Organizational Innovation

No innovation please, we’re too busy

Published date: January 19, 2022 в 12:00 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

A few weeks ago, I spoke to a high-level manager in a financial institution. We talked about his (truly) impressive activities in the field of innovation, and then he surprised me somewhat by saying: “Next year we plan to freeze innovation activities.” Since the company is not a client of ours, I wasn’t directly affected by this decision, but still, I was curious to understand the rationale. Another victim of “the Situation”, I said to myself, but to my surprise he went on to explain: “We have so many good ideas now that we need to pause with innovation and focus on implementation.” This is, in my eyes, a symptom of one of the biggest and most common misconceptions in the field; that innovation is all about coming up with ideas of what to do (products, services, whatever it is you do). The corollary of this erroneous concept is, obviously, that once you have these ideas you don’t need to be bothered with innovation any longer, all you need is to “just” implement.

In reality, the situation is nearly the opposite. The level of innovation that needs to be invested in implementation is not lower, and very often higher, than that which is required for coming up with the ideas in the first place. But this is hardly news for anyone who is involved in the day-today of innovation within a company, such as the manager mentioned above. Why, then, is the mistake so common? It is due, I think, to the fact that people tend to see innovation as a type of activity rather than a quality of performing activities; people see innovation as an answer to the question “what are you doing?” while in fact it is the answer to “how are you doing, whatever it is that you are engaged in?” To avoid this confusion, we use a practical definition:

Innovation is the ability to think and act differently to achieve your goals.

This implies, obviously, that innovation is not limited to certain kinds of activities or contexts. Rather, it is relevant, as an option, in any situation in which a person or group of persons are engaged in a mental activity of any kind. In September, I was talking to a lady who is a director-level manager in a large company. “The last thing I need now is innovation,” she said, “We’ve just finished a successful innovation project, resulting in an amazing new product idea, which I’ve been trying to convince my VP for the past 3 months to OK, but with no success. What’s the use of innovating if they are going to kill your ideas anyway?” To me, it sounded like what she most needed was innovation. From our point of view, this was a classic case of an urgent need for some problem solving, the problem obviously being the need to convince a stubborn VP. And examples of this type are abundant: a VP who doesn’t need innovation because he “just” needs to get his division organized since they keep failing at implementing the great ideas in their pipeline; and of course, the innumerable CEOs who can’t talk about innovation now, because due to “the Situation” (COVID, supply chain, whatever) they see a decrease in sales, profits disappearing, and immediate danger to cash flow. My conclusion: all those people who are too [busy, overworked, full of ideas, engaged in a huge project] to innovate, are precisely those who are most in need of a change in the way they are handling whichever “too” they are immersed in, i.e. they are in dire need of innovation.

How Innovative is a Startup?

Published date: January 5, 2022 в 4:24 pm

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Category: Organizational Innovation,Strategy

Leaders of startups will typically tell you, often with energetic arrogance, that they are perfectly happy with their team’s level of innovation. In most cases, they shouldn’t be. Why, then, are managers of startups, a mostly intelligent breed, so prone to overestimating their team’s innovative abilities?

  1. Although the title “startup” can refer, literally speaking, to any endeavor in its first stages, the term is very often used to denote an initiative led by a small number of tech-savvy founders and based around a novel idea with (hopefully) large business potential. So, almost by definition, a startup is based on innovation, or at least on the potential for innovation.
  2. A startup’s founders are very often considered brilliant by their environment, and very often they are indeed bright and creative.
  3. Successful founders often manage to raise money based on their ideas, which confirms their perception of their ability to invent stuff that others like.
  4. As startups raise funding, they tend to pay generously to founders and employees, which further feeds their sense of self-worth and their self-perception as great innovators.
  5. In the first stages of its lifecycle, a startup often focuses much of its effort and energy on R&D, creating the (misleading) equation: “we focus on R&D – therefore we are innovative”.

