Innovation - Don't Undermine the Change!

A co-worker shared a great article from Harvard Business Revenue on the ways large corporations can undermine the innovation efforts. It definitely represents key things to consider as you work towards innovating within and through an organization, especially from an organization rooted in risk aversion and stability.

1. How you measure success – while a challenge for anyone venturing into new territory (I experienced it on asking others to even articulate what innovation means), defining something to represent a change in behavior, resources, priorities, etc. is a great way to see if there’s forward progress. Start small can be the simplest and easiest thing to do. We setup an area for employees to submit ideas and while there was argument whether we’ve had any successes today (only a few have been implemented); the fact that people were willing to voluntarily share their own ideas represents a success! Not to mention we have over 275 a year later! I would highlight the positive when there was doubt if we’d even get 3 ideas in the first month!

2. Return on Investment – are hard challenge in an expense-reduction environment, but again, start small. Can you test or prototype a piece of the idea and get immediate feedback? Doing something in a 1-3 month window for quick response, versus spending 12 months gathering data that may or may not come true, utilizes the capital in an efficient manner and easier to gain buy-in.

3. And yes – while I love the title of a Chief Innovation Officer – innovation should come from throughout the organization at all levels. Everyone innovating where they can with what they have leads up to larger, bigger changes.

4. “Radical Collaboration” - Working with LOTS of different people from different areas. Even if the idea is tailored to a specific work function, ask someone who is NOT part of that team for their thoughts. Not only will you might learn something new, but it also gives you practice on sharing your idea and why it is so important.

5. Physical space to see the evolution – innovation spaces and physical, tangible things that show not only innovations that produce results, but that say “See, we tried something and not sure what the result may be” are great at building support as they challenge existing practices in a solid manner. Anyone can argue with you about a good idea, but it becomes a whole lot harder of a rock to move if it’s been physically built.

6. Support – everyone looks to the boss to see if they agree. If they don’t, everyone is just paddling in their own direction. You need to see the support not just steering the boat with a given direction, but once it’s on course, getting in the back and helping to paddle just as hard if not harder as everyone else. Seeing this action will motivate everyone else even more than simply saying “you have my support” and residing in a penthouse office.

Some people say change is hard, but then I read a thought that change isn’t hard – we make a hundred changes every day: change your mind on what to wear today, change which direction you take to work due to traffic, change your mind and buy your lunch after you brought to the office, etc. It’s accepting the value of the change that can be the barrier, but without addressing all the above elements, little forward motion will occur. Thoughts and insights?

Measuring Success

I had the pleasure to share how "Barriers to Innovation" is actually a list of key items that Project Managers should consider as they move through their projects.  PMI Honolulu Chapter invited me to speak on what I'm seeing and learning in my role as Innovation Manager at Bank of Hawaii.  While many people gave me positive feedback on the presentation, my favorite was hearing that it forced them to not only think about their projects and the respective stakeholders, but to look at themselves and how they are conducting.  Nice to hear that you can share something worthwhile; however, good project managers they are, asked me a number of questions around metrics.  I know this is something both my team and myself struggle in the effort to report in a financial world that is rooted in metrics and numbers and it made me think about how we do quantify success.

One of the things I experienced in my course work in Organizational Change at HPU was that change is measured by the shift in priorities, resources and time. Changes that are to have a wider impact, enterprise effects and social and culture shifts are hard to articulate in the near term. However, if you measure where people spend their time before, during, and after changes made (and then continue to monitor even after projects have completed), do you notice differences? An idea that we need to innovate so that we do not become obsolete in an ever-changing world is easily understood by our organization. But those innovations may be little things that have long term impacts. My example would be 'willing to try' with not only the understanding but the acceptance that not all new ideas ventured will necessarily return positive benefits, but that's okay as long as we learn, adapt and move forward. As we cocmmunicate this mindset, we're not expecting all employees to suddenly start proposing million dollar projects from day one. However, to have the team mention one project that they tried but failed fast and failed hard at a team meeting is a first step. 6 months later, the attitudes are a little lighter as the team begins to each individually mention a small project from their respective areas that they struggled with and changed course based on the results. Then I hear at a different team meeting, outside my innovation space, the small discussion of not repeating an effort they tried last year due to poor results. I'm seeing that people have spent resources on items that may not have been the most successful. They're talking and spending time with projects that didn't succeed on the first shot. Now I'm measuring my culture shifts by these variances in the priorities, discussion and resources spent on projects compared to prior there was no time spent discussing 'failed' efforts, only the positive ones.

