rejecting best practices of others - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Do you recognize your innovators leaders position?

@paul4innovating — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 07:36:06 +0000

Often innovation succeeds or fails by the personal involvement and engagement of a ‘selected’ few. Recognizing the types of innovation leadership might help you manage the innovation work a little better.

So can you recognize the traits of your innovation leader?

Are they a front-end or back-end innovation leader? Here’s how you can begin to spot the difference.

Before we climb into this

I recall enjoying a book published a few years back, “Innovation Governance- how top management organizes and mobilizes for innovation”, written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps and Beebe Nelson. I can totally recommend it as it is so rich in thinking through much around innovation, placed within this governance framework. It lays out a clear improvement path for innovation to travel. I am drawing from this book on some thoughts about innovation leadership.

The author’s view argues that organizations are traditionally tribal and as innovation is a highly complex corporate activity, which crosses many boundaries both within and outside the organization, it needs clear governance and structures to manage these dynamics of often conflicting and differing goals, expertise and interests. Often each group possesses its own rules, its own judgment of what is important, and this ‘creates’ the absolute need to have a mechanism that ‘cuts’ across these potential barriers.

So can you recognize your innovation leader?

According to the authors of “Innovation Governance”, you need the right combination of front-end and back-end leaders, since the two types are complementary. An example of a front-end leader in pharmaceutical firms is typically found as heads of discovery, often under the leadership of the chief research officer. Whereas back-end leaders would tend to be in charge of clinical development, manufacturing, or marketing-driven activities.

The best way to identify these two types of leaders is often their functional orientation, possible background disciplines, and their general management interest and attitudes.

A good example of this ‘divide’ is between two really famous leaders that have propelled Apple to the top in innovation and sustained execution Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple. Both have been highly visible and well cited in personality, backgrounds, and interests. As described well within the book this difference is best illustrated by this Apple leadership comparison.

The front-end leader.

Steve Jobs was clearly a front-end leader. He constantly sought out more radical creativity in design and end product results. Let’s make clear distinctions on what we think we know of the persons involved.

He had a real passion for new ideas, exploring and combining different thinking and designs, searching for solutions to customers’ unarticulated needs to improve their product experience.
He was constantly questioning the status quo and challenging (extremely hard) the team around him with constant how, what if, what else, why not type questions.
He had a more entrepreneurial flair and more of a venture capital mentality regarding returns and risks; he kept focusing on ‘big win’ promises.
He had this belief to constantly experiment, to open up new paths and different thinking and he looked to accept the risk and tolerate failure by moving through the ‘dwelling stage’ into the ‘learning from’ set of insights.
He encouraged individuals to have a degree of freedom, he challenged them constantly, and he expected a climate of mental adventure and excitement to attract others into the organization but these were made up of a diversity of backgrounds. His own background was rich in diversity and inquiry.
Finally, his tolerance levels were often ‘explosive’ but he generated the level of commitment to producing some of the stands out products of recent years.

The back-end innovation leader

It is often questioned why Tim Cook took over when Steve Jobs died. He is seemingly the archetypal back-end guy. He was credited with managing the Apple supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics, thus freeing up Jobs to focus on his front end pursuits. Tim Cook comes with more operational discipline.

He focuses on getting products to market flawlessly in cost-effective ways, mastering all the complexity of putting in place the operational foundations necessary to go from concept to launch and roll-out.
He has that insistence on achieving higher planning quality and expects the process discipline and standardization to make innovation replicable.
He understands the demand for speed to market through a high level of cross-functional integration and a ‘first-time-right’ philosophy in implementation.
Would have without doubt flexibility in execution decisions, based on detailed operational knowledge and pragmatic risk management.
That ability to motivate staff for product battles and promotion of ‘launch and learn’ approach, leading to adapting quickly to improvements, re-launch cycles, and even recalls.

Balancing the respective innovation clout always needed.

If you have a front-end leader at the helm of your innovation activities then you need to find the balance of who manages the disciplined operational side, then if you have a back-end leader, who will defend an aggressive front-end agenda?

The appointing of any innovation leader has significant implications, sometimes huge. This ‘style’ can determine what generates innovation and can determine the passion, commitment, and the emphasis points that your organization’s innovation will possibly give preference to and provide resources.

So you have to ask “what is our innovation leadership” model?

Is there a balance within the leadership team, how can this be managed smoothly?