 

None of this is totally baseless: startups do indeed tend to be innovative to a certain extent and in certain domains, and their founders and early employees probably tend to be more creative than average. Still, in our combined 50+ years of experience, we have found that founders and members of startups suffer from fixedness just like members of any other type of organization. In fact, because of the phenomena mentioned above, they are often in danger of being even more blind to their innovation-deficiencies than most. Whether this is the reason for the dramatically high rate of failure among startups is debatable, but it is interesting to note that this dismal record is, for some strange reason, accepted as the norm. A closer look at the role of innovation in startups’ development could perhaps provide a clue to some possibilities of changing this currently accepted suboptimal performance.

The following questions can help throw light on several common blind spots, related to a startup’s innovation status. You are welcome to ask yourself these questions about the startup you have founded, work for or have invested in as a mini-diagnostic exercise.

  1. Granted, your founder is a mathematical genius, her algorithm is unique and powerful. While the team works on developing applications to the algorithm, is she thinking about the next step? Is she in love with her original invention or is she willing to pivot? Is she able to come up with the novel ideas needed for pivoting?
  2. Is all your startup’s innovation concentrated in the brain(s) of the founder(s)? Or are there additional innovative ideas being generated by others in the team?
  3. Do you have mechanisms for sharing thoughts among team members, so that ideas can be developed jointly in open and productive conversations? Or are thoughts exchanged only in improvised brainstorming sessions with members sitting around and throwing out ideas?
  4. Does anyone make sure that valuable thoughts, comments and ideas get documented?
  5. When you think of your startup as innovative, which aspects of its activity are you referring to? Only R&D? Have you fallen into the trap of thinking that innovation relates only to R&D?
  6. Have you had any innovative ideas lately about go-to-market strategy or tactics? Are you planning to offer your product only to the usual-suspect-segments? Or have you challenged yourself to think about totally different alternatives to your market promise and targets?
  7. Do you have a problem with hiring talent (probably, since most everybody has)? Have you treated this as a topic for innovation, or are you simply joining the herd by offering high salaries and other goodies to tempt promising prospects?
  8. Do you find the time to discuss less-probable future scenarios? To challenge your assumptions?
  9. As you grow, what is your strategy for maintaining the innovation level that created your startup in the first place? If you’re betting exclusively on the founders’ creativity plus recruiting creative talent, do you think it is enough?
  10. Is money constraining your ability to innovate?
  • Initially, when scarce, do you hold on desperately to what you have, afraid of “distractions” such as opening your strategy to candid assumption-breaking discussion?
  • Later, when abundant (hopefully), throwing money at your problems instead of finding innovative solutions, the hard way?

If the answers to none of these questions seem to warrant a change in your modus operandi, you are either misleading yourself or in excellent shape😊. If you do find that you may benefit from a more structured approach to your innovation strategy, here are three strong recommendations:

1) Make time to deliberately discuss how to be more, and more correctly innovative. Not by the way, not as part of your normal R&D activities, but dedicated, raising-your-head and breathing time.

2) Make sure to hold at least some of the discussion with the help of an external facilitator. They do not need to be experts in innovation, but they should know how to facilitate a tough discussion with hard-headed participants (yes, you and your team).

Once you’ve followed the first two recommendations, chances are that you are on the right track. To make sure you are, and to accelerate the change, you can follow recommendation number 3:

3)     Enlist the support of innovation experts, who follow a methodology and have accumulated plenty of experience with other companies (yes, true, we are such experts, but there are others out there as well).

You will be surprised at how much of a startup’s culture and practices down the road will be determined by taking these steps at the outset and how these steps can help prepare the team for the hurdles on the way to success.

13 Innovation Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make

Published date: October 27, 2021 в 12:20 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

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Do you want to create an innovation-focused culture in your organization? Are you struggling to make organizational innovation a reality?

Are you tired of wondering why your team’s ideas don’t always seem to pan out as originally planned? Or do your team’s problems actually stem from the idea-generating phase?

 

There could be countless issues standing in the way of organizational innovation. But the truth is most of these problems are well within your control to fix.

That is, only if you know where to look and how to solve them.

 

Fortunately, that’s exactly what today’s guide will help you do. We’ll be going over some of the most common mistakes companies make when it comes to organizational innovation and indicate how you can go about correcting them.

