It often challenges the status quo and can on certain occasions, potentially challenge the stated strategic goals as those ‘disruptive forces’ have not been addressed radically enough. Innovation often “asks” difficult questions of ourselves.

We keep asking a lot of innovators but consistently restrain them or starve them of essential resources, at the critical times they need them. We seem to get in the way of blocking innovation so it can’t be seen to align with the goals or vision of the organization.

We keep extorting innovators to raise their game, constantly trying to shape their work so it can fit. We are constantly encouraging innovators to abandon their personal judgments, open themselves up to different possibilities to try and make it “fit” with what we have got or already invested into.

We ask innovators to keep resolute and keep trying, keep pushing the boundaries, challenging and sometimes disrupting the established practices and processes, organizations like to keep in place but this is a very ‘uneasy’ and needs courage, belief but most of all alignment. Innovators need to feel confident they are fully supported and encouraged. They need empowering.

The innovator is constantly dealing with ambiguity, managing a far more dynamic process of knowledge learning and investigating. Often this is in direct conflict or tension with the majority of the organizations need to extract the most efficiencies and effectiveness out of the established systems and processes.

Strategic design often does not single out innovation as different, it expects it to comply. It is this lack of recognition that causes much of the misalignment, as it does not conform to the norm.

Yet strategy and innovation have much in common. They are both dealing with uncertainties, attempting to quantify uncertainties and unknowns, working towards a future state that advances the business by identifying and capturing new opportunities.

This is where cascading helps with alignment- consider a model

To achieve alignment, a cascade of better choices is needed that keeps mapping back to innovation activities and strategic need.

This calls for the need for a choice-cascade model where understanding flows through aligned cascading choices. Its aim is to empower firstly, by promoting and encouraging different levels of sound or best judgment, to enable individual choices, so as to allow for a ‘choice-maker’ to push this back upstream. Roger Martin and Hilary Austen have suggested “the art of integrative thinking”.

Choice options cascade down from the higher-order choices. These should set the context for and constrain (help in defining) lower-order choices.

Choices become inter-related and need to fit context and constraints from this higher-level. If there is difficulty in the fit, then the higher order needs urgently revisiting, hence the cascading effect is a constant, dynamic two-way flow.

Today, if we recognize change is a constant, flowing and rapidly changing part of how we do business, by having in place this choice cascading model you can unfreeze part of a strategy that is not ‘aligning’ with a changing world. It makes the decision-making process more dynamic and allows for greater contribution to strategic choices and the innovation process can equally respond and align on a far quicker, adaptive path.

Choice-cascade needs structure and operating principles

Choice makers within this model need to be explicit in the why:

1. Explain the choice that has been made and the explicit rationale behind it
2. Explicitly identify the next downstream choice to make it a joint venture
3. Assist in making the downstream choice happen explicitly
4. Commit to revisiting and modifying the choice based on explicit downstream feedback

To move towards choices that can outline desired outcomes and describe ways and means to achieve them allows for this alignment and flow of understanding.

A cascade must move in both directions

Water flows down but it is the  ‘pushing back’ provides this feedback cascade, where the real fate of change and realization resides is in recognition and ongoing dialogues. To cascade back, clarity or questioning needs a mechanism or process to return to the top. You gain alignment through this method of cascading both up and down organizations in deliberate ways. We are seeking this alignment constantly, it is the lightning rod that transmits the energy to gain fusion.

To encourage alignment, they need to be explicitly linked to key desired behaviors, determined by the needs of the individual organization. Alignment needs to equally map back to a high consistency in core values expected in practicing, as important. I would suggest a good innovation governance design significantly helps this. This is where building the innovation culture, the environment it works within and the climate that is encouraged prompts the dialogue, conversation, and engagement.

Underpinning this alignment within the Cascade’s design and identification, you equally build a ‘belief’ audit. Its aim is to uncover where alignment is achieved, misunderstood and equally highlights where it needs a better bridging mechanism and most importantly, where there is critical misalignment to be addressed at a higher level. This belief audit strengthens the choice-cascade model as it opens up the dialogue surrounding innovation and its strategic (or operational only) alignment.

How can innovation get squared away with strategy?

As I mentioned earlier it is getting innovation into this ‘choice mentality’ on where to play and what seems to be the real wins by providing as much understanding of the judgment of why it contributes to the strategic goals. You align it or ‘flag’ it. To get innovation to align you need to discuss a whole array of gaps. It needs dialogues, engagement and a clear, cohesive set of ‘shared’ objectives of what innovation can make a contribution and deliver a difference.

