditions and amplitude of change, driven far more from external factors; they tend to stay locked into the existing, and no amount of individual flair can a new organization learning emerge?

Change proficiency/capability – in most companies, people receive training and develop skills based on their specific roles and responsibilities, but rarely develop skills that enable or accelerate change.

The training received is to enact a specific change; it is static as it addresses a point of time. Change proficiencies should be fluid, dynamic, and constant.

There should be NO change managers. There should be evolutionary managers, keeping the organization in a “creative tension” where it becomes the natural form of everyday work.

We cannot expect companies and cultures to change frequently and capably if people don’t have the skills, capabilities, or proficiency to (change) evolve effectively.

We have this preference for stability over change, but we expect what we sell as consistently in a state of change, yet our people, organizations, and cultures prefer stability to change. We can take a different approach and look to, perhaps a return to deepen relationships, not reply to CRM management tools, extend existing products, increase their adoption, and we still can grow.

To learn a language, we have to keep practicing. To gain more out of Microsoft Word, we should continue exploring the existing features of the program, instead, we get taken over by a new release we never deepen our learning, or we simply brush up our language skills just before we need them. We are proficient, but we are not fluent or assured, in total command.

Of course, stability reinforces itself; that desire for security leads to inertia and, over time, active resistance to change. If we took the evolutionary perspective, would it be different? So Companies today must create a preference for more change, reducing inertia, and building change capabilities.

Focus on short term profits rather than longer-term viability – Since change is uncertain and distracts from that productive day-to-day in operations, there is an ever-increasing focus on short term profitability. Change always takes a back seat to efficient operations and short term profits until the ‘system’ or organization finds itself in crisis.

Longer-term viability suffers because of an over-reliance on an increasingly out of date business model, infrequent innovation, and a lack of planning that the evolutionary pathway of building and extending existing capacity can provide.

Changing our ways

How do we move to a real sustaining value creation that is based on the existing, not just on the new? Is there more sustaining value in stopping product change for the sake of growth, when we seem not to have any in the Western world today and alter our thinking to extending what we have simply got?

We can’t continue to keep throwing away what we have, simply because there is something often just slightly better or giving us a certain “bragging” point as having the latest shiny tool. Can we change how we approach innovation for finding and extracting growth out of the existing, not out of the pursuit, always of something new?

The post Everything is changing faster- can we respond differently in our Innovation work? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In the last few months, I have got increasingly nervous about where we are NOT going on climate change

I have never before published one article on each of my three posting sites. This post I just had to. It is shaping me in how I look at innovation, collaboration, the power of networks, ecosystems and most of all, in our world of energy transition needed to reverse climate warming. So apologies if you see it on three separate sites but I don’t apologize for my real, underlying concern on where we are seemingly heading as a world.

The bush fires of Australia have been shocking, devastating, and crippling. They catalyze the concerns we all should have.

Each of us might or likely will face a shocking, devastating or crippling “event” in our lives in the next ten to twenty years. I feel it is inevitable, irrespective if we stopped all the debates and did the level of investment, we need to reverse the climate warming.

The next ten years of our investments in cutting emissions and refocusing our energy needs must go towards clean energy (renewables). Our ability to make a change will determine if these events recently will become the new norm, as our planet spins even more out of our ability to control climate-warming through greenhouse gases.

So I have to move through this shocking, devastating, and crippling effect but have I have begun to accept  the reality that our world is in a “state of climate alarm,” not just a “climate emergency.”

So my emotions are swirling at the moment.

Shocking and devastating was the size, the velocity, and how the fires caught hold and devasted so much of parts of Australia in land, plant and animal life, as well as the human cost and tragedies. As you read of one fire breaking out after another, you became “in awe” of the firefighters. Lacking decent equipment to fight this scale of the fires, they showed all the “Australia pluck and fortitude” they are known for. What a battle. With the intervention of some significant rains recently most, if not all of the blazes seem to have been extinguished; thankfully

Crippling has been the debate since then, and it is only just started. Australia is caught in the middle of the global and country debate on coal. Our need for it versus the need to stop using it. Asia is so reliant; at present, on coal for its energy, we are caught in a real problem.

