Levers of Innovation

I was SO incredibly fortunate to be able to share some thoughts for spirited discussion around change and organization development with the International Society of Organization Development.  Practitioners, professionals, students, researchers, educators, and excited minds interested in change all came together to share thoughts and build our awareness of the OD world and the passionate people who support and engage in the efforts!

When talking about change, working with organizations, what better place to start than what I find myself doing working with Innovation at Bank of Hawaii?!  Too often people hear 'innovation' in the financial industry and they remain stuck around the idea of technology - the mobile and online evolutions many of us use today.

But these very "innovations" are what's pushing the industry to look at things differently, asking 'How Might We' consider another way.  And with the ever-changing environment - regulations, economy and interest rates - coupled with competing against a 150-year old legacy of risk-adversion and security,  the  challenge quickly increases to avoid "becoming irrelevant." But how does one innovate if the competition hasn't created the product yet?  How can you be at the top of your market if the market isn't even existing?

I started considering that my role is not to create that 'end product' that's innovative, but rather my goal became to facilitate others to work, improve, change and consider new approaches such that when we look back, we would say "yeah, we're an innovative organization!"  So if this is my true role, then I began to look what 'levers' were out there that gets you do to something.  What makes you act?  What stops the person who does the same exercise everyday and simply reflect (assess)?  Then, what gets you over the barrier to try something?  And based on that attempt, not only take the feedback and modify, but then repeat the cycle?  These are how I defined levers.   

Too often we react to items - this is how we often see the action to try something new.  I love the example that you would not call budget analysts "innovative" in general, nor tell them to go "innovate the budget."  They're good analysts, they like the numbers black and white.  But what happens if you tell them to cut the budget by 20% across the organization?  Now you might get some innovative solutions as they talk to each other and consider options on how to remove that 20%!

While we can identify those things we react to, my goal would rather be prepared and act before we are forced to!  Avoid irrelevancy, we're proactively leading our charge into a successful future.  But this is going to take some re-assessing our current situation and approaching from a more holistic endeavor.  We need to expose our team to possibilities, get them trying new tools and being more customer focused than product/profit focused.  Consider how you can leverage the social rewards of employees thanking each other in ad hoc ways (vice the formal structure of management rewards).  Let's build an open and creative environment where we keep the boundaries of the business, but the team is free to try ideas and experiment with processes within the flexible arena of the organization.

There's something to understanding these levers and working with them so that you not only slowly move the entire culture, but you begin to make tracks in showing the complete turnaround into an innovative organizations.  And what's best is YOU didn't do it - you get the organization to change their ways!