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

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The best way is to encourage everyone to have the ongoing experience, to get really involved and caught up in projects and initiatives that have the potential for impact. Learning from failures needs to be part of this.

Yet the very best thing is to encourage connected minds for value-creating opportunities and knowledge sharing for innovation to flow across an organization. For this, we need to think about some modern engagement platforms that have ’engagement and knowledge’ at their heart.

Let me offer some thoughts on this engagement need. It is (really) valuable to relate too.

Firstly and most importantly- Absorptive Capacity really does need greater understanding.

A fair time back two researchers, Cohen and Levinthal (1990) pioneered the concept of absorptive capacity, further defined as the ability of an organization to identify, value, assimilate, and apply new knowledge. Since its 1990 publication, the concept has been further developed and given rise to many thousands of published papers around this subject.

The value of absorptive capacity is that when organizations have some prior knowledge they are more receptive to adding new understandings and new ideas.

Organizations that encourage and set about learning consciously set about the search for new ideas and by having this already established ‘learning’, are far better at recognizing new ideas that might lead to innovation.

These organizations develop a deeper understanding of integrating and experimenting with this new knowledge and set about placing it in a new setting, concept or hypothesis, to push this knowledge forward into new innovation. They are consciously advancing learning.

This gaining of continuous knowledge encourages constant learning and this has a positive feedback cycle as it builds the capacities and capabilities for future innovation activity. Absorptive capacity once recognized and established as a system promotes the search for new knowledge that greatly increases the capacity to make the necessary new connections for new innovation to happen.

The ability of our knowledge gathering needs a continuous focus and methodology of approach.

For this to happen, it does need continuous focus. If organizations take the alternative route of wanting to squeeze every last drop out of the existing innovation activity or research department, organizations over time develop as bad learners, they begin to ignore, to assume they have the knowledge and get fixed in their mindsets. They fail to absorb, they tend to reject and increasingly adopt the “not invented here” syndrome. That can only last for a limited time before ‘innovation decay’ sets in, people leave and the knowledge often goes with them also.

We need a system to capture and allow knowledge to flow, and a strong absorptive capacity has three main outputs which result from the flow of external or distributed knowledge: (1) the creation of new innovation; (2) the creation of new knowledge; and (3) that it does lead to new economic and social value. This is why this becomes important to establish and apply.

Managing innovation is the ideal home. If we agree that most innovations happen outside often self-imposed boundaries then we have to extend to all our boundaries and beyond. We have to open up.

We certainly understand that today innovation is not confined to the walls of one particular company. The world ‘absorbs’ more innovation than we can turn into greater value but we need to attempt to capture this and see if and where its value might lie. 

This is going to be achieved more likely within a distributed approach, asking everyone to contribute to innovative ideas, and regularly providing them with the content and context that they need to look for.

Absorptive capacities provide us with the system on which we can encourage the gathering, understanding, and translation of knowledge. It underpins engagement.

Then we have to align technology with this ‘needing to be engaged’

We work in different modes, we have ad-hoc communications, the more process-work-driven collaboration needs and we need to seek out more content-centric collaborations to help us in our work and sense of engagement and worth.

There are plenty of tools out there that need to bring ‘in-house’ as standard service delivery platforms. These include Business Intelligence gathering tools, open access to portals, websites, and intranets to acquire, assimilate, and transform what we are discovering.  Then we need to establish organization-specific collaboration tools, enterprise social networks, encourage the constant feeding and building of content management resources, streamlining workflows, to help others to explore and build on these insights.

The key, though, is a uniformed communication strategy for all to appreciate, accept to work on and gain increased value from it.

Then we need to build this modern engagement platform.

What needs to be part of this engagement platform? It needs to have the capacity to ‘listen’ and capture understanding, it needs to deploy some filtering and analytics, it needs to have some inbuilt principles of workflow and BPM.

Then you need to capture the interactions, offer search and discovery services, organize event management, and be able to retrace the interaction history.

Then it has to have application connectors, domain-specific apps, and value the activity streams to provide rich user experience of different points within the engagement.