Having a better understanding of leadership traits, achieving a ‘given’ balance to offer a more complementary top team, alongside having in place a ‘greater’ innovation governance structure will help avoid many of the pitfalls and dysfunctional aspects, that can be encountered that software alone simply can’t resolve. People with their personal beliefs, passions, and understandings is what makes innovation work, the software is the ‘great’ enabler, and governance “pulls it” all together.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Do you recognize your innovators leaders position? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Those that learn to frame the Strategic Innovation discussion are the big winners

@paul4innovating — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 09:01:22 +0000

Constructing an innovation conversation framework is never easy, we all come at it in different ways and when it comes to those strategic conversations, we feel a sense of panic and growing tension as our messages begin to fray at the edges and slip more into tactical, the more we talk.

If you just diving into innovations, this sort of strategic conversation can change the goalposts, alter the perspective, and can give the innovation a more focused framing to build propositions around. It enables you to stand out as you are able to articulate the “bigger picture”

The framing of an innovation conversation framework

What I am suggesting here is an innovation conversation framework, on how we can approach different strategic value propositions, and where we might need to debate these across the organization, as the points of impact, so we can make a move towards a higher degree of innovation alignment for all involved.

If we take the three ‘classic’ strategic thrusts of product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy, then we need to make clear the potentially different emphasis points within any suggested innovation approach that we should take. We must, within any innovation approach, be clear on what and where we should be placing our primary focus.

Aligning innovation within a strategic conversation framework

This framing can be most useful to remind people who are involved, that there are significant points of difference, or always need to be in anything new and innovative, otherwise, why are “we” doing it? There is a need to agree and align on what we are driving towards – and support any selected strategic direction. This framework can really open up the discussion. It can begin to show the possible implications and challenges ahead. It forms the required strategic dialogue.

Equally, some might argue that you actually need to combine all three, well I’d certainly want to question whether this is possible all at the same time. I would really doubt it if you just consider some of the aspects I’ve laid out within this framework above.

If it is still demanded, and some leaders can be just that, demanding – wanting to cover all the bases without knowing why they should be really focusing down on one of these. The direction you go requires the organizational focus to build the type of capabilities, resources, and processes to match this.

The need for a real alignment of strategy and innovation

Innovation stands in service to strategic goals such as growing market share, differentiation, and disrupting adjacent markets, serving the consistent changing and demanding customer needs, or by honing the delivery process by spotting these and then exploiting them rapidly and effectively. The first thing is you need to have a solid, thoughtful conversation around the type of strategic emphasis you wish to achieve.

Creating clear goals and linking/aligning innovation to those more agile strategies is a vital step before you get into the actual innovation concept stage. Senior executives must establish the manner in which innovation fits within the strategic context established on their goals, vision, and strategies.

Really do try and establish some key principles

I would suggest you really do need, even more, a framework to remind you of the critical differences and what aspects need clear focus to deliver to the distinct value proposition parts. Each strategic value proposition has significant implications to plan and work through.

This framework can help you to contribute to achieving greater alignment between the strategic direction (product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy) and the key innovation aspects that help to align with this which the organization will need to think about and work through. Of course, those that go and build their own, based on their different needs of innovation create something unique and more valuable to “gather around”

** This post was adapted but first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Those that learn to frame the Strategic Innovation discussion are the big winners first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Forget Best Practice, Think Always Of Learning Next Practice

@paul4innovating — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 12:10:53 +0000

Often you hear the request made: “Can you give us a best practice snapshot; we would like to get a sense of where we are”.

The trouble with best practice is you are looking at someone else’s practices and these are highly individual, made up of different groups of methodologies, processes, rules, theories, values, and concepts. These together have provided that specific company a level of success that others – mostly competitors – begin to notice.

There is no such thing as what they have it, you need to copy and have the same.

We all get caught up in best practices, you can’t simply pick up and plug and play, as one organization’s initiative is never the same set of conditions or positioning that others can simply copy.

We desire the “one-size fits all” as a comfort blanket, it makes our innovation lives easier. Many consultants love this request, as they do not need to apply the real skills of discernment, subject matter expertise, and the difficult challenge of peeling away a client’s practice to understand how they can rebuild them to become unique, into a leading practice that cannot be copied.

Here does lie a true competitive component and so many organizations seek to apply someone else’s practice so they can end up as “same” practice.

Moving from “Best Practice” to “Next Practice”

We are all presently learning a new practice. We need to find our individual ways, not copy someones else as this renders us as laggards or imitators, and who wants to have that label? The past best practices are now a very poor playbook for the future digital connected world. We need to ditch much of the endeavors that make up a legacy of past practice, and think forward, to which the term next practice becomes the learning spot.

No one can maintain the past, much of our systems are rooted in the 20^th century, in markets that were predictable and where supply and demand were simply managed to seek out the status quo.