Energy security is for everyone, irrespective, but while we have this Asian dependence on coal, we are going to struggle very hard with combating climate warming. The carbon emissions from coal are our equivalent “runaway train.” It needs stopping before the damage is beyond repair to our global planet.

Each time I return to the Australian bushfires, and all this means for them and us, I keep wondering is this the “crippling” debate we are going to have in all parts of the world? Can we afford this? The political pressures for coal to be still central to Australia’s thinking is simply staggering.

Then I heard the comment “politics, economics and climate” and the different perspectives.

Another alarm bell suddenly went off for me. I was listening to a podcast by Giles Parkinson and David Leitch “There is no new normal in climate change” (listen to the first 5 minutes if nothing else) introduced me to David’s “its the difference politics, economics, and climate.” Actually, that sums up nearly each “debate” I am reading, engaged in or listening too in recent months. It is politics, economics, and climate differences are today’s debate.

How much longer can we afford to wrangle over these? Saving our climate should be in most if not all our debates and decisions, politics and economics need to get behind, otherwise, they grow in size and scale.

Can we be so much nearer to some (horrific) tipping points?

In the last few days, I have also been reading on the nine different “tipping points” going on. This is an article from Carbon Brief on their “explainer of the nine tipping points that could be triggered by climate change”.

“ Imagine a child pushing themselves from the top of a playground slide. There is a point beyond which it is too late for the child to stop themselves sliding down. Pass this threshold, and the child continues inevitably towards a different state – at the bottom of the slide rather than the top.”

“The persistent march of a warming climate is seen across a multitude of continuous, incremental changes. CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Ocean heat content. Global sea-level rise. Each creeps up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.”

Passing an irreversible tipping point would mean a system would not revert to its original state even if the forcing lessens or reverses, explains Dr. Richard Wood, who leads the Climate, Cryosphere and Oceans group in the Met Office Hadley Centre.

This leads me to an article by Bob Watson. Does it seemingly get worse- oh, yes? In Bob’s “Nature is being eroded at rates unprecedented in human history, but we still have time to stave off mass extinctions.”

He states, “We have all assumed that nature would always be here for us and our children. However, our boundless consumption, shortsighted reliance on fossil fuels and our unsustainable use of nature now seriously threaten our future.

Environmentalists, scientists, and indigenous peoples have been sounding the alarm for decades. Our understanding of the overexploitation of the planet has advanced with grim, sharp clarity over that time.

We have entered an era of rapidly accelerating species extinction, and are facing the irreversible loss of plant and animal species, habitats and vital crops, while coming face to face with the horrific impacts of global climate change”.

Now I do not want to get into a bragging right position, but I have known Bob Watson since our teens. I stand in “awe” of him and all he has achieved in the years. He is now Sir Robert Watson and has been chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has influenced my thinking a lot on all of what matters on climate. How he crystalizes the issues is impressive whenever I have bumped into him or in what I read.

The other part of my past few weeks has been the “sense” the climate debate is shifting.

The message is we must take action”. It needs to be decisive and immediate as it is vital.

We need nature conservation and energy change.

In an article written in May 2019, John Vidal, a former Guardian environmental editor he wrote: “Has the politics of climate change finally reached a tipping point?”

This extracted from the article sums up our need to address and resolve:

“Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels would clear up air pollution rapidly and save billions of pounds a year that the NHS must currently spend dealing with heart attacks, asthma, strokes, and respiratory illnesses. Cities would become more liveable, the countryside more attractive. Instead of being regarded by the government as a costly imposition, action on climate and nature regeneration could be easily recast as visionary politics offering huge public benefits.