Clearly, if you lack this deep understanding of how the organization’s strategy was brought together, the thinking behind it, then innovation will often fall short in delivery, as it can’t have enough of the understanding to be aligned. Making hard choices is tied to aspirations of knowing where you want to place your bets, to win.

Often it is within the strategies lies the potential new spaces to play. Strategy informs innovation. It becomes the catalyst of where-to-play and how-to-win and with this, you are giving innovators a better chance to deliver back concepts for those hard choices to be made, designed around innovate concepts that align and feeds the strategic design with winning designs

Having a cascading model in place allows that essential ‘flow’ that connects innovation to strategy but more importantly becomes the connecting point for all within the organization to identify with and…..align too.

Contact me if you would like to learn more.

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The post Innovation has a hard job to align first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We all need to recognize the type of innovative leadership personality within our organization, the ones we are working for, as this might help you manage the innovation work a whole lot better and attract the resources you need.

So can you recognize the traits of your innovation leader?

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

The thinking about this came from this book.

A book recently published “Innovation Governance- how top management organizes and mobilizes for innovation”, written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps and Beebe Nelson is one I can totally recommend it as it is so rich in thinking around managing innovation.

The author’s view argues that organizations are traditionally tribal and often each group possesses its own rules, and its own judgement of what is important and this ‘creates’ the absolute need to have a mechanism or strong personalities that can ‘cut’ across these potential barriers.

One suggestion coming from this book is recognizing your innovation leaders

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. They are able to lead and manage these tribes.

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 Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple, as highly visible and well cited in personality, backgrounds and interests, in what we read. 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.

• He had a real passion for new ideas, exploring and combining different thinking and designs, and searching for solutions to customers’ un-articulated needs to improve their product experience.
• He was constantly questioning the status quo and challenging (extremely hard) and confronting the team around him with constant how, what if, what else and why not type of 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, instinct often drove him.
• He had this belief to constantly experiment, to open up new paths and different thinking and he looked to accept 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. Yet he was, by all accounts a control freak. Nothing passed without his agreement
• His own background was rich in diversity and inquiry and he draw often from this and he portrayed himself as a rebel
• He held onto his vision, yet was prepared to adjust the pathway towards one that responded to meet breaking opportunities.
• Finally, his tolerance levels were often ‘explosive’ but he generated a 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 of an 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 an 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 the ‘launch and learn’ approach, leads to adapting quickly to improvements, re-launch cycles and even recalls.
• Tim seems to ‘think’ strategically, considers the investment community, amassing cash and systematically picking off areas that maintain Apple’s present higher-end approach.
• He seems to continue to encourage higher value incremental steps, holding on to accepted Apple philosophies and perhaps struggles to ‘go’ for the bold new breakthroughs.
• Tim strikes me as more ‘grounded’, providing for greater stability and managing a maturing organization.

Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have strong leadership skills, they both have ‘got’ innovation but their approaches and acceptance levels would have been coming from their different approaches, personalities and backgrounds. They both got detail.

Strong leaders with distinct personalities need understanding. Otherwise, you are often forced back to the ‘drawing board’ for deeper reasons than you initially consider. Consider the personality and what ‘ makes up’ their set of experiences and risk profiles to help ‘advance’ your innovative thinking

Balancing the respective innovation clout is 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 emphasis point that your organization’s innovation will possibly give preference to, and then provide those necessary resources you are needing.

It is well worth understanding where your innovation leader’s personality, background and functional orientation might lie. It might make your task a little easier to attract the funds and resources you need. So many of our innovation concepts die within the organization, often sadly, as they lack sponsorship appeal and simply do not get them excited.

So by appealing to the basic instincts of their personality traits you can perhaps ‘hook them’ into your innovation concept. Once you have their attention you can then ‘open it up’ for why it makes sense to explore further for taking it out into the big wide world.

The post Recognizing your type of innovation leader first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

If you ever look at high performance in sport it is in the consistent, hour-upon-hour, day-upon-day of dedicated practice, hard work and consistent honing that gets you to that performance point. You seek to reduce deviance; you look to achieve a certain consistency.

Business Organizations will like that approach, it ‘plays’ to the efficiency and effectiveness message, it offers up predictability and reliability that allows for dedicated planning and ‘predicting’ solid performance and certainly. This is ideal for those investors looking for consistency in results and dividends and the Executive Board yearns for.