We are facing such an unprecedented change and technology is re-writing the rule book in everything we are going to do. Many have argued it is a foundational shift and today we are struggling to articulate or codify the shifts. We seem to be moving from the world of complicated into the complex. It is hitting us in multiple ways, in scale, in speed, and across the whole organization. Technology and digital are changing business dimensions significantly.

We are moving from “pre-connectivity” to “post-connectivity

Let’s look at what is occurring in the digital transformations we are all undertaking. Shown below are two wonderful paradigm shifts we need to take to grasp digital transformation.

The first contribution is from a short article I came across in my research written for information-age by Carl Bate, managing partner, digital strategy, and transformation, Atos

http://www.information-age.com/digital-transformation-are-you-living-and-breathing-next-practice-or-best-practice-123458572/

This emerging shift in leadership techniques, from best to next practice, from pre-connectivity to post-connectivity, is shown here.

Best practices ‘pre-connectivity’		Next practices ‘post-connectivity’
Business Processes	1.	Value Systems
‘Known’ data	2.	Weak signals, probe, sense, and respond
Primary perspective on the parts	3.	Primary perspective on the whole
Theory X management	4.	Theory Y management
The organizational model	5.	Network analysis and social capital
Enterprise Architecture	6.	Behaviour Based Systems
Stability & predictability	7.	Agility, adaptability & innovation
Change Management	8.	Adoption Engineering
As-Is and To-Be grand designs	9.	Next state, evolving, “adaptive change”
Discipline specialization	10.	Cross-discipline collaboration
IT systems	11.	Information and socio-technical systems
Business/IT divide mgt & translation	12.	Multi-discipline common language
Business & technology specification	13.	Agile product development
Users of technology	14.	Participants in information systems
Bespoke and corporate technology	15.	Service and consumerized technology
Fail-Safe	16.	Safe-Fail
Internally focused first	17.	Externally focused first
Web model as a bolt-on to the existing	18.	Living on the Web

The practices of ‘best’ on the left-hand side are the very practices that have fostered industrialization and led to global connectivity.

The irony is that these practices do not naturally foster external and connected views, which are essential to working in the connected world that the best practices have helped create.

The second contribution to the shift we need in our practices.

The second contribution to thinking next practice comes from a really promising book by David L Rogers called “the Digital Transformation Playbook”, recently published in April 2016, and he is offering a superb list of changes to consider as we move from the Analog to the Digital Era.

The author offers a view on how digital forces are reshaping five key domains of strategy—customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. These five domains describe the landscape of digital transformation for business today.

Many of the fundamental assumptions are outdated and he is suggesting we move from the Analog to Digital era, with his chapters in the book to work through these. This I think is such “next practice” thinking to get us in the digital era mindset.

To achieve this shift you need to build your own understanding and practice your values, beliefs, and pursuit for YOUR business model

David Rogers sums up the change we are all facing from digital transformation to reflect on changing practices

“We live in what is commonly referred to as a digital age. An overlapping ecosystem of digital technologies —each one building on those before, and catalyzing those to come—is transforming not only our personal and communal lives but the dynamics of business for organizations of every size and in every industry.

Digital technologies are transforming not just one aspect of business management, but virtually every aspect. They are rewriting the rules of customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. Responding to this change requires not just a piecemeal approach, but a total integrated effort—a process of holistic digital transformation within the firm.”

The key is to look forward and recognize past best practices are just not relevant today. We need to look forward and seek out those “next practices” that are emerging. These are our own and they are the “right” practices for you as each of us offers something unique, otherwise what chance will we ever have?

** This post was adapted and was first published as a larger piece on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Forget Best Practice, Think Always Of Learning Next Practice first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Please forget best practice, it is all about next practice

@paul4innovating — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 14:30:01 +0000

Often you hear the request made of “can you give us a best practice snapshot; we would like to get a sense of where we are”.

Firstly please forget best practice, this is a mistake for you in a rapidly changing world

The trouble with best practice is you are looking at someone else’s practices and these are highly individual, made up of different groups of methodologies, processes, rules, theories, values and concepts. These together have provided that specific company a level of success that others – mostly competitors – begin to notice and just attempt to copy.

No, there is no such thing as best practices, only your own distinct practices, specific to your own environment, history and needs, you can’t simply pick up and plug and play, as one organization’s initiative is never the same set of conditions or positioning that others can simply copy.