DON’T LET THESE MISTAKES GET IN THE WAY OF YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION

 

To start, you’ll need to take a closer look at your basic approach to innovation.

You do have one, right?

If you’re shrugging your shoulders, let’s start by discussing this all-too-common mistake first.

#1: You have no proper plan in place to support a culture of innovation

You want to create an environment that allows ideas to flourish naturally. That’s great, but so does everyone else.

So, what is your plan?

Without a proper plan in place, you can’t build an innovation-centric culture. It just doesn’t appear overnight or as soon as you say you are innovation-focused.

Instead, you must first create a plan and then brand it. Let’s see why this matters.

#2: You haven’t branded your innovation process

Though your first step may be building your plan, you also need to brand the entire process using a catchy name and a logo to make this abstract process tangible to your team.

It may sound gimmicky at first, but it’s proven time and again to be one of the major contributing factors helping teams successfully innovate.

The concept behind the idea is simple: By branding this process, you’re sending the message to your employees that you’re serious about innovation, and you’re committed to it.

You’re also reinforcing the idea that innovation is now a part of your culture, not just an afterthought. But caution! Correct this and Mistake #3 may be rearing its ugly head.

 

#3: You have created “Empty Branding”

Companies that heed the call to brand their processes often fall into the trap of spending large amounts of time and money on creating the hype without backing this buzz with corresponding actions. Employees then start to wonder about the gap between declaration and practice, which often leads them to regard innovation with skepticism and conclude that top management is committed only to PR.

So, as you devise your branding and internal communications plan, two things must also happen simultaneously:

  1. Someone from your team needs to take ownership of the entire process.
  2. Someone else should be consistently managing the team.

We’ll touch on both points next.

#4: No one has taken ownership of the process

It’s essential that someone take ownership of your innovation process.

Now, this does not mean they’re the only one working on the project. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

All hands are on deck. But the person in charge ensures that a system is in place. It’s branded and weaved into your culture, and it’s properly managed.

If you’re working with a small team, this person could also be the one managing the team as well.

 

Keep in mind, these are still two distinct roles and should be treated as such. Otherwise, you’ll be making another costly mistake.

The ownership role ensures that the planning is done, and the foundation is properly laid and in place.

The person in the management position ensures that your systems are working and running smoothly. And if they’re not, they’ll be the ones to make any necessary adjustments (more on this next).

#5: No one is managing innovation

Just because you create a system doesn’t mean it’s going to run on its own.

That’s why an innovation manager is key and – depending on your organization’s size – her/his team.

This person helps foster and grow the seeds that have been planted in the initial approach.

 

To succeed, your innovation Manager(s) should use a “top-down/bottom-up” approach involving both senior management and staff in programs and activities.

Your Manager and/or team will need clear assignment of roles and responsibilities and the ability to monitor that the organizational innovation is actually happening according to plan.

But even with these measures in place, if you’re making this next mistake, these actions won’t matter as much as they should.

 

 

#6: You’ve fostered an environment where people are scared to speak up for fear of criticism

In addition to ownership and management, your organization will also need people with facilitation capabilities.

These people help ensure that your employees feel comfortable speaking up — without fear of criticism or judgment.

During the group discussion, there will always be employees who speak up more often than others. But it’s essential that these team members don’t overrule the quiet ones.

If you’re creating an environment where people can’t speak up, they won’t. And some of your best ideas may never surface.

 

To alleviate this phenomenon, take breaks during discussions to moderate any employees who are taking over the conversation and encourage quiet team members to speak up without worrying about what anyone will think.

However, expressing yourself and generating ideas is still only half the battle. You must also use them, or you’ll be making this next error.

#7: You also lack proper systems to manage innovation in your organization

If you really want to see your team’s ideas take off, you need to figure out:

  1. How you’re going to manage those ideas
  2. How they will be put in place
  3. How you’ll measure their viability
  4. How you’ll gauge if something is working, needs to be scrapped, or just needs a slight tweak (more on this later)

Get these systems in place right away or your best ideas will slip through the cracks.