Today uncertainly asks for a different performance

Today, we face a different type of performance – one that is not ‘just’ dependable but one that is often unpredictable, one that seems perhaps more suited to innovation that outsmarts others in unique ways.

We need to be predictable in performance but we need to deliver unpredictable innovation that wows our customers and the markets to achieve this. To do this you have to run today’s organizations faster, better, in more active and engaged ways to extract the best from it but to allow it to exploit options consistently and with clear purpose.

This engagement needs a different honing than most organizations are certainly not capable of delivering, without thinking long and hard about the way they must undertake a more transformational pathway. One that can connect and deliver a consistent and coherent innovating performance across the organization.

With so much around us, of unprecedented levels of disruption and uncertainly, unrelenting competitive pressure, fickle markets and customers, it creates either a ‘freezing at the top’, a paralysis-effect focusing just on short-term incremental measures or the “going for it” with huge ‘big bets’ that risk losing the whole farm. There must be better ways to manage in these times of uncertainty without having to choose one end of the spectrum or the other?

Managing innovation well is this middle way.

Innovation requires careful managing. I like to put the emphasis of innovation behind both efficiency in innovation and effectiveness in innovation. Innovation may never be simply predictable but it can be well-managed, to extract and leverage its best performance but to achieve this it needs a highly focused top management engagement. Often we are not seeing this in many organizations today.

You simply can’t delegate innovation down the organization. Innovation needs to be as aligned, as honed to strategy, to extracting from its available resources as anything else in organizations. It needs connecting, it needs articulating, it needs framing, it needs cascading throughout the organization.

We need to cascade innovation down the organization.

I believe there is an essential gap within the way we set about innovation today. There is a need for a well-articulated and well-communicated innovation strategy that can be delivered in an organizing framework that has been called the Executive Innovation Work Mat. Over a series of articles and blog posts I have laid out the Value Proposition for this.

In obtaining the right innovation engagement at the top of our organizations, well communicated throughout the entire company, we reduce distance and bridge many current disconnects surrounding innovation. We consistently raise performance.

Triggering the cascade-effect is seeking out broad adoption.

How do we achieve firstly, a change in performance that is both rapid but also one that works on consistently looking for improving performance over the longer-term? We need to think ‘velocity’ not only down organizations; we need to encourage this sense of movement in multiple directions, flowing back up organizations in knowledge and understanding with the ‘result’ of going out performing in greater successful innovations, time and again.

I’ve previously written on the cascading effect needed for innovation success looking at two-way flows and the value of closer alignment.

I want to go one step further in THREE VISUAL CASCADING steps

We need to achieve alignment, all sorts of alignment. We need to convey throughout the organization and encourage a closer alignment on not just what to do but also to support the how to do it as well as the where to do it.

We need to leverage across the entire ecosystem that makes up the organizations place where we consciously work on immediate impact points in this year’s innovation outcomes but also what is going to give us this longer-term transformational effect.

This requires a huge emphasis on collaborative efforts, on promoting behaviours and matching understanding within a greater transparent organization climate and culture.

We need to find more fluid and flexible organizations that respond through searching for innovation consistency. They need to have a ‘flow’ of knowledge, of clarity, of a sense of scale in their learning and dialogues that promotes greater successful innovation outcomes as the sense of on-going mission.

We need to align, offer clear vision and purpose and this needs orchestrating from the top of the organization to the bottom. Organizations need an integrated innovation strategic framework that can deliver commonality in understanding, in purpose, in language. We need to cascade.

What we are looking for is a cascade of better choices to achieve the desired innovation outcomes that only an integrated innovation design can achieve. This is where the engagement from the top of the organization becomes pivotal. They ‘frame’ the design; they offer the alignment and integrated approach I believe the Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology can provide.

The work mats aim is to engage the top of our organizations to lay out the conditions and result impact they expected from innovation. Then it needs to be cascaded throughout the organization.

Through this cascading-effect you move closer to better choices that can get so much closer to the desired innovation outcomes all involved want to seek out.

A performance that reflects a team’s or organizations best efforts to be best at what they do; the outstanding innovation performance consistent to the needs and growth expectations demanded in today’s constantly changing world.

Where consistency needs to be fluid, flexible, aligned and agile in innovation – that’s the new target performance standard needed.

The post A Cascade of Better Choices for Greater Innovation Outcomes first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Not just in researching it, in debating it but in eventually constructing a sound framework, that is visual, easy to connect too and for hopefully many to become involved and engaged with, brings this work together into a realization that is really rewarding.