We desire the “one-size fits all” as a comfort blanket. Many consultants love this request, as they do not need to apply the real skills of discernment, subject matter expertise and the difficult challenge of peeling away a client’s practice to understand how they can rebuild them to become unique, into a leading practice that cannot be copied. Here lie a true competitive component and so many organizations seek to apply someone else’s practice, so they can end up as “same” practice.

Moving from “Best Practice” to “Next Practice”

The digital transformation that is underway is becoming a very uncomfortable place. We are all presently learning a new practice. The past best practices are now a very poor playbook for the future digital connected world. We need to ditch much of the endeavors that make up a legacy of past practice, and think forward, to which the term next practice becomes the learning spot.

Finding your best practice is extremely tough, it is often a “blind” adoption as you never fully appreciate how one company arrived at this point, whatever is claimed. It is far better that you quickly benchmark assorted practices across yours and also different industries and then stop and reflect. You need to invest a lot in researching, seeking out understanding, and then experimenting with your own needs to develop your emerging practices for digital transformation, believe me.

Just take a look at the recent report I compiled on digital transformation.

This is a meta report I have written and was released this last week, on the recent developments in digital transformation. It offers a selection of key visuals and overviews from 14 reports, which in turn were shortlisted from an original data set of 140 reports on the topic, published over the course of the last years. The intention of this report is to provide data for orientation for people dealing with this difficult topic.

The report should give you an opportunity to find connecting points in the understanding of digital transformation. The link provided below takes you to an access sign up page. Do please note the statement “Just good stuff, no spam, unsubscribe anytime” to give you assurance the intention is to inform and offer useful content, they want to track the level of interest in the report.

http://i.hypeinnovation.com/exploring-digital-transformation

I do encourage you to take the time and download the report, it should offer a good oversight and value into your own understanding of digital transformation but let’s get back to your next practice.

Forget the past, much of our roots need digging up and discarding.

No one can maintain the past, much of our systems are rooted in the 20^th century, in markets that were predictable and where supply and demand were simply managed to seek out the status quo.

We are facing such an unprecedented change and technology is re-writing the rule book in everything we are going to do. Many have argued it is a foundational shift and today we are struggling to articulate or codify the shifts. We seem to be moving from the world of complicated into the complex. It is hitting us in multiple ways, in scale, in speed, and in scope, across the whole organization. Technology and digital are changing the business dimensions significantly.

We are moving from “pre-connectivity” to “post-connectivity

In this report I have been compiling writing on the topic of Digital Transformation, I have been attempting to find these emerging and next practices. It has been a very, very deep dive into this subject and it is full of different views, approaches, suggestions and recommendations. In the report due out in the next few weeks I have attempted to ‘pick out’ those practices that take you towards a new thinking for digital transformation.

What I have not included in the report are these two wonderful paradigm shifts we need to take to grasp digital transformation. I believe these should stand apart as they form the new ‘common language’ we need to apply to move into a digital transformation.

It is the critical shift from best (past) practice into next (new) practice

The first contribution is from a short article I came across in my research written for information-age by Carl Bate, managing partner, digital strategy and transformation, Atos

http://www.information-age.com/digital-transformation-are-you-living-and-breathing-next-practice-or-best-practice-123458572/

This emerging shift in leadership techniques, from best to next practice, from pre-connectivity to post-connectivity, are shown here:

The practices of ‘best’ on the left-hand side are the very practices that have fostered industrialization and led to global connectivity.

The irony is that these practices do not naturally foster external and connected views, which are essential to working in the connected world that the best practices have helped create.

The second contribution into thinking next practice comes from a really promising book by David L Rogers called “the Digital Transformation Playbook”, recently published in April 2016, and he is offering a superb list of changes to consider as we move from the Analog to the Digital Era.

The Author offers a view on how digital forces are reshaping five key domains of strategy—customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. These five domains describe the landscape of digital transformation for business today.

David Rogers sums up the change we are all facing from digital transformation

The key is to look forward and recognize past best practices are just not relevant today. We need to look forward and seek out those “next practices” that are emerging and explore them for what they mean for us, not for others. They are, or will become the (golden) keys to unlock the future common language of digital transformation, something we all are needing to learn.

Publishing note: This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their agreement, I have added this to my own site.

Save

The post Please forget best practice, it is all about next practice first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Are you dependent on other’s best practices?

@paul4innovating — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 09:16:17 +0000

I often wonder if “best practice” is actually a hidden drug within our organizations that everyone simply craves to be taking.

Why do so many advisory organizations promote best practices? Simply because those in the organization constantly feel under pressure to demonstrate why they are falling behind or keeping ahead of their competitors.

They crave knowing best practices, but tell me what really is the best practice of others really achieving?

