 Organizations
tend to be, or become, innovative for one of two reasons: Either it's
their culture (the style of the people the organization attracts, or at
least that of its leaders), or it's forced by a crisis to innovate or
die. But my experience has been that most organizations are not very
good at innovation; they don't seem to be able to put together the
right combination of people, environment, incentive, process, and
knowledge to get it quite right.
Great ideas, and real change, almost always occur at intersections,
at juxtapositions that are often serendipitous but can be tweaked to
advantage if you know where to find them. Innovation usually happens at
the intersection of three spaces: What's happening, What's possible, and What's needed.
-
You discover What's happeningby
ensuring everyone on your innovation team is as knowledgeable as
possible about
the entire organization and industry, and current developments in every
discipline and area of society that can have an impact on your
organization: Politics and regulation, economics, demographics, science
and technology, the arts and aesthetics, culture, communication and
education. You can enrich your What's happening knowledge with a Continuous Environmental Scanning process.
- You discover What's needed by
staying in close contact with customers and potential customers and
investing time understanding their business and their situation, and
'thinking them ahead': What if this happens?; What if we could do this for you?
- You discover What's possible
by using your imagination, by bringing together the right people in
your cross-disciplinary innovation team (including customers and
potential customers, and creative and knowledgeable people from other
disciplines) and using techniques to enable them to think outside the
box, techniques like those illustrated below:
I've written before about this discovery process -- a process suited both to solving critical problems in complicated situations and enabling a collective understanding to emerge in complex
situations. There's no rocket science to this: You can see children use
essentially this process to solve problems, alternating between
individual thinking and asking questions and the collaborative and
discovery steps. I've seen every step followed, in almost precisely
this order, by squirrels working together to defeat my successively
more sophisticated squirrel baffles on our bird feeders. It works.
The steps in the discovery process Learn, Listen, Explore, Understand are designed to surface What's happening and What's needed knowledge. The steps in the discovery process Imagine, Reach Out, Brainstorm are designed to surface What's possible knowledge.
It is the Imagine step that is usually most difficult,
at least for us adult humans. For that reason most organizational
innovation programs include some kind of Future State Visioning process
-- a powerful application of story-telling technique. But many of the
Future State Visions I've seen are pretty timid, and reflect the myopia
of the preparer's perspective: Whether they work in the manufacturing
division or the service area or the R&D department, their creative
vision is pretty clear (but often not terribly bold) for the area of
the organization they know well, and pretty fuzzy and naive as that
vision gets further and further away from their area of expertise.
This is why it is so important to start off with the Learn step, and to have a preliminary session that allows the innovation team to
- learn about what happens in the parts of the organization they aren't familiar with (a key element of What's Happening), and, even more critically,
- listen to customers describe how they see the organization operating from their point of view and how they think it could be improved (i.e. What's Needed).
Once you've done that (and only once you've done that) you are ready to effectively explore What's Possible.
At this point you can jump-start the Imagine step by giving the team examples of stories of Future State Visions that differ dramatically from the Current State in different ways.
Here are some possible ways to do this (my examples are just
illustrations, your Future State stories should be grounded in
knowledge of What's happening and What's needed):
- New Products:
Envision the current core product of your organization disappearing
(due to a disruptive innovation, or because it's reached the end of its
useful life cycle).Then tell a Future State story about how the organization might have rebuilt itself
around a completely new product, one that's consistent with its
people's core competencies.
For example, if your organization sells audits, imagine that 'fraud
insurance' had rendered audits of financial statements obsolete and
unnecessary, and that the future organization specializes in environmental audits, audits of police behaviour during arrests, and audits of workplace conditions.
- New Process:
Envision the invention of a completely new way of producing the
organization's current core product, and tell a Future State story
about a day in the life of an employee using this new process. For
example, if you're in construction, imagine that instead of building
on-site, the construction of entire walls is automated using modern,
ultra-lightweight materials (with all the wiring built-in, and smart
sensors that respond automatically to light and heat conditions).
Imagine that all the walls are movable, reconfigurable. Imagine that
instead of a concrete foundation the house 'floats' on a foundation
that allows it to be disassembled and moved, and to be
earthquake-resistant.
- New Distribution Method:
Envision the delivery of your product in a completely different way --
electronically, perhaps, or by you going out to the customer's home or
office instead of them coming to your office/store. If that's too hard
to imagine, think about $8/gallon gasoline.
