How can we bring increasing agility into our innovation work, that requires both stable and dynamic moments to deliver better outcomes?

Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices, that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?

Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.

As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile.

A report provided by McKinsey “How to create an agile organization” has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

McKinsey does point out in this report you do need all eighteen practices to be fully alert to agile, but it is these dynamic ones that hold the real promise in my mind. These are the ones we all should move towards as our projected aim to achieve.

So let me summarize these nine dynamic practices

I have taken the nine dynamic practices outline meaning from this McKinsey report and added my own thoughts and reflections within these summaries.

1. Information Transparency

Today we need to take away all the filtering going on in organizations. Those who fill positions to control and attempt to influence the data. If we can’t unlock the knowledge within the organization, we fail to connect the people working within the organization to its products and related customer needs. Transparency makes the sharing of the knowledge increasingly relevant to connecting up the ‘whole’. There needs to be a very powerful concept of un-filtering, to allow the flow of understanding. It is highly dynamic and powerful in all it can release if encouraged and supported.

2. Rapid iteration and experimentation

The whole emphasis today is on rapid and fast cycles of learning. That testing, learning and adjusting from mistakes and building on these become really valuable progress points. Prototyping is getting so much better, it is creeping into the everyday culture when we innovate, or should. The MVP concept is so right to get features that are potentially better, out there, to test and learn from.

3. Continuous Learning

The moment we stop personally learning, we are the real losers. We need to find ways to ”cut out time” to explore and look for new ways to learn to improve ourselves and what we do within organizations. We need to push for new ways of working and to learn ‘more freely’ from other’s knowledge, in open exchanges and ways to collaborate. We progress by learning from failures and relating to them.

4. Flexible resource allocation.

We need to be adaptive, fluid in any organization and team design. The ability to feel in a position to ‘ramp up or shut down’ initiatives empowers us. We need to want to constantly change teams, seek out joining new ventures. To be always wanting to be redeployed, not because we are hanging on but because any new deployment means new horizons and opportunities. Seek change out, embrace this flexible world and show you are a key resource to help mold and shape it.

5. Open physical and virtual environment.

I often struggle with open planned offices, they provide an environment that distracts and not promote. If you can achieve a way that people communicate and collaborate with each other then great but when you are in a globally dispersed organization it is how you openly ‘react’ in your daily work. For me the virtual environment holds the real future and with so many organizations denying social tools the key to make it ‘purposefully designed’ is to make the activities clearly visible to all that need to know, to constantly show where your intervention and impact has made a difference in building context, content, structure or sharing knowledge. We need to find much better ways to make this a really dynamic, exciting, and rewarding part of agility within organizations

6. Sensing and seizing opportunities.

The value of being proactive, to watch out for signals, to then act upon them, to make your insights valuable to change perceptions, to alter customer bias, to engage with the external environment to shape, influence and contribute into new initiatives makes ‘sensing and seizing’ so important to drive innovation as the catalyst of change.

7. Technology, systems, and tools.

The constant demands being placed on us, to learn and adapt to new technology, systems, and tools as it keeps changing is mega-hard to keep pace with. New organization design in architecture, infrastructure, practices, and ways is tough to integrate the old and the new. How we respond to these is highly dependent on the articulated needs of the business. We can only be ‘responsive’ if we relate to the changing needs. The ability to have a more modular architecture, updates coming in a shorter interval of times can help in a continued updating. It is when the process determines rigid design you can’t change. To ‘react and respond’ you need to keep looking at moving towards technology frontiers. Exploring and exploiting contributes to a better holistic desired business outcome.

8. Role mobility

The movement needs to be constant. When we design we need to always account for achieving a certain fluidity. We need to constantly match our present skills with organizational needs. As we develop a more open talent marketplace we need to have this increasing mobility. Communicating roles, tasks and project outlines need to be demanded, then we have the understanding to change and then deliver to these ‘askes’ of us. These need to constantly match with our own goals, the alignment is the enabler to make this happen.

9. Active partnerships and ecosystems.

Relationships are our trading value. As we build out networks we need to trade. We trade in knowledge, in contribution, in working alongside others to co-develop. We seek out partnering, to invest our intellectual capital with theirs. We look to build the organization’s ecosystem through these engagements, to contribute to new products, services and solutions to look to bring them always to fruition. Our ‘need’ for activity and engagement builds a thriving, more dynamic environment.

In summary.

If we can embrace change by seeking out ways to re-equip ourselves, we encourage our organization to become more dynamic by these actions. We do get stuck in a certain mindset and set of behaviors. We become beholden to them, they eventually ‘freeze’ our progress, we stop learning and experimenting. We need to push for formal mechanisms of change, we need to seek out our own. We need to take hold of our actions, be clear on our organization’s vision and how we believe we can contribute.

As individuals, as members of fluid teams and as an organization we need to be mutually reinforcing. For me, fluidity is equally the growing need of organization’s today.  It is in recognizing that the dynamic practices found for building agility into ourselves and the organization do lie in these nine practices, they give us this level of fluidity. Take them on board, practice them constantly and over time your agility becomes your transformation. It becomes the ‘norm’ and allows for constant adaption.

The post Achieving agility within your innovation work first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Let me confess: I am not alone I am sure but I seem to be presently suffering from Social Media Return Dilemma. There I’ve said it, it is out in the open, “I suffer from SMRD”.

To be honest I am struggling with social media in innovation, struggling to get my head around it for my business, for me for a long time. It often seems overwhelming, do you feel the same? I worried about this years ago and still do. What is the best social media to have as part of your communicating strategy, how much time do you network?

It starts with a realization

I can see daily the amazing power that social networking can provide, it is certainly eating into my day, more and more. Is this a good thing or bad? What suffers, what benefits? The time issue has to increasingly be managed, and I have yet to come up with a repeatable plan to manage social media consistently each day into my work. I get so much from viewing, commenting, relating and learning.

I don’t have a clear enough strategy for it or where to direct my social media energy, does anyone? It continues to evolve in front of our eyes, are you cresting the social media wave or swimming like crazy to get back up on the surfing board?

I am still learning, experimenting, exploring through a combination of writing blogs, contributing to others, updating my connections, tweeting sometimes like crazy, publishing, promoting or simply clicking on a retweet or offer a “like” back to the author or the one that has publicized something that interests me. Often I do wonder all this frenetic energy leads to what end. It does nag away at me?

My daily bread is innovation

I focus 100% on innovation- I research, I advise, I coach, I mentor, I consult around it. I also write a fair amount about the subject. It is a little “all-consuming” and maybe social media is eating into this a little more than I can digest.

Not an uncommon dilemma

Presently I work as an independent but find this has its marketing difficulties so I need a greater exposure and through social media, I feel I can achieve this. It can lead to a clearer awareness of what I stand for and what I can offer and to date I can see solid progress in others responding, connections made, work undertaken on behalf of others. I want more, so I have to stay on this social media treadmill. The building does take time and time is a precious commodity, so I try to balance this accordingly. Is it “the chicken and/or the egg” so it becomes part of this social media return dilemma?

For me I certainly want to contribute to others, to provide back some of my experiences and significant knowledge gained in working across different aspects of innovation, as many people struggle with this daily. The one problem is I want to get paid for this and I keep wondering how social media can give me that monetary return?  At present, it seems more a constant outpouring and I have not figured out yet, the return for this. The more traditional channels to market still yield more but I think, no I believe, this is changing but it is early days. I’ve just got to figure out my SMRD model better to make this happen more.

The #influencer model- things are changing fast

Things are changing at last. There is a growing recognition that over time your thoughts, opinions, views build up a level of trust. Now, this is precious, as you really do need to guard this, hold onto it and keep improving it as best you can.. Achieving a “go to” trusted resource means you are entering the emerging #influencers domain. This #influencer phenomenon is presently hitting a fever pitch for consumer brand marketing and digital influencing. Perhaps innovation is following from where I see and partly where I seem to be heading, into the #influencers camp, in understanding this and re-orientating to what it requires. What do I need to put in and what do I want out of it- gigs and (close your eyes or look away, those of you that are sensitive to this) paid work for sure!

Connecting is one thing, engaging is another!