If you are behind, best practice informs you and you go into a frantic mode to try and catch up. By the time you have achieved the best practice, it is simply out of date as those practising this have most likely moved even further on.
If you are the ones attributed with a best practice it can usually create a level of complacency, while you sit back and bask in the afterglow, or you rack your brains to extend this ‘leadership’ position in even better ways, determined not to relinquish this recognition and start to ‘mess’ with these practices.

Often the result is you can lose sight of why you were a best practice as you upgrade to the next level of automation through technology, forgetting that part of the best practice might have been the personal touch and engagements you had with your customers, dealing individually with their specific problems, as you race to automate these, so you can keep ahead in practice.

I argue you have to be very careful with best practice

Firstly 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, yet it is the place for gaining leading practice.

It is just so easy to copy, yet how often do we fail to recognize all the contextual factors that went into making a specific set of (best) practices in one organization as those another organization simply believes it can blindly copy?

Other organizations good practice is their practice, in their circumstances and in adapting the practices to suit their market conditions and I guarantee these are not yours!

Your practices are all that matter to your customer, so keep focusing there

Of course, best practice has its comparative use to gather intelligence, to gain competitive understanding of where they are in their development. But these are their practices and to simply set about to adopt these as your way forward is just a huge, expensive mistake in many cases.

I believe if you are focusing on the good and emerging practices within your own organization as the area to focus upon, to leverage and understand.

Then to measure these with what your customer expects, your market is telling you or your ability to engineer real growth or not. Those become your practices for learning and wanting to improve into those that make your organization really work effectively in its context.

Then applying, experimenting and learning from novel practices that provide growing confidence in creative thinking.

Also give some thought for next practice, those practices that prompt reinvention. They start such totally fresh thinking; they challenge existing paradigms and move you towards considering new business models.

The Cynefin Framework
One framework I strongly relate to is provided by www.cognitive-edge.com with their Cynefin framework. It places ‘practices’ in their appropriate domain.

The Cynefin framework has five major domains

The first four domains are our most relevant for seeking out the appropriate practice:

Simple, recently renamed the Obvious space, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense – Categorise – Respond and where we can apply best practice as it is more for incremental, the space where you are working with more of the ‘established’ routines, extracting the efficiencies and repeating established practice.

Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.

Complex, this is the domain, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act – Sense – Respond and we can discover novel practice.

The fifth domain- The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, simply unaware of what you need to do and in which state you should apply. Often people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision adding more complexity to the disorder.

In full use, the Cynefin framework has sub-domains, and the boundary between simple and chaotic is seen as a catastrophic one: complacency leads to failure and tumbles into chaos.

Dealing with different types of innovation really works in this framework

For incremental innovation, constant reoccurring stuff, the ‘simple’ domain applies and best practice pushes down on efficiencies and effectiveness, on being consistent with standard processes and clear structures. Always be conscious of the limitations within best practice.

For a more distinctive innovation, you tend to move more towards the complicated domain, where experts ‘kick-in’ to help and offer plausible outcomes based on known experiences. You need to listen to conflicting advice and watch out for entrenched thinking so it can be challenged.

If you are pushing for more radical innovation then it has a higher complexity and risk and falls into the complex domain. The range of options sometimes seems infinite where we explore more through the lens of perspectives and judgement.

The outcomes are never easy to predict upfront and you need to keep looking for patterns to emerge and ‘inform’ your decisions. The use of experimentation, gamification, allows greater interactions and a place you encourage dissent and finally be patient and allow time for reflection.

This type of innovation can change the game.

Then we have the chaotic domain, where disruptive innovation tends to sit. You lack any clear ‘cause and effect’ as it is entering more of the unknowns. The key is deciding to act, not from knowing the practice but recognizing it is novel, as you search for what will work, attempt to take back control and provide clear and direct interventions to firstly stabilize, understand and learn from and then further respond to bring it back into some order that allows you to participate.

The appropriate framework of practices and approach are really valuable
This framework offers a perspective that has enormous value as it offers managers a guide in placing different thoughts with different actions.

The Cynefin framework offers a typology of contexts to help you sort out a variety of situations in which you might need to make different decisions and then provide what actions to take from the recognition.

The framework looks to place the appropriate actions and decisions into the right context. The framework emerged from complexity theory and innovation falls into this.

I would suggest focusing on and developing your own practices is so much better than attempting to ‘adopt’ others’ best practices.

When you next think of best practice as your answer, come back and reflect on this first, to place the appropriate innovation into the right practice that meets your needs, not someone else’s.

*****

Publishing note: This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

Save

The post Are you dependent on other’s best practices? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.