Hey, happy Monday,
You know at the bottom of every email (including this one) there is always a link to pick a time from my calendar and meet in a short call. That’s the number 1 reason I created STRTGY: to meet people who have that fire inside and are creating something they believe in, for themselves, for their team, for the world.
And one of the feedback I get most often is, “In your newsletters, everything is written so simply that it almost seems like everyone can do innovation. But is that really the case?”
I always answer like this, “Of course it isn’t! For some people in fact it is technically impossible!”
Just because it is simple does not mean it is also easy.
Some organizations are properly designed to ensure that innovation does not happen..
These three are the most recurring ingredients of the perfect recipe for disaster:
- Unclear vision and direction
- Confusing efficiency with innovation
- Projects with the broken neon effect
Make sure you don’t have them.
First things first
Innovation is one of those fuzzy concepts that everyone puts in their mouths but no one can explain. Ask anyone in the company and they will all give you a different answer. Not necessarily correct or wrong, it will instead be much more likely that that definition is without practical application.
Yet all companies define themselves as innovative in their field in some way.
Dan Ariely (whom I do not know personally) will forgive me if I steal and edit his most famous tweet :
Innovation is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, no one really knows how to do it but everyone thinks others are doing it…
➀ Unclear vision and direction.
I don’t want to come across as a know-it-all as you read these lines, but I can assure you that in my career very few times have I received a meaningful answer to the question, “What is your Vision?”
I also stopped asking the second question.
“What is your Mission?”
Yet it is lesson number 1 in any basic level marketing course!
Repeated ad nauseam.
That must be why we forget.
Sometimes someone tries to buy a pre-packaged Vision and Mission from change management consultants or even worse from graphic design agencies–it almost never works but it sure does produce beautiful mugs, posters, and gadgets.
It is impossible to discover new things if you do not know the direction in which to look. Of course wandering around is fun, but not productive.
The ability of leaders to define get a clear understanding of the one direction in which the entire organization tends to create value for its customers is the single most important thing to enable people to make an impact with their work.
The “Why” and “For Whom” the company exists is important.
The “What” and “How” are discussed in the next paragraph.
➁ Confusing Efficiency with Innovation.
These two things are always confused.
Some companies are incredibly good at what they do, and their results show it. But that doesn’t mean they do innovation.
They are efficient in providing stakeholders with steady growth in revenues, improvement in margins–efficiency indeed.
But growing 10 percent year on year is easy up to a point.
From €300k to €330k sometimes simply means having an extra new project.
But from €5M to €5.5M probably means having identified and exploited a new opportunity.
E-commerce is not innovation. Social Media Marketing, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Funnel Marketing, Growth Hacking, are not innovation. They are pure efficiency.
Ways to do the same things but with less energy.
All these activities only make the way in which people come into contact with your offer and, perhaps, purchase it, more efficient.
Distinguishing efficiency from innovation is the second important step to begin to be truly innovative.
➂ Broken neon effect
From time to time someone decides it is time to innovate. An enthusiastic team is immediately formed and starts working on the future until…
… until the biggest client asks for a quote for a major project. And the whole team goes back to what they were doing before.
Indoor gig economy. Outside consulting firms. Inside fast-track project factory.
There are many types of agencies, consulting firms, and system integrators, but they all have the same CEO: the client who generates 80 percent of the revenue.
It is not possible to innovate intermittently.
When the team is dedicated part-time.
When innovation is often a sop to keep talent from getting bored.
Innovation is a structured process of discovery and validation. It must be managed like any other industrial process. It cannot be reinvented every time neon starts up again.
It is necessary that a group of people be allowed to have different rules from the rest of the company and that success can be measured by different numbers.
Because growing new ideas into a significant competitive advantage requires resources, incentives and a plan of action that is different from business as usual.
So what to do?
Identify these warning signs early enough to bring out and solve these kinds of problems that generally lie in these areas:
- People
- Is there a clear and shared definition of the future to be created?
- Are the right people in the right role?
- What are the incentives for those who change their behavior and accept the risk of failure?
- Processes
- How is the budget affected?
- How are resources allocated?
- Is it possible to streamline the bureaucracy to prioritize learning over error reduction?
- Is success objectively defined and measurable?
- Products
- Is it possible to shift the focus from competitors to customers?
- What is the contribution of all teams to improving the customer experience?
- Is it possible to use Design as a Process and not simply as an aesthetic issue?
And what can we do together?
The most powerful management tool for aligning these three areas and driving the organization as a whole toward success are OKRs.
Those who have already heard of them, I am sure, will have already gotten a sense of what they are and how powerful they are by watching this video (TED), this video (GV Startup Lab), e this book o this book…
So much information is already available out there, and yet OKRs are simultaneously incredibly simple and difficult to implement.
Do most implementation projects not survive the first few meetings and just create a series of abandoned Spreadsheets in Google Drive?
At STRTGY we are working on a program to help teams to Launch the First Cycle of OKRs in 90 days or less.
If you want to learn more and know if you can be a part of it, the first step is to meet in a brief call and figure out where you are on the path now.
Choose the best time to from this link.
Good work!
Make yourself heard.