Finally, all of this needs to be integrated into the larger organizations’ processes and be able to be ‘syncing’ capabilities with the more traditional systems of your organization.

Achieving engagement

So this engagement platform interacts with the world to bring it into your four walls, it engages with other systems that help it in their capturing and dispersing abilities and it simply connects people. Lastly, it has to contain interesting work, knowledge, or activity.

There is a real need to think through the modern engagement platforms we require, both externally with our customers and other stakeholders, and also for our internal needs and this comes increasingly from technology solutions.

.There is increasing acknowledgment on the value of collective wisdom, growing flexibility in discovery and selection, relying on others that can add new knowledge and insights as well as recognizing the match and balance between intrinsic and extrinsic values for motivating and achieving real engagement for all those wanting to grow and prosper.

The post We need to shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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”

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• a slightly different version was originally published on the Hype blog posting site.

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There is a real increasing pressure to totally reinvent my business. The past business paradigm of reaching out, providing value, and making money is still there. Still, it is how we all undergo the changes needed in a radically different set of economic circumstances.

We all are seeing the world in a very different light, in some ways a very harsh one, where the old normals are breaking down. The change in our world is even a little scary, it actually is giving me a little “angst.” I need to put some reorder into my world.

Firstly as many of you know, I have been investing my time in growing my understanding, expertise, and thinking over three “core” topics. My Innovation intent has been central to this for twenty years, but this has ‘funneled down’ into recognizing the value of ecosystems as the business design for innovation to thrive and deliver more significant value creation. In the past two-plus years, the whole Energy Transition has been my vehicle to apply my innovation learning and ecosystem thinking.

We must hold on to much of what we have, but we really will be forced to abandon so much of our accepted norm.

My search or questioning is not about abandoning what I have invested over these years, it is how can I redirect it. To shift its position to actively contribute in new ways, to adapt and adjust to the ‘new normal’ we all must seriously recognize is coming towards us.

We are all undergoing such a paradigm shift at present, not just in the present “lockdowns” or social distancing rules imposed but how these will increasingly have an impact on our health, social and economic well-being.

The world just might never be the same.

The economic fallout is going to be a very rough time in the coming weeks and months. The levels of job loss, bankruptcies, and our old reliance on what we thought were stable businesses will be highly challenged. We are certainly in a VUCA world now, so often used to describe changes, but it can now be applied in a real reality we are facing. VUCA is short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity,

Something we are all undergoing and experiencing is needing us all to re-evaluate. It is way beyond social distancing, avoiding the Corona Virus or suffering lockdown, it is emerging out from this into a new world of different realities.

A paradigm shift is hitting us.

Yet we are undergoing such a paradigm shift I went back to look at the word “paradigm” to see its meaning at this point of time.

Firstly, a paradigm shift is defined as “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.” When you change paradigms, you’re changing how you think about something.

We are being challenged in our system of beliefs, ideas, values, and habits that are a way of thinking about the real world and what it means. A possible change from one way of thinking to another.

To get to this new paradigm, we need to establish a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field. We are in the “eye” of the coronavirus storm, so this is relatively difficult, but we need to become hyper-alert of how the changes will work and what they mean for each of us.

I used the visual above of the meteor hitting earth and wiping out the dinosaurs and a way of life as a warning of what cannot be allows to happen. The economy in the next few years may not have the same impact but it will impact us all!

We are possibly at a point in time, maybe the lifetime of all of us, one that alters the way we work, interact, and shift our thinking by this current event we are in. I can’t imagine we will return to our past normal; we need to search for a new one, each of us, and this new understanding becomes part of the new normal.

A paradigm shift is a significant change in the concepts and practices of how something works, it will mean different points of power, inequality, and social change. We are entering a position of significant disruption. We need leadership and guidance to help us form a view of the world, guided by the principles of objectivity, knowability, and deductive logic, not opportunism and self-interest.

Having a new understanding will eventually shape our day to day life. They control how you react to a situation, What actions you are taking for certain things and how you will solve a problem, a new way of working or living.

Accordingly, a paradigm shift is defined as “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.”