The opportunities are certainly endless to engage across the many innovation communities and social networks. To be honest it really is becoming a full-time job and I am simply ill-equipped to go there. I run a business, this must be only a part of the running, not the taking over.

I am trying to balance time, need and return.

I have certainly found offering a considered opinion on “all things innovation” as hard work. My time spent in research gathering and exploring, let alone reading all this collected wisdom is hard work. Yet in my view, to be recognized as an innovation expert, where I think my knowledge does reside, you do have to put in this hard graft and can be very satisfying.

I’m equally always in search to engage. By engaging in numerous conversations, in exchanges, asking/ answering questions and gathering value contribution back, needs a consistent synthesis of how to channel this back into my business in a more effective and productive manner. I’m told the opportunities are endless but are these leading to work? So far it is difficult to tell as my experimental strategy maybe is muddling the social media water, or is it all the combinations that keep me “bobbing along”. I often ask myself am I straying away from traditional models of consulting and client approach and is there one better than another?

Is anyone out there, really listening?

All I know is most clients seem to have given up listening completely. That is until they run into their own brick wall and then you see all the signs of panic and suddenly and urgently need to seek from others, finding answers to their problems. Often these are the new ‘burning platforms’, self-inflicted,  as many simply were not aware what was actually coming towards them, they ignored the warning signs, that building up of a head of steam, that then suddenly blew the cap off their innovation well.  Then it is “parachute time” for help to arrive and full-scale rescue. That familiar roar of the innovation fire engine coming to help douse the fire before it fully consumes those that waited for far too long, for it to happen.

Where do you go to generate awareness? We are told to form a social media strategy and execute it. Oh yeah, right! Is that on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google +, Flickr, Tumblr and soooo many more. Anyone got some half-decent solutions to manage this without an army of helpers, human or robot? Of course as pointed out by @mirko_ross in reply to @akwyz, for super-nerds Medium, Slack, and Discord. We can go on.

What I really do enjoy about social media

Social media allows me to build real relationships with my potential innovation audience, to inform them instantly of new developments in my area of expertise, in my company, in my travels, in my thinking and more and more in my life. I really have got to know many others that are social #influencers or experts that you can turn too and get some reaction.

Social media is allowing me to bring a previously unseen human factor into these relationships and I like that. It does seem the person at the other end understands the #influencer brotherhood and more than often wants to respond, as they are actually looking for that same important value in their social/ business need of being seen as contributing?

The blurring in front of my eyes

Don’t you wonder who really has time to read the “stream” of tweets that just “blur” in front of my eyes? How do we sort out this stream and extract value? I really wish I had a few more magical tools for that.

Are people on the receiving end really connecting with what you say or recommend and more importantly listening to all this advice being offered? Are we forming deeper relationships from this or just fleeting ones? Am I still a click away from the recycle bin or buried in a flood of messages crushing my message by arriving later and on top of the page?

So I’m asking myself many open-ended questions, on the contribution and impact that social media is having on my business life. I learned many things, I’m moving towards a better social media strategy from all this questioning. Will it transform my business- well that is another open question?

What I’ve learned to keep remembering

1. Social media is not a ‘fad’; it has become deeply embedded in my daily life.
2. I’m needing to engage across multiple groups to contribute and to learn from others
3. I am getting a ‘pulse’ on innovation happening all around me, each day, that shapes my thinking and response.
4. So far I have been dealing with social media on my terms but struggling to extract the value I need to build this fully into my business. I need to go with a different “flow” and “letting go” as you can’t relate to everything but what does that mean?
5. Broadcasts don’t work, self-promotion is not welcome and there is emerging a clear accepted social behavior depending on the social media. I’ve avoided these pitfalls and pleased that I have, as so many others seem not to be as socially aware.
6. It takes a lot of time to build up a reputation, a feeling of being a trusted voice, going to bed each night you worry constantly over not losing that.

Where I’m still learning

1. I need to select and settle on the social media applications that can fully support my strategic development priorities of building a thriving innovation knowledge practice.
2. I certainly feel I need more professional guidance to this whole area to make more sense of it as they seem to be fragmenting even more and experimenting just for the sake of it is tougher for small organizations to do. I just still feel inadequate when I see others seemingly working this space seamlessly- or are they?
3. Getting recognition of the expertise and knowledge that resides ‘within’ my business is still hard to achieve through the tools and applications. Knowledge platforms that work like Google or even LinkedIn are not so aligned to knowledge depth or breadth, they seem aligned with clicks, views, and shares.
4. The time that this engaging in social exchange is taking out of my day needs to be capped. It really is a huge daily struggle.
5. These “online exchanges” are running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year…even on holidays! You choose when you want to get involved yes, but is this just not leading us into an even bigger treadmill of never-ending activity?
6. The development of #influencing is valuable within my business mix, more than ever. Social media, my growing network are connecting me more than most other marketing channels into prospective clients.

What I still question to find the right answers to on four topical points:

1. That links are the Key to Success! It goes beyond that, it is to do with engagement, sustainable engagement and links are just not enough.
2. There are out there amazing building opportunities that wait. You can’t engage in social media half-heartily, it has to be full on!
3. Opening up new markets for your business will happen. Yes but I think over time, a time you have to put in to make this happen and it is often random, fickle and fleeting and must be the real struggle within the corporations at present, seeing a return on investment. Can we afford to just’ go with the flow’ on this?
4. Social media can provide instant market research abilities and feedback. The larger you are, the more demanding this will be. The more opinionated you are the more popular you seem to be but that has its downsides. The fickleness of crowds. The instant reaction may not reflect the long-term value.

So, I struggle on social media and its role in my chosen space of innovation. When you suffer from SMRD like I do,  they do tell me that part of the cure is to talk about your own troubles. A trouble shared……is a trouble tweeted!

The post So I keep asking myself “What is the role of social media in innovation?” first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I was catching up with my often collaborator and sparring partner on “all things innovating” Jeffrey Phillips  recently, and within our conversation, some of our discussions sort of triggered a reflection back to some fundamental work we undertook some years back.

In revisiting it, I felt it does stand the test of time and does seem to make this “come around” seem true. Let me provide a quick introduction along with some brief explanations :

Innovation for me always needs common reference points

When you don’t have a common approach to something, in this case, the management of innovation, you can have considerable pockets of inefficiency and a high level of ineffectiveness to deal with. Your organizational energies become fragmented as you constantly deal with differences, gap issues & misunderstandings that result in much-hidden costs and ‘spent, unproductive’ capital.

You often find resources are not focusing on advancing innovation; they are often spent on fixing what you have. By not having a clear common approach that everyone understands you fail to establish a common language. By not adopting a common set of innovation reference points you can remain often unproductive, consistently re-adapting, re-working and plugging gaps that could be better invested in managing the many aspects of complexity you always find in a better thought-through innovation management structure, one that focuses on advancing your activity.

A belief that has not changed.

Jeffrey and I believed, even more so today, that the innovation space needs a common starting point – a collaborative reference model.  Certainly, many other large and successful industries have common standards – in technology for definitions and common software and platform building, or in common accounting protocols have significantly advanced business confidence, common understanding, and sharing. We are gathering around the protocols in Industry 4.0 presently to connect and link manufacturing in a more “globalized” world.

So we need to begin to build an Innovation Management Understanding

It is with these shared and transparent frameworks, clients can gain knowledge, have a growing confidence to make an investment and gain a clearer sense of direction. So why don’t we seem to achieve a common approach to innovation, not constantly adjusting and adapting to different ‘standards’ or approaches and feeling innovation just seems to be stuck in a random, ad-hoc approach, left in individual organizations to figure out?

What we all really want is to acquire a common, repeatable, scalable innovation structure that allows us to invest, manage distinctly different innovations on a consistent basis.

 Adopting a common innovation framework has numerous advantages

Clients in partnership with advisors can build from this basic common platform of understanding by the more effective use of applying people with the right skills and capabilities to focus and accelerate the job-on-hand: the need-to-deliver innovation consistently to final clients needs.

