During these unprecedented times we’re compelled to refresh business operation models.
The fundamentals in creating growth of innovation in communities is by:
- Organisational transformation
- Entrepreneurial strategy planning
- Professional development, and
- Product or service management
These are the eight important levers for existing organisations to adopt a startup approach.
1. Our most important assets
Talent is important, especially in startups and innovation communities. There are very few processes and teams figure stuff out as they go. This requires agency, initiative, flexibility and readiness to get stuck in and work out the real problem worth solving. Tim Brown, Co-founder of IDEO Design Consultancy coined the metaphor of T-Shaped people. This is people with a broad range of skills, and expertise in one. Employing someone should be less about the job they’re required to do and more about the impact you’re trying to create. Fundamentally, it comes down to getting the right people on board.
2. Allow people to act, solve and grow
Learning and Development opportunities for employees should no longer be stand-alone programs that rely on employees returning to work and applying their knowledge. It’s time for them to be held more accountable.
21st Century learning communities invest time and resources in training people in agile, design thinking, and lean start-up. At the heart of these methodologies, we develop an idea, build a pilot, and test its Desirability, Viability and Feasibility. Our growth will be realised as ‘learners’ seek ongoing improvement of the idea. This forms a loop: test, learn, and repeat.
As a respected community, you need to trust your teams, provide oxygen to an idea and let it breathe.
This can be quite challenging. Not all professionals like to admit they don't know how to proceed. Developing a hypothesis, building a pilot, and testing it is tantamount to saying: “I've got no idea what I'm doing”. Therefore, the approach of test, learn, and repeat, is necessary to mitigate risk and to avoid wasting time and resources.
3. Embracing a culture willing to fail
Entrepreneurial cultures cultivate a shared understanding of ‘how we get things done around here’.
Cross functional collaboration and rapid learning processes is a sure way to get things done to meet the purpose. One of these learning processes, a hack, can bring together a diverse group of people that have permission to create something new. A hack is a quick experiment to learn something, to solve a problem. What’s great about the idea of hacking, from a cultural perspective, is that it foregrounds the idea of playing things out, or ‘moving fast and breaking things’. Faced with a challenging situation, it's easy to procrastinate, sitting around worrying about how to proceed. If the cultural norm is “do it once, do it right” people can be terrified about trying anything new, and afraid of failing. Astro Teller, is the Captain of Moonshots at X, when a team fails to achieve what they'd hoped to achieve, he’ll say: ‘You failed? Great! What did we learn from that?’
4. What can operational innovation look like?
Cutting to the heart of the matter it’s the question that’s stopping us from scaling innovation across our businesses. How possible is it to empower people to collaborate? A flat structure can generally remove the bureaucratic processes that slow things down.
It's important to ensure the right decisions get made and the company stays on track. Every company requires some hierarchy. At the end of the day, someone must ensure the stakeholders interests are being served. But, with the right structure in place, such as a holocracy it’s possible to open things up, and empower people to test something fast.
There are two key leadership tools required for keeping work on track:
- implementing the right decision-making protocols, and
- implementing learning metrics
5. Make decisions based on time, cost and quality
The best people to make decisions are the people closest to the problems. Data can win arguments - This is a mantra in the startup industry.
Traditionally, seniority determines who wins an argument. It's the people on the coalface, who are interacting with the users - who have the greater insight into what’s working and what’s not.
It makes sense to devolve decision-making power from the top to the bottom of the organisational pyramid and let the people who are gathering data make the decisions.
6. How do you measure innovation?
One thing that trips businesses up when they invest in innovation is the absence of change in the way they evaluate success.
Trouble is that knowledge is intangible, and the return of an experiment is usually negative. Agile organisations evaluate things differently. They measure progress in terms of ‘learning metrics’: agreements about what teams need to learn in order to succeed at what they’re trying to do.
For example, here's how things work in one of our current innovation projects:
- First, we had to identify the challenges and develop a product innovation roadmap.
- After a 6-month engagement, we were able to release 4 concept prototypes, 1 pilot program and a business model for what we’re calling habitual to provide action-orientated learning experiences.
- After 12 months we launched a new company and are now commercialising these opportunities.
- As a result, our innovation 'funding meter' has been extended for another 12 months to further identify new products and services to solve how might we prioritise learning for SMEs.
7. How do you reward people to start?
You need to find ways of rewarding people on a moral and emotional level for asking questions, devising experiments to learn new things, and doing all the hard stuff that's involved in hacking solutions.
As leaders, we need to provide the freedom to question assumptions, experiment to learn, and even throw themselves into the jaws of failure.
Carrots and sticks are fine for motivating people to do simple work. Numerous studies have shown that money is an inadequate motivator for these kinds of complex cognitive tasks. If you want to motivate people, you need to speak to their intrinsic desires for things like autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
8. Data wins arguments
Agility requires an open flow of information. Often, I see a waste of resources due to the mutually exclusive projects not sharing plans, objectives and learnings. How are they supposed to know that they are not doubling up on work?
There is no easy answer here. The Bottom line is, if you want agility, you need openness, and openness requires trust. Trusting people always involves an element of risk. The question for leaders is, how much risk are they prepared to sustain for the sake of agility?
My optimistic view is, if you create an environment that sparks curiosity, and engage people who want to work in that environment, they will love you for it. This leadership style provides employees a respect to act responsibly with the data you share. Until they don’t. There’s always a risk.
There’s never a silver bullet to innovation, but my experience is to enable the right people to get involved and BRIDGE THE KNOWLEDGE TO ACTION GAP. This is one of the working models that I’m implementing across regional innovation communities and businesses. The biggest barrier is always getting people to be vulnerable - and to just start!
Stephen Rutter is the founder of innovation consultancy, The Scale Institute who design innovative learning strategies & product development opportunities with a varied group of clients across Australia (that all value learning) include Universities, large corporates & SME.
30-min consultations for people ready to act - using Calendly.
https://www.thescale.institute/
