Посты автора Amnon Levav

Amnon Levav

Co-Founder and C-IO (Chief Innovation Officer) at SIT

eduction as a Key to Innovation

Published date: October 24, 2021 в 11:13 am

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Category: Innovation,Methodology

Take a second look, please, at the title of this paper. There seems to be something wrong, something missing – right? A possibility that comes to mind is the letter ‘a’, which would turn the words into the perfectly plausible (although somewhat unpromising) title: Education as a Key to Innovation. This solution is, alas, rather less than perfect, for if the mistake were a missing ‘a’, then there is a second, typographic error at the head of the page – the ‘e’ should have been upper case – a capital ‘E’. This seems to suggest a different set of solutions to the puzzle of the faulty title – the missing letter should be upper case, and situated at the beginning of the odd-looking “eduction”. Three candidates can be identified quite easily, just by scanning the alphabet from Aeduction to Zeduction.

Deduction as a Key to Innovation would be, for me, an intriguing subject, all the more so due to the prevalent view that the ability for deduction resides somehow in the “square” left side of the brain, at the remote end from the supposed seat of creativity and its sister – innovation. The title opening this paragraph would lead, in that case, to a hope for content which, if nothing else, would provide a welcome change from the non-deductive mainstream of innovation fostering. In fact, this article is about a method, SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking) which uses a rather analytical – although not strictly deductive – approach to the generation of innovation. Specifically, the aim in this article is to describe one of a set of techniques used in SIT. The name of this technique is Reduction.

So it is Reduction as a Key to Innovation that makes most sense as the correct version of the article’s title. Note that this option – the ‘R’ solution, has a further advantage. If Reduction is indeed the subject of this article and the first word in its title, then the supposed error is actually an example of the application of the very subject of the article on its own title. Indeed, as you can see below, it perfectly matches the SIT procedure for applying the Reduction tool to the task of inventing a new product (in our case – a new title for an article). Here is the procedure for applying Reduction to an existing product, to come up with an innovative version of it:

1. a. List the product’s internal components.

  b. Mark those components that seem essential.

2. Remove one or more of the essential components and visualize the resulting “virtual product”.

3. Search for opportunities or benefits that can arise from the “virtual product”.

4. Define the new version(s) of your product, the target market(s) and the new benefits.

5. Adjust each new product according to specific needs.

Note that Amazon and the iPhone are prime (oops) examples of Reduction, as are the older ATM and even contact lenses. In our (more modest) case I started out with the obvious and unexciting “Reduction as a Key to Innovation”, dropped the initial “E” and asked myself what benefits you, the reader, could derive from this truncated title. The result is for you to judge.

What about the third candidate for the solution of the puzzle in the article’s title? We mentioned before that there is, as you might have noticed yourself, a third letter that can function well at the start of the title, making it into the hard-to-pass-by Seduction as a Key to Innovation. Not completely irrelevant, it must be admitted, for if you’ve chosen to read these pages, and gotten this far into them, it would seem that some act of seduction has taken place. Our work in applying SIT to the field of advertising suggests that there is indeed a connection between se- and re-duction, to the extent that leaving out key elements of a communication, such as an advertisement – as is often done in the case of teasers – entices the viewer into an interaction with the ad, which usually leads to higher recognition, involvement and retention of its contents.

 Take the following ad, from a classic campaign created by the fabled Neil French.

 

The text:

“This page is dedicated to those amongst us

who have learned to recognize quality without peering at a label.”

 

For those of you who – like me – haven’t, this is a campaign for Chivas regal whisky.

 

Here is another classic, this time by Ogilvy &Mather Sidney.

 

Shocking to see that this 20-year-old ad could have appeared today, which points to the limited influence of advertising in general, but both ads exhibit several characteristics common to Reduction advertising: 1) curiosity is aroused; 2) there is respect for the viewer, since he or she are trusted to fill in the missing information by themselves; 3) production costs are absolutely minimal, 4) key elements of the commercial seem to be missing, giving the ad a unique feel.

This last characteristic is, of course, the literal meaning of the use of reduction, and is thus common to any application of the tool, whether in advertising, New Product Development, Problem Solving or any other application. Like many creative tools and most SIT tools, reduction helps its users overcome the well known “Functional Fixedness”, by suggesting that some element of the situation can play a role other than its traditional purpose. But reduction goes one step further and liberates thinkers from an arguably deeper preconception which can be called “Existential Fixedness” – the view that things and situations are defined by an inventory of their components. Reduction, then, in some of its versions, challenges not only your view of what things do, but even of what things are. This is the power of reduction, and also the source of the feeling of unease that it often inspires.

 

Reduction, as mentioned, can be applied in virtually any field. Actually, it might be an interesting idea to apply reduction to the structure of an article, say by finishing it with no

 

Historical note: this piece is a slight adaptation to a text written some 20 years ago, for internal purposes, in the days when SIT still used the term “Reduction” for what we now call “Subtraction”. I leave it to the loyal reader to imagine the first paragraphs of an article titled “traction as a Key to Innovation” 😊

 

Bibliographical note: you may want to read more about Subtraction and several additional tools in the article we published years ago in the Harvard Business Review, called “Finding your innovation sweet spot”. It was at my HBR editor’s insistence that we changed the tool’s name from Reduction to Subtraction. He was right(:

An Effective Tool for Problem Solving – Part 2

Published date: October 10, 2021 в 12:37 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Problem Solving

In Part 1 we described a method for laying out a chain of events that describes a problematic state of affairs, starting out from a problem statement. We call the resulting diagram a UDP chain, where UDP stands for Undesired Phenomena. I used an example from 6sigma.org to create the following map. If you are one of the few people on the globe who have not read Part 1 (you and the LinkedIn algorithm(:, I strongly recommend that you click here to do so, and 7 minutes later return to continue reading here. In this Part, I will continue with the same example to demonstrate a principle and a tool that can be used to “break the chain” and find solutions to the problem. The following was the UDP Chain based on the Root Cause analysis in the 6sig.org example:

Creating the UDP chain usually results in a first wave of ideas or at least directions for solutions. Simply laying out the problem in this way is conducive to fresh thinking, and to the discovery that some of your colleagues may even understand the problem totally differently from you. But this is only the first part of the exercise.

To test a UDP Chain, we recommend that you read it aloud, from bottom to top, as if you were telling a story. Any defects in the causal logic will immediately emerge as you listen to yourself. In this case the story could sound like this: I have a hole in my pocket, so I lost my wallet, so I was left without cash, so I didn’t buy gas, so my gas tank was left empty, so I couldn’t start my car, so I couldn’t drive to work, so I got to the office late, so I got in late (again) to a meeting with my boss, so it added to my boss’s list of complaints, so I needed to prove myself even more, so I needed to stay late in the office. Every instance of the word “so” represents one of the small causal arrows in the diagram, and if I say, for instance, that there was a hole in my pocket and therefore my wallet got lost, I am accepting the causality of: hole in pocket -> wallet lost. Or: I will get into the office late -> I will arrive late at the meeting. The general structure of the UDP chain is therefore this:

Link N exists and therefore Link N+1 will also come to be (and therefore Link N+2, N+3 and so on). In our approach to problem solving, we aim to break this seemingly necessary sequence of events, by first asking a challenging question:

A)   What if, DESPITE N, NOT N+1?, which we can phrase also as:

A*) Let’s accept that N will happen, and then see how we can make sure that in spite of this fact, still N+1 will not happen.

