A metaphor for Innovation in business organizations: its like injecting appropriate doses of Wellness into a human being’s life

The health and wellness boom has created a wealth of awareness and generated a veritable tide of information in the past decade or so. As a consequence some of us are indeed leading healthier lives than we were previously. But many others are still struggling even to get properly started.

I find a striking parallel in the world of business when it comes to Innovation. Some organizations have succeeded in seriously innovating, while a majority continue to struggle.

Most people in their 20s and early 30s unconsciously continue to treat their bodies (and minds) the same way they did when they were in college, till the system starts to give off serious signals of wear & tear. Once these distress signals cross a certain threshold they can no longer be ignored and then people are forced to seek out some health solutions. Similarly most organizations and business leaders continue to flog their existing products, processes and business models — till a big-sized “very tough to tackle by current methods” problem waylays them. For instance:

· An auto component maker in the brakes space gets hit by a double whammy: declining OEM sales in BOTH the Commercial and Personal Vehicles product categories — as the entire Indian automotive industry goes through its worst downturn (2012). Aftermarket (AM) sales could have been a lifesaver, but this business has been badly neglected the last several years. Can something be done to revive the company’s AM business in a hurry?

· A pharma company faces alarming deceleration in its flagship Metabolics business. Many things have been tried out in the past two years, including induction of ‘fresh blood’ into the leadership, and newer ways of engaging customers and influencers. But nothing is working. Other product lines are too small to compensate for stagnating sales in Metabolics & consequently this is pulling down the entire company’s performance.

· The Business News channel of a media house finds itself facing steady decline in its viewership numbers. Theories abound, from “Increased sophistication of business news audiences over the past decade” to “TV channels giving way to internet news consumption” etc. Several programming ideas have been tried out, but nothing is delivering the badly needed upswing in viewership. It seems an existential crisis has crept in up upon them unnoticed. Can the channel stay relevant in this day and age?

Confronted by such a beast, how do organizations react?

o A few could still choose to continue in a state of denial.

o Some will opt for a ‘stretch’ response — e.g. setting up a ‘War Room’ to ensure senior executives & internal experts concentrate their energies in the effort to fight back the menace. Or rejig the leadership, bringing in people deemed more suited to the task at hand.

o Others will call in outside help: “Let’s get the best industry expertise”, usually the big consulting outfits.

While the first reaction only worsens things, the second response can end up becoming a parody of “5 blindfolded men and the elephant”. Remember these are the sort of problems where current SOPs are not succeeding! So no one leader is likely to have a ‘proven’ remedy acceptable to the rest. In such a situation the fightback usually ‘adjusts’ to the lowest common denominator of ‘consensus’ ideas, or succumbs to the ‘loudest’ voice.

The best industry expertise from outside is likely to provide some movement to begin with. But this approach also has its downsides. Besides being costly, getting a load of outside experts is no guarantee of a ‘permanent’ fix. In fact solutions from outside experts tend to run into palpable organizational resistance when it comes to execution.

Worryingly, in my view the above responses to intractable business problems suffer from a deeper, more serious flaw : The underlying assumption that “Concentrated application of the best organizational/industry experience” is sufficient to crack every business challenge.

Whereas the uncomfortable reality is that the pace of obsolescence of most organizational assets is accelerating in the 21st century — and this includes industry expertise. When organizations are struggling against ‘New Age’ problems — think the unpredictable and much severer boom-or-bust cycles now hitting the automotive industry, or the rapidly changing content consumption habits of media audiences — the collective experience of organizational leaderships may well represent the baggage of the past, preventing the emergence of badly needed solutions!

The complex, unfamiliar nature of ‘big problems’ thrown up in the 21st century business world more often than not requires leaders & organizations to jump out of their comfort zones, think differently and ‘act out of the box’, i.e. Innovate.

Yet many seasoned CXOs continue to try and run faster & faster on the same old treadmill even when it is painfully clear that they (and their organizations) are no longer making any meaningful progress. When ‘Innovation as a possible option’ comes up for discussion, such ‘organizations on a treadmill’ are likely to respond with

“We are badly stretched as it is…. where is the bandwidth for trying out something new??”

I have realized they operate from a strong underlying belief:

“Innovation is Separate and Extra Work, which might have been attempt-able IF we had the luxury of Spare Time and Spare Energy!”

If you have ever struggled to find the time to give your body & mind a dose of ‘Wellness’ that they badly need, you will see the parallel.