I read a view today offered by Brian Solis, “Get ready for the ‘Novel Economy’ and recovering from COVID-19 fallout.”

Brian Solis has been one of the industry’s most influential voices when it comes to humanizing disruptive technology trends and is the Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. This post was shared by Vala Afshar, the Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce. (@ValaAfshar)

“We are entering what I refer to as a #NovelEconomy. Novel means new and unusual, and that accurately describes these times. In a business sense, Novel represents a new strain of market conditions that are not fully identified or understood. Thus, we have no pre-existing defenses or experience against this level of astonishing disruption. We were all simultaneously thrust into a melee of panic, fear, confusion, and disorder. There’s really no widespread expertise, playbooks, or best practices to guide us. Nor, is there a preventative business vaccine to protect us from this or future disruption…yet. But truth be told, we don’t really want to respond with preexisting roadmaps or checklists. Herein lies the opportunity”

A new normal is upon us, the paradigm shift that will change the World. We need all to think about what the shift means and what opportunity or concerns this will bring us.

As more of our working becomes remote, we will increasingly need to rely on building a strong network of relationships, our need for multiple ecosystems to function and thrive in a post-corona virus world. “At a distance” sounds daunting, but it is not. I have worked remotely for nearly twenty years, and the value has progressively shifted over that time.

Brian offers three phases that make sense to me to frame my own new understanding of recovery:

1) Survive- Reaction to Crisis

2) Build, Secure, and Operationalize for Transition State

3) Thrive – Next Normal Business Continuity, Disruption Proofing, and Innovating Forward

As Brian suggests in his post, “our preexisting roadmaps are going to be inadequate.”

Hence my search for a new direction to apply what I know in a rapidly changing world where innovation, ecosystems, and networks will become important as ‘new’ ways of working.

As for the Energy transition part, well, we are still in a world that is rapidly warming, so investing in clean energy makes societal sense to curb climate change. If we don’t address this, climate warming is possibly our next global crisis that is, even more, going to be on a different ‘order of magnitude’ to this current virus crisis.

Clean energy, combined with intense climate action, is positioning the world even more dramatically into a better future. Getting our planet back into balance may not stop pandemics, floods, or disasters from happening in the near term, but we need a new order, that new normal. A new normal that often emerges out of a crisis.

He finishes with, “Our challenge and the gift before us is that we’re looking at a blank canvas for what lies ahead” I do not believe this is a blank canvas, but we must re-work the canvas while we can.

Let’s not load any canvas with old paradigms.

One of the possible consequences of the current “virus crisis” is the way we spend our resources and money to bail us all out of the economic downturn. For instance, will it be supporting fossil fuels due to intense lobbying to gain a short-term response? Or will we attempt to capitalize on the need for a long-term shift towards sustainable renewables? One that is reinforcing a permanent trend of generating new growth, new markets, new jobs, and protecting our future health and move towards that cleaner, safer future we all should seek ‘post’ this current period. Will it be to try and take us back to a consumption-driven economy where we keep throwing away precious resources that NEVER have their real cost built-in. Will we ’embrace’ the value of a circular economy at last?

My renewal needs a “higher” order to reframe my work.

We need to shift towards better foresight, fresh ways to envisage our world, reigniting our “collective imaginations.” We have been very complacent, we are at a time of heeding a ‘wake-up call,’ especially here in the Western world.

The awakening might be desire, taking to task those that have deflected investment money in our health systems, infrastructure, education, inventions, and investing in the needed global challenges we have talked about, given token investment.

How each of us makes sense of the new world before us will determine destruction or emergence. We need to channel as much as we can into new innovation to offer a new set of societal dynamics. Ones I believe would lead to higher levels of economic development, better welfare, and increase opportunities for more significant value creation for the broader society than was never offered in the old order, pre-corona virus, just talked about.

Perhaps one “higher-order” for me might be increased activism to bring about the changes that are clearly needed will become more central to my work?

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Being in a personal crisis is one thing, but being in a global one is a whole lot different. So much is totally out of your control. You can rant and rave at some of the decisions have been made, or likely to come on some current performances.