But what happens when the voluntary measures run out and the warming is not seen to slow because greenhouse gases are so long-lasting? Really addressing climate and biodiversity collapse means rationing carbon. It means no more free ride for extractive industries such as mining, palm oil and forestry companies who profit from environmental destruction. It means heavy penalties for polluters, the axing of food and aviation subsidies, and taking a torch to vested interests. It means addressing the indirect causes of the crisis, such as population growth and consumerism, even rethinking the whole idea of progress and wealth.”

We are facing a crucial point in time; this decade is our last stand

How do you put together and explain the devastating effects of the Bush fires of Australia and put them into the context of where we live and what climate change will mean for each and every one of us? It is floods, crop failures, deteriorating air, fires, global epidemics, loss of habitat, loss of jobs as we increasingly live in a world of dealing with disruption and dislocation.

“What we’re seeing are the effects of climate change. Sometimes, it’s said that Australia is the canary in the coal mine with the effects of climate change being seen here most severely and earliest… We’re probably looking at what climate change may look like for other parts of the world in the first stages in Australia at the moment,” said Professor Dickman from the Faculty of Science.based in Australia.

If this comment is the reality then what this really will mean in any global action on climate, what will happen if we do pass a tipping point, how much more can we afford to lose in nature, in plants, in animals in our air we breathe before we face something that becomes “catastrophic”?

Do we have any alternatives? Is this too dark for you?

I come back to what made me sit up and realize. Today’s evaluation of anything we do is going to be based on “Politics, Economics and Climate” in what it costs, what it means, and its impact on us.

Which one dominates the others is not the issue; it is we need to make sure all three are of equal importance, yet we need to recognize climate action ‘determines’ the other two in bringing global warming under control. We have nowhere to hid in decades to come and if we do, it is only going to get a whole lot hotter.

I close by quoting Bob Watson “As policymakers around the world grapple with the twin threats of climate change and biodiversity loss, it is essential that they understand the linkages between the two so that their decisions and actions address both.

The world needs to recognize that loss of biodiversity and human-induced climate change are not only environmental issues but development, economic, social, security, equity, and moral issues as well. The future of humanity depends on action now. If we do not act, our children and all future generations will never forgive us.”

The post Politics, Economics and Climate need to come together. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

A firm’s ordinary capabilities are the ones that enable us to perform efficiently and effectively, those essential routines and practices that often require having a high level of technical need supporting these activities.

In contrast, dynamic capabilities are those higher-level competencies that determine a firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure both the resources and skills to possibly shape, they have the power to transform, and then be deployed to meet rapidly changing business environments, to take advantage of these changing conditions. We need to seek out the dynamic ones and nurture these as they give us the real ability to grow and build our new capacity.

Recognizing the importance of Dynamic Capabilities

Dynamic capabilities are about selecting the right things to do and getting them done, while ordinary skills are about doing something right. The former implicates dynamic efficiency, the latter static efficiency.

Dynamic capabilities require an organizational form that leverages the knowledge and capabilities of managers throughout the organization. In business firms with strong dynamic capabilities, the critical tasks of managers, especially those in the top management team, are entrepreneurial. It’s not just a planning role; it’s also strategic. It involves planning along with engagement and enactment; it encourages agility.

Appreciating and leveraging those ordinary capabilities is equally essential

The stronger these regular capabilities can be ‘honed’, then organizations can go beyond performing essential business functions well and can excel in these. While most capabilities, including some dynamic capabilities, are underpinned by organizational routines, many of the activities of top managers are non-routine by nature.

The key entrepreneurial capabilities needed for asset orchestration and realignment of the enterprise often reside in the skills and knowledge of top managers, managing the routines and assets and respond dynamically when changes are happening to adapt and respond

Ordinary capabilities involve operations, administration, and managing governance. They are rooted more firmly in routines than are dynamic capabilities. A method is a repeated action sequence, which may have its roots in algorithms and heuristics about how the enterprise is to get things done. Organizational routines transcend the individuals involved.

Finding the right complementary blend of capabilities is a real challenge to achieve

The capabilities perspective views the enterprise as clusters of complementary assets that must be combined and coordinated to create value. The utilization of such assets, therefore, requires managerial action. Managers in the dynamic capabilities framework perform that role. They orchestrate and call into being, the assets that are vital to firm performance.