Speaking of ideas, the way your team ideates to come up with ideas could be another issue holding your innovation back.

#8: You’re still using traditional brainstorming-type methods

Are you still relying on the ol’ brainstorming technique where everyone sits around the conference table and tries to come up with ideas on-the-spot believing that “there’s no such thing as a bad idea”?

This is a huge mistake far too many organizations seem to be making. And their growth — or lack thereof — shows it.

In short, ideation sessions require structure and discipline if you want to break out of existing paradigms and biases.

To do this, you must focus on what you already know (“inside the box”), and then you must look at the problem from a different angle, which is also the next most common mistake on our list.

 

#9: You’re looking at the problem from the same angle every time

If you’re looking at a problem the same way every time, you’re always going to get the same results.

Take a step back and try to attack the problem head-on using what you know and the fact that your current angle is not working.

If you’ve tried to solve the problem from all sides, maybe you’ve been working on the wrong problem altogether.

 

#10: You haven’t mapped out the real problem first

If you’re stuck on the same issue and keep wondering why you’re not making any progress, you must ask yourself, “Are we sure this is really the problem?”

 

Chances are, it might not be. Start creating systems to solve the wrong problem, and you’ll be wasting everyone’s time.

So before you dive into different angles of approaching the same problem, you must first identify that you’re truly tackling the real issue at hand, not merely one posing as the problem.

Only when you correctly identify your true problem can you put your team’s skills to work on fixing it. There are tools that will help you do just that and surprise – finding the root cause is not necessarily the right way to go about it. Actually, it seldom is. Another common issue: you may not be giving your team the tools they need to succeed.

 

#11: You don’t give your team the tools they need to succeed

Even if you uncover your team’s strengths, if they don’t have what they need to get the job done, your innovation efforts will be wasted. Managers often erroneously assume that if they just put in the relevant incentives – carrots or sticks – their people will be driven to innovate. But no amount of motivation will help people who simply lack the skills and capabilities to innovate. And these can be acquired using the right methods.

And not only are the tools available, but employees can also become adept at using them, and can dramatically improve their organizational innovation capabilities with practice and dedication.

Besides giving your team everything they need to succeed, you also need to encourage communication and cooperation — especially if you have different departments working independently.

#12: Your organization is divided into silos

When business units do not communicate or collaborate, it is easy to lose sight of key insights, miss opportunities for synergies, and greatly decrease the probability of implementing meaningful projects.

Though this may occur in many ways within an organization, it is especially detrimental when it comes to organizational innovation. So, focus on fostering communication and teamwork.

 

Now, what happens when you create a plan, implement ideas from your team, and still don’t achieve the results you were hoping for?

Do you consider your team’s efforts a failure?

#13: If something doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed

Creating a culture of innovation cannot be achieved without a few failed attempts at implementing new ideas under your belt.

But it’s how you deal with these ideas that matters more than if the actual idea was a total flop.

So many organizations chalk the first (and only) loss as a sign that the idea failed and all others will similarly fail like, but this isn’t always the case.

 

You may only need a few small tweaks to your idea for it to be a huge hit and avoid innovation mistakes. Building on what didn’t work will only lead to stronger concepts.

If you’re not careful, you’re bound to toss out good ideas simply because the first run didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned and that will cost you.

 

Our experience has shown us that making an innovation program sustainable and fruitful in the longer term requires an organization to focus on the 7 elements of Organizational Innovation. Many of our most valuable insights have been learned directly from implementing these programs with our innovation partners. We will share more about this model in future articles.

Incentivizing Innovation: How can you get your employees more actively engaged in innovation?

Published date: September 22, 2021 в 12:50 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation,Strategy

At the behest of one of our clients, SIT studied innovation rewards and recognition practices among 20 companies, from multinationals to SMEs, ranging in size from 200 to 200,000 employees and across sectors such as finance, healthcare, consumer goods, marketing, agriculture, food, hardware, etc.

Based on our research and findings, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best and worst practices for incentivizing innovation and for building your rewards and recognition programs.