Often you are left wondering where the insights or collective thinking was trying to offset the events that were unprecedented and scary but have now put us into such a massive economic downturn.

The decision to throw a protective shield around our health systems made sense, but the human suffering unfolding is going to be very tough on those that made these decisions, as it is to nearly everyone else. Facing this economic collapse is mindblowing.

We all are coming to grips with what this means in our working lives. We are in for immediate shifts in our working environment as we emerge from “lockdown.”

Innovation is going to become central to overcoming huge global problems of keeping our distance, inventing, and implementing the solutions to keep our “social distance” and know we are safe or not..

That will come from the use of the physical space and technology warning us of possible threats. Invention and innovation thinking will come to the fore; technology will be far more used to protect us, to notify us or alert us.

We will become even more reliant on our smartphone. “don’t leave home without it” will become a growing mantra. The reliance on our smartphone is going to mean we all can be identified, tracked in some form or other. Do we lose our freedom or do we gain our freedom?

If social distancing is going to be with us for some time, to protect the majority of people to being exposed to the coronavirus, this “distancing” makes for more remote lives, reliant on technology to bridge the human contacts of the past.

Separation is going to be high on our need to understand all of what this means in phycological and personal ways. What will this mean to our daily routines, as we unlearn and then rapidly attempt to learn a new level of normal

In some ways, Asian societies are better placed than Western ones.

In some ways, Asian societies have some advantages. They have social distance as part of their lives already. I wrote a post some years back “The ‘pull’ of the dual forces within our cultural thinking” describing several differences; we need to further explore the social distancing one that I did not specifically mention in that post, here.

There is real importance in fully appreciating sometimes considerable differences between not only cultures but ways different groups go about their ‘collective’ business. We need to recognize differences and balance them. Now is the time to also learn from Asia in this ‘distancing need’

“Hail and greet” become potentially dangerous.

We need to learn social distancing rules that are for many in Asian societies second nature. We like to hug, embrace, kiss far more readily; we like to get closer to the person we are talking too, which is the opposite in Asia. That formality, if you want to label it that way, gives them a better ability to distance themselves. We in the West exhibit a more extrovert manner, how will that change if we are forced to keep our distance due to the unknown enemy of this virus.

Will we want to shake hands as liberally as we have done, or will we take the guide from our Chinese, South Asian or Japanese communities that politely bow, nod their heads, or put their hands over their heart. Social distancing goes way beyond standing 6 feet away.

I was reading today this article Our offices will never be the same after COVID-19. Here’s what they could look like, written for Fast company. It is about the work being undertaken by Cushman & Wakefield as they have been helping 10,000 organizations in China move nearly one million people back to work. Using learnings gathered in China, along with World Health Organization data and the advice of medical specialists, the firm developed a new concept inside its own Amsterdam headquarters dubbed the Six Feet Office.”

The core premise is to ensure that six feet, the recommended measurement for safe social distancing, stays between people at all times. This behavior is encouraged through properly spaced desks, but also visual signals, such as a circle embedded in the carpeting around each desk to ensure people don’t get too close.

Can you imagine what this means in holding conference room meetings, those informal meetings around the “water cooler” or preparing your snack in the one kitchen space when you are required to have six feet or nearly two meters between you and the other person? How will that practically work? That goes way beyond any established practices we see today, anywhere.

Will we be structuring our days differently? We need to be creative and imaginative.

The daily meeting, gathered in the bosses office, can’t happen; it must be done at a distance. Perhaps we introduce the tannoy from years back, the public address system, where the daily “instructions” got broadcasted across the shop or work floor. Now that is a throwback, or will it come through a desktop message, as you log on.

Will we be using “instant messaging” even more? Presently these have served a purpose, liberally called collaboration tools. Still, the world of “distant collaborating” we are rapidly entering is going to bring out a slue of new tools to make this a newly emerging practice and business opportunity for many.

How will we be changing our work habits; how will we distance ourselves on public transport, for instance? Clearly, when we find a vaccination for the Corona Virus much of these new restrictions can be relaxed, but will they change our nature of work in the interim and the old ‘normal’ never returns.