They determine the speed and the degree to which, the firm’s particular resources can be aligned and realigned to match the requirements and opportunities of the business environment to generate sustained positive returns.

The alignment of resources both inside and outside the firm includes assessing when and how the enterprise ought to form alliances and joint ventures with other organizations.

Understanding all your required capabilities needed is essential

Valuing and knowing both your ordinary repeatable capabilities, to enhance and improve existing performance, and discovering those that are more dynamic in nature, to change performance more significantly are both critical to identify, build and support in consistent and thoughtful ways. The key is knowing what is critical and then how to focus and invest in those that drive and sustain performance.

Investing in a mapping of your innovation fitness landscape can significantly contribute to this understanding and advance organizational performance in the critical areas that offer it present and future value.

**Extracts were drawn from the paper and built upon: “The Functions of Middle and Top Management in the Dynamic Capabilities Framework” by Sunyoung Lee and David J. Teece

The post Recognizing different innovating capabilities to develop and grow first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post Cracking the complexity code first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

They will often wait while one part of the organization is reluctant to make a decision, even when their part of the ‘collective’ decision is not one that has real implications, it is that ‘they’ expect to be within the decision loop and will undermine any deicsion they were not partly too. So many ‘breaking opportunities’ get caught out in the lack of dynamics or that real energy and purpose to decide. It goes into a perpetual loop.The opportunity becomes a struggle to execute upon.

“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick”.

The only way to ensure speeding up is to be more coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted and expect delivery on a clear, set timing. If one part simply ‘sits and waits’ what chance do you have of injecting something that might have a real impact, it gets reduced down, it gets pushed back, to a point where an original idea is unrecognizable when it finally emerges.

Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will reduce the tensions, reduce the ‘shearing effect’ and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance but this needs the impact of time to be imüposed. What innovation often lacks is the same attention space, to equally site alongside efficiency as the organization’s two value creation points. They need to share an outcome orientation that “compels” decisions to be made. Realized value only comes from outcomes that are ‘tested’ in the market place. We are judged in performance on our efficiencies, effectiveness and innovation capabilities.

Where do we start to make innovation more dynamic?

Firstly we need to revisit the work on “adaptive enterprises and systems”. We need to find ways to deal with unpredictable, discontinuous change and make this more predictable for us to manage. That means making calculate risks, more of them.

We lack often a real coherence of purpose; we lurch from one opportunity to another, from one quarter of results into another with often no consistency in our activities. Performance has been taken over by opportunistic behaviors.  Innovation often takes the real brunt of this as it cannot behave on a quarterly result forecast, it has a different rhythm.

How many times have we been caught in this series of defending needs due to the focus on short-term results? Our intended strategy moves suddenly into a deliberate strategy, and then somehow this gets abandoned or unrealized and slowly we replace this with an emergent strategy that is rapidly become our realized strategy that we present to the world, as a response to ‘factors outside our control’ for our often indifferent performance.

We need to react to performance.

Who really talks about the EXACT results achieved from innovation for instance in a consistent, structured way? We draw attention to a given innovation but not to the (world-class) capabilities we are building to turn innovation into a ‘sustaining innovation machine’ All we here is just a general reference to it, to cloak innovation often in the ineffectiveness that lies within.

For innovation and many things going on within organizations they often lack real coherence, they ‘signal’ inconsistent behaviors, especially within the organization. These bad signals simply build up all the tensions and dysfunctional aspects that middle order management and the organization, in general, has to mop up and cope with.

How can innovation thrive in this sort of chaotic mess? No wonder it never takes hold, it just has nothing ‘permanent’ to attach too and grow. Management needs a radical overhaul so innovation can be the vehicle for what is articulated but often poorly delivered on a consistent basis.

Context & Coordination needs designing in purposefully.