And those of you who have indeed bitten the Health/Wellness bullet, would probably have realized by now that to be truly ‘well’, making cosmetic changes to your lifestyle is not enough. Rather it requires going deeper within yourself to uncover & change some fundamental beliefs you’ve been carrying with regard to body, mind and perhaps life itself.

Admittedly, to start some healthy practices is better than doing nothing at all! For instance just ‘taking the stairs sometimes instead of the elevator’ IS going to do some good to your health, even if you do nothing else.

In the world of business too many organizations have indeed taken some tangible steps when it comes to Innovation.

How about organizations that ARE innovating?

Over the past 5–7 years many organizations HAVE actually gone out and done something about innovation: for instance setting up an Ideas Portal that feeds an Idea Management System, or setting up an Innovation Cell. Others have trained up a number of their employees in design thinking or creative problem solving.

A little probing reveals that even in these organizations that are convinced of the value of Innovation, it is prone to a certain ‘template-isation’: their approach to innovation seems to be inspired by either the ‘Innovation as Culture’ or ‘Innovation as Process’ schools of thought, or by a bit of both.

Their success thus far has been mixed, and not surprisingly so.

As any seasoned manager knows, Culture is undoubtedly one of the toughest things to change in an organization. Except for a few notable successes, attempts to create a culture of innovation usually run into tenacious antibodies of organizational resistance.

As for the Process-centric approach, like any process this too is susceptible to the ‘Garbage-In-Garbage-Out’ syndrome: witness the many organizations with idea-management systems choked with trivial ideas! Even if a powerful idea comes through the idea funnel, it quickly gets clouded by a number of doubts as to its “complexity”, “executability” and ‘likelihood of success”.

(For a few more home truths on innovation in organizations read Sarah Cooper’s satirical piece https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/12-innovative-ways-to-innovate-your-innovation-324cbbaeb374)

So while there IS ever-more-urgent need for serious innovation in business organizations, current attempts to innovate appear to be going through major struggles of their own.

Just as in the case of someone trying to make their body & mind truly healthy, sooner or later the realization dawns that you need to go much beyond initial baby steps like “climbing the stairs sometimes instead of the elevator”;

so also in the case of Innovation:

In order to seriously benefit from Innovation you need to get down to much deeper reflection.

Coming to grips with our current state of thinking around Innovation

Based on their knowledge, and in some cases actual experience of real-life attempts to innovate, I find a spectrum of beliefs about Innovation playing out in business leaders’ minds. These beliefs heavily impact their (and their organizations’) ability to benefit from innovation in these tumultuous times when the sheer necessity to innovate is staring organizations in the face:

1. Some continue to think Innovation equals ‘Product Innovation’. Which means its the job of certain departments only (for instance R&D and Product Engineering) to worry about it. And unless you are in such functions, innovation is NOT something directly relevant to your work.

2. Many others do not deny the relevance of Innovation to their work, but believe its a lot of Extra Work — in fact a ‘luxury’ they can contemplate indulging in only if & when they have Energy & Time to Spare.

3. Yet others, influenced by the ‘Innovation as Culture’ school, believe it takes an organization-wide herculean effort for companies to innovate, because it calls for nothing less than the whole organization undergoing an ‘innovation DNA’ transplant.

4. And then there are those who’re convinced innovation is inherently highly risky, because its highly unpredictable. Influenced by the ‘Innovation as Process’ school of thinking, they believe the way to handle such a volatile activity is to set up a rigorous innovation Process, invite everyone to start thinking innovatively, put all ideas through a funnel and hope that the process will over time start churning out practically ‘doable’ ideas.

To all such business leaders either daunted by, or wary of, or plain unconcerned with the prospect of Innovation, perhaps there is something to learn from our experiences with Wellness.

In my own case, when I became conscious of the need to work on my health in my early 30s, at first I went by textbook advice and started going for a jog in the morning. But within a few days I realized that I am just not a morning person and the 30–40 minutes the jog took away from my morning sleep was making me more & more irritable. The result I had expected (weight-loss) was nowhere to be seen, rather a big negative appeared in the form of a sleep-deprived mind first thing in the morning!

I was on the verge of giving up my foray into a healthier life.

Luckily for me a brainwave struck at that point: How about trying an evening jog?

