Innovation Is Everyone’s Job (But Stay in Your Lane)

Here's a TL;DR:

• Organizational Resilience involves both bottom-up ideation and top-down management.
• Focusing on Product Market Fit is critical for all employees to avoid a disjointed workforce.
• Idea Management: requires processes to elicit and channel innovative ideas from employees.
• Encourage Innovation by providing resources and space for teams to be creative within their assigned roles.
• Capture Innovative Ideas by train leaders on how to receive ideas, even if they initially seem unconventional.
• Implement Feedback Mechanisms and establish clear channels for Innovators to share their ideas and ensure leadership carefully evaluates them without bias.

Some may think that if you staff an organization with bright minds and folks with “entrepreneurial spirit,” you’ll organically build a team that keeps the company relevant and future-relevant. I really think that’s not the right way to make your organization resilient to market changes and prepare your organization’s future. I consider Ideation and Innovation best being a “bottoms-up” type of effort, but keeping your company revenue positive and making the best impact as a company has to be well managed with effective and rewarding “top-down” processes.

Of course, you should have bright minds and encourage the entrepreneurial spirit, but a major risk of focusing on this is that you end up with a large part of your workforce constantly thinking up new ideas and wanting to R&D all the time. It jeopardizes your company’s ability to remain laser-focused on your Product Market Fit because you’ve got pockets of your organization coming up with distracting ideas that (likely) are at the very least tangentially related to your product, but it may not align.

No matter your size, your company better know what it’s selling. You and everyone in the company need to understand what the product is, who the customer is, and how you plan to make your customer’s dreams a reality. If your company is large, then their product, customer, and focus will maybe be more Business Unit-centric, which is great. Make sure your teams are staffed with the right ratio of Get-It-Done people and Thinkers & Innovators, but the trick is to ensure you set up the right processes and mechanisms to (1) elicit and (2) channel the ideas that your Thinkers & Innovators come up with.

Let your teams operate to get their core jobs done. Give them the resources and space to be creative within their own swim lanes, but make sure they stay in their own lanes. Leverage team leaders to identify the Innovators and empower your company leadership to engage with these Innovators to collect their insights, feedback, and advice, and give their ideas and feedback serious consideration.

Most innovative ideas are usually not well understood in 1:1 conversations - it’s human nature; the idea may initially sound too brash, naive, and may just sound crazy. Leaders need to be trained in how to capture off-the-wall innovative ideas so that they can approach these ideas with openness. Another way to receive these ideas is to do it in a workshop session to begin with warmups like team-building exercises, icebreakers, and collaboration settings, then spin folks out into breakouts to elicit their day-to-day challenges and their innovative solutions.

Establish your feedback mechanisms so that your Innovators know where to go to suggest those crazy ideas that just may help your business grow and adapt to the changing marketplace that you operate in. But make sure - above all else - that your leadership team carefully digests and ensures that while each Innovator and all Teams stay in their swim lanes, so your organization from top to bottom remains laser-focused on your company’s mission. As your leadership adopts the best ideas and celebrates the Innovators involved, adapt the relevant teams’ focus in order to incorporate those innovations.