This question leads to a second wave of ideas (the first came through the creation of the UDP chain itself), each created through posing the question on a specific pair of links.

  • What if despite the fact that my car won’t start, I can drive to work? (take a cab, get a ride, rent a car, call an Uber etc.)
  • What if despite the fact that I can’t drive to work, I will get to the meeting on time? (Zoom?)
  • What if despite the fact the I lose my wallet, I will have cash (next time)? (payment app?)

As you may note, each of these questions brings up thoughts, some more mundane others more exciting, but what they all have in common, and this is the power of what we call the first Qualitative Change Question, is that you eschew the tyranny of the causal necessity. Think how often we automatically assume that one bad thing leads to another. The Qualitative Change question challenges this mindset. It is also wise in the way that the famous AA Serenity Prayer (which, I just learned through WP, was written by Reinhold Niebuhr) teaches us:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference.

With God’s role played in our case by the Spirit of Innovation, we can aim to replace the misguided search for the miraculous Root Cause which when extinguished will solve our problem, with an acceptance that some things we cannot change, don’t need to change, and, as we will see later, may even not wish to.

As I demonstrate in my article about the COVID World (click here to read) both individuals and corporations tend to make the automatic leap from, say, “there is strict social distancing” to “my restaurant/theater business is ruined” while others, who resist the urge, demonstrate that the option to break the chain exists. I am not espousing the New Age concept that just by dint of willing something you can achieve it, only pointing to a possibility to challenge the assumption that you necessarily won’t.

Asking this question provides you with two benefits:

1)    You can select a variety of entry points to tackle your problem;

2)    You gain flexibility of thought by reconsidering the causal relationship between links in the chain.

You are now ready to ask the Second Qualitative Question, which will challenge your thinking even further than the first:

Qualitative Change Question 2: Given a link N, what if not only will N+1 not come to pass, but

The more N increases, the less N+1 will obtain.

This question not only breaks the causal chain, but turns it on its head.

  • The more I lose my wallet the more cash I will have (maybe losing my wallet repeatedly will convince me finally to keep my cash elsewhere?)
  • The less cash I have the more I will be able to buy gas (I will finally download the payment app to my phone?)
  • The longer my boss’s list of complaints the less I will need to prove myself to her (I finally realize that I don’t want to work for a boss who constantly complains about me, and I finally make the move and leave the job?)

This is the classic “Qualitative Change” in SIT terminology: you train yourself to focus less on the phenomena that are bothering you and more on the relationships between them, and then to challenge the necessity of these relationships. This is pretty powerful when you manage to internalize the habit, and not only in work-related contexts:

  • We took the family to the beach and the more it rained the more fun we all had.
  • The more time I had to spend driving the girls to their activities around today, the more I advanced with the article I was supposed to write.

Note that if in the first example one could claim that it was just a matter of defining what I considered as “having fun”, in the second example there is an objective measure – the article’s deadline, and the task was indeed objectively achieved by running the article’s outline in my mind as I was driving or sitting around and waiting, or maybe even by discussing some of my premature ideas with the girls while in the car (a conversation such as the one that gave birth to one of my recent posts). Back to a business context and some real-life examples from the past year:

  • The less our customers can come to our bank branch, the stronger our relationship becomes (launch an initiative for calling our clients at home and offering support)
  • The lower the demand for our flagship product, the more profitable we will be (use the opportunity to focus on launching our higher-margin next generation for which we never managed to get proper management attention before).

You may have noticed that this flipped approach to assessing causal relations, although not identical, is a more generalized form of the well-known tactic of turning a problem into a solution. The UDP approach is wider, and it very rarely fails to deliver solutions, but even when it doesn’t, it invariably leads to fresh perspectives about your predicament.

In future installments we will analyze specific case studies to demonstrate in further detail how these tools can be used and converted into daily habits. Meanwhile, please try this at home!

[The tools described in this post have several progenitors. They are mainly based on the PhD work of Roni Horowitz, who in turn was strongly influenced by the work of both Genrich Altshuler and Karl Duncker, with contributions from Jacob Goldenberg and the SIT team as it used and refined the tools in 25 years of work. No one but me is to blame for the philosophical comments; they are my fault only.]

An Effective Tool for Problem Solving – Part 1

Published date: October 3, 2021 в 12:26 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Problem Solving

If you come to a problem-solver and say: “I have problem X”, most chances are that they will tell you to search for the Root Cause (RC) – a basic rule of Problem Solving (PS). I want to propose that in most cases looking for the RC is not an effective nor an efficient way of going about PS. I will then present the basic principles of an alternative approach, which I believe can very often be more useful.

Here is a definition of RC from Wikipedia:

A root cause is an initiating cause of either a condition or a causal chain that leads to an outcome or effect of interest. The term denotes the earliest, most basic, ‘deepest’, cause for a given behavior; most often a fault.

And this one, from ASQ.org, refers specifically to the common usage of the term in the context of Quality:

A root cause is defined as a factor that caused a nonconformance and should be permanently eliminated through process improvement. The root cause is the core issue—the highest-level cause—that sets in motion the entire cause-and-effect reaction that ultimately leads to the problem(s).

All this speaks to a widespread intuition: that in order to solve a problem one must look beyond the symptoms, and dig deeper “to its roots”. In fact, since the term seems to have been in circulation at least since the late 19th century or beginning of the 20th, its existence may even have contributed to the strength of this common intuition. So, what’s not to like?

To demonstrate the limitations of searching for a RC, and to demonstrate an alternative, let us use an example that appears in 6Sigma.us, as an example of using a common tool for RC analysis, named “The 5 Why’s” and attributed to Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota.

The problem statement does not appear explicitly but presumably it is: “My car won’t start”.

  1. Q – Why won’t your car start? A – There’s no gas.
  2. Q – Why is there no gas? A – You didn’t buy any.
  3. Q – Why didn’t you buy any? A – You didn’t have any cash at the time.
  4. Q – Why didn’t you have the cash to buy gas? A – You lost your wallet.
  5. Q – Why did you lose your wallet? A – There’s a hole in your coat pocket.

The RC here is, obviously, the hole in the Problem Owner’s (PO) coat pocket, and obviously, it makes a lot of sense to fix this hole, if PO doesn’t want to be in the same predicament again or suffer even worse consequences. But let us look at a different approach, that starts out very similarly but then diverges dramatically from RC analysis.

We write the initial problem statement in the middle of the page, and, before we ask the Why questions, we ask, five times: “So what?”. Then, we add the 5 Why questions and their answers below, as in a RC analysis. The resulting chain could look like this:

 

This series of causes and effects, which we call a UDP Chain, where UDP stands for Undesired Phenomena, seems like just a longer version of the same list produced by the 5 Why’s, but conceptually, it is a total rebuttal of some crucial aspects in the RC approach, resulting in an approach that addresses the crucial faults of RC analysis:

1)   The Problem Statement is not “the problem”. It is the intuitive manifestation of the pain felt by the PO (problem owner) at a given moment. More often than not, we will discover, through building the UDP Chain, that what needs to be fixed is elsewhere, or in several “elsewheres”.