Best Practices

#1. Innovate in your own skin

Design rewards that are consistent with your company’s culture, products, structure, and goals. Copy only if you think the model will work for your company, not because it worked wonders somewhere else.

 

#2. Involve authors in the implementation process

There is nothing more exciting than seeing your idea come to life. Seeing ideas through to their completion and implementation is often the greatest reward.

#3. Have something set aside for spot-rewards/awards

Not everything needs to be a huge production. Give managers some ideas as well as a budget to acknowledge or reward innovative behavior when they see it.

#4. Uniform method

Try to have some alignment throughout the company of what’s being done, which, at some level, involves everyone in the company. It can be exciting and surprising to see where ideas originate!

Worst practices:

#5. Short term-ism:

Rewards with a lasting impact can be powerful. Money can be spent and vouchers used, but a letter can be read over and over and plaques displayed proudly!

#6 A system that causes strife and division:

Make sure you reward in a fair and consistent way. For example, if you create a system based on managerial discretion, follow up on it to ensure all managers are indeed providing rewards. Or, provide guidelines that allow people to win more than once, if appropriate.

Innovating Innovation

#7 Incentivizing innovation takes a lot of attention and practice, but it’s crucial to the development of an innovative organization. The more engaged your team is, the better your results.

What rewards and recognition practices have worked best in your organization?

 

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

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.

On Indicators and Measuring Innovation – Part 2

Published date: August 8, 2021 в 2:00 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

In Part 1 of this micro-series we mentioned 6 observations about indicators and measurements in general, with a focus on some common difficulties. In this installment, we will look at several points relating specifically to the measurement of innovation. This is in no way intended to be a comprehensive treatment of the subject, but I will try to cover some useful points.

Let’s start with the question of the necessity and viability of measuring innovation. When we worked with Tal Givoly, at the time Chief Scientist of the Israeli software company Amdocs, he used to say: “Management is so interested in innovation, that it plants a seed and then pulls it out of the ground every day to see how its roots are growing.” I like to quote him to managers as a call to caution, not only in meddling with innovation but also on trying to monitor it too closely. Still, the opposite approach is no less misleading. According to this, innovation is a magical phenomenon, a spark that one cannot ignite at will, let alone measure, and any attempt at doing so will result in extinguishing the fire. This is obviously misguided since, without measuring the results of your innovation efforts there is a slim chance that you will receive the funding and support to sustain them beyond the initial burst of enthusiasm that started the drive.

Contrary to the “mystical” attitude, we tend to say, with only a bit of simplification, that innovation is like any other business process and therefore should be measured just as you would, say, your sales or efficiency efforts. So, assuming that innovation must be monitored and measured, there are two basic intuitions as to how this should be conducted. The first stems from the following logic: one’s motivation to be innovative is the wish to achieve the organization’s goals (see our post on the definition of innovation) and therefore these very goals, as expressed by their corresponding indicators, can adequately assess the value of our efforts to innovate. If we launch an innovation drive which does not result in an impact on our regular business indicators, then we are wasting our time and money. Therefore, the only indicators that an organization requires in order to monitor and evaluate its innovation efforts are those that are used to measure its performance anyway.

 

 

The appeal of this approach is that it both simplifies the measurement process and ties the innovation efforts inextricably to the company’s goals. Unfortunately, it has two grave shortcomings: 1) it is very hard to isolate the influence of your innovation efforts from the myriad factors that influence business results (factors both external – a pandemic, say, or internal – flaws in a product, or unwise allocation of resources); 2) even when you can isolate the contribution of your innovation activities, their influence on business goals will be evident only after several months, or even years. So how do you monitor your activities and make decisions as you go along, if their effects will appear only, say, within 6 months?

These difficulties often lead innovation leaders to adopt the opposite approach: since it is virtually impossible to isolate, especially in real time, the output of innovation efforts, it is seen as wiser to simply measure inputs. You hatch your plans for innovation, define specific activities, and closely monitor their delivery and implementation.

 

This is indeed a much more practical approach, which lends itself easily to project management and real time decision making. The only trouble is that you may find yourself beautifully and efficiently implementing a useless plan, that does not translate into any important benefit.