Has the future of work arrived in a very unexpected way? The adjustments are immediate and huge.

Where is innovation going to rapidly figure in delivering the changes we all need to think about in this world, waiting for a vaccine not just to be developed but to be administered, to EIGHT billion people. How will we handle that, that needs a very creative way to track, trace, inoculate, and build the scale required.

How long will we be in this world of required “social distancing?” What do we need to change to recognize it is with us for some months or even longer.

The post The immediate shift in work and social norms needs innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

I wanted to go back to one of my favorite frameworks, the Cynefin framework for partly thinking through the “known-unknown-unknowable” in our present world. We are seemingly more in the “unknown or unknowable” at present, perhaps in a world of disorder, in our understanding and actions relating to this coronavirus, a global pandemic.

The Cynefin framework is from Dave Snowden through Cognitive Edge. The positioning of Cognitive Edge is “making sense of complexity in order to act.”

I start by suggesting we need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order; to stabilize the chaos we are in. What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs. We need to constantly ask: is it clear, complicated, complex, or chaotic, or even worse, highly confusing. The Cynefin framework significantly helps us to determine what particular parts we are dealing with, in the decisions needed.

None of us today can predict when gaining a sense of order will come about while we are in the middle of the pandemic. Yet we should attempt to understand why certain decisions being made do make sense, others perhaps not.  In any chaotic situation, as we presently are,  the overriding need is to stabilize and determine the constraints to quickly establish some level of order.

We do need to make sense of this current global disorder so we can begin to act in a very different world

The best place to start is looking at this great framework from the present context, one where we are in disorder, possibly in chaos or seemingly chaotic, is recognizing not just how events are “hitting us but how we need to get out of them”. We are at this high level of concern at present. The “making sense in order to act” is paramount to reduce fear and bring some sense of order to our present world..

When there is chaos there is a certain reality of fear and uncertainty. The absolute urgency is to stabilize the situation and take what seems chaotic or in disorder and apply the rule of Act- Sense- Respond. It is crucial to reduce the pressures and find solutions that bring quick and decisive order.

In the Cynefin framework, you need to Probe- Sense- Respond or Sense- Analysis- Respond at the minimum, to gather the facts, makes sense of theses and make decisions to take Chaos into managing complexity at the very least. The need is always to respond in a crisis to reduce disruption and fast gathering pressures.

So, where do I start to explain this framework a little more?

I attempted my explanation some time back of the different framing domains in this post “The Use of the Cynefin Model for Innovation.” At the time, it was for framing innovation as these can pass through each of these domains, or actually, it can help those innovating to recognize different opportunities to innovate differently.

Let’s describe the domains that are highly relevant here in this pandemic crisis.

When you are faced with the chaotic domain, this needs a rapid response. This requires clear leadership and direct communications to attempt to impose immediate actions and re-establish order.

Then there is disorder, not knowing which domain you are in, and we often struggle to recognize which one we want to be in and if we stay confused, this disorder stays with us until we impose order, structures, or clarity to the thinking.

Finally, to complete the understanding of this disorder, Dave Snowden has recently renamed this domain of Disorder to Aporetic/Confused (A/C). The OED defines aporetic as a state of “perplexity or difficulty” Aporetic means “at a loss” and indicates an unresolved confusion, or a paradox, as it can all too easily produce catastrophic failure. The prime example of this has been in the current coronavirus where Governments imposed strict movement conditions and shutdowns far too late, to not avoid the spread of this virus. Thus that boundary is represented by a cliff, or more technically as a catastrophic fold.

Helping to explain this framework further, as it really is an essential frame for our thinking at this time

To help further explain the value of this frame to those unfamiliar; there is no better place than refer to those that are far more expert in understanding this framework. I liberally quote here from Chris Corrigan who explains this really well and its value in understanding complexity and how to frame it.

In a recent, beneficial post from Chris Corrigan, “A tour around the latest Cynefin iteration.”

He describes the Cynefin framework well extracted from this post:

“First, it’s helpful to orient people to the framework. To begin with, it has five domains: the one in the middle, plus four others.