2)   The reason we start building upwards, rather than starting with the Why’s going downwards is twofold:

a.    It gives a measure of the importance or urgency of the problem, thus providing an evaluation of the prices one is willing to pay for a solution.

b.    You may discover that what you perceived as a problem isn’t in fact something you need to change. I personally find this the most useful part of the exercise, when I use it on my personal problems (my 2nd grader refuses to study math, so what?, so her teacher will be angry, so what? so she will fail her this year? so what? So she will have to work much harder next year, great – let that be a lesson for her, excellent, I don’t need to do anything about it now).

3)   The UDP chain opens up an entire range of entry points to solve the problem. In the Part 2 of this article, we will introduce an important tool for finding solutions based on the UDP chain analysis, but independently of which specific tools you will use, the UDP parses the problem situation in such a way that you have now at least 12 entry points or angles of attack to try to solve it. The worst you can do at this stage is to narrow the search to one specific link, whether root or other – there is absolutely no reason to deal with the hole in the pocket first!

4)   Even if you do want to focus your efforts on a single link, there may be very good reasons to focus on others, rather than the “root” link, depending on various factors, for instance:

a.    If you are there, with the car, at the side of the road, the state of your coat pocket is undoubtedly very low on your priorities. You may, instead, wish to get hold of some money, or some gasoline, or find someone to replace you at the meeting.

b.    The coat might have been lent to you by someone and you don’t intend to ever see it again, so why bother about the hole?

c.    Your problem is that you tend to lose your wallet constantly. Today it was through the hole, but other times because you just forgot it, or left it in the office or whatever. Fixing the whole wouldn’t really be very helpful then.

d.    In the same vein, you can easily imagine how to continue this series of scenarios in which the RC is low on the PO’s priorities. Why direct their thinking to it then?

5) What determines the level in which the problem should be tackled are two parameters:

a.    Define which is the lowest link that you are not willing to accept and make sure you break the chain somewhere below that point. Example: if the only thing I care about is not having to stay at the office late to impress my boss, then I can break the chain at any link below #12 – that means I can tackle any of the 12 links below! Even link 11, meaning that in principle I could still be stuck with the car, be late for the meeting, incur the boss’s rage, and just find a way to show that I am trying harder without having to stay late. But obviously, if I am not ready to live with the fact that his boss will be dissatisfied with him (#10), then the chain should be broken below that link. Hailing a cab there and then is a solution that comes to mind (lock the car well before you do that). But note that we are still very far from the RC, and it may very well be the case that we don’t have any reason to go that deep because we can find a better, faster solution, much easier to achieve and much closer to our pain point. If, for instance, you are hurrying to a wedding after work, you may decide that #5 is your lowest acceptable link – “no gas in the car’s tank” in which case, forget your meeting or boss, and make sure you somehow get gas into the tank and then get moving.

b.    Define what is the lowest link that is still within reasonable scope for intervention by the PO. You should break the chain anywhere from the link and upward. Are you a psychologist? Do you have the authority – ethically or organizationally speaking – of dealing with a certain phenomenon? Do you have the expertise? Make sure you work on a link or links that are within your scope in all these senses.

c.    The combination of this ceiling and floor give you the Solution Domain – this is the scope within which you are searching for solutions by breaking the chain.

6)   Chains of cause and effect tend very often to be cyclical rather than linear. Imagine that you ask another Why? (link #0) and come up with “He doesn’t have time to fix his coat”. In this case the top SoWhat (#11), which states that he needs to stay later in the office every day, is obviously the cause for #0, thus closing the loop and creating a (somewhat vicious) cycle.

 

 

In sum, although searching for a Root Cause can be useful at times, we recommend a method that both opens more possibilities and enables you to select the most effective and efficient course of action rather than necessarily tackling “the root”. In 25 years of experience using this approach we have found that very often just mapping the UDP Chain will usually either:

1)   Liberate you from the need of taking action (so what? Nothing);

2)   Emphasize the variety of ways that your team understands the problem state;

3)   Point to the real versus perceived pain points;

4)   Mark the scope of the problem and its potential solutions;

5)   Open a variety of angles of attack.

And – TEASER AHEAD – a UDP Chain sets the stage for finding a variety of solutions using Qualitative Change tools, to be described in Part 2.

A Systematic Approach to Process Efficiency

Published date: September 29, 2021 в 6:08 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Strategy

There are quite a few methods to enhance productivity and increase process efficiency. Some notable examples are 6-Sigma, Kaizen and Lean. Most of these methods are highly effective at identifying waste and redundancy, and pointing out where you need to cut, focus, or streamline. This leads very often to substantial savings and gains in efficiency. Unfortunately, as much as these methods excel at identifying where to save, they are seldom helpful in prescribing how to do so. When it comes to leading their users to ideate about potential alternatives or solutions to current wasteful practices, practically all productivity methods resort to… Brainstorming.

But, as research and practice has repeatedly and consistently established, Brainstorming is not an effective means for generating truly novel yet viable solutions.

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In other posts [click here if you want to receive a copy] like “Busting the Brainstorming Myth” and “How Effective is DT as an Innovation Methodology?”, we have described some of the major faults of the BS method for ideation. Here, we will just briefly mention that BS tends to produce either unexciting ideas that are not new, or exciting ideas that are not viable. This is the point SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking comes into play. As opposed to BrainStorming, SIT is a structured process calling for disciplined ideation within well-defined constraints. By changing the problem solver’s mindset, this process consistently leads to novel and effective approaches to problems and challenges.

Paradoxically, SIT requires that you focus on existing resources and capabilities (which is why the method is also referred to as “Innovating Inside the Box”), learning to use them in novel ways by breaking your so-called “Mental Fixednesses”. The method is therefore especially apt for constrained environments or systems defined by strict engineering requirements.

Here are some brief case studies that highlight how relatively small shifts in perspective, achieved through a structured process, can lead to substantially increased process efficiency.

HAVI –  Opening a Bottleneck with No Additional Resources

 

HAVI is one of Asia Pacific’s largest logistics companies. At their depots in China, HAVI faced a consistent problem: delivery truck arrival times were frustratingly unpredictable, causing a slew of issues. For example, sometimes multiple trucks would arrive at the same time. And, since Havi had a limited number of truck unloaders, truck drivers spent unnecessary time waiting for their trucks to be unloaded. To avoid this process bottleneck, HAVI needed to find a way to streamline the unloading process.

HAVI considered various solutions, but none were cost-effective. They considered, for example, extending the warehouse to add docking space for extra trucks, but realized this renovation project would be prohibitively expensive and not necessarily tackle the workforce aspect of the problem. They also considered hiring a temporary workforce during busy periods. However, since the busy periods were often unpredictable, it would be impossible to foresee when the workers would be needed.

The Right Incentive

Using SIT’s thinking tool, Task Unification, which assigns a new and additional task to an existing resource, HAVI came up with a creative idea to improve their warehouse’s process efficiency: truck drivers arriving to the warehouse were offered the option of unloading the trucks themselves. Initially, this idea seemed totally untenable, as the drivers, it was believed, would certainly refuse to take on an additional and arduous task. But, after giving the option some thought, the Problem Solving Team realized that, given the right framework, the drivers would actually be more than happy to comply. With less downtime on the job, additional pay for the extra task, and more control over their schedule, the drivers had everything to gain.