Again, where do we start? We start with the ‘disconnect’ that organizations often have. The understanding of the underlying purpose of the organization beyond just making money and keeping the shareholders happy does need a deeper primary function, it needs rearticulating. Some organizations do a reasonable job of this but many simply don’t.

We need to restate our primary function and purpose far more in its societal contribution. We need to express the bounds as a governing set of principles that are known, reinforced and measured against. We then need to set about building in a consistent way, the capabilities that are able to produce the outcomes. We need to build in the accountabilities into the roles that reflect that innovation, effectiveness, and efficiency that is needed so they can be managed equally side by side. We need to teach the ability to be adaptable and recognize the differences so as to actively manage the ‘creative’ conflicts and tensions.

Reduce the tension in the layers or structures

The really hard part of managing in larger organizations is in managing the layers and competing forces. Often we forget to reinforce acceptable behaviors, we leave role structures to lose and incomplete and we set deliverables in often ‘woolly’ ways. This just promotes uncertainly and it is not an adaptive organization in leaving this so open. These unnatural built-in tensions create this shearing effect. They grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

These different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off,’ is the pressure of time. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated’ but sadly they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for delivery of new concepts. We need to re-establish the difference between goals– within a certain period covered (one year), objectives– attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but clearly possible concepts, that progress at slower rates and go well beyond normal goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons and publically discussed, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products.

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and actually state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on a daily basis.  The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside tangibles (known’s) needs a greater appreciation of their complexities and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving a ‘decent’ result. Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of inquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect.

The opportunity of the network economy

Again, the realization of the growing web of networks that we are constantly engaging with becomes a growing part of the new more adaptive innovating enterprise. We need to encourage more empowerment to engage with outside parties, to explore, to investigate, to bring in and then diffuse and disperse in new ways. For this, we need to design around more absorptive capacity I’ve often written about. (See   http://bit.ly/zdfmba).

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes.   We have struggled on many parts of establishing really good metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations. Part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost center, or the capacity was already established and we often don’t break these down and assign these clearly enough to the different activities, we should, but into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency or innovation? We judge these through the effectiveness of the outcome.

We need to balance existing performance engines for repeatable everyday tasks with innovation delivery engines for new activities to make our organizations function more effectively. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have offered some thoughts on this at the implementation stage, although they still need more examination.  As Scott Anthony points out in his article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension there is one, in my opinion, that needs deeper investigation and development and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces. Roger Martin suggests in one of his books “The Opposable Mind” that we need to develop “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change.

Ecosystems often reflect the shearing effect.

In any environment, the ‘rates of exchange’ of the different components or constituents operate at different speeds. Interactions occur more at your own level of contribution or awareness, the different dynamic layers sometimes you are simply oblivious too or ignore..We need to become far more aware. Often we get away with something due to that  ‘in-spite of’ syndrome that kicks in. Sometimes though, something catastrophic does occur and you have to pay attention ( a merger, layoffs, threat of closure) but the real reality is, different layers within organizations tend to be often simply oblivious, even impervious, to necessary change and just ‘does its job’.

Maybe then, this is why so many organizations seem dysfunctional but do continue to survive, to limp along until something really does disrupt their world as the existing ecosystem just seems to allow different interactions and speeds. Can we not alter this though in more thoughtful ways, than the usual ‘carrot and the stick’ approach or ‘fear and retribution’ approach and methodologies often employed to achieve results?

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the worrying thing is that any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along. Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick. The only way to ensure speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted.

Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will certainly reduce the tensions, reduce the shearing and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation and that certainly is not the current business, as usual, we see today.

Perhaps working on these dysfunction spots it might free up some real, much-needed space for innovation to take a deeper hold. It does seem with all the suggested emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness, if you accept this argument, it might be a good idea to have innovation alongside, as it does thrive more when there is creative tensions around!

You bring a more ‘dynamic’ environment into play by bringing together the sense of purpose and the governing principles of how you are setting about achieving this- through your people and building their capabilities to innovation.