If consultants, advisors, and practitioners can demonstrate that their solutions are based on a common framework they set about the creation of their own unique differentiation, based on their unique skills and points of value-add, not hiding behind generalizations, easy to copy quick fixes, spend most of their time on the constant need to firefight and plug gaps, or sometimes add to the mystery that unclear aspects of innovation management or incomplete advice can generate. It degrades efforts in our view.

We constructed a four-layered innovation model building around 1) strategy, 2) different necessary innovation approaches, 3) people and culture and 4) processes and platforms.

Reviewing where we are and recognizing innovation can be approached very differently

Now before I go any further I want to spend a little more time on reviewing this past work, relating it to what we have learned in the recent times on innovation’s advancement and see if we can re-emphasize the depth of analysis and research we undertook and bring it back into our innovation world.

This is the next step in building the common understanding

This is recognizing there are different innovation types and they have unique approaches that can still be incorporated in a common process. Each has its own detailed map but the top-level type denominators are shown below.

As I said, on my recent re-visit it seems to stand a test of time and forms a fundamental bedrock of collaborative innovation in all its different dimensions and guises.

Then we have the Common Process suggested as the adopted process for managing innovation

This is where innovation management software needs to be ‘joined up’. We have two distinct offerings, those that provide software for the front end and those that approach the portfolio management process. These need integrating but as the best, in the class as an integrated robust software offering, one that is available in one software package, not as it is offered today, in one or the other being a stronger piece of software (FFE) and the other staying light (PLM) or the other way round. It needs connecting up in a comprehensive way. Some current software providers might claim this is being offered but I have yet to be convinced any have achieved this as yet. Let me be proved wrong!

Does what I am sharing here make sense to you?

I need another chat with Jeffrey to see if we can open this back up to the scrutiny it requires and, as always, different thinking to improve the approach any argument for a common innovation process requires from others.

We are not usurping the different standards being currently worked upon for any ISO or equivalent proposal. We are in the search for a practical and logical common practice for innovation and its management process.

The post What goes around, comes around, in Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

It is not just for innovation application, that can determine innovation activities. It has multiple values in any organization thinking and alignment.

The 3H informs the decisions to be taken, by recognizing their importance to the future and ‘frame’ resource allocation, identify current capability gaps to resolve.

It helps to enable the whole organization to “get onto the same page” and move towards that desired future.

This 3H thinking helps break down complex issues. Thinking in different horizons prompts you to go beyond the usual focus of fixing innovation just in the present it provides the connections of the present with the desired future. The 3H builds portfolio design, outline the steps to resolve in any complex challenge, it ‘informs’ strategy and builds the business case for taking a specific direction to that ‘desired future’.

If you want to read more on the three horizons then take some time out to explore the “insights and thinking” resource page shown under the ‘tabs’ above.

I recently applied the three horizons thinking to ‘frame’ a new innovation design

Using the 3H you have to have a ‘reasonable’ framing intent, those essential guidelines that can provide “the Wireframe“ (a concept taken from thinking about a UX backbone) for establishing the basic design and activity process. It forms the foundation to move forward with a ‘united’ purpose, it gives the essential backbone to your future thinking. This is a useful way to think about the initial 3H outcome. We capture those signals around us today that can point to a very different future.

So the thinking intent of searching for a new innovation design had some framing assumptions that can leverage where we are to move towards a new future

• In my view, we must go way beyond “open innovation” as we practice it today. There is a real need for a broader ecosystem approach that taps into a constellation of diverse and specialized players that all come together around a particular challenge, collaborating to deliver growing complex solutions that offer real growth value for the client.

I would argue this fits within a constellation of partners all working towards delivering innovation that is highly valuable, radical, disruptive and distinctive. A network of highly vested ecosystem partners all working towards a common goal on behalf of the organization that holds the principal intellectual property, as the founding partner.

I believe one option to seriously consider is you can project this forward as becoming an ecosystem arrangement with a multitude of agents participating in resolving complex challenges, sharing their individual knowledge. The ecosystem sets about pooling their collective expertise, working in a collaborative creative environment, built on a platform design, where the development and commercialization of the process are established, mutually understood on who shares or owns what and driven to a co-created proposition. The significant outcome being a collective approach to working on creating real value creation, one that delivers on the expertise and passion infused into this.

• We recognize today we need to be highly adaptive in what innovation applications, processes, tools, and frameworks can be used, or possibly “grabbed” then why not perhaps from the innovation cloud and ‘drawn down’  into the individually designed innovation process we believe we need. Applying transformative applications at speed requires the approach to rapid experimentation, frequent iteration, and close collaboration between those involved. Adapting agile management to empower a more dynamic collaborative environment, using all that is available to you, intelligently and appropriately.  Designing a process that looks capable of delivering the challenge or idea but can also be updated and adjusted, as we learn and go.
• We also know today that innovation management itself must become “fluid” in design, in adaptation so the right approach is to be constantly ‘adaptive’ and put together what is needed to tackle the challenge that needs resolution. A constant redesign to meet the circumstances seems to be a goal of what we achieve in any new innovation design.

So we have a series of questions to ask and explore based on this ‘premise’

• It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where people, things, and knowledge understanding that is often fragmented and dispersed, can be combined, and where the mutual value is based on the unique combination and utilizing the different technologies available. This needs designing in unique ways, not in rigid processes and structures, expected to be repeated and only achieving incremental advancement. Each innovation challenge is unique and needs to be treated so.
• I think applying a digital mindset is clearly a transformational phenomenon across much of the existing business today. The unique combining of the cloud, big data, social streaming, the internet of things, mobility, the industrial internet, are all making this the time for new growth opportunities, exploited through this digital economy and require a radical overhaul of the design today, to realize the benefits. Where is innovation within this? Innovation needs to embrace digital fully.
• Can we find ways to be highly adaptable, agile and fluid in grabbing and taking the parts of the innovation system, and then constructing them into that design and process that works for that specific challenge? We build a process that relates to the problem at hand in its structure, offering the suggested process needed in frames, tools, process designs that you adapt to each challenge.

Becoming adaptive in organizations that are often highly rigid and standardized is so conflicting, so different, you must separate the two that many are arguing even stronger today than ever, offering a dual innovation process or organization design to exploit and explore.

• We recognize that Innovation today conflicts with much of our existing organizational designs. We need to separate it out and recognize it can be highly fluid and adaptive to extract the best, not to be constantly forced to be compromised by constraints within the system.
• We also know innovation involves a more abstract thinking, as we are increasingly focused on “engineering our business in new and different ways” and this becomes the new goal of providing a clear uniqueness, a real competitive edge that is purposefully designed in our innovation systems, to meet specific needs.

So there is this growing need to have a new cycle of innovative design.

So in my premise, I believe we need a really radical way forward on innovation, a highly adaptive solution, where all these solution parts are available on demand, constantly adjusting and adaptable to the situation you have to resolve.

Does this recognition of the growing importance of platforms and ecosystems, of designing with more of a digital “eye” be able to shape any future innovation design? What type of innovation intelligence platform can be built so multiple ecosystems can form around it? It needs to be one that is integrated and connected up; in tools, methodologies, frameworks, in solution providers and collaborative clients, all working on common problems with data intelligence, feeding into their decision-making process, evolving the discovery and the needs required through innovation, by what they are “intelligently” learning and exploring

There is a sequence to work through within the 3H thinking, shown here to help in this

So as my initial outputs in thinking I came through this 3H sequence (H1- H3- H2) in establishing my “wireframe”.

You might recall, the aim of understanding the 3H is to recognize differences between horizons; H1 is often seen as the prevailing or dominating system and what it needs to deal with for sustaining those parts that have value, validate the purpose or need a “refit” as the external environment changes over time. With H3 there is a need to build the desired future state, the ideal system we believe will transform and allow us to grow and then begin to explore the options of what and how we get there.

Often that future understanding is clearly present in the existing, as commonly referred too as “weak signals” or blind spots, these are often hidden amid the noise of delivering on today. We need to amplify these signals and harness the ones that have become emerging in practice that challenge our thinking. These help us to figure out what is changing.

H2 aims to draw out often the conflicting tensions and dilemmas between vision and reality and determine differences, distinctions to manage diverse views, that often can collide & diverge. H2 is the place you experiment, build and strengthen the existing (H1) but explore the concepts, prototypes, fill the missing gaps in your capabilities to move you towards H3, validating and adjusting in what you are learning as you go.  Hence why you work H1- H3- H2 as the sequence.