For Jeffrey Phillips and me, we believe we are offering something that makes sense through our framework, which we call the Executive Innovation Work Mat, with a link to the short introductory series, published in September 2012.

In our initial White Paper there is the outlines of our thinking behind this Executive Innovation Work Mat.  The important message is that we want to deliver the message into the boardrooms of as many business organizations as we can, with this message of intent which can be simply summed up as:

“we believe we have a framework that will help the leadership of organizations to identify with, understand their role in this and in this strategic participation and framing innovation intent, so advance the contribution of innovation within their organizations and beyond.”

Let me lay out the overarching proposition for this.

We believe there is an essential gap within the way we set about innovation today. There is a need for a well-articulated and well-communicated innovation strategy that can be delivered in an organizing framework that we have called the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

The work mats aim is to engage the top of our organizations to lay out the conditions and result impact they expected from innovation.

This framework provides the guidance through its seven innovation domains that combine to move towards an explicit innovation strategy, that is looking to align far more to the organization’s growth goals and strategic intent than most organizations deem to achieve today.

In obtaining the right innovation engagement at the top of our organizations, well communicated, we reduce distance and bridge many current disconnects surrounding innovation.

The end result is we gain identification and we believe improve organizational responsiveness through this involvement. It can deliver the essential alignment that innovation requires to support an organizations strategy and goals.

The framework provides both formal and informal mechanisms, it combine the intrinsic with the extrinsic, so as to make up a more effective way for decision-making and creating innovation to take place. This combination effect provides the necessary support to the efforts involved in discovering, exploring and executing innovation and a significant contributor to the strategic and tactical linkage needed within the organization.

In summary let me articulate the potential this work mat can offer:

Key implications
Innovation is not an isolated event; it is not made up of islands of knowledge. Innovation requires a “pulling together” and needs this overarching organizing framework, that provides the deep, enduring commitment to its constituent parts from the top of organizations in the support and the understanding required to make this happen. The framework provides the innovation leadership, it lays out the “conditions”  for innovation through the work mat methodology.

The leadership have the underlying responsibility to establish it, leverage it and effectively work it fully through, using this framework as the mechanism for sustaining the innovation focus in a well-structured way.

This gains a real organizational value as it provides the top-level understanding of the seven essential domains needed to support innovation that covers the structure, design and process, governance, motivation and metrics and the conditions to strengthen the climate and environment to bring this to life.

Points of emphasis
This framework provides a uniforming and growing cohesion required for innovation to be focused, it seeks greater alignment in activities and engagement around innovation; it actively works at reducing barriers and many of today’s uncertainties through its constant engagement, communication and dialogues prompted by its construct.

The framework becomes the document of the leaderships commitment and engagement, it raises innovations visibility in a structured thoughtful way, it seeks to encourage and draw in the organization for them to gather around.

Eventually we can see this framework becoming a sort of innovation mechanism for the “collecting house in meaningful exchange on innovation” where the essential strategic activities are captured and where the actions can be recognized, measured and valued. It triggers engagement and provides the motivations to delve even deeper into generating greater innovation outcomes as the end result around its framing ability.

The essential Common Language
Eventually, it forms a significant part of the required innovation ecosystem. A place where a common language forms, a clear explicit place where context connects with the work going on and the value of this is how the people involved in innovation work, connect and engage.

A dream, no, it can be a reality. We need to provide increasing clarity and purpose to each persons daily work, to their innovation activities, so all draw meaning and value from the connections across the framework, they recognize the boundaries and push beyond in confidence, not fear. They need the appropriate “signal” and guidance from the top to gain encouragement to push the boundaries of potential but set within this overarching frame.

Risk is identified through dialogue and governance on what any actions mean and the understanding of these for any impact, negative or positive, on our innovation ecology can be evaluated. This pushes innovation beyond the normal incremental approach often found today, as leaders become more aware and can “frame” issues and understand opportunities better through their strategic lens.

Achievement Goals
The leader’s role is to provide guidance, strategic and sometimes tactical guidance, as well as to offer inspiration and clarity of purpose. They need to “draw out” the essence of an organization’s desire to innovation. By both articulating and nurturing innovation through this framework then innovation is driven and directed, then surely we are headed in the right direction.

An organizational framework for innovation draws people in, it achieves connection and engagement. If innovation can “resonate” throughout the organization it gains the “required attention”. It becomes embedded as the “force” essential for growth and over time part of our “natural”  daily occurrence.

