10 Rules for Strategic Innovation (Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble – Idea to Execution)

Rule 1: In all great innovation stories, the great idea is only Chapter 1. Building breakthrough businesses requires forgetting, borrowing, and learning. These central challenges demand more than just talented and ambitious leaders; they require leveraging the power of organisational DNA [staff, structure, system, culture].

Rule 2: Sources of organisational memory are powerful. Organisations naturally cling to CoreCo’s orthodoxy, even when moving into new environments. But NewCo needs to operate in fundamentally different ways [what got you here won’t get you there].

Rule 3: Large, established companies can beat start-ups if they can succeed in leveraging their enormous assets and capabilities.

Rule 4: Strategic experiments face critical unknowns. No amount of research can resolve these unknown before the business is lunched. Therefore, success depends more on an ability to experiment and learn than on the initial strategy. [OB is more important than strategy when it comes to innovation.]

Rule 5: The NewCo organisation must be built from scratch, with new choices in staffing, structure, systems, and culture. This is the only way to defeat the powerful forces of institutional memory. Conversational awareness of the differences between NewCo and CoreCo business models does not suffice.

Rule 6: Managing tensions is job number one for senior management. The health of the links between NewCo and CoreCo deteriorates easily. There are several natural sources of tension, driven by dynamic forces – particularly the changing demand for and supply of capital within the organisation.

Rule 7: NewCo needs its own planning process. CoreCo’s norms for evaluating business performance will disrupt NewCo’s learning.

Rule 8: Interest, influence, internal competition, and politics disrupt learning. To ensure learning, you must take a disciplined, detached, and analytical approach to making predictions and interpreting differences between predictions and outcomes.

Rule 9: Hold NewCo accountable for learning and not results. You can achieve accountability for learning by insisting on a disciplined learning process. Accountability for results against plan, while simpler to practise, is counterproductive.

Rule 10: Companies can build a capacity for breakthrough growth through strategic innovation. Skills in forgetting, borrowing, and learning are the foundation. Managers must start building these organisational skills early in a company’s life.

Book Summary - Andrew Hargadon “How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate” HBSP, 2003.

The gist: innovations = recombining (people+ideas+objects) in new ways
Critical success factors for innovations to work: two – envisaging non-existing combinations across teams/indutries AND building necessary networks to support executing ideas into products/results


The business of innovation
The strategy of technology brokering takes advantage of relatively simple but consistently overlooked characteristic of many breakthrough innovations - that innovations are the recombination of old people, objects and ideas in new ways. So before we consider the ways in which technology brokering works and organisations was first explored the complementary nature of innovation in more detail.

Recombinant innovation and the sources of invention
The revolution sparked by Henry Ford for systems of mass producing automobiles was a product of recombinant processes. The immediacy of his success came from the utilisation of existing technologies borrowed from other industries. Recombining previously disparate elements often creates a whole that is greater by far than the sum of its parts because the process enables innovation to pull the best people, ideas, and objects from different worlds.

The recombination of existing elements into novel and powerful new technologies, scientific theories, and social movements is a process that depends critically on the individuals and organisations involved. But hiring smart people, creating flat organisations and cross-functional teams, and engaging in brainstorming in rapid prototyping are not enough to make organisations innovative. It's not the free pinball or casual Fridays. To those in the automobile industry in 1910, engineers were not just thinking outside of the box, but they were thinking in different boxes.

Organisations pursuing innovation often unconsciously select individuals, organisational structures, and innovation strategies that would put them on the leading edge of their current markets and technologies. All the while, however, some of the most innovative technology can be found not in their focus on rivals, but to the side, in other worlds were potentially valuable but unknown technologies have already emerged.

Bridging small worlds
Acess to the people-ideas-objects of other worlds gives people an advantage in seeing how those resources can be used in new ways. But at the same time, bridging small worlds is not that simple. Small worlds, like the boxes people think in, see innovation in two very different ways. Because of the nature of small worlds, changes in any one part of the system needs assistance by the rest of the system. Small worlds also constraint inhabitants by limiting what they see as possible and appropriate, giving them the ties that bind them to other people, ideas, and objects inside the world and that, in the process, blind them to alternatives on the outside.