“It’s helpful to think of the domains as a slope, starting high in the bottom right and tapering counterclockwise around to the bottom left. The domain in the middle is the most important for me, and the most underappreciated. It is the domain of Confusion (it used to be called Disorder).

The domains on the right side are “ordered,” meaning that stuff there is largely knowable and predictable, and problems are solvable. These Clear or Complicated domains are distinguished by the number of interactions going on – the more parts in the system, the more Complicated it is – and the level of expertise required to know what the answer to a problem should be.

The domains on the left side are “unordered,” meaning that situations are unknowable and unpredictable. This is the world of Complexity and Chaos. These are distinguished by the way the system changes, self-organizes, and creates emergent phenomena. Complex systems exhibit emergence and self-organization, and Chaos displays the lack of any meaningful constraints, that sense of randomness and crises.

The further you go counterclockwise, the more unordered and unstable the system is. If you go clockwise, you introduce stability and order to the system. Stability lies clockwise of where you are now, and instability lies counterclockwise. It is important to note that this is true until you get to the boundary between Clear and Chaos. That is like a cliff. One falls off of the Clear domain into chaos, and it is difficult – if not impossible – to recover and clamber back up to the well-ordered world with Clear answers.

Most helpful for understanding strategy and the use of the framework is understanding how constraints work. From Clear to Chaos, one can move through the framework using constraints: Clear systems have fixed constraints that can break catastrophically and can be repaired easily f you know what you are doing. Think of a water leak. If you know how to repair it, it is a simple matter to do so. If you don’t, you fall off that cliff into Chaos quite quickly, and it takes a lot of time to get back to normal.”

So at present, with the CoronaVirus, we are in the complex, chaotic, confused/conflicting stages.

Then there is no better place to go than with Dave Snowden. Dave is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge. He focuses on complex issues relating to strategy, organizational decision making, and decision making

Dave wrote some timely posts recently, a series of five posts under “Cynefin St David’s Day 2020 (part one link) to his final one (5 of 5) within his Cynefin St David Day series. They are most useful to read if you are interested in deepening your further understanding of this framework.

One particular point that he makes is this need to quickly manage out of the confused and chaotic state of the A/C domain. When we are in high levels of confusion, we can soon slip into further chaos, and that is something to be clearly avoided.

As we manage out of the chaos, we need to keep these points in mind

The three key opportunities Dave Snowden suggests we can do in these chaotic, confusing times are, I summarize or quote here from a post he offered recently:

1. 1. You’ve never had a better chance to change things. Things will never be the same again but hopefully, we can use this time to come out more strongly, more resilient in the face of the wider challenges to come from global warming and more deadly pandemic.
   2. Start to learn at all levels now, as we also need to capture the day to day narratives as close to the point of learning as possible to manage differently in the future.
   3. His third point for me is the most important  I quote: “Retain diversity of response, not everything is chaotic and understanding the diversity of systems and sub-systems can allow you to apply the appropriate methods and tools in context.  There will always be complicated and often clear actions and techniques; decision making needs to stay agile not plunging into a single domain but maintaining awareness of them all and the movements between them.  The more we can shift from complex to complicated the easier it is to scale things, the more we can prevent entrained patterns of thinking and response from preventing that diversity the better.”

So the Cynifin framework really helps us make sense of our present world

Where it was, where it is at present and where it needs to return too or actually be reframed as a world that needs different order and thinking. Does it help you to make a better sense of how actions should be framed?

I leave you with this quote;

*****

My next post starts thinking about an innovation pathway that helps us to break down how we need to build our thinking in new creative, innovative ways. We need to return to scale and rescope and re-boot the global economy, but I would argue these need to be in different ways.

For example, our energy source should be based on our needs to accelerate the renewable sources and reduce the fossil omitting ones of gas, coal, and oil. Our purchasing habits need to change from constant consumption to more reuse. We are in a crisis, but in this, we need to emerge differently. Have we been outsourcing strategic supplies to the point of over-dependence on other countries? Is this correct, or can they be managed differently but at what cost?

The post Focusing on moving from disorder in today’s world 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.