 

By incentivizing drivers to unload the trucks and paying them for the time they spent unloading, HAVI utilized its existing workforce to solve its problem. Since drivers no longer needed to wait for unloaders, they could unload their trucks immediately, resulting in reduced time and quick turnover. By using SIT’s structured thinking process, HAVI managed to save time and money, while eliminating a problematic bottleneck.

Teva Pharmaceuticals – Doubling Production Capacity – Now!

Teva, an Israeli pharmaceutical company, experienced a surge in demand for a specific drug, to which we will refer here as Drug A, when a rival company went bankrupt and could no longer deliver it to market. As new clients approached Teva for Drug A, the company realized that they had an incredible opportunity to grow their business quickly. However, to do so, and ensure retained interest from the new clients, Teva had to double capacity in two weeks’ time. The issue, however, was that the manufacturing line for Drug A was already working at full capacity. While prior attempts to increase capacity had resulted in a 15% production increase, Teva needed a more drastic change.

Drug Cocktail?

 

In order to double production quickly without significantly changing their process, Teva turned to SIT and its systematic methodology. Using SIT’s Closed World Principle, which states that solutions to a problem can be generated focusing on existing resources, the Problem Solving Team collectively listed all the elements within the production line and its vicinity (the production line’s “Closed World”).

Through a mapping process, the Teva team first identified that the greatest challenge in dramatically increasing production with the current production line (let’s call it PL-A) was one of the stages of the process, Stage 7. At the same time, the team also came to an initially counter-intuitive concept: that they could consider as part of the Closed World, another, adjacent line: PL-B, in which a different drug was being produced.

By analyzing each of these production lines and their processes, the Teva team arrived at a novel idea. It appeared that PL-B had a stage that was very similar to PL-A’s Stage 7 (the bottleneck). But, as opposed to the situation in PL-A, this stage in PL-B was actually working at only half its capacity! The ensuing solution was as simple as it was surprising: the team redesigned the PL-A process so that immediately after Stage 6, half of the ‘material’ on the Production Line was diverted to the neighboring PL-B, taking advantage of PL-B’s excess capacity in the relevant stage. After finishing Stage 7, the material was immediately rediverted back to PL-A to continue the regular Production Line A process to its conclusion (see diagram below). By using the adjacent Production Line’s (PL-B) capacity, Teva was able to double production with a minimal investment. This occurred almost immediately, giving Teva exactly what the company needed to match market demand for its drug.

 

Complement your Toolbox with a Counter-Intuitive Approach to Productivity and Process Efficiency

Most companies strive to improve process efficiency and enhance productivity. There is always some way to function faster, use fewer resources, or produce less waste. Traditional methods are effective in leading you to do so – but only to a certain extent. These methods usually point out where you need to act but fall short in helping you come up with novel ideas of how to do so. Using specific thinking tools and principles, SIT can do just that, helping you take full advantage of existing resources in surprising and innovative ways, ultimately leading to Productivity Through Innovation.

Four Steps for an Impactful Session

Published date: September 26, 2021 в 1:25 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation

I am definitely not a charismatic speaker. My voice doesn’t project much, my physical presence is underwhelming and the energy that emanates from me is more soothing than exciting, as I’ve been told (they meant it in a nice way😊). Despite all the above-mentioned handicaps, I very often deliver what are considered very effective talks, courses or workshops. When I teach in universities, I am consistently rated very high in terms of student satisfaction (which doesn’t mean much, but helps me set up the argument for this post) and in the good old days I presented in conferences appearing to impact audiences. How is this possible?

Part of the explanation is the content, obviously. Easier to engage your audience when your topic is innovation. Yet, I believe that at least part of the explanation lies with the model I use, which is in no way rocket science-ish, but is based on common sense and plenty of experience. According to the model, in order to create a tangible impact on participants in a session, a speaker should take them through 4 STAGES. Note, by the way, that I refer to “participants”, rather than “listeners”. To achieve meaningful learning, participants should actively move between the following 4 stages, not just by listening.

Stage 1: Rock the Boat, Unsettle

The first station in the journey is often missing in talks or workshops, mainly because it can be a somewhat unpleasant experience for the audience. In this stage, you must create among your listeners a sense of dissatisfaction, or at least unease with their current status. For example, if your topic is innovation, and you believe, as we (in SIT) do, that a key message in this context is the importance of cognitive fixedness as a barrier to innovation, you will want to start by demonstrating to each and every person in the audience that he or she themselves suffer from some kind of fixedness. Just hitting them with, say, a mathematical puzzle won’t do the job, since most of the audience will just shrug it off as irrelevant (and rightly so). In a similar vein, jointly making fun of the mythological Patent Office director who is supposed to have claimed in the end of the 19th century that no more inventions were needed is merely a cheap way of pleasing your audience with the false feeling that some stupid bureaucrat in the 19th century had fixedness, and we can mock him from our superior vantage point. Instead, challenge them with something that will readily demonstrate: a) that each and every one of them suffers from fixedness, and b) that you are exactly in the same boat with them (admit it, your only advantage over them is that you came to the session prepared).

In this stage you are creating the cracks through which new information and – more important – novel beliefs and sensations will start penetrating the minds of your audience. Without it, the chances that they will open themselves to a real change are slim. With it, there is some possibility that this will happen, provided you can pull off the other three stages as well. But a caveat is in place. Making the audience uneasy is a risky move: some people can actually get up and leave (happened to me in a corporation in the US when I declared that I will not be using a PPT presentation in my session), others can mentally switch off or decide that they hate your guts. The goal, then, is that they feel disturbed by the content but not so perturbed that they disconnect or lose their trust in you.

Stage 2: True, it’s tough, but there is a horizon

After feeling a bit down in the first stage, your audience needs a boost. They need to feel hope. This is, therefore, the time to share positive and even uplifting examples. Whereby in the first stage you focused on a problem, now is the time to demonstrate solutions. In the example I used for Stage 1, you will move from demonstrating that you, me, everyone has fixedness (scary!) to exemplifying that fixedness can be overcome (phew!), for example by showing an elegant solution to an interesting puzzle you shared in the first stage. This needs to be handled with care as well, because you are showing that a solution can be found, but still haven’t described HOW.

Stage 3: Not only are there solutions, but there are tools to reach them

This is where the real work happens, and the official takeaway is supplied – you present the tools, which are often the reason why participants attended your session in the first place. This is considered, as if by definition, the most practical part of your session. In reality, though, the shock you delivered in Stage 1 is probably the biggest gift that a participant can receive. A tool without mindset change is often useless, while a realization of the limits of your current thinking can many times be an important first step for habit-changing. Still, it is better to bow to popular demand and supply tools, and indeed, if you do a good job, participants will then be able to apply them post-session. In our example from Stages 1 and 2, I would at this point demonstrate one of what we call our “Thinking Tools”, designed to break the fixedness to which we called attention at the outset. BUT, this post-session implementation will typically happen only provided that you deliver a proper Stage 4.