History is filled with examples of organisations and industries were swept away by the winds of creative destruction. It's easy to place the blame on nearsighted individuals who, unlike their farsighted counterparts (inventors), could not see or embrace the future. Technologies in one place may be valuable to both remain unseen and untapped by others. By bridging these worlds, one can develop the ability to see how these resources can be combined with others and put to new use.

Bridging activities bring the people of organisations into contact with problems and resources of many different worlds. There is no one right way. Technology brokering requires many simultaneous bridging activities because of these activities both presented and created to/by the open mind is necessary to see in new connections and new combinations.

The paradox inherent in the innovation process is that innovators need wide ranging ties across distant worlds to generate innovative ideas in the first place, yet they also need strong focused ties in communities around emerging innovations. Firms must commit resources to both. The answer is not to resolve the paradox, but rather to appreciate that each seemingly conflicting goal. Bridging brings the people ideas and objects of distant worlds into the organisation and into new combinations.


Building the new worlds
A birthday bash took place on October 21, 1929 on the 50th anniversary of Edison's introduction of the lightbulb. Henry Ford hosted the party, moving Edison's Menlo Park laboratory (and seven carloads of stuff) to Dearborn to become part of his Greenfield Village Museum. Edison's wife mentioned in her diary that Thomas was so much more than the light-bulb, but she thought this was a big PR for GE.

When innovation is seen as the work of a genius, we are in for trouble. Too many times entrepreuners attempted to walk in the footsteps of Edison and Ford - determined to be individualistic just like their role models. But they [Edison, Ford] weren't. What sets them apart, and what sets up technology brokers, is the recognition that innovation requires not just a new idea (built from combinations of old ones) but also the collective effort necessary to make that a new idea work against doubt and uncertainty of the process. Innovation requires building a community of like-minded and wholly committed individuals who see their shared future of the success of the emerging technologies and industries.

So to succeed, technology brokers actually must walk a delicate line between establishing the broad ranging and networks required to see and combine valuable new ideas across industries and, once innovations are constructed, building the necessary collective action community around those innovations. Technology brokers must pursue strategies that put them on the territory of existing worlds, yet retrain them to become the core of the new ones. Some are better at bridging multiple domains, others at building communities around their ideas. The lessons of technology brokers offer insights into balancing these two competing strategies.

Technology brokering as a firm
For some companies, like IDEO, innovation is not a deviation from the everyday work but rather the single process behind the survival. Although such technology brokers are rare, there is much they can teach us about how they have linked their innovation strategies to their structure, work practices, and culture.

A dedicated technology brokering strategy bridges small worlds, exploiting the position between different worlds to combine existing objects ideas and people in new adventurers, and building the necessary communities around these new experiments that will ensure their success. Such a strategy works because these firms are continuously moving into new worlds. This innovation strategy, together with their organisational structure of work practices, create internal marketplace of ideas and a culture of wisdom where in new ideas and artefacts can move around freely.
Technology brokering without the structure in practices and culture won't work any more than these structures practices and cultures will work without moving among multiple worlds. However, not all firms can dedicate themselves to the continuous pursuit of innovation. For the rest of us, it's more important to recognise when and where we can create groups within large organisations that can invoke technology brokering strategy or recognise and create communities around the new recombinant innovations when opportunities emerge.

Technology brokering within the firm
Inside large organisations, there are already the potential for existing ideas objects and people from one market to move to another in new combinations. Also within their walls, however, these firms have the barriers between divisions for responsible groups that make bridging worlds and building a new venture difficult.

For these firms the answer is to form internal technology brokering groups chartered to move across many small worlds of the firm rather than establish themselves in any specific. These groups main responsibility is neither performing in the presence nor the future but rather of redistributing the future that’s already here.