The post Dynamics within the system are always dominated by the slow components. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How often do you feel the tensions surrounding innovation?  A tough part of managing within larger organizations is in reducing the layers and competing forces, the underlying tensions that innovation (uncertainty) brings out?

Hierarchy so often dominates or dictates the speed of what we do. That is so often set in weird logic and a shrug of the shoulders.

Confronted by the need for gathering facts, innovation often struggles as much of this takes significant time and is often outside the organization’s present understanding.

It is in the pursuit of logic, and often this lacks real (hardened) facts that hold innovation back, as it runs on a very different ‘timeline’ too much of our everyday organization processes or approaches.

The constant re-organization is ‘killing’ the organization to form any rhythm.   Innovation is often in that uncomfortable territory of ‘not knowing,’ it cuts across established structures, and so many time challenges the “status quo.” I often suggest that “innovation is a very uncomfortable bedfellow to have around. It does need separation, or it will never perform at its ‘very best.’

Let’s take a look at some of the consequences of these tensions.

Presently we see in large organizations this lack of “pushing for risk” or wanting to change the underlying business offerings. There is always a stated “we must be innovative to survive,” but we very rarely see what this means in real ongoing support to give that some framing, some guidelines, and clearly identified resourcing.

How many times do you see the organization set the deliverables in often ‘woolly’  undefined or impossible ways to truly measure the success of innovation.  Unable to meet the very system they impose of requiring KPIps by capturing and measuring what this means, so innovation struggles and often dumb-sized to meet arbitory measures, so it “fits” within the system..

This verbal remit never gets the underlying points to encourage those tasked with innovation to go and explore. This vagueness just further promotes uncertainly, delays any improved performance, and we end up with the same mediocre result, where safely has ‘ruled’ the day.

Organization layers grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

Are we ever going to honestly face up to the forces that immobilize our organizations?

If we really want to work progressively towards an adaptive organization, we must stop the knee-jerking or react to short-term pressures. To bring a better level of clarity to the many left open, fuzzy, and still so unclear areas within organizations, leadership must find better ways to resist their impulses to constantly re-organize. Strengthening what they have, allowing the existing structures to expand outwardly, is sometimes better than to break them into different structures that reinforce new silo thinking.

We still seem to love the ‘carrot and stick’ approach.

In leaving so much open to even ignoring critical parts of a business’s performance or operating model allows leaders one minute, use outcomes as the ‘whipping boy’ for unfortunate or disappointing results and, in so doing, slowly immobilize those underneath, scared to make a mistake or be associated with failure.

Adaptation to short-term performance works both ways. To the shareholder demanding immediate results but also to the management to hide behind this to create unnatural built-in tensions and often create a shearing effect. Innovation gets caught up in this. It can’t solve complicated product design solutions in thirteen weeks.

It can show quarterly results of progress, but that is often for internal consumption only. Innovation becomes a catch-all phrase, so it gets dumbed down to reinforce “our organization” is constantly undertaking it.

Innovation gets caught up in the needs of the reporting requirement so it can fit an arbitrary and stupid timeline that is required to adapt to a financial calendar year. Forced by the “bean counter” to be broken down into reporting on a quarterly result, as that is required by the system. No wonder we have tensions between innovation and an organization geared to this financial numbers game.

Organization structure ‘grinds’ against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

They ‘freezeout’ creativity unless it ‘arrives’ from the top of the organization, then it is often super-imposed, but is that optimized to get the best out of the creative or discovery process`? Eventually, the organization dies if it cannot allow the natural generating new forms of creativity from within, this has been hollowed out by this constant demanding and imposing from the top.

The organizational design needs to change to allow for creativity to flow back in.

We need to ensure creative knowledge flows up and down organizations. We need to change our thinking from layers into a network of connected parts that we keep small, flat, and focused but constantly aware their existence is dependent on others outside their mini-ecosystem. The “ebb and flow” of knowledge gain and interactions need to be allowed to evolve, not forced, or simply being reliant on machine learning or automating the process.