 Stage 4: Not only are there techniques and tools, but YOU yourself can leave here and use them

This stage is also often overlooked, or its importance underestimated. Paradoxically, the more charismatic the speaker and impressive the show, the lower the probability of implementation by the audience (yes, you say to yourself, here is the uncharismatic author of the article rationalizing his situation😊). “Yes, sure,” our participant says to herself or him, “All this is well and good for you, rock star, but what has it got to do with poor old un-innovative me?” This is the part in which the participant needs to be convinced that all this good stuff s/he has been hearing about can actually be useful in their reality with their abilities. The most effective way of achieving this objective is allowing the participants to experience your tools or technique there and then, allowing them to feel at least some measure of success. You can also tell them of others, similar in as many respects as you can to them, who have crossed the bridge. This is also often not sufficient, so the last part of Stage 4 is where you lead each of your participants to commit to a specific action that will allow them to bring to bear their learning in the near future on a real-life issue. In our fixedness example we would ask them to think of a specific topic or issue that they would approach using this tool, imagine a partner or partners with whom they would like to try this out, and – if possible – even send them a message right there, during the session, and set a time to talk.

These are the 4 Stages – they are not very easy to follow, but also not beyond the reach of any of our readers here. The catch is that if your main goal is to get a standing ovation (TED-style) or high grades on a feedback form, or just enjoy smiles all around, then the recipe presented here is probably not your best choice. But, if you wish your session to lead to a concrete impact on a large percentage of your audience, following these four stages greatly increases your probability to succeed.

There is also a bonus to adopting the 4 Stage model: with some adaptations, this model can also serve as a general blueprint for driving organizational change. You can find some hints in our articles on Errors of Exclusion: Two Blind Spots when Planning your Innovation Initiative; On Indicators and Measuring Innovation – Part 1; On Indicators and Measuring Innovation – Part 2 More on this topic in a future article.

How Most Trainings Fail – Part 2 or How to Design an Effective (behavioral change) Innovation Training – Part 2

Published date: September 19, 2021 в 1:22 pm

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Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation,Organizational Innovation

In the first installment of this article (click here to read), I claimed that most trainings that purport to change participants’ behavior fail to do so. I then mentioned 6 points that are in our (SIT’s) view crucial to the success of a training course, while emphasizing that even the best of courses would probably fail to achieve its desired impact unless it is part of a wider, big(ger)-picture program. In this part – #2 – we present 6 additional observations, this time about how an excellently-designed course can be embedded into such a comprehensive program.

1)    Immediate action. In my first ten years as a facilitator, I used to pepper my workshops with plenty of jokes. Once, in the outskirts of Madrid, I even got into a simultaneous match against 15 ad professionals from the local BBDO agency, in which they would take turns to each tell a joke and challenge me to retort with a related one, which I did until their stock was exhausted. They asked me to reveal my secret for remembering so many jokes, and, as a bonus to you – loyal reader – I will share it with you now, as I then did with them. The trick is that every time I heard a joke, I immediately found an opportunity, if possible even two, to repeat it. The same rule applies to participants in a training in which they are taught the use of a tool. First, obviously, they need to apply the tool immediately during the course itself (we referred to that in Part 1). But although this is a necessary condition, it is far from sufficient. The more elusive rule, let’s call it Moore’s Law of Application, is: for every week in which the alumnus of a course does not use a tool she was taught, the probability that it will become a part of her toolbox decreases by 50%. OK, it’s not really that mathematical, but there is no doubt that the principle is valid, and the reason is not only the fading nature of memories. Just like jumping into the water from a diving board, the more you ponder the possibility, the more frightening the prospect of actually performing the action. Build into the very structure of the course an opportunity (or several) to apply the learnings immediately after it. Do not leave this to the initiative of the participants.

2)     Create a community. Continuing with the sporting metaphors: no need to elaborate on how much easier it is to stick to a training discipline when you are doing it within a group, rather than pulling yourself out of bed at 5:30 am to run in the snow by yourself. Creating a dynamic and active community of practitioners is a formidable challenge, to which we will dedicate an entire article (click here to be notified, meanwhile, 3 points to consider:

a)     The best time to start crystalizing a group of people into a community is during the course itself – it is too late if you put your mind to creating a community after the course ends. Try to give the participants as many opportunities as possible to get to know each other within the course, whether remote or in physical presence. This may feel like a waste of time, that could instead be spent on delivering more “content”, but in fact it is usually the best use of participants’ time, especially if it is integrated with practicing or discussing the content (see Part 1 for thoughts on the “how” vs. the “what” of a course).

b)    First steps for creating a sense of cohesion can and should be taken even before the group meets for the first time. Participants can be asked, for example, to prepare a visual presentation of themselves, or a short video that can be circulated a week before the first online session.

c)    A cool exercise we use from time to time is to randomly allocate pairs before the course and have them meet each other virtually before the session (and possibly present something jointly to the rest of the group). This combines points (b) and (c).

3)    Someone with official dedicated time should coordinate the follow-up, and monitor alumni’s progress and needs. This person can distribute materials, encourage communication, help share success stories, detect need for support, measure levels of activity and results, and more. Since most participants of an innovation training will not typically be dedicating their full time to the topic, it is important that, at least for one person, making sure that course learnings are implemented is defined as part of their day job.

4)    As part of the program, you should conduct an activity with the direct managers of all participants. Sending a trainee back to their job without preparing their boss is counter-productive. Our experience shows that the single most crucial factor in a trainee’s performance is the attitude of their direct manager. The good news is, that managers can be trained to exhibit behaviors that encourage a subordinate’s innovative activities, and avoid those that stifle them.

5)    Our experience shows that conducting a 2 or 3 day course as a stand-alone is hardly ever effective. That is why we recommend structures like 3+1+1+1 or 2+2+1 or 3+2+1 etc. The +1 or +2 days additional training sessions should be devoted both to learning additional tools and – more importantly – to share experiences in utilizing the methodology, success stories, and challenges. Trainers should help solve common problems, while the participants support and learn from each other.

6)    In addition to, in parallel, and integrated into the training, participants should be assigned (or take on themselves) specific implementable projects, receiving support to complete them utilizing the skills that are being taught in the training. This serves as proof to participants that what they are being taught actually works, it also helps filter out trainers whose syllabus doesn’t really do the job, it gives trainees the opportunity to involve (and shine in front of) their colleagues and it offers the extremely valuable opportunity to put learnings into practice as soon as possible.

Adhering to these “Training Dozen” points (these 6 and the 6 in Part 1) may sound like a big headache, requiring what is often considered to be an excessive outlay and wasted time. But:

  1. Consider the true objectives of your training program. If it is intended mainly to “enrich” participants, you need not give these suggestions an additional thought. But, if your aim is to release back into the organization a group of alumni that will be active and generate impact, ignoring them is a grave risk.
  2. Although it seems as if this kind of program requires huge resources, they are actually pretty small in comparison with investments made in most companies on IT, machines, M&As, software and other areas. If you truly believe that “our people are our most important asset”, what is more important than maximizing this important asset’s yield?

Happily, in the past 3-4 years we are seeing a constant and steep rise in the number of companies that realize that innovation training programs should be substantial, with serious management backing and a comprehensive outlook. Apparently, experience is teaching the field that easy, inexpensive one-off training programs do not deliver the expected value. Luckily, there is also enough positive experience, both online and in person, to enable companies to run well designed successful programs.