- New Need Drivers:
All businesses must meet a basic human need, and we're accustomed to
thinking that we've got them all covered, until an invention like the
Walkman or iPod or Blackberry comes along and shows us that music and
information and communication are so important we really need to have
them everywhere, anytime. Imagine something that would usher in the
realization of a whole series of new human needs. For example, suppose
the concept of community makes a resurgence, thanks to networking
technology and the growing popularity of intentional communities: If in
the future many human needs have to be satisfied at the community
level, instead of the more nuclear family level or hierarchical state
level, how would that affect the need for what your company does, and how would you respond?
- New Customers/Constituencies:
Networking and the Internet are changing the way we form relationships
and affinities, to the point customers are taking over the marketing
and development (e.g. Harley-Davidson Owner Groups), and allowing
products to be offered to customers and constituencies that might never
have been imagined. By disintermediating your suppliers, could you
reinvent the way your industry relates to the end-consumer? Tell a
Future State story about that.
- New Economy/Ways to Make Money:
Outsourcing, globalization and offshoring are putting many industries
through convulsive change. But as Marshall McLuhan said, "every service
creates disservice". Think about whether your organization should be
outsourcing or offshoring in the future, but also think beyond that:
Will swelling dissatisfaction over poor quality of offshored products,
and worse or non-existent service from companies that do this, create a
whole new set of needs your organization could fill? And if the Gift Economy is coming, rather than fighting it or hoping it won't last, how could you embrace it and lead your industry into it?
- New Employees:
Envision a future in which every single employee must add a great deal
of value, and in which every employee is effectively a self-employed
contractor. How would that affect who you would 'hire', and nature of
work they would do, and hence what business you would be in, and what
new businesses you could quickly and easily move into?
- New Attributes: Nobody
buys a product, they buy the attributes, the benefits of that product.
As Rob Paterson says, "we don't need an air conditioner, we need
coolth". How could you reinvent your industry by better matching your
product's attributes to current and as-yet-unperceived customer needs?
And don't forget the extremely valuable attributes that technology
inventors so often overlook: simplicity, ease of use, and good design.
- New Technologies:
The technologies that will revolutionize your industry are not being
invented for your industry. Be the first to study new and emerging
technologies across a whole swath of different industries and imagine
how they could be applied to your industry and your products and
processes (more What's Happening knowledge needed here).
- New Wraparounds: The book The Support Economy
envisions suppliers collaborating to provide 'seamless end-to-end'
service, so you won't have to deal with one organization for a product,
another for servicing it, etc. -- intermediaries will emerge who will
sell you the cradle-to-grave benefit you're looking for, and they'll
handle the dealings with all the different suppliers for you. How would
this affect your organization. Are there additional services and
benefits you can 'wrap around' or build into your product or service
that will allow you to extend your contact with the customer beyond
just point-of-sale?
- New Customer Experiences: If
you've listened closely to customers give you their take on their needs
and how well you meet them today, you should be able to envision a
much-improved 'customer experience' that improves both customer
satisfaction and your 'share of customer'.
- New Ways of Marketing/Selling: The
rules are changing fast in sales and marketing as the tug-of-war
between suppliers and customers for knowledge and power escalates.
Today, in most industries, relationship is everything. Tomorrow, with
the customer taking more control of the buying decision, but still
valuing good relationships with suppliers (and finding them harder to
find and afford), how will this affect how you market and sell your
product?
These stories are not intended to be 'answers' on how to innovate your
business. They are simply provokers, to get your innovation team to
think outside the box, to stretch their ideas of what the company does,
and could do, what the market is, who the customer is, and What's possible.
If you've got the three ingredients right, you should start to sense an inevitable, and healthy, creative tension in the group that results from a growing awareness of:
- what's needed but not yet happening or possible (thinking too far ahead of the curve)
- what's happening now that is a barrier to realizing what is possible ("that's not what we do") or is disconnected from real needs ("they used to need that, hmm I guess they don't anymore")
- what's possible but not needed, or not yet needed (a solution in search of a problem)
It is in the discovery of what is, and what is not, at the intersection of What's needed, What's happening, and What's possible
that true innovation occurs. If you look at the great innovations of
the past century, you'll find they hit this sweet spot -- often by
luck, sometimes with brilliant foresight, always with great knowledge
and greater imagination.
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