Today these different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. Creativity and innovation are primarily human endeavors. We add layers onto further layers, and each time we are constraining the organizations or the individuals to explore, they stay ‘trapped’ within their space if we superimpose on them. We progressively build up an unhealthy tension.

Imposing the killer effect of time just because of a financial calendar is stupid – it hurts innovation significantly

Just look at how organizations impose time on us. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off’ is the pressure of time. Imposing time as a condition for innovation can be a real killer. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated,’ but sadly, they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for the delivery of new concepts.

We need to re-establish the difference between goals – within a specified period covered (one year), objectives – attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but possible concepts that ‘advance’ at slower rates and go well beyond standard goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive, and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons, and operating across these needs different mindsets, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products.

Managing innovation across the three horizon methodology helps reduce tensions, design innovations that can be more radical or breakthrough. The three horizon methodology spaces out the activity, thinking, and activity, it allows innovation to be defined and determined by its complexity and its time/value relationship in importance and complexity.

Tacking the incompatibles to ease the tensions

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on our daily business, it is really so often just incompatible, and we should recognize this.

The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside the tangibles (known) needs a greater appreciation of their complexities and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving a ‘decent’ result. The unknowns need far more investigation, relationship understanding, and evaluations to turn them from a possible discovery into a worthwhile one that can begin to be quantified.

In Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of inquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect. We do need to address this lack of acute innovation management within our organizations. It is not ‘business as usual.’ It is managing the process of unusual business inquiry.

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes, the results from all the investments, energy, and inputs.  Outcome orientation holds a precious key to think about far more.  We have struggled on many occasions to establish robust metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations’ obsession to judge the whole organization by the same KPI’s.

Often we find part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost center, and organizations create cost center tensions in allocating resources or the necessary time. We should break activities down into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency accounting or actually progressing the innovation concept along? We need to judge these through the effectiveness of the outcome. Forget the allocation input, it is the successful innovation outcome.

Scott Anthony had pointed out in an old article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension, there is one, in my opinion, that needs more in-depth investigation and development, and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces.

Roger Martin suggests in one of his books, “The Opposable Mind,” that we need to establish “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change. The ability to understand the difference between exploring and exploiting is critical to how we manage innovation in its different needs of discovery and execution.

Innovation should be alongside as an equal partner to efficiency. It becomes efficient innovation and core to what you do and how you operate.

Seeking constant efficiencies is slowing down our organizations. We need to do the opposite, to speed them up and capitalize on finding innovation opportunities quickly and then knowing how to scale them equally fast. We need to do this by developing the competencies and understandings of experimentation, piloting, prototyping in fast, discreet and measured ways

The worrying thing is the slow components dominate any dynamics within the system, and the rapid aspects have to simply follow along. I see this an awful lot. In all organizations, it accommodates the slow, thereby reducing down the very effectiveness of the organization to adapt, respond, and grow to market changes. Slow holds everything back, and we can’t afford to keep waiting in a world where others are more adaptive or agile.

“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick.”

The only way to ensure speeding up is to be coherent on purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted and evolve the organization design away from layers and hierarchy.

We need to build up a series of internal networks that depend on each other but continuously reach out to connect, share, and exchange but more within an organizational design that is flat but highly responsive and interdependent to work well. This needs orchestration, not a hierarchy in its managing. They need constant attention; they need to speed up, to be encouraged, and well-resourced.

We need to work a lot harder on all the dysfunction points in organizations

Only by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will undoubtedly reduce the tensions, reduce the ‘shearing effects.’ It allows the organization in all its layers, to ‘react’ by recognizing its tension points and set about addressing them, not allowing them to fester and continue.

Organizations somehow has to reflect far more on its continued lack of performance. It takes time to identify the ‘tension points’ and then to undertake the appropriate action to come back into a balance.

A balance where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation, and that certainly is not the current business way we often see today. We so often find much of the ‘tension’ is not favorable, it is debilitating.

The post Organizations suffer constantly from unhealthy Innovation tension first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.