The benefits of internal technology brokers come from more than simply the dynamics of recumbent innovation they also come from multitiered markets at large firms create existing technologies can have potentially revolutionary impacts and the different markets, other can also have an impact on their organisational processes

The key to success is the realisation that technology brokering happens on the ground where people are most familiar with the existing technologies and the problems their markets present. Senior executives are crucial in a their position to link these otherwise disconnected visions.

Creating internal technology brokers requires creating the same conditions that exist in, eg, IDEO. This means postioning these groups outside of the individual divisions were they might be subject to the distractions and resources and strains of P&L within the single market. It means creating the conditions in which they are rewarded for introducing existing technologies into a different small worlds of an organisation-add not focusing their efforts within any single one.

Finally, not all firms are large enough or diversified enough to benefit from developing internal technology brokers around particular problems or technologies. For such companies committing the entire firm or even a single group is infeasible. The value of technology brokering for these firms lies in recognising when opportunities for recumbent innovation arise and the know-how to seize those opportunities.

Exploiting the emergent opportunities for technology brokering
In firms that are focused on a single or a few markets were success depends on building competencies and on building close relationships with a few key suppliers and customers, accidental insights into potentially valuable technologies usually go unnoticed or if recognised are dismissed by critical others.

Most firms won’t have senior executives to turn to when valuable ideas get dismissed by those who are simply protecting their own expertise. Organisations need to develop the capability to recognise the value of technologies in other domains and to quickly build bridges necessary to these new ideas. They also need to develop the ability to quickly build the network connections around these technologies to make them successful first within themselves and then in the market.

Looking back moving forward
Common sense, it's been said, is the genius in its dotage (Einstein: “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen”). We now hold [given] believes that previously were considered revolutionary. And while it's easy to look back and see the obvious discovery, it's more useful to try to understand why that finding was not obvious beforehand. Elements of various inventions were in use long before the revolution began.
For these breakthroughs to happen someone somewhere had to make connections nobody else had made before. The very existence of these technologies made them revolutionary when they were introduced elsewhere, but their very existence also made it difficult for those most familiar with them to take them apart and put them together in new ways to complete the circle.

Just as genius turns to common sense common sense turns to prejudice. The same innovative people of previous generation will become the ones to suppress the next. Starting a new cycle requires building new combinations of people, ideas and objects. And building those new combinations requires bridging distant worlds in order to find and exploit existing resources within them. It may take a genius to see the potential for a breakthrough innovation across a fragmented landscape, but the genius depends more on the network that allows us to see across worlds than on any inherent talents.

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Mea Culpa training course

If you would like to receive a free copy of introductory material of my 5-session training course (“Mea Culpa”) addressed for both frontline staff as well as senior managers, please feel free to contact me by email (azharalani@gmail.com), twitter (@azharalani), LinkedIn or directly on mobile +447842322021. We can also discuss how to deliver the training to your organisation.

Mea Culpa course helps staff at various levels own up to their mistakes and build an organisational trust-based culture of candour. Errors are not only one of the main types of process waste in Lean; they can be fatal as in health care, aviation and energy industries. Admitting to minor mistakes is one approach to avoid having major ones.

Mea Culpa 5-session training course can be delivered to an audience of up to 30 people, either as one-week module or scheduled over a course of up to five weeks as suits the workforce/organisation. Course introductory material (available free upon request) is PowerPoint slides in PDF format of 42 slides, file size 1.84MB. Training materials content can be customised to fit your organisation’s industry.

If doubt begets belief, then vulnerability is essential for trust.

We build on strengths, but beliefs start with doubts. For teams to perform at higher levels, members need to have the courage to take risks, safe in the knowledge of their own vulnerability – in other words, to build trust from the ground up.