Though exercising late in the day was against conventional wisdom, I experimented with an evening jog and it worked miracles! Not only did I start losing weight, but I found it was delightfully de-stressing for my mind POST a hard day’s work. In fact, the resultant improvement in my stress levels was of such magnitude that it ‘out-weighed’ any kilos that I may have lost! In hindsight I realized that my deeper need had been stress-relief for quite some time. But because I was unconscious of it myself, no textbook formula had any hope of delivering a solution to it. It was only because I kept twisting & bending the “rules” of healthy-living as I was not satisfied by their results, that eventually I landed up with a formula delivering real output.

That evening jog quickly became an unshakeable part of my life, and the positive results encouraged me to go deeper, in subsequent stages starting to work on my diet, work-life balance etc.

I learnt that a results-focused approach to wellness succeeds by going beyond the textbook to take your specific personality with all its idiosyncrasies into account. And by design weaving itself into your workday in a way that tangibly & unambiguously uplifts your quality of life. These positive results in turn rev you up for even more exploration & success along the path of wellness.

While wellness may have absolute value in the abstract, for the ordinary time-starved Joe it just doesn't make sense to spend energy on it unless he can experience real results in the context of his unique way of living.

A few years later as I ruminated on the struggle to make an impact in my early days as an Innovation consultant, the analogy with Wellness struck me. Do organizations also deserve to be thought of as having unique personalities? Do they have patterns of (collective) thinking and working different from any other organization?

Patterns that a ‘template-ised’ approach to innovation is likely to struggle against?

The more I thought about empirical evidence in front of my eyes, the more my conviction grew. The germ of Results-focused Innovation that started taking shape in my mind then has benefited scores of organizations over the years.

Results-focused Innovation

In my experience as a Strategic Innovation consultant over the past decade, I have often reflected on the efficacy (or otherwise) of received wisdom around innovation when I practically apply it to business.

One big realization I have had is the mismatch between the focus of the prevalent theories of innovation versus the focus of real-life business organizations:

The theories mostly worry about INPUTS — tools, processes, structure, people, culture. Whereas organizations, in the final analysis, are concerned only with OUTPUT!

I guess in my case it helped that I grew up on the business side of things — Sales, Marketing, Product Management — BEFORE I got into business consulting. In my first few years of consulting it started becoming clear to me that while innovation theory was adding chapter after chapter to already massive tomes with every passing year, it was succeeding lesser & lesser in communicating with & being relevant to hard-pressed business leaders. The 4 beliefs around innovation (highlighted earlier) that business leaders live with are a glaring symptom of the general failure of innovation theory to connect with the one over-riding desire of every senior business leader: PRODUCE RESULTS.

So I began experimenting with innovation theory in the early years of my consulting avatar, starting to bring in more & more practicality to it, and the outcomes were encouraging for both sides, client & consultant. Over the past few years, constant application and improvement of this ‘practical angle’ to dry theory has led me to a highly effective approach to innovation : what I call Results-focused Innovation.

Here is what ‘Results-focused Innovation’ brings to the table:

1. Because it counts Process innovation and Business Model innovation as legitimate targets (in addition to the usual suspect i.e. Product innovation), Results-focused Innovation has the firepower to overcome your business’ BIGGEST PROBLEMS : think Below-par Growth, Strategic Commoditization, Sluggish Profitability, Slipping Marketshare, Sagging Customer Satisfaction, Stalled Productivity and so on.

And it can deliver results quicker than you imagine. Results-focused innovation IS relevant to all strategic business leaders (and their teams), unless someone is operating in the sort of rarefied business space where no big problems exist!

2. Results-focused Innovation is NOT about back-breaking labor. Its role is to help figure out a SMARTER and BETTER way to run your business, NOT to pile up extra work for an already stretched workforce. In fact Results-focused Innovation usually leads to significant saving of bandwidth : bandwidth that was earlier getting dissipated in wasteful channels.

3. You don’t need to attempt a wholesale ‘Culture Change’ in order to succeed with Results-focused Innovation. Any organization or unit or team CAN innovate successfully without first undergoing an elaborate ‘DNA transformation’.

4. The quality of ‘high accuracy’ IS a hallmark of Results-focused Innovation initiatives, which translates into sharply reduced risk of failure.

Because its driving motive is to produce business results, Results-focused Innovation injects just the ‘right’ dose of ‘reflection-reorientation-conceptualization-execution’ appropriate for the unique, real-time needs of your organization — avoiding over-engineered, templatised quagmires that innovation is prone to.

Pretty much what experience has shown about Wellness approaches that really work : those that treat you as a unique individual with distinct patterns of thought, habits, likes and goals not quite like anyone else’s.

In my next blog I talk about how Results-focused Innovation works and succeeds where other approaches might struggle: