Leaders: Break Through the Hierarchy and Allow Your Innovation Juices to Flow!

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Matt is an innovation leader tasked with making his company "future proof." Like a wall of bricks, he faces a lot of resistance to change. While he adopts an approach of innovation and forward thinking, the structures in place are conservative and archaic.

Matt needs to ask the questions: Where is the world going and how does that affect the future of our industry? How can we improve our product or service and make it fit with future market needs?

He needs to get the right people to listen. How does the lonely voice of Matt echo across the halls and cubicles of a traditional and conservative company? How does he break through the hierarchy to inspire the “big new” or a “big different”? How does he turn fear of the unknown into excitement for the future? Matt has to get everyone on the same innovative page.

A company for tomorrow…

In his article Why is Innovation so Hard, Edward D Hess says that “innovation occurs when we co-create something with customers or when we create new value by combining seemingly unrelated things or ideas in new ways, transferring something from one environment to another, or finding new insights in patterns or aberrations.”

For companies to survive in the economic landscape of this century, it is vital to have internal processes that effectively generate insights into customers needs and test solutions to meet those needs. These processes ensure that new concepts are formulated, new businesses can be acquired, and every endeavour is easily scaled.

Achieving this in both the short and the long term requires more than a consultancy report. It requires a culture of ongoing innovative entrepreneurship. Aside from brainstorming with sticky notes, playing table football and using a lot of buzz words, people need to actually understand the innovation practices. This means understanding how to build and test a business model that underlies a ‘cool’ product or service.

How to get innovation right?

Innovation is hard to define. It exists along a continuum, from physical improvements to improving existing products, services or processes and includes those rare disruptive moments that may completely change a company’s direction.

Innovative ideas also rarely emerge from an “aha!” moment. Instead, they usually arise from teams that dare to think different and utilize a new set of methods and behaviors.

Following a proven methodology to flex the thinking muscles and to build this muscle memory into a skill-set that can be recalled and used again and again.

In organisations, it can be a challenge to incorporate the mindset of “thinking differently” into the existing structures that have been in place for years. This paradigm shift is where Matt has to start.

The search giant, Google, stimulates their employees to be entrepreneurial by allowing them to spend 30% of their time pursuing their own creative interests which has led to innovative ideas such as Google Maps and Google Adsense.

However, the prevailing culture in many corporate enterprises is that bigger is better. They undertake projects on a larger than life scale, maybe larger than feasible. Employees who commit, have to achieve. This attitude is one of innovation’s worst enemies.

Innovation equals change. People are resistant to change. Companies even more so. We have a built-in resistance to upsetting the applecart. Why? Because of fear. Failure as an employee may manifest as delayed promotion, losing credibility or even losing your job. Failure as an employer means loss of morale, productivity and eventually, profit. But, there is no chance of moving forward for the risk-averse. Risk is a constant and managing that risk is crucial to innovation.

But how can you do that? Many innovation leaders mimic each other and say: ‘fail fast and cheap’. Referring to the fact that new ideas need to be modified and tweaked at a rapid pace based on responses they obtain in the market. Why do we call that failure? You are getting insights and answers from potential customers. These insights may not always be the outcome that you are hoping for, however, they do lead you to building the right solution. A ‘No’ is also a valuable answer as you learn what customers do not want. You just need to ensure that you attain enough insights and answers in a short time frame in order to find the ‘yes’ that you need to develop a solution that meets the needs of your customer.

The governance structure of companies who get innovation right focuses on smaller teams of innovative-thinkers-in-training who identify many insights at a rapid pace. Many insights lead to faster remedies and employees are taught to trust in their own abilities within set parameters.

Catch 22

The remedy for the paradoxical nature of innovation is obtaining insights fast. The risk in such a setting immediately becomes more acceptable. Lessons are learnt and we can build upon the valuable information we gather in the process.

Once fear of failing has been mitigated, teams are more prepared to put their necks on the line as it were. Starting small and working in manageable teams further reduces the risk – and the fear – of failing. Employees start thinking like entrepreneurs.

Fail or succeed – ever forward

Establishing an entrepreneurial mindset is best done by harnessing organic behaviour, not distributing advice. Any innovation consultant’s parting gift should not be a mere report, but the legacy of a completely validated new way of working.