 

Our suggestion is, therefore, to create a dynamic “sliding scale” approach to measuring innovation activities, which I will demonstrate in the following scenario (derived, with some generalizations and simplifications, from our work with various companies and organizations).

Imagine that you have decided to train 400 of what we call “Innovation Coaches” (in a forthcoming post, we will describe the design, deployment and management of such a coach community. Click here to receive a notification when the post comes out). Their goal is to promote innovation throughout the organization through the facilitation of innovation sessions. The first indicator will therefore be: number of coaches trained. Since you had reached the conclusion that there was a need for 400 coaches, you want to make sure that they are trained as planned. Not a trivial task, given both the logistic requirements and the HR challenges.

 

But, of course, training a large and increasing number of coaches can end up being a huge waste of time and resources, unless they are delivering results, so, upon completion of the training of your first batch of, say, 16 coaches, you must immediately start measuring the next indicator: number of sessions delivered per coach. This helps assess the cumulative effect of the coaches on the organization, and along the way gives you some insight on the percentage of active coaches out of those who have undertaken the training (if less than 80% are somehow active, we recommend you review either the quality of the training or the trainees’ selection process, or both).

Obviously, as you celebrate a hopefully growing number of sessions, you may only be causing an even greater waste of people’s time and therefore your company’s resources. All depends on what they are actually achieving in their sessions, which is extremely difficult to assess, given that the impact of the participation in a session on a participant’s brain and behavior is extremely difficult to measure. You can therefore resort to a simplified proxy, the most practical and direct you can measure, which is the number of ideas produced in a session, to assess its productivity.

 

These are only the first three steps in an ongoing process. But how should this process be timed? How soon should one move from one indicator to the next? The proper answer to these questions is crucial to the success of the entire enterprise, not only of the measurement itself, but also the actual results, since the mere act of measurement exerts, as we all know, a strong influence on the measured activities. Say that a coach has graduated from her training. She is keen on trying out her new skills, but, on the other hand, she is a bit hesitant about having to stand up and lead her peers, or maybe even her superiors, through an exercise that has less than a 100% probability of success. She may also have to contend with a lack of support from her boss who is complaining that she is behind schedule in her regular work. The knowledge that someone is counting the number of sessions she runs can nudge her in the right direction, together with, perhaps, an extra carrot, such as the promise that any coach who facilitates, say, 6 sessions in the first two months is eligible for participation in an advanced training. So, counting the number of delivered sessions is probably a good idea immediately after coaches’ graduation from their training. But caution! In this fragile stage, counting the number of ideas produced in the session is nearly always premature, and most likely will significantly decrease the number of sessions and lower the percentage of active coaches! “Now, I don’t only need to add to my workload, argue with my boss, stand in front of not-always-collaborative colleagues and risk the embarrassment of wasting everyone’s time in what could turn out to be a useless session, they also want to monitor the number of ideas that came out? I’ll need to spend time documenting and reporting, and then find myself being scolded because they came to the conclusion that my session hadn’t been productive enough?”. Time and again we see that when management pushes to measure session results too early, coaches react either by lowering the number of sessions they facilitate, or by conducting them without reporting, which, in terms of organizational evaluation, amounts to the same thing. This phenomenon emphasizes two key dilemmas in measuring innovation activities:

  1. What you measure doesn’t only affect what you know but also what happens to those you are measuring;
  2. The more data you collect about an activity, and the more you tend to impose reporting efforts on the actors, the less time, energy and motivation they will have to do the actual work.

We strongly recommend, therefore, that you allow coaches to feel confident with conducting sessions, hopefully even enjoying the process, before you start monitoring the sessions’ outcomes. But, at some point, this must happen, and as you start counting the number of ideas produced per session, the next question arises. As we have all painfully learned, mainly thanks to the inefficacy of Brainstorming, quantity of ideas is not only not a guarantee of quality but can also become a burden and an energy drain. Which is why the next indicator is required: % of ideas from a session that made it into the company’s idea-development pipeline. Subsequently, you can select one or more stages of your development process and count the ideas that achieve each one or jump to the next important milestone: number of ideas launched into the market (or, if your output is not products into market, the equivalent measure such as processes changed, services offered, social programs launched, etc.).