How Most Trainings Fail – Part 1

Published date: September 12, 2021 в 1:05 pm

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Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation,Organizational Innovation

(In honor of my favorite book on education: How Children Fail by John Holt, which merits an entire post by itself. Click here to be notified when it comes out)

Many training programs are probably successful. Still, my claim is that most trainings that are directed at modifying trainee’s behavior tend to fail, and the primary reason is that training sessions, by themselves, are not an effective means to create behavioral change. In addition, many training programs suffer from one or usually several defects.

Now that I have hopefully called attention to the gravity of the situation, we can restart the post on a much more positive and constructive tone.

How to Design an Effective Innovation Training – Part 1

(behavioral change training)

There are many outstanding training professionals out there. They can design and deliver interesting, engaging and enriching training sessions, and receive very high scores on trainee’s evaluation forms. Yet, if you visit trainees, say 6 months after the training session, you will rarely encounter profound and lasting behavioral change. In our view, there are several important conditions for this often sought-after but rarely-achieved result. I will mention a few of these principles below, focused on innovation training, but, in fact, relevant to any training that strives to change people’s behavior in a corporate or organizational context. We will address two levels:

I. The training sessions (or course, or webinar);

II. The training program as a whole.

This post – Part 1 – deals with training sessions themselves, in Part 2 you will find some thoughts on the bigger picture.

I. Training sessions

  1. Prioritize the HOW over the WHAT. As made famous by Michael Polanyi (philosopher and all-round Hungarian/errant-Jew intellectual) there is a crucial distinction between knowing that and knowing how. You can, say, be an expert on the mechanics of the operation of a bicycle and still fall every time you try to ride one, while, obviously, most kids who can zip by you easily on their bike do not have the faintest notion of how it operates. Their knowledge, argues Polanyi, is tacit rather than explicit. Behavioral change is based on tacit knowledge, which is why you should be careful not to define a training only by its “content”. What percentage of a bike learning course for your kids would you want to be dedicated to explanations? If your goal is that they know how to ride a bike, the answer is probably “close to zero”. Review your next training session through this lens, by asking of each item in the syllabus: will it teach them how to do something? What?
  2. Limit your content. When we started to deliver training sessions, about 25 years ago, clients would demand that we teach all our 5 basic tools in each two- or three-day training. It seemed to make sense – they were paying what they considered to be a substantial sum of money, their people were kept away from their day jobs for 2 or 3 days, they wanted their money’s worth of training. If we tried to argue that it made more sense to teach only 4 of the 5, the feeling was that we were trying to keep some merchandise from them because we wanted to sell it to them later, at an additional cost. It took us several years and hundreds or thousands of trainees to accumulate sufficient confidence to insist on limiting the content. Today we rarely agree to teach more than 3 of these tools in a single training course. It is not only a question of having enough time – obviously the more time you waste on teaching additional content the less time you have for the crucial task of practicing how to use the content – experience shows that the more tools a beginner has in their toolbox, the harder it will be for them to select a tool in a specific situation and the less focused they will be in learning to master a specific tool. Optimal scenario: learn 2-3 tools max in one training, go out, apply, build your confidence while honing your skills on the go, and only then – come back to learn 1-2 additional tools.
  3. The magic number 16. This is simply a very effective number of participants to have in a training session – offline or on. Allows you to work in pairs, 4 teams of 4, two teams of 8, enough energy in room or zoom, even if 1-2 don’t make it to the session that day. As a provider – be firm, insist on capping the number, resist the temptation to agree on enlarging the team in exchange for charging extra for surplus participants. As client of the training – resist the urge to push 2,3 ,4 additional participants to supposedly “get more” for your budget. You end up getting way less (20 less-than-optimally-impacted participants is much less than 16-strongly-impacted alumni).
  4. Send tentacles into the future. Everyone (hopefully, by now) knows that what happens after the training is as important or more than what happens during. Build this future into the training itself by weaving into the activities what I call “tentacles into the future”, by which I mean tasks and experiences that directly affect what will happen to a participant post-event. Examples: send your future self a message, set meetings to complete specific tasks with a partner, write a message to a colleague who is not participating in the training to sell them on an idea you have just come up with, design a plan (including date and participants) for running a session based on what you learned, etc.
  5. Imagine the “Alumnus Journey”. It is nowadays common practice, when trying to sell, to imagine and craft a detailed “customer journey”. In sales, it can save you from “wishful selling”, which is sending out messages that somehow, hopefully will drive clients to purchase your wares even if you’re not exactly clear about how this is supposed to play out. The same goes for training: the fact that participant X successfully learned a specific tool or skill does not at all imply that they will actually use it. Spend time and thought on visualizing the precise path to implementation and make sure your course refers to all expected obstacles. Example: about 14 years ago we discovered that many alumni of our Innovation Coach courses felt very comfortable using some of the tools we taught them when they found themselves in the right situation, but still very few of them did. The barrier, it turned out, was that they didn’t know how to even arrive at the right situation. To help get them over this hurdle, we created a module named “From Story to Session” that trained them in the gentle art of converting a proverbial water cooler conversation (what’s Zoomish for water-cooler, I wonder?) into a structured session in which they could apply their newly acquired tools. (More on the specifics of training Innovation Coaches, in an upcoming post. Click here to receive a notification)
  6. The Full Monty. Most important: remember that the training session(s) are only part of a wider training effort. Careful! It is relatively easy to plan, say, a 2-day training course and agree that “there will be preparations and follow-up”. But when you do that, you miss the point, as you are still treating the training as a course with a before and after that support it. You are therefore only paying lip service to the notion that what comes after the course is at least as important as the course itself and thus must be built into the course from the outset. In our next post, Part 2 of How Most Trainings Fail, we will discuss training from the point of view of the bigger picture.

Driving Organizational Innovation – Roles and Responsibilities Part 2

Published date: September 5, 2021 в 2:00 pm

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Category: Innovation

In Part 1 of this series, we shared a table detailing roles and responsibilities, with several caveats:

  1. Not all roles need to be defined in all organizations;
  2. Names of roles vary across organizations, as do the demarcations between territories and responsibilities;
  3. Role definitions can and should be dynamic, changing with the development of the innovation program or drive;
  4. Roles can start as part-time activities and develop into full-time, or they can start as FT and settle down into PT when processes flow more independently and require less external pushing and driving.

As roles and processes are being defined, organizations often ask themselves whether governance and responsibility over innovation should be centralized into a corporate entity dedicated exclusively to innovation or better be distributed throughout the organization. The table below assumes a hybrid approach: some of the functions are centralized (Sponsor, VP Innovation, SC, Coordinator), while others are expressly dispersed (coaches, managers, owners etc.). This structure is designed to make the most of both variants, each with its pros and cons.

Advantages of the centralized approach:

  1. More efficient in terms of budget and headcount, by avoiding the replication of efforts in numerous divisions or territories;
  2. Allows the creation of a dedicated team of high-caliber experts in innovation who can then share their knowledge and expertise throughout the organization;
  3. Facilitates quicker and easier access to top decision makers and purse-controllers;
  4. Makes it easier to align with company strategies and design innovation policies according to the big organizational picture;
  5. Some activities, such as incubation of startups, may require isolation from daily activities, which is easier to guarantee outside of the business units;
  6. Promotes cross-pollination, knowledge transfer and use of shared resources between diverse units, by becoming an innovation hub.

