Internet Junkie Biz

Posts Tagged ‘Opening’

Most companies claim to put innovation at or near the top of their corporate agendas, but many of them constrain themselves from delivering on this ambition.

They burden themselves with cumbersome processes, which, instead of encouraging and liberating creativity, constrict it in a virtual straitjacket. There is nothing wrong with processes per se; quite the contrary: good ones liberate people to focus their creativity on innovation itself, rather than on dreaming up ways to deliver it.

My gripe is instead with the way many innovation processes seem designed to catch errors and avoid risk. Even the terminology encourages this: words like Stage Gates, Pipelines and Funnels all sound very mechanical and very constricting. As soon as innovation projects hit problems, the stage gates crash down upon them and the decision makers are quick to pull the plug and avoid wasting resources on these problem children.

Decision-makers often kill off promising ideas too soon because their supporters are unable to produce hard evidence for the business case. It is short sighted to expect data to support the return on investment so early in the life of a big disruptive idea.

A better approach is for the decision maker to tackle his or her role with a different mindset. Instead of acting as The Gatekeeper and slamming the gate shut at the first sign of trouble, they would benefit from reframing their role as Gate Opener, playing the part of problem solver and supporter, and working alongside the team to help them find a way to make otherwise promising ideas work. This requires setting aside an analytical and judgmental mindset and adopting a more creative one as a builder of ideas and a cracker of problems. The decision-maker is usually the most experienced person in the room, but all too often that experience is channeled into the very easy task of saying No. A far greater challenge and better use of their talent and experience, is to play the role of coach and supporter, helping the team find a solution or make the idea even better.

Doing this requires courage on the part of the leader. Saying no reinforces the sense of a leader’s power and influence. It also means risk is avoided and that can be career enhancing in many organizations: if you don’t stick your head over the parapet you won’t get shot. Instead, rolling up the sleeves and getting stuck in to helping solve a problem means you might fail. It can also feel a bit too democratic for some! But doing it will win the genuine respect of the team and gives high return disruptive ideas a real chance of winning through.

This doesn’t mean that the gate should never be shut. If the problem can’t be cracked, or the idea has little merit, then consigning it to the graveyard before too many resources are wasted is the right thing. Nor does it mean that every minor idea should be laboured over when all the indicators show it has insufficient merit. Far better to put it out of its misery and get on with the search for bigger and better ideas.

I am thinking more of high risk, big return, innovations that require courage and mean changing the existing rules of the game. These are the ideas that often get killed off at the first sign of difficulty. “It will never work” “It’s unaffordable”. “Manufacturing I would add complexity”. “We don’t have the capacity to handle this”. “It won’t work in our usual distribution channels”. “It’s very different from what we do now”. If the size of the prize is big enough or the unmet need that this fills is real enough, then it is worth pitching in and trying really hard to make it work. This may well involve completely changing the rules of the game: different routes to market, outsourced manufacturing, extensive testing, remodeling, and bringing in additional brains or external resources to help crack the challenge.

Don’t shut the gate on high potential ideas before you have given them a chance to bloom.