Spyreism no.8 - Spread the innovation bug

At one point in my career I was working for an organization that was going through change management in transforming certain aspects of its business practices. Our CEO at the time and the management team were constantly advocating certain changes in our behavior and procedures. There was massive communication constantly on the topic both in the physical and the virtual environment. New SW tools were deployed and were used for the new work procedures required by the change. It took the organization many long months to go through this change and I can only imagine the cost of that transformation at the time. However, with all its benefits it was a time period that consumed high levels of budget, resources and management attention.?

When management teams are faced with the challenge of making the organization’s culture more innovative, the default approach is to go through this sort of change management simply because this is the top down, structured approach that has become so prevalent in corporations around the world.

At Spyre we developed a different approach which is more entrepreneurial in its nature. We consider the innovation team as a sort of “Startup” within the established organization it operates in. Well managed startups follow proven practices where they start by offering a very focused value proposition to a target audience of early adopters. Only when this initial focus catches on fire and traction begins to form does the offering begin to expand to ever increasing audiences and a broadening value proposition. In a similar fashion, the Spyre approach to changing an organizational culture follows a few principles:

1. Change is achieved by doing - We do not believe in inspiration and communication alone. If an organization is to become innovative then it simply has to innovate. People have to go through an entrepreneurial experience in order to truly internalize what it means to be an entrepreneur and thus, be able to spread this spirit across the organization. I invite you to check out my Spyreism no.7 article for more about that.
2. Start with your early adopters - We recommend that you start working with the executives who are the most open and cooperative to working with you. First achieve success in such areas of the organization that are your early adopters so to speak. Success should be in the form of innovative projects being added to official work plans and deployed. Follow this up by communicating this success and recruiting ever broadening areas of the organization through their decision making executive.
3. Train your super-spreaders and set them loose - Our approach to introducing innovation is to train a group of change agents that are called innovation leaders, give them very specific tools and a clear set of tasks to perform which will cause more and more managers to be attracted to innovation activities. This isn’t about training for the sole purpose of acquiring a skill. It is about constructing the home assignments in such a way that will facilitate the change for each innovation leader in their own area of the organization. They become friendly super spreaders that help spread the innovation bug across the organization.

There’s an added benefit to taking this approach to change as opposed to the traditional change management. It is much more cost effective, causes minimal disruption and can be performed at a very low level of risk. As an innovation manager, such a move by you will be considered as astute, measured and responsible. Assuming you do a good job of communicating progress as well, you will position yourself as a respectable function compared to other traditional agendas you are compared to in terms of costs and benefits to the organization. You can read more about measuring innovation and progress in my Spyreism no.2 article.

If you wish to learn more about how this is done, click below to schedule a complimentary meeting https://www.spyre.group/advisorymeeting .