Motivation to innovate
We need to cultivate innovation. It is the primary source of new wealth creation, of sustaining a healthy future, of securing that future.
Each of us needs to personally understand how innovation happens, what are the ‘multiple’ connecting points, all the intersections and cross-over points needed to make it work, and work well repeatedly. Innovation cannot be delegated, it needs to be mastered, it needs to be shared.

We all need to become “innovating conscious”. Everyone needs to “get it” not just a few selected people today.

Shared understanding and consistent follow-up
What the executive team does, in what it communicates in its actions and behaviours, in its participation and its resource funding of innovation, becomes vital. Innovation runs counter to many of the existing (accepted) processes and faces stronger “headwinds” and resistance because it challenges many of the existing practices and processes honed and established over many years. It needs executive leadership to manage these tensions and dynamics. To show innovation leadership.

This framework becomes the “glue” that connects across the seven domains essential to innovation and re-enforce a consistent need to challenge, overcome yet equally maintain performance.

Changing Behaviors

People make or break innovation. Innovation is an inherently social activity that needs relationships, networks, structures and supporting systems. People need to belong, belong in an environment that nurtures and encourages innovation, in a community that balances risk and learning, a place to generate and execute. A place to experiment and learn.

From the top to the bottom of the organization requires active engagement, growing identification and understanding and knowing that the skills, exposure to competencies and building capabilities is an ongoing process that feeds off a climate of trust, mutual respect and ever-evolving partnerships to achieve the work that is needed can be done.

Real Value Points
For engagement in the Executive Innovation Framework, the work invested in this work mat exercise offers as real value benefits:

1. The framework can create cohesion and consistency of innovation purpose that will reduce many existing barriers and uncertainties around innovation
2. As the leadership does become engaged this will demonstrate a significant commitment and promise that will certainly increases the visibility of innovation, lowers risks, encourages more involvement and generation of better ideas.
3. The framework itself will generate work flows that link, become more dynamic to explore and promote the innovation skills, capabilities and competencies needed. They become more cohesive, coordinated and focused. It seeks to reduce tension and increase the dynamics within innovation.
4. As the framework connects, in its understanding and as its impact grows, we certainly believe, confidence builds. Both formal and informal areas are addressed in parallel, growing all-round identification and alignment.
5. You begin to align compensation and incentives into your abilities to generate the innovation activities that provide the impact the organization is looking for.

While CEOs or other senior leaders responsible for innovation they don’t need to dominate innovation activities but they do need to fill this critical role to ensure:

• linking of innovation activities to corporate strategies,
• communicating the importance of innovation consistently and demonstrating their personal engagement,
• aligning the corporate culture and compensation programs to innovation goals and activities
• creating innovation governance frameworks and providing the environment to allow innovation to function and thrive.

The essential role that leadership plays in innovation
While few executives will conceive the ideas that become best-selling products and services, executives must orchestrate and lead the rest of the organization, in building a culture that embraces innovation and provide the leadership and guidance innovation demands.

Leadership is certainly seeking more innovation in their business models, more distinctiveness in their innovation offerings, a wish to explore different options. To meet this, they need to become more involved in all aspects of innovation to achieve this innovation improvement and reduce uncertainties that lies often within their own minds. I would suggest it is through this framework that it becomes the focal point and offers the mechanism to provide these necessary conditions and can set the “pulse”that enables the innovation juices to flow.

The competitive pace today and for a sustaining future requires innovation engagement from the top. Executives who understand their role in shaping innovation frameworks and activities, and, more importantly, increasing opportunities and engagement for the entire organization, that can be “driven” through this framework, will deliver better and more sustained innovation outcomes by its engagement effect.

Innovation needs to be seen coming from the top as compelling.

There are some very compelling arguments why the leadership of our organizations do need to become fully involved in providing and guiding the innovation design. Organizations need an overarching strategic design for innovation and this must come from the top.

Here are two series of short papers laying out the business case for the engagement of the top of our organizations within innovation, based initially upon turning the buzzword of innovation into the imperative and a further set of papers based on leaders need to engage and drive their innovation needs to achieve the strategic growth they believe is achievable.

We need to reduce this present gap of poor innovation leadership; we believe the Executive Innovation Work Mat approach can definitely help towards this goal, it has real value to investigate, construct and implement as an overarching framework for innovation alignment within organizations.

The post The Overarching Proposition for the Executive Innovation Work Mat first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.