How innovation teams can stop killing innovation

I’ve worked in innovation in one way or another for pretty much the last two decades. Be it agencies, start ups, consultancies, advisory or now in a global company. I remain a firm believer that creativity creates business opportunities, business opportunities are created when companies create better solutions to seemingly unsolveable problems, and that small, focussed and purposeful teams of determined people can change the world.?

Sounds easy doesn’t it. You just need an amazing team, with amazing ideas and the right resources to deliver.?

So... why isn’t this happening everywhere? What is stopping innovation team innovating? What is stopping resource rich organisations with talented people innovating everywhere, every second. Much has been written about how businesses unknowingly create environments that mean innovation can’t flourish (corporate inertia, lack of senior buy in, innovation theatre, unfocused capital allocation, vanity metrics, “it’s hard” syndrome..), but honestly, I think innovation teams have a clear accountability in this also. It takes two to tango after all, and like so often in life people are happy to look up above, or to their side to cast blame, so innovation teams really now need to start looking in the mirror and ask themselves some pretty punchy questions and start adopting some new behaviours … and language... to better their chances of success. Meaningful change, after all, starts from within.?

Here’s some thoughts on where that conversation might start:

1. “This is going to be amazing….but we don’t know enough yet”

I’ve been guilty of this all too often. There should always be a healthy level of paranoia and scrutiny in the signals we see and the data we collect. Things that seem too good to be true often are, but at some point you have to take the plunge, and hanging out in the seemingly safe waters of the kids pool saying “we just don’t quite know enough to swim yet” is nothing in comparison to the learning (and forgetting) curve forced upon you when you dive into the scary waters of the deep end. More than this, saying “we don’t know enough” never builds confidence in senior leadership, teams, stakeholders and partners. It questions our sources, methodologies and urgency. What we need to be saying is “our most relevant and recent data is telling us X which is why we’re doing Y”. If you leave a meeting thinking your stakeholders lack belief in what you're doing, have a hard think about what you're actually saying to them.

2. “It’s not big enough for us to care (yet)”

Large companies use scale to make a big impact, but there is often a mistake made that either a market isn’t big enough or a signal is too weak/unproven. Innovation teams need to make more of the size of the potential problem (and the opportunity that presents) and less of the size of the immediate market. Filtering opportunities in this way is deep seated in protecting the business we have today vs attacking the problems we see tomorrow - and that’s a dangerous place to be. Innovation teams have an accountability to make this problem visceral, real and urgent, working harder to translate this into everyday scenarios that people can understand. *NEWSFLASH* - large powerpoint decks won't do this. It’s not good enough to say or think “they just don’t get it” and you walk out of the room, and it’s dangerous to let people too far away from a customer problem reframe for the business is order to make sense of it themselves. Removing yourself (and others) from the problem so you can take an objective view on it is crucial.?

3. Obsessing on future value (only)

Creating a narrative around the value innovation teams create is difficult. Innovation teams will always talk a good game about the future. Don’t get me wrong - hanging out in the future is awesome. Everything is better in the future (“future Nick” has more time on his hands to spend with his kids and wife, is fitter, thinner, richer etc..) but obsessing about the future doesn’t solve todays problems easily. Doing the work does. Creating future value starts today and is always emergent, so being more clear about the immediate value we bring and how that translates over time against key themes and problem sets (with data backed evidence) is more helpful than any roadmap, product backlog or white paper could ever be. Logos and theoretical models do a poor job at driving change and winning hearts and minds. They create more (and the ill focussed) conversations around the issue than attacking the issue itself. And whilst that might work in different areas of a business, or indeed in SOME contexts, Innovation teams need to stop using traditional storytelling tools (ie slides…) which have unhelpful associated memory structures when it comes to reframing problems and values and start making to think and (proudly…warts and all…) thinking out loud. Data speaks volumes, customer feedback is essential, brilliant strategy lives in the world and through the actions of others, not on a 16:9 power point slide.?

4. Avoiding group think and saying “yes”

Creative innovators under pressure can often have an inbuilt preset to say “yes”, especially when in large organisations where demands come in thick and fast. 4 years in a large business have taught me to “sharpen my elbows” on a weekly basis and whilst i never (obviously...) actively look for conflict, I’m comfortable with people not agreeing or being uncomfortable, as that’s a reality I have to live everyday.??The other reality is most people aren’t ok with this, so get ready. Innovation teams are doing things differently to drive different outcomes - at some point it’s always easier to say “yes” (especially when things are going against the plan) but they have to hold the line. The appeasement and agreement trap is real, but if we truly believe in a certain future value, then I feel it’s fair to say that the future will not thank us for not standing our ground in that moment or asking the difficult questions today.?

This starts with the team you build and the imaginal cells (thank you https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/aidanmccullen) they interact with. Check this out.

We must have differentiation and diversity of thought. We must carry strong views, lightly held. Remember, Abraham Lincoln famously surrounded himself with people who disagreed with him and issued the Emancipation Proclamation on?January 1, 1863. JFK famously surrounded himself with “yes men” and took the world??to the edge of nuclear war with the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. Go figure.?

5. Apologising for failure (and by that I mean "succeeding to learn").?

I’m not sure of the exact statistic (or even if an accurate and reliable one exists…) but we all know most truly innovative approaches to problem solving fail. And there’s a really good reason for that.??The reality is that most things don’t work because problem solving operates in a dynamic environment. Problems don’t stay still - they run about like sugared up children at the end of a 5 year old birthday party. Half organised fun, half chaos theory. The learning we capture (or this “success of failure”) is the richest value. So it feels strange to me to apologise for learning at pace.??And let’s think again on how this language may affect those surrounding an innovation team. At best it says we did something wrong and we’re ashamed. At its very worst it utterly diminishes the value and future value of the team. All because we said sorry.?

Just 5 points which I think may help drive accountability and better outcomes for those of us who are daring to do different. It’s not exhaustive by any means and I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have. I’ve enjoyed writing this - I hope you’ve found it useful.?

N. Tate // Feb 22