How to Innovate Like a Shark

by: Simon Sinek

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Tags: Change, Innovation, Simon Sinek

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5 Thoughts on Innovation in Organizations

by: Thom Rainer

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Every organization must deal with change. The crux of the matter is not if change will take place, but if the organization can lead change rather than just react to it. The most common type of proactive change is innovation.

Innovation is simply an attempt to do something new or differently in order to achieve better results. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But any leader knows well that introducing innovation in an organization is easier said than done. Volumes have been written on change, change agents, and organizational response to change. My purpose in this brief article is to discuss just one facet of change: introducing innovation to the organization.

Five Thoughts

Most organizations do not naturally embrace innovation. Those who therefore attempt to introduce it to the organization often meet both active and passive resistance. We must be astute students of innovation to understand how we can best move new ideas forward. Allow me to suggest five thoughts on the matter.

1. Leaders must lead and model innovation. New ideas and initiatives cannot just be theoretical rhetoric. Leaders must hold themselves accountable for introducing innovation on an ongoing basis. The leader must persistently push the organization to embrace innovation as a value and priority.

2. Innovation must be embraced by the organization as a whole. This thought is naturally corollary of the first. Innovation cannot be autocratically dictated. Without ownership at all levels, innovation is likely to fail. Passive aggressive behavior is common unless people truly believe that innovation is critical for their own success as well as the success of the organization.

3. Leaders and others throughout the organization must resist the common objections to innovation. The challenge is that the objections are often valid. So it’s easier to yield to the objections rather than to find ways around them. Some of the more common words of resistance are: “We don’t have the capacity to do something new”; “We tried that before and it didn’t work”; “It costs too much and the payback is too long term”; and “We just need to focus on that which is already core to our organization.”

4. Innovation is a step of faith. Introducing innovation to the organization would never be problematic if we knew we had guaranteed success. So many organizations get involved in analysis paralysis to demonstrate why something won’t work.

5. Some innovation failure should be normative in organizations. It is unlikely that there will be any tolerance for innovation if there is little tolerance for failure. If the members of an organization expect that innovation failures will be punished, you can be sure that few, if any, will ever be innovators themselves. It is easy to fall back on the comfort of pain avoidance.

A Time for Change

The writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us “there is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven” (3:1, HCSB). Never have I witnessed such a time of change. Sure, change has always been a reality. And certainly we have clear evidence that the rate of change is ever increasing.

But what our world and our organizations are experiencing today is seismic change. It is the type of change that will permanently alter the landscape of our reality. Those organizations that fail to grasp that reality and fail to respond to that reality are already on the path of failure.

Never before have organizations needed to change and innovate like they must do so today. Certainly the infusion of innovation must be measured and introduced with great discernment.

But the failure to innovate is a huge barrier for entering the future.

And it may be the beginning of a certain path to death.

Read more from Thom here.

Tags: Change, Innovation, Structure, Thom Rainer

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Managing Innovation is About Managing Change

by: Braden Kelley

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Innovation is about change. Companies that successfully innovate in a repeatable fashion have one thing in common – they are good at managing change. Now, change comes from many sources, but when it comes to innovation, the main sources are incremental innovation and disruptive innovation.

The small changes from incremental innovation often come from the realm of implementation, so the organization, customers, and other stakeholders can generally adapt. However, the large changes generated by disruptive innovation, often come from the imagination, and so these leaps forward for the business often disrupt not only the market but the internal workings of the organization as well – they also require a lot of explanation.

The change injected into organizations by innovation ebbs and flows across the whole organization’s ecosystem.

Let’s explore the change categories visualized in this framework using the Apple iPod as an example:

Read the rest of “Managing Innovation” here.

Tags: Braden Kelly, Change, Innovation, Structure

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The Next Logical Step…is Often the Wrong One

by: Mark Howell

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When are you willing to pull the plug on a strategy?  How many times does a strategy need to have the exact same results before you conclude that it is the wrong strategy?

When are you willing to rethink an assumption?  How many times are you willing to profess confusion when the outcome is not what you anticipated?

How often have you begun thinking about the next ministry season and set in motion an almost exact replica of last year’s approach because you always have a small group fair right after Labor Day (complete with a catalog of semester options) or for that matter, you always do a church-wide campaign in the fall (and your existing groups love including new people for those 6 weeks).

I can’t speak for you, but I can say that it’s normal to do again with only slight variation what you’ve done previously.  It’s normal.  It happens all the time.  And that’s the problem.  After all, didn’t Einstein persuade us when he said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results?”

If you want different results you need to change the design.  And I should add, if you want significantly different results you’ll need to do more than tweak the design.  You’re going to need a different design.