The absolute underscoring of this is to raise “future consciousness with a common awareness of the future potential within the present” It is to gain common identification and sense of purpose, both at an individual, team and organizational level.

Often within our ‘business as usual’ attitudes, there actually lie the seeds of destruction. Today there is a relentless pace; we are facing a relentless change occurring. Yet we actually subvert the future to prolong the life of the existing. We need to frame our innovation needs differently for exploring and exploiting innovation across different time horizons to move beyond the usual.

The underlying need in searching for a future ‘desired state’ in innovation design is we do need to recognize that Innovation is constantly facing disruption; it is constantly going through life cycles and new waves of different activities and business invention, we begin decay faster today than ever. We run increasing risk that we begin to lose any dominance or competitive position increasingly. We need to innovate, to evolve, to sustain ourselves and maintain our market positions in a rapidly evolving world. To cope with this accelerating world we need to ‘go digital’ in any innovation design.

Here are my opening thoughts framed in the three horizons thinking I undertook.

Horizon One – keeping the lights on, managing today but moving forward

We have to recognize that innovation will certainly not get any easier; it will be faster, more demanding and a heck of a lot more risky to design, create and execute.

Without a doubt, digital and physical do operate at really very different speeds. We need not only a new innovation management system, we need a modern engagement platform.

At the moment innovation is seriously lagging in its potential as we have failed to “connect it all up.” Yet it is not just a need to simply connect up, we have this need to redesign innovation from the bottom up in its design to ‘account’ for all the changes that have ‘advanced’ our understandings.

 We need to leverage technology in significant ways to automate the process and capitalize on the power of data, intelligence, and flexible design delivered in highly adaptive ways.

We know a lot about innovation and its needs – in culture, environment, treatment, processes, collaboration and aligning to customer needs and being integrated into any strategic intention of the business, going forward, to deliver the new growth ‘called for’.

Horizon Three – confirming future aspects and realities to move towards

I think we need to see a greater advance in multiple Business models, each will not stand alone, they will interlock in intelligent ways, to benefit from scale that becomes the essential need and greater appreciation of sharing services, jointly working towards common outcomes.

These strategic connections will open-up due to collaborating in different partnerships those opportunities for shared cost of new channel developments, building their part of the value propositions, driven through common back office services.

These will increasingly rely on platform management to manage these and partners within ecosystems to come together to achieve more complex solutions that advance customer experience.

The growing pressure will be demanded to find solutions that provide a cohesive and business-focused approach to the new social enterprise where we seek engagement at scale into multiple arrays of communities and advocates that has data and innovation as their operating core.

Horizon Two – the zone of conflict to resolve and work through.

As we recognize that the enterprise will need to move towards a design that is constantly evolving, adapting, adjusting and reacting. We need to design our systems to be highly agile. Systems that allow people to make their decisions based on the data they can access and predict a result.

This needs to be designed so it will be totally redistributed down to the person that is the interface so they can have decision authority, to seize breaking opportunities and achieving customer satisfaction far more quickly than in the past.

It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where ‘people, things and their business offering’ can come together for mutual value based on the unique combination of the different technologies available.

We go and simply ‘grab them’ to fit the innovation we are working upon. We design the innovation system we need after we know what we are trying to achieve the challenge or idea. We “pull down” what is needed. Can we design a totally ‘adaptive’ innovation process to fit the specific need?

Moving from the present H1 into a world of Ecosystems and Platform collaborations, calling for a different innovation design.

There will be a constant evolving evaluation of the assets both internal and externally that make up this digital world (people, the business, and things) that will take this out beyond the control of one company, into a system within a larger system to make it works at a far constantly evolving speed, gaining adoption and appreciation of the value of being connected and collaborative.

We need to adapt our system thinking to the challenge identified, not the other way around, that of trying to fit them into a generically designed process. It should be each real challenge needs the innovation system design that is unique to fit the mission; highly adaptive, designed to the business need and the innovation discovery that helps fulfill the mission. It adjusts and you learn.

The dizzy array of strategic choices will totally disrupt existing business models if they are right in their design. We can scale a concept faster than ever, we can utilize others for resources, we can collaborate in highly agile, flexible and fluid ways. We are partnering more than ever, how can we accelerate that? How can we design innovation purposefully to work within this digital world, where (global) scope, scale, and speed are being demanded?

In summary

The whole world of communicating, transacting and designing all the different negotiations and products that meet the immediate needs of the customer makes this the “digital business era”, where constant redesigning and orchestrating the parts will keep it at the forefront by a constantly evolving set of combinations and leveraging a network of diverse capabilities.

All of this ‘calls for’ a radically new innovative design, built upon the digital age and the technologies available, as well as flexible enough to adapt into the future to provide a more dynamic innovation process, not one that today is very static in its present form. We need to make this case for change, as well as search for the mechanisms of that change.

The post Applying the Three Horizon Thinking to a Fresh Perspective of Innovation Design first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The number of helpful reports, observations and suggestions are constant and becoming overwhelming to translate effectively.

How can we map a new pathway for shifting current practices and transform them?

Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?

After working through a number the one that held my attention and has become central to my thinking to take organizational practices forward was provided by a recent report from McKinsey “How to create an agile organization”. This report has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.

As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile.

I want to separate agile from the software push side, empowering small teams, into this agility for organizations. We all need to learn or hone new skills, be this sense-making, novel, and adaptive thinking, developing deeper social intelligence and managing new media literacy. How we do this will be one of the keys to making progress or sinking due to a growing cognitive overload.

I recall one report suggesting the work environment needs to be redesigned with three goals in mind, so we can tackle increasingly higher-impact challenges, strengthen those higher-impact connections to deliver on these challenges and thirdly, be in the right shape to amplify the impact.

These three suggestions came from the Center for the Edge. I liked these as they fit my innovation mindset and focus and continues to extend my own views, such as these two posts of “Making Agility compatible for you” and “Building Collective Agility for Innovation”

So, let me return to the McKinsey report, it builds out “agility” even further.

They have identified eighteen practices for organizational agility. Have you noticed how many organizations are emphasizing agility in their transformation, yet McKinsey have suggested nine of these practices are more for stability and can give the foundations for the shaping the other nine, those they nominate as dynamic.

Stable and Dynamic Practices of Agility.

A brief summary but I would recommend reading their report

Now within the list of stable practices, I think most organizations are falling into the trap and placing their emphasis on building these. Is this focus wrong? Yes, but it is largely where you are in nay transformation journey. There seem very few organizations have completed any form of agile transformation, they are for many a current work-in-progress.  It is the scope and ambition of organizations real determination to transform, their higher aspiration, that will determine how far along an agile pathway they can go. The stable group reflects significant progress on where most of our organizations find themselves today.

The ability to transform, moderates the ‘higher aspirations’ and my feeling is, unless you aim for the dynamic agility practices from day one, you will not make sufficient progress in delivering agility into the organization. This is why I just want to focus on these more dynamic ones, as they really begin to make a radical difference, one that can separate one organization from another.

McKinsey does point out you do need all eighteen to be fully in practice, but it is these dynamic ones that hold the real promise in my mind. These are the ones we all should move towards as our projected aim to achieve.

So let me summarize these nine dynamic practices

I have taken the nine dynamic practices outline meaning from this McKinsey report and added my own thoughts and reflections within these summaries.

1. Information Transparency

Today we need to take away all the filtering going on in organizations. Those who fill positions to control and attempt to influence the data. If we can’t unlock the knowledge within the organization, we fail to connect the people working within the organization to its products and related customer needs. Transparency makes the sharing of the knowledge increasingly relevant to connecting up the ‘whole’. There needs to be a very powerful concept of un-filtering, to allow the flow of understanding. It is highly dynamic and powerful in all it can release if encouraged and supported.

2. Rapid iteration and experimentation

The whole emphasis today is on rapid and fast cycles of learning. That testing, learning and adjusting from mistakes and building on these become really valuable progress points. Prototyping is getting so much better, it is creeping into the everyday culture when we innovate, or should. The MVP concept is so right to get features that are potentially better, out there, to test and learn from.

