How Decluttering Your Business Can Make Room For Innovation?

We’ve all heard of decluttering our rooms up till now but here’s something every business executive needs to know: in addition to your office room, your business, too, needs decluttering.

Innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor. One has to go about it carefully and cautiously, from testing the waters to decluttering business rooms and ensuring seamless integration.

It isn’t surprising to know that nearly 95% of innovative products fail at the pilot stage, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. There are several reasons attributed to those failures, namely lack of transformational leadership, focus, processes, collaboration, resources, and short-term thinking.

A major part of this endeavor lies under the umbrella term “decluttering business.” But what is it? How do you do it? And what happens once you’re done with it? Find it out in this article as I share my decades-long industry expertise gained by spearheading innovation and rectifying failures in the digital currency space.

So, Why Is Decluttering Important?

Put simply, decluttering allows you to work more effectively and efficiently. However, there’s definitely more to that generalization than what meets the eye.

Before we get to how to declutter your business space, it is important to understand why it makes a difference.

Decluttering organizes your business goals, clearing away the mess that comes in the way of them, and aligning priorities, products, and tasks. By doing so, business owners inadvertently feel more focused, confident, clearer, in-tuned, competent, and productive.

Running a business, that too which is not organized on the micro-level can likely make you spread too thin in juggling more than one management task. Not only does this lead to professional burnout, but you also don’t get enough time to do the tasks at hand – let alone do them well.

Feeling overwhelmed is consequently linked to procrastination. When there’s structure, discipline, and fewer, clearer goals to meet every month; positive and productive energy diffuses through all levels.

Getting organized reduces stress and anxiety while boosting employee productivity and satisfaction. It is critical to realize when your business needs some immediate decluttering because, without it, your message becomes diluted, marketing is hit and miss, and content, as well as income, is inconsistent.

How to Declutter Your Business: 5 Expert Tips

These five hand-picked tips that I’ve chosen to share today are from my experience as a global industry leader in my space.

1.?????Listen and learn

I cannot emphasize the significance of understanding your business, its desired outcomes, and importantly, its customers on a deeper and contextual level. Crafting a buyer persona and targeting a demographic of audiences is not an efficient way of running a successful business.

The key is to listen to what your customers and stakeholders are saying, as well as learn new and advanced ways to capture your audience. With the passage of time, buying behavior is evolving and thus requires a combination of human and machine ingenuity.

Engage with your customers in real-time using new tools like Messenger and Drift. Interact with them on phone on a regular basis or connect on digital media to know deeper about their pains, needs, and expectations. Remove the bias, be concrete, and be focused.

Another way to achieve this is by generating data from customer analytics. The latest generation of digital technologies has enabled us to gain unprecedented insights into consumer action as it reads through a webpage or clicks a link. Using this data, traverse the customer’s path and do your best in cleaning out the mess.

Besides customer behavior, it is important to listen and learn about your business partners. This helps in determining whether you have chosen the right one for your venture or not.

2.?????Clear the workplace clutter

Putting together a corporate strategy requires you to simplify things and make tough choices. What are the essentials for you and your team to do a job well and create an impact? The key is to simplify your strategy such that your direction, priorities, and plans are clear, believable, and implementable enough.

A few actionable ways to declutter workplace operation is to assess what activities to not engage in. This often requires making ruthless choices and narrowing them down to a few critical goals so that they can be implemented in your culture. Importantly, you must engage key stakeholders in not only achieving goals but also in identifying what goals make sense for their teams so that real-world experience and buy-in can be added.

The clarity in business strategy is indispensable. Getting $150m in revenue is a clear goal. Scoring more than the last year’s revenue is not a clear goal. Thus, by articulating clear business goals once your priorities are identified, your team is better able to understand them.

In essence, these moves clear the clutter that obscures your way to important and defined business goals.

3.?????Allow for changes to occur

Innovation and creativity should be the cornerstones of how you work. According to Global Innovation Survey by McKinsey, innovation is becoming critical to growth particularly as the speed of business cycles continues to increase. Nevertheless, while 84% of executives agree with the importance of innovation, only 6% are satisfied with the performance of innovation in their organizations.

Spearheading innovation in the workplace is not the challenge. Leaders today are rather driven to create and test new products, given the ongoing technological advancement and corporate pressure. Therefore, although the stages of aspiring, choosing, and discovering are covered by most leaders, they fail to bring something new and unrivaled to the table.

The third expert tip to declutter, hence, is in beyond permitting change. It is in designing collaboration to enable it.

The first step is to define the challenge and understand its root causes, manifestation, and effort. Once that is done, the next approach is to assemble a diverse team of skilled labor who can effectively retain as well as blur boundaries between the engineering side and customer-facing side of the company – whenever and wherever required.

Leaders should aim for a maximum diversity of experience in innovation which is only enabled by workplace collaboration, allowing specific members of the team to meet regularly – if not all.

To make things happen, try to simplify processes and in-person meetups, and create a safe, collaborative space. Experts recommend bringing the entire team on board for conceiving ideas for innovation but you can always create a team of 10-12 persons instead of making 2-4 persons responsible only.

4.?????Forget the old-school, traditional ways of doing business

A fine way to declutter your running business is to dispel the old-school, traditional ways of doing business and embracing complexity.

Ever since the pandemic, while most companies were operating in a hybrid model, the majority of the global business landscape permanently switched to digital channels.

Looking after our family’s 31-year-old digital trade exchange company, BBX, I’ve seen how we gradually yet steadfastly moved to the decentralized space with the growing popularity of online shopping.

Keeping that in mind, it is important to shift mindsets on a large-scale, industrial level. You have to have a flexible, hybrid approach where you can operate on either level. Be honest about the company’s needs, talk it out with your employees, and don’t fret if some workers want to work remotely.

The point is to be comfortable with the change so that your operations are not cluttered by struggling to cope with the past and the future processes of work.

5.?????Stakeholder management strategy

“No man is an island,” of course. Every project that you work on requires people. Every function in the business has a role to play in defining and delivering the brand experience to discerning customers.

From PR to HR, customer support, product management, and sales; you can’t perform well alone.

In addition to gathering innovative and experienced people around you, you require deft stakeholder management and a collaborative outlook.

Managing stakeholders primarily depend on the following factors:

●???????The size and complexity of projects, from examining the milestones, and the number of resources required to the time allocated to it.

●???????Sponsorship, advice, expert input, physical resources, and reviews.

●???????The time available to be spent on communication.

Making the Case for Change

In conclusion to these ways of decluttering your business for easy, fast, and successful innovation; here’s how you can make a case for change.

Before any of the above tips can be applied, it is crucial to state the reason for the change. A clear and understandable statement of why change is needed and why you can’t function properly without it.

The second stage is to provide the evidence to back your claims. These could be surveys, performance reports, complaints filed by customers, or other internal and external information sources.

Once the reason for the change is justified, you’ve got to investigate different routes of solutions. In essence, leaders of change will generate a team of the right people to build ideas and suggest solutions.

Moving forward from 2022, it is peak time to start decluttering your business – and make room for innovation before your processes are cramped up amidst overwhelming ideas, piles of goals, and all-over-the-place buyer personas.

I welcome all to comment and share your decluttering experience, were your desired outcomes reached during this process?