In his famous book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” Patrick Lencioni outlines the root causes of teams’ inability to realise their optimum potential, and he puts absence of trust at the base of the pyramid:
  

1.       Absence of trust

2.       Fear of conflict

3.       Lack of commitment

4.       Avoidance of team accountability

5.       Inattention to team objectives

As for Descartes, he doubted all his beliefs to see which ones he could be certain were true, or to trust his beliefs if you like. We need to apply this method when building teams to help members realise their full potential. It has been argued that what Descartes really meant by “I think therefore I am” was “I doubt therefore I exist.” The very act of doubting one's own existence serves as a proof of the reality of it, or at least of one's thought. Some say this argument has become the foundation for all knowledge. We can apply Descartes “discourse of the method” to the exercise of building trust among team members by starting with, what I would like to call:

The Declaration of Team Trust.

You see, the beauty of Descartes model is that it starts from scratch, from the ground up, and deconstructs every belief to sort out what’s true and what’s not. Similarly, with Lencioni’s model, trust, being the base of the pyramid and the foundation of a high-performing team, to build it out we need to recognise team members’ vulnerability. We also need to ensure that we will have safety net(s) in place to try out new things and fail-safe when things don’t work out as planned.

As a suggestion for the Declaration, we can ask team members to sign a sort of a social contract for the newly formed team (or newcomer members) using the opening lines in Descartes’ “Meditations” - with some adaptations:

“We might have in the past accepted many false opinions about other team members as being true. Consequently, what we afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful. Going forward, we commit to getting rid of all the opinions we had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building our team trust from the foundation.”

A new type of “flow” in Lean: know-how vs know-why

Having worked in and led many kaizens, and by coaching executives and managers about the principles of Lean, I have always asked the question: why do we focus only on the process “flow”, how about workers’ flow?

I once came across a business book that had more (positive) psychology than numbers! Fascinated by the title “Good Business,” the book talked about “flow” from the operator/worker perspective. I thought that is a good source to tap in while attempting to extend the concept of “flow” in Lean. The book author, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, argues that the quality of experience is a function of the relationship between skills (x) and challenges (y). Optimal Experience, or “flow”, occurs when both variables (x, y) are high.

“We have to grasp not only the Know-How but also ‘Know-Why’” -Shingo

It is fundamental in Lean to implement process flow, as it is a pre-requisite to have “pull” if a process is to be optimised. However, that is all true from the process perspective. In many industries, especially process-intensive ones like energy, healthcare and retail, the flow of the product and the work of the operator are on two different planes, as Shingo showed us in his network of processes vs operations model. Hence, what is needed here is to think of “flow” in Lean down two dimensions: process flow and operator flow. The former is a very well documented in Lean literature. I think we need to shed some light on the latter, let’s call it operator flow.

Operator experience is optimal when the job at hand present the worker with challenges that match their skills, as Csikszentmihalyi eloquently demonstrated in his aforementioned book. This calls for the whole discipline of organisation design to be employed for this discussion – and rightly so. As part of my experience working within huge business transformation programmes, I learned first-hand the importance of sequencing the steps of implementing change: first, design processes to ensure Lean flow/pull: simple, streamlined, standard processes, then and only then, design roles to operate the processes. Bundle related roles together logically and hey presto; you will have job descriptions ready to be published to hire the right people for the right job. If all goes to plan, workers will be able to do the right thing, the right way first time and every time, that was the inspiration.

Csikszentmihalyi neatly summarized the steps required to achieve flow:

• The task at hand is challenging enough – “just right” neither boring nor frustrating
• Focus: you will need to concentrate without interruptions and/or noise
• Crystal-clear goals: if you aim at nothing you will achieve it all the time
• Immediate feedback provided
• Task at hand is meaningful enough to be front and centre and absorb you into it so that everyday life recedes into the background. In other words: know-why not only know-how.
• Sense of self disappears for a while (loss of ego) and when it comes back, you are refreshed. Sense of inspiration and harmony
• You are in control over your actions – autonomy

While Maslow professed “self-actualisation” as the ultimate human achievement, Csikszentmihalyi goes further to say that we need to contribute beyond one’s self as integrated individuals – every worker is unique in their own right but can achieve much more when part of a team – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Some ideas have energy of their own, but we need to harness that energy. Most people think Edison and Ford where geniuses who worked alone. Wrong! They were supported by their team and networks and that’s why they were able to turn vision into reality on a continuous basis. They created industries on the back of their innovation. Therefore, in process design, we need to create workplace to be amenable for operator flow to occur.  Letting creativity juice flow is one way of creating such workplaces. By enticing operators to work better together and together better, and encouraging them, especially front-line staff, to come up with new ideas to make their job more efficient and more effective, ie to process-innovate not just product-innovate, we will have a more conducive atmosphere for flow to happen in (at least) two dimensions.