3. Continuous Learning

The moment we stop personally learning, we are the real losers. We need to find ways to ”cut out time” to explore and look for new ways to learn to improve ourselves and what we do within organizations. We need to push for new ways of working and to learn ‘more freely’ from other’s knowledge, in open exchanges and ways to collaborate. We progress by learning from failures and relating to them.

4. Flexible resource allocation.

We need to be adaptive, fluid in any organization and team design. The ability to feel in a position to ‘ramp up or shut down’ initiatives empowers us. We need to want to constantly change teams, seek out joining new ventures. To be always wanting to be redeployed, not because we are hanging on but because any new deployment means new horizons and opportunities. Seek change out, embrace this flexible world and show you are a key resource to help mold and shape it.

5. Open physical and virtual environment.

I often struggle with open planned offices, they provide an environment that distracts and not promote. If you can achieve a way that people communicate and collaborate with each other then great but when you are in a globally dispersed organization it is how you openly ‘react’ in your daily work. For me the virtual environment holds the real future and with so many organizations denying social tools the key to make it ‘purposefully designed’ is to make the activities clearly visible to all that need to know, to constantly show where your intervention and impact has made a difference in building context, content, structure or sharing knowledge. We need to find much better ways to make this a really dynamic, exciting, and rewarding part of agility within organizations

6. Sensing and seizing opportunities.

The value of being proactive, to watch out for signals, to then act upon them, to make your insights valuable to change perceptions, to alter customer bias, to engage with the external environment to shape, influence and contribute into new initiatives makes ‘sensing and seizing’ so important to drive innovation as the catalyst of change.

7. Technology, systems, and tools.

The constant demands being placed on us, to learn and adapt to new technology, systems, and tools as it keeps changing is mega-hard to keep pace with. New organization design in architecture, infrastructure, practices, and ways is tough to integrate the old and the new. How we respond to these is highly dependent on the articulated needs of the business. We can only be ‘responsive’ if we relate to the changing needs. The ability to have a more modular architecture, updates coming in a shorter interval of times can help in a continued updating. It is when the process determines rigid design you can’t change. To ‘react and respond’ you need to keep looking at moving towards technology frontiers. Exploring and exploiting contributes to a better holistic desired business outcome.

8. Role mobility

The movement needs to be constant. When we design we need to always account for achieving a certain fluidity. We need to constantly match our present skills with organizational needs. As we develop a more open talent marketplace we need to have this increasing mobility. Communicating roles, tasks and project outlines need to be demanded, then we have the understanding to change and then deliver to these ‘askes’ of us. These need to constantly match with our own goals, the alignment is the enabler to make this happen.

9. Active partnerships and ecosystems.

Relationships are our trading value. As we build out networks we need to trade. We trade in knowledge, in contribution, in working alongside others to co-develop. We seek out partnering, to invest our intellectual capital with theirs. We look to build the organization’s ecosystem through these engagements, to contribute to new products, services and solutions to look to bring them always to fruition. Our ‘need’ for activity and engagement builds a thriving, more dynamic environment.

In summary.

If we can embrace change by seeking out ways to re-equip ourselves, we encourage our organization to become more dynamic by these actions. We do get stuck in a certain mindset and set of behaviors. We become beholden to them, they eventually ‘freeze’ our progress, we stop learning and experimenting. We need to push for formal mechanisms of change, we need to seek out our own. We need to take hold of our actions, be clear on our organization’s vision and how we believe we can contribute.

As individuals, as members of fluid teams and as an organization we need to be mutually reinforcing.For me, fluidity is equally the growing need of organization’s today.  It is in recognizing that the dynamic practices found for building agility into ourselves and the organization do lie in these nine practices, they give us this level of fluidity. Take them on board, practice them constantly and over time your agility becomes your transformation. It becomes the ‘norm’ and allows for constant adaption.

The post The Dynamics within Agility. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We have to evolve it, as we go. With anything that is evolving in front of our eyes, we will need to recognize some of the decisions we will make will turn out to be wrong but made as a good judgment at the time, on ’emerging’ evidence, not proven. Achieving a digital transformation is becoming really essential for innovation, helping to enable your ability to deliver sustained growth through making all the ‘connections’ come together in different ways than ever before; in evaluations, analysis, in collaborations and in the process from discovery to eventual commercialization.

Digital transformation executed well is a really big undertaking. It goes way beyond making a series of incremental improvements to become cloud-ready as are supposed to build in and reflect social, mobile and digital technologies in the solution set. We need to fundamentally transform our processes by opening up and engaging with customers in dramatically different ways, in real-time, in constant exchanges and connected ways. Everything needs to be tracked and traced.

Customers will want to participate, influence and aid your design and final product. On top, we have to deal with a broad range of communities, across platforms and in different ecosystems at speed, scale, and scope to master different levels of complexity and draw in the expertise we lack within our organization. However, we must do all this in this world of the uncertainty of if it does all connect and work, to reposition all our businesses towards the digital world.

Digital transformation is, without doubt, an event of historic impact, challenging what we know

Technology is becoming an integral part of our lives, for us personally, as consumers or employees, but equally for businesses, the government and our educational institutions. It is pervading everything.

Look at digital transformation as an investment, our future ability to function, compete and communicate will depend on it. Investments always take time to show results, and digital will demand a lot. It is shaping the ways we will work in the future, on how we are going to connect, communicate, and learn. Often, we have been caught up in a specific device we use. This time, it is different though. It is how that set of devices allows us to become connected, how they interact and form a system to tackle a need or task. We are all struggling to re-equip ourselves, in skills, in simply managing, in managing the digital world and its demands. This is another work-in-progress

Digital transformation will keep pushing us to become more efficient and effective yet also to become more adroit and innovative. It erodes and eats into our time that in the past was taken up by so many other things. We will need a new reset in our values and beliefs, we will have to carve out a different set of routines and habits, otherwise digital will simply take over our lives to the detriment of everything else.

The good thing is that Business entities are being forced to open up

Digital transformation happens on a scale and scope that makes many reluctant to take it on; it seems overwhelming in its complexity and risk. The business returns seem hard to quantify in traditional metrics yet the need for transformation compels us to ignore the known metrics and believe in all the unknowns that we are told are achievable.

Often it is hard to convince deciders to support this need for such a significant transformation, whether they are just skeptical or lacking technology adroitness. They want to slowly attack it, sometimes in the hope, it might “sort of” go away. Yet for others, who recognize the future lies in technology and the power of networks and community engagement, it is the opportunity to radically alter their way of doing business; the opportunity to forge new competitive positions that have an engagement at their heart.

We don’t know what the “end game” will look like

We don’t know how the digital transformation will turn out in the end and we have to accept that. Much will come towards us as we adapt, learn and experiment, with many emerging technologies, all in different stages of their evolution.

You sometimes get a sense of crisis pervading the boardrooms, a sense of growing concern, when they recognize the threats and the magnitude of change this transformation will demand of them. They are often the least equipped to understand it. They have to become highly reliant on others to teach them, inform them and encourage them to keep ‘at it’

They will be required to find multiple resources for this journey, and be it just to stay competitive in this new digital world where the demarcation is blurring and industries are agonizing in continuous disruption. It is the blending of all the different experiences, understanding, and comprehension that is rapidly flattening the hierarchy to accommodate all these different voices contributing to building a new digital business landscape.The “survival of the fittest” will be determined by how successfully and how fast deciders

The “survival of the fittest” will be determined by how successfully and how fast deciders maneuver through this shift. Transforming established businesses has become an imperative today.

We are told there are three strategic goals to justify the transformational journey:

1. Providing a better, systematic customer experience, leading to greater loyalty and fostering a community of advocates
2. Internally, digital transformation can improve the operational efficiency
3. New business models, which were not feasible before the time of the connected world, offer new markets and growth opportunities

The worry becomes with customer engagement there is this risk that senior executives will let transformation fail

Of those strategic goals, achieving customer engagement, in the sense of a sustainable partnership, is the most valuable one. Digital transformation enables you to engage your customers along their journey across various products, services and communication channels. Digital has become truly pervasive in people’s lives now and this forces businesses to think about how they can become a consumer technology company, irrespective of what they offer.