Advantages of the distributed approach:

  1. Innovation is perceived as an aspect of the “real business” as opposed to an impractical theoretical exercise of “the suits” in corporate;
  2. Goes in hand with the dictum of “Don’t do innovation, but rather innovate in what you do”, because innovation is happens where the organization’s core activity takes place;
  3. When business units need to pay for innovation activities (even if, as we recommend, they are sometimes subsidized by corporate) there is an immediate feedback loop, since they will agree to pay only for those activities that generate tangible value for them;
  4. The cycle – innovation-process->implementation->testing->adaptations->launch->innovation-process – is much quicker the closer one is to the field, which makes for a more adaptive and thus eventually more effective innovation process.

We therefore believe that a good mix of centralized and distributed roles can create an optimal structure. Below you can see the table as it appeared in Part 1, and following the table, some comments and a bit of a deeper dive into several of the roles that appear in it.

 

Some comments and tips about several of the roles:

  • iSponsor, CEO/President. At the risk of stating the obvious: we have consistently seen a strong correlation between the level of involvement and commitment of the head of an organization and the traction of an innovation drive. Although the easy route, and the policy of choice for many a CEO is to remain at the declarative level, the effective approach is to prove to the sceptic internal public, tired of bombastic initiatives that dissipate within a few months, that this time around he or she really means it. Practically speaking this requires: a) allocating budgets (money where mouth), b) participating in innovation-related meetings and activities, and, the toughest and therefore rarest of innovation-promoting behaviors, c) demonstrate that s/he themselves can change their habits and modes of thinking as expressed in (some of) their actions.
  • Steering (“Stirring”) Committee. The SC’s role is pretty obvious, we just wish to add that the adjective “stirring” is not a typo, but the expression of the idea that unlike many a SC, this one should engage both in giving directions and in rocking the boat so that other associates will be free to move and shake, challenging and changing existing structures. I wanted to write “easier said than done” but realized that this concept isn’t even easy to say, let alone do. Still, it is very much worth the effort of trying to instill this spirit in your SC which in turn will hopefully transmit it to the organization.
  • Core Steering. Just because a SC, even of the “stirring” ilk, tends to be unwieldy, and you want to have the ability to move quickly (but try not to break things(:
  • iCoach. Of all the roles mentioned in this list, the iCoach is our favorite and thus the type of role on which we spend most time and energy. (Click here to be notified when we post our 2-part series on Building a Robust Coach Community) According to our approach, a strong network/community of coaches can be the mainstay of an innovation drive. We train coaches for three main tasks:
  1. Lead what we call “mini sessions”, in which 3-5 participants spend 2-3 hours solving a problem or exploring opportunities for change, as the coach facilitates using thinking tools;
  2. Engage in what we like to call “Opportunistic Innovation”, which means unofficially injecting innovative thinking into meetings, especially when thinking is stuck in a rut, but without declaring that it is what they are doing;
  3. Become the go-to person for their immediate surroundings for all matters concerning innovation.
  • iCoach’s manager. The only role in the list for which one is not officially appointed, but finds him or herself in by dint of someone else’s official appointment. We will come back to the topic of coaches and their performance in more detail in a specific post, but here I will just mention that our experience shows that the most crucial factor in determining a coach’s level of engagement and their productivity is the type of support or lack thereof that they receive from their direct boss. This is why we currently include activities with coaches’ managers as a standard component in our coach training programs.
  • Participant/User. Without bestowing upon them an official title, reaching these guys and gals is a huge part of the goal of the entire endeavor. Companies can create innovative ideas and offerings through the efforts of small, isolated and dedicated teams, but those that wish to achieve true transformation and cultural change, will need, by definition, to reach the rank and file of the organization. In the optimal scenario, innovation skills and behaviors cascade throughout the organization through myriad activities led by all the roles listed in our table, but these activities achieve traction only through active participation of the other associates. For example, in an organization with 100,000 employees there can be 5-10 executives in key innovation-related positions, several dozen part- or full-time innovation managers throughout areas and geographies, some 1000+ coaches, and a long-term effort to reach out to the rest of the 98,000+ employees, without which the innovation impact will be limited.
  • iCoordinator. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this role (and yet it is so often underestimated) for the success of an innovation program or drive. While other, more glamorous roles, will define strategy and put it into action, someone needs to make sure that communication flows, dates are marked on calendars, activities are monitored, action items are reported when completed and all the other small details that ensure that plans are executed. This role is usually filled by an associate with administrative abilities and an admin position, but often it is an opportunity for an admin with motivation to expand her or his horizons as the job grows and develops.

There is much more to say about these roles, as well as those not detailed here, but I believe that these notes can serve as a good basis for a discussion and analysis of what you may already have in your organization and what you wish to define going forward. As usual, you are very welcome to share your thoughts, questions, suggestions and experience either as a comment to this post, or directly to me. Any inputs will enhance our knowledge and hopefully, through our work and writing, enrich others as well.

Driving Organizational Innovation – Roles and Responsibilities

Published date: August 22, 2021 в 2:00 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation,Strategy

Your organization has decided to embark on a program to boost its innovation capabilities, maybe shift the innovation culture or even try to change the organizational culture. Assuming that you will proceed in a structured approach, you will definitely ask yourself whether you need to assign specific innovation-related roles, and if so – which and how.

Like good, annoying stereotypical consultants we offer two pieces of seemingly conflicting advice:

  1. Avoid as much as possible creating a parallel governance structure, and steer away from overloading the organization with even more unnecessary bureaucracy;
  2. Make sure that specific innovation roles are defined and that at least some of them will be exercised by full time dedicated associates.

The first of these two is self-explanatory, I believe. The reason for the second is that if you rely exclusively on part timers and on a generalized motivation among the troops, innovation will simply not happen, since an associate’s “real” day job will always take precedence over their innovation assignment. A mix of part- and full-timers can do the job, provided that a proper structure is put in place and managers throughout the corporate ladder are committed to collaborate with the full-timers and support the part-timers.

The “correct” or proper structure obviously varies immensely depending on the organization implementing it. Very few organizations that I am aware of implement all the roles in the table below, and even those who do, don’t persist with all of them for a long time, mostly because not all are needed as a permanent fixture. In fact, as an organization develops and progresses in its innovation journey it will tend to need less of a supporting structure, until, in its ideal end stage, it can completely shed the structure as more and more people innovate in what they do, simply because it is ingrained in their modus operandi and their newly formed thought structures (for a useful definition of innovation, that can help understand what is it exactly that you are driving to achieve, see our post What is Innovation). But meanwhile, on the way to this elusive and lofty goal, here is the perfect, optimal, full blown, often unrealistic-but-still-useful-reference org-tree of innovation governance in a corporation.

Again, it is important to stress that:

  • This is a catalogue of many possible options, which only rarely appear in the same organization at the same time;
  • This structure obviously applies to large organizations, often multinational;
  • Terminology also varies widely. For example, the terms iAmbassador, iCatalyst, iLeader are often used interchangeably with iChampion, iCoach, iManager or even VP Innovation;
  • The hierarchical level of those holding the various roles can differ, be higher or lower than the level specified in the table, but note that – as discussed in our post Two Blind Spots – one should take care to drive innovation both from the bottom up, as well as top-down, while heeding the most important agents – middle management. The table above reflects this principle.