Innovation success factors

• Quality of business ideas – rigorous selection
• Education program – unique, tailored
• Delivery – state of the art- excellence
• Mentors – strong network, wide, world-class
• Inspiring role models

This is one of the risks process standardisation presents to any organisation-redesign programme. Where do you draw the line between locked-down “gold standard” processes and the provision of “sandbox” for workers to innovate? Well, one answer is in the organisation’s vision statement that Csikszentmihalyi wants us to call it the “soul” of the organisation: “if a vision is genuine and is carried into action, it becomes a powerful attractor for members of the organisation. It provides a goal that is worth pursuing over and above the extrinsic rewards that can be provided by the job.” 

I tried discussing Csikszentmihalyi flow when I worked at one of companies in the Middle East. The aim was to increase KPIs to new unprecedented levels – stretch goals if you like. During the session where I was announcing the new targets, I told my team that we need to have jobs to be challenging enough to match your skills, which, after working with my team for several months I was convinced they were to ready to shift gears upwards. And I recall the message worked very well. However, this was also coupled with launching “team collaboration” and “process innovation” awards, which got everyone buzzed, and all wanted to achieve more by working/innovating together.

My article about and Q&A with Shurooq Amin

Exhibition: “Shot! – The Untold Truth of Society Girls” by Shurooq Amin

Words: Azhar Alani - Paintings: Shurooq Amin - Venue: Lahd Gallery, Hampstead, London

Plato once said something to the effect that physical lust involves the eclipse of the soul by the body. When I saw “Take Me to Heaven” painting for the first time, I thought of it as the exact opposite: the soul has triumphed and eclipsed the body in total submission. The half-naked woman in the picture is kneeling totally, where the front of her face is touching a prayer mat or a small carpet she is using for, eh, meditating? Perhaps!Among Amin’s other paintings on display at the Lahd Gallery, this one stopped me, full stop. Amin, a multi-talented artist, presents local cultural dilemmas using traditional devices in an uncanny way - an art form that is hard to describe as just painting. The woman’s wild hairstyle in the “Take Me to Heaven” masterpiece connects it to another striking painting labelled “Medusas Resting”. Go figure!

The two asymmetrical wing-shaped tattoos in blue and red are not only located at the summit of the woman’s body as it’s kneeling, but it’s also the place where Amin shot this painting with a rifle using Hornet cartridge. She said in an interview that she felt, after having done the paintings, that “there was something missing.” That’s when Amin pointed at either the heart or the “summit” of the main character(s) in the pictures and shot them with a rifle to finish off the artworks. Hence the name of this exhibition: “Shot!” as all paintings on display have been actually shot at by the artist. It’s quite a scene when the paintings are viewed in the Gallery where the telltales of the passing bullets are staring at you when you look closer.

And here is another twist: in some countries, like the UK, this particular type of bullet, the Hornet, is prohibited from use on deer for game hunting. Was the aim of shooting then to kill, one wonders - if we use deer as a metaphor for women? And the reason why this type of cartridge is prohibited on deer, you may ask? These bullets are considered “sub-powered.” Now all of a sudden we find ourselves thinking about the suffering of the women portrayed in the pictures. Was Amin trying to show that in the Middle East the “upper crust” has no mercy or bravery to end the suffering of those “society girls," as they are customarily known, who usually fall victim to judgemental labels and misconceptions? Or are we all misled to think this way when those “Medusas” are hiding behind their veils and with that obscuring their true colours?