The challenges are massive. Companies are struggling to see clear business benefits in traditional ways of managing return on investment. Senior executives have been trained in a curriculum that didn’t prepare them for this world of digital technology and a collaborative world where they have to listen, learn and accept others are often more often right.

The senior executive lacks the understanding of new tools of engagement, which are table stakes already in the world beyond their own corporate offices, in startups, social media companies etc. They consider technology as something for others to worry over. Increasingly, they also lack the relevant exposure and experience to handle the new game successfully.

Driving an effective digital transformation through technologies, which are constantly adapting and evolving, is not the prediction-model based experience they are used to and that got them to the top. A new mindset is required, with solid risk judgment based as much on experience as in listening to others, replacing hard facts often with soft instincts, and incomplete data that is in a constant validation of structured experimentation.

What’s the goal to keep in mind? Looking at the needs of return

• Simply put, you need a picture of how you will (eventually) make money when you start your journey of digital transformation. Create a clearly outlined set of value propositions, and define how you will engage and interact with your customers, partners, and suppliers in products, services, and business models.
• Your business will revolve around what customers really want, a seamless experience where speed, time, performance and response become dominating values – far beyond a specific job-to-be-done. The return in innovation, in new products and services that will rise in ongoing customer satisfaction, becomes as relevant as pricing a product. The customer is willing to pay for a product he or she believes good value, great service and solves their needs
• The toughest part of any transformation is actually recognizing you have to challenge your own past assumptions and be prepared to strip them down and rebuild them on a constant always experimenting basis, adapting to what you ‘hear’ and can ‘see’ in breaking opportunity from all the increased data coming into you to analysis.
• In general, business is moving towards a culture of experience. Whether in communications, development, or delivery, with the customer, in the product itself:
• Everyone’s time within the organization is pivoted towards the outside world, learning to collaborate, exchange and forge different alliances.
• There is a great advantage in seeking increasing speed and scale. It delivers ‘time to impact’ to as wide an audience as you can achieve. Having a global ambition or partnerships that can enable speed to market makes increasing sense but there is a higher likelihood you will have to narrow your offering focus to reduce internal complexity but still deliver within a network of providers, products, and services that deliver to customer needs.
• And the most important change in perspective is about being different, about carving out our own uniqueness but recognizing this is forming more around platforms and ecosystems where all participants look to collaborate and build a more superior offering than one they could achieve on their own

So the actual starting point will be to come up with a detailed plan of coordinated actions that challenge the way you have been running today’s business and totally rethinking it from top to bottom to make any transformation, digitally dependent.

Innovation is becoming highly dependent on digital technology, it feeds understanding, validates it and delivers much of the final value proposition. Undertaking a digital transformation becomes essential to the health of innovation, let alone the company for the future.

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The post Moving to a Digital World totally across your Business is highly challenging first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We continually learn nthat intuition and ‘gut feel’ on research set up and gathered weeks or more often months ago, has a hidden cost as it rapidly goes out of date. This ‘knowledge’ is becoming out of date before we can gain from it and sometimes highly dangerous to follow, or believe in in the more volitile market conditions of today’s, those that are rapidly changing. We need to get closer to ‘real-time.’

This reliance on rapidly out-of-date understanding cannot be the basis for any justifications for high-stake bets when it comes to innovation. We need to change our thinking and design in the digital insight part more specifically within and along the innovation process. Technology in all its forms is altering the innovation game but are we adapting to this radical change potential? We need to embrace it.

We have, in the past, partly because of levels of uncertainty. We have been overly reliant on ‘poor’ limited data and tended to take a safer route to market from this limited comprehension of the dynamics within the market. We are trying to achieve well-defined problems based on limited validation and simply place “solutions” into the pipeline for innovation. We attempt to work methodically along the timelines irrespective of changes constantly occuring, often impervious to the market conditions change, often going on before our eyes, with the end result, a disappointment and a lot of wasted energy and resource.

We continue to couch our bets and gravitate to solutions that are as close to what we currently offer, and that just keeps reinforcing the incremental route regretfully.

Today we can radically alter this innovation discovery by getting as close to ‘real-time’ if we care to invest in it. We need to invest in the enablers of technology to deliver constantly updated data, to allow greater analysis of choices and potential, closer to ‘go/no-go’ decision points.

Digital threatens (thankfully) this entire incremental pathway.

Markets continue to have even greater uncertainty and we need to respond in very different, faster, well-informed ways. Competition is changing, markets are blurring and customers are becoming far more vocal. To respond we need to reconceive innovation into a constant and rapid learning approach, listening and observing from these sources.

The need is to become far more iterative in feeding back what we hear; full of experimentation, testing, and adjusting, we must lend ourselves to adopting a far more minimal viable product approach, where we continually test assumptions, checking what is valued about the concept, gained constantly from the customer or market feedback.

Digital is also pushing us to shake off complacency since customers are increasingly further connected and interacting in new ways, making the constant choice, adapting to best experiences, imaginative offers and certainly not being as brand loyal for most of our products as previously. We need to find different and adaptive paths to ‘plug into’ and join the conversation, to help shape that conversation and through these exchanges, recognize how the brand and reputations become increasingly important in all things innovating.

Digital tools are changing how customers discover, evaluate, explore, make their purchases and use products and then how they react, share, interact and make their connections to our brands. The whole process is highly dynamic and reliant on the ‘network and social media effect’, and the job of the innovator is to translate this and respond in fast, nimble, agile ways, to fulfill the needs and capitalize in responsive ways. This demands a radical redesign of the innovation process and the whole customer engagement process. Most of our organizations today, really lag on this engagement, let alone on building a more adaptive and agile innovation process being ‘fed’ by the technology solutions we have available to us today.

The need is to “test to learn” and then adjust and adapt, some thoughts include:

• Without a doubt, it is finding and using more techniques and tools that help you make far greater rapid prototyping, testing, piloting and learning from these understandings and how they can be quickly translated back into the innovation process to improve on what you have known, into one of what you have become aware of. “Testing to learn” will become the new innovation mantra and the accepted innovation process; a dynamic, fluid and rapid experimenting that makes it a constant learning one.
• We are today, partly down this route of early learning, with the help of software that can capture ideas, offering a sound vehicle for communicating these and a place to gather and define solutions that can be taken forward. Yet we have to push the path of constant evolution and that will continue to come at increasing speed from technology to keep providing new knowledge so as you can constantly improve on your eventual value proposition but that is going to require an ever-increasing agile organization and adaptive system.
• We will need to find different ways to redesign the manufacturing process (more outsourcing) to have more adaptive points where we can intervene and change product design further upstream. We will need to find different ways to ramp up or dampen down finished goods and that is going to push ‘agile’ even further. The ability to balance “scale, speed, and scope” will become paramount in this.
• We will need to learn to focus on the seizing of emerging opportunities in quicker ways but also take a much tougher approach to divestment, so as to release resources from declining positions of advantage. The whole life-cycle thinking needs challenging and thinking through.
• We will need to push for “agile systems” where we can design new applications, find better communication and collaborative social technologies to reduce delays in getting the right information to the right people to advance the process and reduce the duplication of work or the search for the information needed to complete the job. We need to focus much more on reducing innovation process cycle time for faster deployment.We must be constantly adaptive not blindly following an outdated innovation process, that is full of rigidity.
• We will also need to invest in more data-driven front ends to build a more sophisticated process of discovery. The whole concept of divergent experiments and convergent testing leading to validations will become the way to think of the innovation process as a re-looping process. This will require a critical mindset change from a linear one on how you set it, in the design of the process and the use and application of the digital tools you deploy to move this through this constant, ongoing iterative process. Nothing can remain ‘static,’ we need to make it ‘highly’ dynamic, iterative and fluid, a constant learn and adapt.

Rapid innovation matters and it will become even more central in 2017 as digital takes hold.

Rapid-iteration needs to replace the fixed product release date mentality we see in much of our innovative software. We are in a world, driven by digital that requires us to constantly adapt to new learning that is coming from real-time market feedback. The way we learn from this and our rapid innovation application process will be all about this continually testing new assumptions to improve our (final) product and service propositions. This is where the cloud provides the ability to constantly update and release, so we the innovators benefit.