 

Using this same logic, the sliding scale for measuring the results of your innovation efforts can be extended according to your organization’s process of product development, or project management. Common additional stages that can be added to the scale are revenues, profits, savings or market share obtained through the launch of a product or initiative, thus converging what started out in one extreme pole as a measurement of pure inputs into the opposite pole of relying on those indicators that monitor your organization’s goals and objectives.

 

Note that the approach described here attempts to address some of the pitfalls and follow some of the guidelines mentioned in my former post on the subject:

  1. Be practical by starting superficially, but do not be daunted by the difficulties and insist on going further and deeper;
  2. Consider the needs both of those who are doing the measuring and those who are being measured;
  3. Remember that measuring is an invasive process that affects the measured for good and bad, and timing can crucially determine which one it is;
  4. Consider carefully what you decide to measure, and be prepared to defend the rationale of its importance;
  5. Be transparent about the results, whatever they end up demonstrating.

In a future post, we will describe how this same approach can be expanded to apply to organizational innovation, rather than to a specific activity, by breaking up the large organizational effort into what we call The 7 Elements of Organizational Innovation. Meanwhile, we recommend that you try to apply the sliding scale approach to one or several of your innovation activities. And we would love to hear how it goes and what you learn.

On Indicators and Measuring Innovation – Part 1

Published date: August 1, 2021 в 2:00 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

On June 30th, I posted about the meaning of the term “innovation”. These were the post’s opening sentences:

When I typed “definition of innovation” into Google the other day, I came up with 1,710,000,000 replies, which means absolutely nothing, of course, raising the question why the arguably most influential company on earth has been consistently feeding us with this useless piece of data for so many years. So, I promise to use this very same opening sentence in a future post (repurposing, saving on first-sentence-emissions) about some common popular fallacies around indicators and measurement.

Keeping my promise here, I reiterate my bewilderment and will attempt to use this example to shed some light on the oft-asked question: how should innovation be measured? This question came up yet again last week in a conversation with an Innovation Manager in a medium-sized financial company. “They [management] are demanding that we boost innovation throughout the company when I don’t even know what innovation is nor have any idea how to measure it.” The former question was addressed by the post mentioned above. In this post (both parts) we will address the latter.

Here, in Part 1, we will start by using the example of Google’s indicators to share some observations on what should or shouldn’t be done when measuring performance in general. In Part 2, we will analyze some specifics of measuring in the context of innovation.

As I write this, I repeat my search for “definition of innovation”. Why does Google choose to share with me that my search took 0.60 to complete and that it came up with 1,860,000,000 results? Why would I care? What can I do with these two pieces of information? One can imagine that in the late 1990’s this pair of indicators served to signal both “look how fast our engine is”, and “see how many results we can provide you with”. Even then, there was a glaring discrepancy between the search engine’s stated differentiator and the indicators communicated. Google claimed the superiority of its algorithm based on the quality of its results, not their quantity nor the speed of their delivery, so why were they boasting characteristic #1 while measuring #2 and #3?  This is the result of my repeated search today:

 

Keen readers will have noticed that the number that appears above constitutes an increase of 150,000 finds over my former search, quoted in the opening paragraph. Say that Google has indeed found 150,000 additional hits in less than a month. So what? Have I gained anything from this increase? Obviously not. Clearly, then, these indicators have not been selected to cater to my needs as seeker of information. Why were they selected then? One suspects that a possible reason is that they are simply easy to measure. So, the first observation on the misleading use of indicators is:

Observation #1: People and organizations tend to skew towards indicators that are easy to measure.

Ben Gomes, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering, has been quoted as saying, “…our goal is to get you the exact answer you’re searching for faster.” He goes on to explain: “Our research shows that if search results are slowed by even a fraction of a second, people search less (seriously: A 400ms delay leads to a 0.44 percent drop in search volume, data fans).”