I thought this might be a good topic to share for feedback as it's not just innovation measures, but really, how do you create measures for any new process or product, that you have no baseline or even no benchmark to compare to, but at the same time you're in a business and expected to produce?

Barriers or Opportunities - Recipe for Success

After my last post about Why Innovation is SO Hard, it was interesting to see Forbes come out with an article on the 10 Barriers to Employee Innovation.  While workload and resources were both named, I found it interesting the 'concreteness' of the items identified.  But at the same time, these "barriers" I think are the opportunities and if you look at it that way, I think there's a recipe for success written right in front of you to help your innovation efforts succeed!

1. Closed-Mindedness - your opportunity to show that Innovation is about asking "What If?" or "How Might We?"  The more the organization opens up and considers the idea BEFORE judging and saying no, the more ideas and the more open your organization will foster creative thinking rather than appear the nay sayers that is often heard.

2. Traditions - use the foundation you have made to support your trials at pushing forward.  Bank of Hawaii is EXTREMELY risk adverse, and our customers appreciate how secure and safe we've made their financial future.  Trying an 'innovative' approach goes against that risk; however, we've built this trust and with calculated risk, as you engage this loyal customer, explain to them and continue that trust, if you're open you'll get that trust to try the new approach, work through it WITH the customer.

3. Jealousy – this is not a barrier, but something that needs to be eradicated.  You all work and support the same organization – that’s one team.  So get every project or effort talking about the ‘team’ effort.  The team succeeds, the organization succeeds and therefore, the employees are rewarded.  Remove the support for individual contributions and focus on the team work. 

4. Money – rather than ‘budget’ for research and development, encourage the ideas.  If you cultivate good ideas, business cases will emerge naturally.  Then it’s not so much a matter of asking management for money to try an idea, but the ‘innovative’ idea is then brought to fruition through the same channels any revenue opportunity might have – but it’s that time that gets the idea to the point it can show return on investment that’s so important.

5. Generational Difference/Age – this is fact, no getting around it.  Instead, acknowledge it and encourage it as different perspectives together can help evolve ideas to reality.  You’ll need a team and the more perspectives the better the solution will not only produce results, but will be accepted by the organization.

6. Communication – this is a challenge so I’d say start with just encouraging people sharing what they are working on, no matter how ‘boring’ the project is, sharing the awareness of what the organization is look at becomes so insightful that often many natural teams will emerge that want to help the project, whether or not they’re part of the official team.  The biggest thing – share WHY a project is underway, an idea was not implemented or there are changes – knowing why will get the buy in even if they don’t agree, they understand.

7. Size – Figure out what works – a large company is just a bunch of smaller teams.  Get each team innovation in their groups and it bubbles up to an innovative organization.  And when you’re talking culture change, changing habits and mindsets, acknowledge the larger the size the longer the time – so if you’re a large company, its okay if it takes time, don’t stop!

8. Education – I’d push this back to communication.  Those who see something interesting, learn something, try something – share it with others.  Have your organization educating itself.  If everyone learned one thing or found one piece of information interesting and shared it, you’d have a plethora of new information that sparks ideas!  That’s what you want, not to learn how to innovate but to plant the seed to feel like you want to ask “What if” or “Why”.

9. Thought Leadership – to me, simply act in your leadership role the way you want others to act.  Culture change is inspired – when people see you doing things, reaching out and sharing, they will feel encouraged to do the same.  Set the example and then you won’t have to force, they will want to embrace the mentality on their own.

10. Resources – this is a secondary concern, focus on the idea, the value.  Do this while inspiring then people will find the resources.  You’d be amazed when an idea starts from the ground up how excited people get and how much time they put into it.  Watch a simple team building activity, like our recent costume contest – people put time and effort and were extremely creative and innovative with their designs, supporting an organizational function all without pay – imagine this was a revenue generating idea for the organization!!

I’m thinking that this recipe above would be great topics for future discussion – how you’re doing it and sharing lessons learned from Bank of Hawaii!