This, I believe, requires a rethinking of the innovation process, as we will need to transform the existing methods and make them increasingly digital and social, in real time, feeding (as close to) real-time data and insights. We need to focus on the rates of innovation output from our learning and improvement in the eventual offering, not on the ‘classic’ input and output metrics from the past, as our constant bearing. It is outcome learning as the driver for metrics It is how we design this in a more comprehensive manner will be a real challenge in 2017.

Are we in a pivotal year of the rapid innovation application process? Will we finally move towards a greater fluid and looping innovation process? One that is fully designed and adopt as our new innovation discovery to the execution process based on the transformational effect of technology. One that is a constant path of innovation understanding and evolution that fits far more with these digital transformational times we are going through. They certainly do need to form a closer partnership for us to gain the transforming value.

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**adapted and revised from an original post supporting a digital transformational study exploring leading practices completed for Hype. Register and then download, it is complimentary

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The customer has become absolutely central to this transformation and the push towards the 4th Industrial revolution is driving this transformation wholesale, across all industries and services engaged in business.

Let me outline some of the challenges in my opinion that might help us all form a clear view of the digital transformation journey, recently researched.

Firstly I’m sure we can all agree transformation is very hard at the best of times

Digital transformation is doubly difficult, it forces us to work with mostly emerging, constantly evolving technologies, and then apply these in an integrated way into an existing business. This stretches our abilities significantly.

Beyond making a series of incremental improvements to become cloud-ready, we are supposed to reflect social, mobile and digital technologies. We need to fundamentally transform our processes by opening up and engaging with customers. On top, we have to deal with a broad range of communities, across platforms and in different ecosystems at speed, scale, and scope. However, we must do all this to reposition all our businesses towards the digital world.

I provided a recent digital transformation report that might help you in planning this digital journey.

I wrote a meta report on the recent developments in the digital transformation in late 2016 that was published by Hype. The report offered a selection of key visuals and overviews from 14 reports, which in turn were shortlisted from an original data set of 140 reports on the topic, ones published over the course of the last few years, that from my research, I found the most valuable. To obtain a copy, it’s free, click this link to register and download.

The intention of this report was to provide data for orientation for people dealing with this difficult topic, it was an attempted to extract a selection of the best emerging practices or thinking of the what, how and why digital transformation needs to be top of every business person’s mind. The report was designed to help you to trigger your thinking, and make you aware of multiple challenges and opportunities you may encounter on this journey.

I provided an opening backdrop to the report here as triggering points to reflect upon and recognize.

Business entities are being forced to open up

Digital transformation is happening at a scale and scope that makes many reluctant to take it on; it seems overwhelming in its complexity and risk. The business returns seem hard to quantify in traditional metrics. Thus it is hard to convince those undecided to support this, whether they are just skeptical or lacking technology adroitness. Yet for others, who recognize the future lies in technology and the power of networks and community engagement, it is the opportunity to radically alter their way of doing business; the opportunity to forge new competitive positions that have the collaborative engagement at its heart.

We have to embrace new technology – or leave the stage

The buy-in to this means undertaking a disruption to the existing organization, to the way you go about business. When considering this, you begin to understand the magnitude of the speed of change demanded. It implies a competitive need for opening up, for responding to and connecting with all external parties who are ready to collaborate.

We all need to think mobile, digital, cloud, and social far more than we did to date. We need to become comfortable in the analytics of big data. If we are not willing to accept that, we should step aside and allow those willing and digital savvy to take the reins and set the pace for the transformation journey.

At present individuals are far ahead of businesses in embracing the digital world

Transformation is coming at us in rapid waves. Its scale and complexity is either seen as amazing or simply accepted, with a shrug of the shoulders. Many are expecting it to be a seamless experience, powerful and adaptable, allowing the individual to make it highly personal.

However, business is lagging in exploiting the opportunity, whereas we as individuals seem to have embraced the social digital world already. Companies want technology to transform their business, but they struggle to find ways towards opportunities that offer true growth.

We don’t know what the “end game” will look like

We don’t know how the digital transformation will turn out in the end and we have to accept that. Much will come towards us as we adapt, learn and experiment, with many emerging technologies, all in different stages of their evolution.

You get a sense of survival pervading the boardrooms, a sense of growing concern when they recognize the threats and the magnitude of change this transformation will demand of them. They will be required to find resources for this journey, and be it just to stay competitive in this new digital world where the demarcation is blurring and industries are agonizing in continuous disruption.

The “survival of the fittest” will be determined by how successfully and how fast deciders maneuver through this shift. Transforming established businesses has become an imperative today.

However, there are three strategic goals to justify the transformational journey:

1. Providing a better, systematic customer experience, leading to greater loyalty and fostering a community of advocates
2. Internally, digital transformation can improve the operational efficiency
3. New business models, which were not feasible before the time of the connected world, offer new markets and growth opportunities

Customer engagement becomes the primary focal point of justification to transform

Of those strategic goals, achieving customer engagement, in the sense of a sustainable partnership, is the most valuable one. Digital transformation enables you to engage your customers along their journey across various products, services and communication channels. Digital has become truly pervasive in people’s lives now and this simply forces businesses to think about how they can become a consumer technology company, irrespective of what they offer.

The challenges are massive. Companies are struggling to see clear business benefits in traditional ways of managing return on investment. They need to experiment and be ready to be agile and adapt as they go, as their customers will radically alter their perceptions and past positions. The journey will often be uncomfortable but necessary.

Senior executives have been trained in a curriculum that didn’t prepare them for this world of digital technology.

They lack the new tools of engagement, which are table stakes already in the world beyond their own corporate offices. They consider technology as something for others to worry over. Increasingly, they also lack the relevant exposure and experience to handle the new game successfully. Driving an effective digital transformation through technologies, which are constantly adapting and evolving, is not the prediction model based experience they are used to and that got them to the top. A new mindset is required, with solid risk judgment, replacing hard facts with soft instincts, and incomplete data with structured experimentation.

We must overcome the barriers for digital transformation

As outlined above, we face plenty of barriers for digital transformation: a lack of vision, not understanding the urgency, holding on to traditional measures for growth, and a host of organizational constraints that restrict decisions.

How do we best start off?

The toughest part of any transformation is actually recognizing you have to challenge your own past assumptions and be prepared to strip them down and rebuild them. Once you have accepted that, the answer to the questions is as simple to say as it is difficult to carry out. You have to understand and potentially fix your customer relationship, adjust internal operations and create a data collection workflow for business insights you can base your decisions on. And you have to do all this in a concerted way, as much as possible. So the actual starting point will be to come up with a detailed plan of coordinated actions and this is where this report might have great value.

What’s the goal to keep in mind?

Simply put, you need a picture of how you will (eventually) make money when you start your journey of digital transformation. Create a clearly outlined set of value propositions, and define how you will engage and interact with your customers, partners, and suppliers.

Your business will revolve around what customers really want, a seamless experience where speed, time, performance and response become dominating values – far beyond a specific job-to-be-done.

In general, business is moving towards a culture of experience. Whether in communications, development, or delivery: everyone’s time within the organization is pivoted towards the outside world. And the most important change in perspective is about being different, about carving out our own uniqueness.

A digital transformation is an event of historic impact, challenging what we believe to know

Technology is becoming an integral part of our lives, for us personally, as consumers or employees, but equally for businesses, the government and our educational institutions. It is pervading everything.

Look at digital transformation as an investment. Investments always take a time to show results, and digital will demand a lot. It is shaping the ways we will work in the future, on how we are going to connect, communicate, and learn. Often, we have been caught up in a specific device we use. This time, it is different though. It is how that set of devices allows us to become connected, how they interact and form a system to tackle a need or task and we need to learn how to respond to what they are telling us, and listening to others has never been the corporate’s best attribute.

In Summary

Digital transformation will keep pushing us to become more efficient and effective but also to become more adroit and innovative. We will need to take a ‘dual’ mindset to constantly balance these often conflicting tensions so as to harness all the different power sources of digital and structure the business and organization accordingly.