In spite of the variability, and the need to adapt roles and responsibilities to the specific organization, we find this list and structure useful, since all of the functions listed have a real and productive role in promoting and driving innovation in an organization. None of the roles mentioned above is make-believe, although they all need to be infused with content and meaning as they are created, and the task is often daunting, given that the person filing them will often be the first in her or his role.

Sixteen years ago, I sat with Oscar, a sad-looking and deflated manager who had just been awarded the title of innovation manager for a division of 8,000 employees. “I like the title and believe that it can be exciting,” he said. Why, then, did he look so forlorn, I asked. “In my former job, colleagues were running in and out of my office all day, my phone was incessantly ringing, everyone needed me. I had a real job. Now,” he sighed, “I’m sitting quietly in my empty office figuring out what to do.” Today, as VP Innovation of the entire 23,000-strong organization, he manages a team of 50 employees, plus several dozens of interns and students in part-time roles, playing a crucial role in the mother company’s ongoing transformation. His team also lends support to the company’s 1200 trained Innovation Coaches, not all of whom are currently active, but many of which have leading roles in promoting innovation in their respective units (click here to be notified about our future posts on Creating an Innovation Coach Community).  One could cynically interpret this development in terms of Parkinson’s Law – a new bureaucracy nourishing itself and creating useless jobs, but on the contrary, they are constantly being monitored, their results measured according to agreed-upon indicators (see our posts on Measuring Innovation (Part 1 and Part 2) and found to be greatly contributing to the corporation’s growth and profitability. Time and again we find that, when correctly defined and executed, an innovation governance structure can be the key to drive innovation effectively throughout an organization.

In Part 2 of this nano-series on Roles and Responsibilities, we will dive into some of the roles mentioned in the table above, discuss characteristics of those individuals who can fulfill the tasks and point out some recommended dos and don’ts when defining and performing them.

5 Tips for Running an Excellent Innovation Award (or at least minimizing damages of a lousy one)

Published date: August 15, 2021 в 12:30 pm

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Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation,Organizational Innovation

I hate competitions and awards. Some say it’s because I’m not sufficiently competitive, others will consider it a sign that I am too competitive to consider losing. Be that as it may, experience has mostly confirmed my suspicion of the genre. We’ve seen competitions that burnt up hundreds of working days and resulted mainly in frustrated applicants who didn’t win. Other competitions run out of steam after one or two editions, or become a chore that employees grudgingly collaborate with for fear of retaliation. On the other hand, I must admit that introducing an innovation competition or award in a company or organization can be beneficial in several ways, some more obvious than others:

  1. Certain associates who otherwise would not bother to offer a novel idea or embark on an innovative initiative, may do so in the hopes of winning;
  2. Teams may be formed to tackle the challenge jointly thus promoting collaboration;
  3. If the prize is substantial, it can serve to communicate management’s true commitment to innovation;
  4. If the competition culminates in a grand event, it can be an opportunity to put innovation in the organizational spotlight;
  5. If successful, a competition can serve to showcase an organization’s abilities to its stakeholders. Competitions can be excellent PR opportunities;

These and other, less lofty reasons (egos involved, power struggles, etc.) can definitely tip the scales` and lead an organization to launch an innovation competition. This post refers to internal awards or competitions rather than those that are open to the public. Considering some of the following five points can increase the probability of making this kind of activity successful.

1. Ideas or achievements? In most cases, for an internal competition, we strongly recommend the latter.

  • Awards for ideas can be useful to create deal-flow for an internal VC or accelerator. You set aside some funds and turn to the public (or your employees) to uncover ideas that can be developed into startups, whether to be developed internally or to be spun off.
  • Awards for innovative achievements, rather than mere ideas, are much more conducive to actual implemented results. In order to even qualify for consideration, the applicant cannot just present an idea, but must also make sure it is implemented. A much more challenging task, but also much more useful to the organization.

On balance, therefore, for most cases we recommend that participants compete on achievements rather than ideas: they are easier to evaluate and they communicate the message that what the company is after are results, rather than only concepts.

2. How do you define which applications can be considered legitimate innovations? For this, we turn to our definition of innovation (to read the post), by requiring that associates submitting achievements should demonstrate:

  • The impact of what was achieved (a product, a process, a new strategy, etc.), as quantitatively as possible;
  • The fixedness (or several) that had to be broken in order to arrive at the impact, as specifically as possible;

3. Should the call for application be completely open? On one hand: why not? You can send out a call to any associate to submit any achievement in any field, given that it complies with the two abovementioned criteria. On the other hand, we have found that it is useful to nudge or direct applications, limiting possibilities and thus increasing focus and improving quality. You can do so in one or more of the following ways (and, of course, others):

  • Define a number of categories with a separate prize (or prizes) for each. For example: Marketing and Sales, Digital Technologies, Sustainability, Organizational Culture, etc., according to the organization’s strategic priorities;
  • In order to break professional silos, you can require that applications can be submitted only with the participation of, say, both R&D and Commercial. The requirement can be adapted to the characteristics of the organization and/or the silos you wish to break. In any case, when you accept only achievements rather than ideas, applications will naturally tend to be submitted by teams rather than individuals, promoting (by definition) teamwork, but not guaranteeing cross-silo collaboration, which can be achieved through specific requirements like those mentioned above.
  • Chairperson’s (President’s) Challenge: for certain organizations, we have found, a motivating and goal-sharpening way to kick-off a competition is through what is often called “The President’s Challenge”. This requires that top management spend time and effort to select one or several challenges whose solution can have a strong impact on the organization, and then publish their conclusions in the form of a brief. The down side of this format is that it excludes many potential ideas and initiatives from competing, but this loss is more than offset, in some organizational cultures, by: 1) the extra effort invested by contestants when a demand comes directly from the top, and 2) the power of a coordinated effort of many minds to tackle a specific problem with a large potential payoff.

4. The jury – it is recommended to assemble a jury combining high level executives from the organization, including the President or CEO, with external experts. Participation of top executives from the organization is usually the strongest motivator, for obvious reasons. But external judges can play important supporting roles. First, they confer a sense of importance and gravitas on the proceedings, second, they are useful for PR, establishing your company as a reference for innovation (if you deserve the title), and third, if selected wisely, they can contribute a useful external perspective and relevant references from other industries. A fourth reason is that this type of invitation can be an opportunity to strengthen ties with suppliers, other players in the ecosystem and sometimes even clients.

5. Prizes come in many forms and monetary values. A general rule of thumb we tend to use is that prizes for innovation work best the further they are from purely monetary compensation and the nearer they are to the professional and personal needs of innovators. Motivating examples can range from the modest (a voucher for an interesting course) to the extravagant (a 5-day exploration trip for the winning teams to an exotic and challenging location for innovation-by-adventure), and from the purely professional (vouchers for simulation experts and designers to further develop your ideas) to the more personal (a dinner or weekend activity with you spouse and maybe the kids, to compensate for all those extra hours you spent working on this project instead of being with them).

 

In summary: do we recommend that you set up an innovation competition or award in your organization? Yes, we do. But with a caveat: although the concept seems pretty straightforward, it is probably easier to get it wrong than right, unless much care is taken with the details. I believe our 5 tips can serve you as a good starting point, and I am sure there are many others that you, our readers, are aware of. It would be excellent if you shared some with us in this space.

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