I wonder if Amin sees herself as an Arab “suffragette” - someone, in her own style, campaigning for the rights of women locally. But where exactly is “locally”? Previous exhibitions by Amin touched upon the identity issue by depicting the polarity of West vs. East and how this contrast plays a huge role in the making of the Arab youth and shaping their aspirations. It’s the inverse of Orientalism if you like: how the West is depicted in the Middle Easterners' mind. 

Like other seminal works of art, Amin’s paintings are loud. They provoke some fundamental questions. I left the gallery with my thoughts already longing to go back and see the paintings afresh. The questions those paintings got me asking started to sound like a true and genuine tone; a voice that I know too well: “I” was asking “myself” about “me.” Amin managed to bring all the three of “us” together right in front of this great painting where the soul was calling: “Take Me to Heaven.”
- Azhar

Q&A with Shurooq Amin

After publishing the article above about Shot! I (AA) asked Amin (SA) few questions about her work.

AA: “Take me to heaven” is a very provocative piece of art; to say the least. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

SA: “Take Me to Heaven” raises the question of religion vs spirituality. The source of humanity is nakedness; we are born naked. Our connection to God, or to the source, the universe, or whatever you have faith in, is a connection based on purity and intimacy. Whether we pray five times a day or not at all, whether we go to Haj or never set foot near the kabbaa, whether we wear Hijab or a bikini, spirituality comes from within. And a true Muslim should know that God is omnipotent, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-hearing. Hence, this painting is not simply that of a "naked woman praying", and certainly lust was not implicated when it was painted; however, it urges the viewer to open a dialogue and question the validity of religious rituals vs true spirituality.

AA: The UK prohibits the use of Hornet bullets on deer (for game shooting) because it’s “underpowered.” Can you explain your choice of this type of rifle cartridge? (If we can think of deer as a metaphor for women)

SA: I chose the Hornet bullet simply because it was aesthetically the most suitable for my work: it dug through the canvas and the wood in a clean, crisp manner, leaving behind it the right size hole, subtle and understated. I had no idea that it was prohibited in the UK when I decided on using it, nor was I thinking of deer as a metaphor for women. But then again, I find that very interesting indeed. You might get better answers if you hypnotize me, as I've been told my subconscious is far more aware than my conscious [but then again, that applies to everyone, doesn't it :) ].

AA: I found your poem “The Other Wife” a bit out-of-character when viewed against your repertoire. One can sense a deep lsense of oss and longing from a woman who was meant to be up against all what life throws at her.... Was this poem a “one-off”?

SA: No, the poem 'The Other Wife' is not a one-off. In my poems, I frequently take on different personas. Instead of writing about a character, I "become" that character. That poem was triggered by a true story that happened to a friend of a friend. I was instantly disturbed by it. I wanted to be in her shoes and see how it felt, what made a woman reach that level of victimization.

AA: Do you see yourself as an Arab “suffragette” if there is such a movement within the Arab world?

SA: Others see me that way, but I certainly don't. I've done nothing to deserve that title, other than just be really brave (reckless?), and not care at all what critics or fundamentalists say about me. I say things as they are, write without censorship, and paint with integrity. Ultimately, most of my poems, short stories, and paintings are shocking and controversial; but then again, someone's got to do it, say it, paint it. Why not me? When I get a emails or facebook messages or phone calls from fans or clients or other artists saying that I've inspired them, opened up dialogues for them, or just helped them in some way, that's enough for me.

To find out more about Shurooq Amin click here.
For her latest exhibition click here. 

Becoming an Agent of Change

Published in British Medical Journal (BMJ) Learning as a training module with 1hr CME credit.
http://learning.bmj.com/learning/search-result.html?moduleId=5004461

Becoming an agent of change: key principles and practical examples of managing change

 

Learning outcomes:

After completing this module you should know about change management as a discipline as well as your role and contribution to change. You should also know how to start putting what you have learnt into practice. You should:

• Be able to define and recognise change
• Know the difference between change and transition
• Be able to describe the three stages of transition and the four phases of response to change
• Be able to outline the steps for implementing change effectively
• Understand your role and contribution as an agent (or champion) of change.