Digital is presently determined to be all-dominant, it simply erodes much of what we know and eats into our time that in the past was taken up by so many other things. We will need a new reset in our values and beliefs, a new re-equipping, to deal with everything digital.

Welcome to the digital era where we all are learning to transform ourselves! You might find the visuals shown in the report as very valuable, so as to piece together your understanding of the needs of any digital transformational journey. I enjoyed researching and extracting the best leading practices and frames to help.

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The post The backdrop of digital transformation and its consequences first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Recently I was asked to complete a review of digital transformation, to gauge where it presently is, to take a look at the leading emerging practices and ‘professional ‘wisdom’ and turn these insights into a report due out before the end of the year.

There are many innovation implications in this digital transformational journey that hold my increasing attention. For most of this last twelve months I have been increasingly tracking, researching and responding to supporting clients need  about digital transformation, so I was happy to take this on. Little did I realize how this digital transformation has become a flood, a torrent of wisdom, many offerings different, often varying views and advice.

The more I deepened and intensified my investigation there came this overwhelming feeling that it is getting a real overload on those wanting to understand this digital transformation that is occurring. It seems no industry or business person is going to be immune to this transforming impact yet we seem to be facing such a deluge of advice. Picking it apart requires the stamina and focus of a long distance swimmer, the same commitment I think will be needed for this digital transformation journey

So I need to pick it apart. Not easy but a challenge.

A digital transformation does mean going back to so many fundamentals. We need to create a digital transformation strategy, a clear roadmap and build the business case as it is going to be, well, umm……..transformational.

I do get a distinct impression there is no randomness in this, it does need to be well thought-through. It is not like downloading one app, or simply moving some items over to the cloud, assessing its value and purpose and how it currently fits, and then simply dispensing with it if it does not meet our need. This is about having a viable business in the future, based on digital as we have this overwhelming, nagging feeling all our current business models are under threat.

It is no more just the smart, nimbler upstarts threatening us, it is coming from all directions, at speeds that seem to increase the rate of change constantly. Those of us burdened with a legacy system and a management holding onto the past glorious days then your days seemed numbered. This is going to require a significant investment in energy, focus, and resource commitment.

We do need really different thinking. We need to ‘up our game’ in boldness of leadership and the totally, utterly unshakable belief in innovation, exploring new business models, grappling with all the available assets inside and outside the organization being pulled together in new digital ways, exploiting all the technologies as they ‘break’ and evolve. There seems no more “wait and see”, it has become “learn and experiment fast”

Where to start?

Firstly we do need to recognize technology is inseparable in what we doing, going forward. The blurring of our lives, of the breaking down of the different old industry demarcations, the blending of government, corporate and social engagements is giving increasing voice to each of us as individuals, all happening due to this exponential set of connections. I sense from many this is ‘epic’, exploding and life changing, with all of us simply learning to adapt and adjust.

The choice of apps, platforms, the number of connected devices is teaching us new ways of communicating, learning, interacting and extracting different value and needs out of the technology available which is all constantly evolving.

How does a large business keep pace with this exponential connection? Where is the starting point or the necessary change inventions one needs to bring in to understand the gaps and fill the voids, can we back-fill as we equally move forward?

The past business decision was based on evidence, validated and justified, it sort of evolved at a steady pace. The sheer scale and impact of how technology is evolving at increasing speed will need a massive mind shift.

Although each organization is having so many competing priorities, the gap between how it is organized today and building these required digital capabilities is getting wider, unless you work through this transformation plan in a clear, purposeful way. It has to begin  with a ground-up approach, small experiments that can quickly be scaled up or revised. It needs very hands-on engagement throughout the whole process.

A key need of this digital transformation is going to be asking the question of how can we build in ‘greater agility’ and what is presently stopping us from achieving this. Then it is the agility to achieve better response times to customers needs, to respond to market changes quicker, to translate insights into knowledge and then into the product and service innovations that meet ever-changing needs.

It is recognizing and then facing up to your present ‘pain points’ and the key competitive places that agility, digital understanding and translating this into outwardly facing outcomes will significantly improve your abilities to compete, in often volatile markets. It is shortening the time between understanding and reacting and this is where digital transformation offers both the ‘return’ promise or becomes the threat.

Forming a strategy, roadmap and business case needs real considerations

There are many considerations, each organization will be different. Yet all have a common need; the recognition each organization needs to develop its digital capabilities, organization-wide, not stuck in some IT department. It is a total company-wide set of activities that are affected. It is developing the digital capabilities across the organization by transforming the culture, the people’s digital skill set and the structures to get into sync, not just with newly defined organizational goals but also consistently adjusting to the rapid pace of change occurring in the marketplace, aligned to customers evolving needs.

The critical first points to address is the lack of something, be this the resource to undertake such a task, a lack of digital talent residing in the organization or digital savvy, the ability to make this a corporate priority and not leave this to limited pockets of divisions, functions or channels. It needs this powerful syncing and top-level focus and support.

Then we need to encourage and expand the risk appetite, in rapid experimentation and learning, to accelerate the infusion of digital talent, enhance the understanding of soft skills and the art of collaboration, in new teaming, in-goal and process identification and solution solving. Also in developing greater fluidity in structures, exploring and identification with the needs of new solutions to keep ‘feeding’ this back into the evolving roadmap. All of this needs to establish a new digital rhythm to encourage the flow of knowledge and understanding, to feed back into evolving solutions that will take time to develop and embed.

Then you face all the potential barriers that need early identification. The need for alignment across the organization, the ramping up of skills, breaking down those silo’s to stop any efforts from being disjointed, establishing different metrics that reflect this digital transformation journey and show proof of adoption and usage spread, constantly adjusting resources, building the new digital culture and finally, keeping the lights on in running today’s business, as you undertake this transformation. No easy task but one that needs a complete re-engineering,ending with a redesigned organization, fit for the digital future.

A very different type of orientation – a digital core reliant on the edges

So it is recognizing that digital transformation is multiples of connected intermediary goals, learning by doing, adjusting and evolving. Yet the critical change is this might be internally driven but it must be driving to a very different outwardly engaging result. The changes at the core, need to be totally connected to the outer edges of the business due to this hyper-connectedness. This shifts responsibilities to a more decentralized environment.

It is transforming to offer customer experiences, to engage deeper with multiple stakeholders, to make sure the last mile of the external engagement which are all operating at the edge, are the points in value understanding, so then it gets processed in the core where this more agile internal process responds, adapts and adjusts constantly.

The need for interconnecting both the internal world with the external world is partly why we are seeing such a high level of attention to platforms and managing in ecosystems, both in enterprise and broader systems of ecosystem thinking.

Finally, one book written by David L. Rogers “the digital transformation playbook” offers a good read covering this complex subject. He has broken down his view of digital transformation into these five handy yet critical focal points: For each domain of customers, competition, data needs, innovation and value he is suggesting these five strategic themes of: 1) Harness customer networks, 2) Build platforms, not just products, 3) Turn data into assets, 4) Innovate by rapid experimentation ad 5) Adapt your value proposition (constantly).

In summary

Digital transformation is about undertaking a systematic journey, built on interim building steps, to adjust to the learning and response. The reality is this is a long transforming journey that will take years to undertake for many established businesses that need to shed legacy, adjust and reorient their resources, processes and thinking to adapt to this connected world.

Going digital will need strong governance and leadership, consistent technology integration, a growing digital literacy for the operations, processes and all involved to enact change in roles, systems and supporting model.

Lastly, to achieve a different result that provides a return for all this undertaking and effort will mean ensuring the customer journey, the touchpoints and the experiences meet the customers’ needs, not those internally imposed ones, build on the business expected needs.

Value will be driven by the market and the customer, not top down but bottom up and this will need a very different orientation to innovation through platforms and ecosystems to build communities of common purpose.

The future will be driven by communities of vested interest, that keep evolving, adjusting the value proposition constantly, to meet the constantly evolving customer needs, and that will need a highly fluid, agile and adaptive organization, working in multiple structures, adjusting in evolutionary ways, reliant on everything digital.

Digital transformation is truly transforming for all of us.

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The post Swimming along a road in a flood of digital transformation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.