Dreaming of being a church of groups but seem permanently mired in the muck of church with?  Chances are your strategy has a design flaw.  Can’t figure out how to break through the 50% connected in groups barrier?  Odds are your strategy needs a major overhaul.  Stuck at 80% adults connected in groups?  In all likelihood…your strategy has an innate limitation that prevents breakthrough.

I like Tim Brown’s analysis.  Brown, the CEO and President of IDEO and author of Change by Design, has pointed out that teams that are truly committed to developing breakthrough products “will not feel bound to take the next logical step along an ultimately unproductive path (Change by Design, p. 17).”

Read more from Mark here.

Tags: Change, Innovation, Mark Howell, Strategy, Vision Frame

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When Innovation Fails

by: Russell Raath

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In business we speak a lot about “innovation” — how to foster it, how to drive it, how to implement it. But what do we mean when we talk about “innovation”? A recent WSJ article broached the subject and, rather accurately in my opinion, revealed what we have all known for some time: even when organizations are not necessarily doing anything groundbreaking or new, they still call it “innovation.” Just because it just sounds grander.

Incremental changes are referred to as innovations. Tweaks to products are considered innovations. Reorganizations to “better serve customers and markets” or to “align internal capabilities” are intended to make companies more innovative; in fact, they are often touted as innovations in and of themselves. We have missed the point. These are not “innovations” – rather they are simply “improvements.”

Here’s what we usually see: Management decides that they need to innovate. Individuals and teams form a working group, establish a charter, and set out to work on innovation improvement initiatives. The results are usually a rehash of something they are already doing, perhaps with some improvements on the margins, all complicated by Gantt charts, red-yellow-green dashboards and issue logs. If, after some time, these “innovation” teams paused and reflected on their efforts they might even feel some sense of accomplishment — because anything other than achievement would indicate that their efforts were a colossal waste of time.

Trust me, I know firsthand.

Earlier in my career, I was appointed to an “Innovation Board.” It was a novel concept, and the aim was to find “new and innovative ways to increase revenues significantly.” The 15 people on the team were assembled because we all (supposedly) had “been around” and were known for questioning the status quo. We were also relatively senior — principals, directors, and senior managers. We brainstormed, broke into teams, and came up with the ideas that would “make the next market.” Very quickly, we also realized that a team of four (since we had broken into four smaller teams) didn’t have all the answers. Fast forward to the end result: a lot of time, some frustration, and a bunch of small improvements — but little in the way of innovation.

So where did we go wrong?

First, we lacked enthusiasm. None of us went into the process with a sense of passion that we could, or even should, find something new and different. We were appointed, and as we all know, when you are tapped on the shoulder, you don’t say no, lest you jeopardize your next promotion.

Second, we were all senior. Way too senior. Yes, a senior leader’s perspective is useful, but much more important is that of the many customer-facing people who are dealing with these issues everyday, trying to fix what is broken, seeing what others are doing, and who know (almost without thinking about it) what is wrong with how the company does what it does. They have less to lose by challenging and questioning, and it doesn’t form the basis of what made them successful. Conversely, how eager are leaders to challenge that which made them successful in the first instance?

Third, no-one knew what we were trying to do. Who cared if we had spent 100 hours working on building something new and exciting? The other 14 people, maybe. And those who did know about our little initiative? They looked at us as though we had all the answers; by being placed on the “Innovation Board,” we were seen as the innovative thinkers — and, as a result, others were left feeling that they lacked what it took to generate fresh, game-changing ideas. How wrong.

The way we tried to create innovation — organizing, prescribing, and delegating it — didn’t work. Yes, these groups may improve things — maybe even a lot of things — but rarely is this “innovation.” Producing the next product (like the iPod) or creating a new market (Instagram, without a big team) that had never existed before — that is innovation. Microsoft creating the Surface — not so much innovation, and more catch up? Thinking once an innovator, always an innovator — not a path to success.

Innovation does not come out of a controlled situation. If you want more innovation, allow more chaos. Follow these steps to create that chaos.

1) Use only volunteers. Who in your organization feels excited about trying to build that next product or market? Let THEM — the people on the front lines, who are doing their day jobs, who happen to know your business better than anyone else — into the process.  Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat figured this out. Others have too.

2) Sponsor an environment that encourages risk-taking. It’s fantastic if an employee takes initiative and risks making innovation. What do you do if they fail? Are they punished? You can be certain if an employee is punished for taking a risk toward innovation, that other employees will not be taking any risks.

3) Make time for brainstorming. It takes time, and sometimes it takes creating a particular environment to get employees into an innovative mindset.

This approach will foster some truly transformative ideas, and there will be an enthusiastic base of supporters ready to turn those ideas into action.

Now that’s a novel approach. Maybe, dare I say, an innovation.

Read more about Russell here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Russell Raath

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