Note that although the professed goal is to provide an “exact answer” there is no indicator to measure to what extent this important measure has been attained. This lacuna may be attributed either to a harsher variant of Observation #1 (above):

Observation #1*: If you haven’t figured out how to measure something, disregard it (even if you know it is crucially important).

Or, in more unfortunate cases:

Observation #2: If you’ve figured out how to measure it, but you’re not happy with the results, hide them.

For obvious reasons, we don’t expect Google to show us a search result that looks like this:

 

But wait, you may say, the Google VP did explain the huge importance of speed, so that is a crucial factor that should be measured. Yes, it may be crucial, but for them, rather than for you. This, then, is a prime example of:

Observation #3: Technologists and bureaucrats will tend to measure and communicate indicators that are important for them, rather than for their users/clients.

It is, no doubt, of the utmost importance for Google’s techies to measure and monitor the precise duration of each and every one of the 5.4 billion(!) daily searches (2020) on their awe-inspiring platform. But that does not at all mean that this specific piece of data about my search is of any interest to me. Ask yourself: Have you ever noticed this number? If I tell you that your search x took 0.36 seconds or your search y an agonizing 0.72, would these numbers mean anything to you? It is a stretch to imagine that Google, with its 135,301 employees and 182,527 billion US$ revenue (both numbers refer to Alphabet, end of 2020) can’t figure out that these two indicators are respectively useless and meaningless to their users. Why then, do they appear so prominently? Another possible explanation could be:

Observation #4: If you prefer to avoid sharing certain indicators, direct the spotlight to others.

This may be the most sensible explanation of the Google indicator puzzle: speed and quantity may actually be playing the role of what I propose to name “decoy indicators”. The function of this class of indicators is to enable a company to offer a semblance of transparency, while in fact obfuscating all those indicators that its audience could really be interested to monitor but is not even aware of. The Google-search-indicator-set of our dreams would maybe include some or all of these:

 

A majority of these indicators would probably be as useless to most of us as the two original ones, but would at least supply a welcome variation on the theme, or perhaps could be rotated throughout searches so that the user would either select those she wished to see or would be served a random selection of 2-3 each time. The other indicators could, say, be accessed by clicking on an icon. Does it really matter which indicators are selected? It could, very much.

Nine years ago, when we took our 3-week old youngest daughter to our favorite pediatrician for a small check-up, he noticed a minor irregularity and prepared to perform a small but invasive test on her. I stopped him and asked why he was planning to do so. He answered that it was “the protocol” and would supply him with a piece of important data which he would register in her newly created computer file. When I asked whether the value of this data would determine any specific action to be taken, he admitted that it would not. I therefore asked him not to perform the test to which he immediately agreed. This incident re-confirmed a rule I strictly follow in all my dealings with medical staff to the chagrin of many of them: always politely request that they provide a simple rationale for whatever action they are about to perform. Surprisingly, very often they are not able to do so, apart from quoting “the protocol”. The corollary of this rule for medical tests or examinations, as for measurements in general is:

Observation #5 When you select or design an indicator, make sure you know precisely what you want to know and why.

Even if the price of measuring and communicating a useless indicator is low (even lower than the minimal invasion of my daughter), you would do best to avoid it, as indicators tend to take on a life of their own by bestowing undue importance on the measured quantity.

Observation #6: Indicators, even if selected for the wrong reasons, and therefore useless, will appear important because they’re there.

And, once the indicators are there, you will find yourself playing the corporate-Edmund-Hilary and inevitably climbing the management-imposed-Himalaya, diverting energies from other, more constructive endeavors. This is one of the reasons that we all at times experience a certain unease even as we are exceling according to some set of indicators or other. Deeply, intuitively, beneath our superficial satisfaction at hitting our numbers, some voice is asking: but what for?

In the next post (Part 2) we will discuss how these phenomena play out in organizations’ attempts to measure their level of innovation, as they use indicators such as number of ideas submitted to idea-boxes, number of patents, % of revenues spent on R&D, % of sales derived from new products and other commonly used indicators. We will see that many such standard indicators can be applied usefully, depending on timing and context, and will review several examples, exploring how they can be constructively put to good use.

 

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