Tune Out, Turn Off: Disengage or Engage

There is a consistently-reported high level of disengagement linked to leadership in the workplace that manufactures both passively and actively-disengaged people. The level of disengagement is often quoted at up to a staggering 80% of the workforce[i]. But this problem is not restricted to the UK or USA it is a worldwide phenomenon. Leadership is routinely stated as one of the major sources of disengagement.  A quick look at Gallup’s 12 Questions on engagement show how most questions can be directly or indirectly related to leadership.

Since 1997 the Gallup Organization has surveyed approximately 3 million employees in three hundred thousand work units within corporations. This survey consists of 12 questions which measure employee engagement on a five-point scale indicating weak to strong agreement. Analyses of survey results show that those companies with high Q12 scores experience lower turnover, higher sales growth, better productivity, better customer loyalty and other manifestations of superior performance.

Q1. Do you know what is expected of you at work?

Q2. Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?

Q3. At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?

Q4. In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?

Q5. Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?

Q6. Is there someone at work who encourages your development?

Q7. At work, do your opinions seem to count?

Q8. Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?

Q9. Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?

Q10. Do you have a best friend at work?

Q11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?

Q12. In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

The Gallup Engagement Index slots people into one of three categories:

• Engaged employees who work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.

• Not-Engaged employees who are essentially “checked out.” They may be in the building but they are sleepwalking through their workday. They are putting in time, but going through the motions with low enough energy or passion in their work.

• Actively Disengaged employees who aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness in their relationships with their colleagues. These workers undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish every day through virtual sabotage. They would rather be somewhere else, even if they can’t think of an alternative.

Results of the survey vary from country to country, organisation to organisation, age, education and gender. The results have ranged from 70% to 80% in disengaged employees over nearly a decade. Here are the results from Gallup Employee last year.  The Gallup Engagement Index in the US shows that the current trends remained relatively stable throughout 2011:

A.      Engaged = 29%

B.      Not engaged = 52%

C.      Actively disengaged = 19%

Summary

What you will notice is that the population of A (29%) is probably carrying the remaining population of B & C (71%) on their backs. An obvious conclusion is that MF Leaders need to focus on reducing the B & C population ratio and converting significant populations into A-type Engaged workers if the business is to grow and innovate.

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[i] Blacksmith, N., Harter, J. (2012) Majority of American Workers Not Engaged In Their Jobs - Highly educated and middle-aged employees among the least likely to be engaged. http://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/Majority-American-Workers-Not-Engaged-Jobs

 

It's People Who Innovate, Not Processes

We either innovate or we die. We broadly accept this dictum. But what do we choose to do about it? And on reflection, do our choices make real sense?

First Story

A few years ago, I was working with the consulting arm of a national healthcare system on the issue of the low rate of adoption of innovations developed at centres for excellence into local practice. I have always been intrigued by the joined issues of the psychology of incompetence and the form that resistance to change can take, often known as Not-Invented-Here (NIH) culture.

I ran an exercise involving both local practitioners and government consultants, and we came up with some powerful and interesting lessons for accelerating adoption of innovations. Being a big fan of the rule of 3 (the idea that if you can identify the top 3 issues and resolve these, then the remainder will probably take care of themselves), I facilitated the exercise to identify the 3 most powerful influencers of local adoption of innovations:

1. Use the language of the people who are going to implement the innovation, don’t use MBA language. Consultant language has a tendency to alienate user audiences and trigger powerful NIH behaviours. If you can, employ a typical “user” of the solution who has strong links with the audience that you want to influence, and who expresses themselves authentically.

2. Demonstrate the real results gained to show it’s worth doing: ideally, try to show benefits not only to the customer, but also to the user who makes the innovation happen.

3. Recruit people who think innovating is part of everyday work. Try to employ people who want to innovate, or at the very least make it clear that work is going to involve a continual interest in improving and changing performance.

On reflection, the lessons can be reduced to 3 words: language, benefits and perhaps they are all about the psychology of innovation.

Second Story

At the beginning of 2008, I was working with the Heads of Innovation of 2 businesses which had recently been acquired. I was facilitating a series of discussions about the future shape and direction of innovation strategy in the newly-merged organisation. On the surface, these Heads of Innovation were complying, but in reality they were stressed, and naturally jockeying for dominance and succession or for golden exits. The official outcome was going to be their agreed strategy for doubling turnover through innovation within 3 years. After 2 sessions together, I found that they were playing the old scientist game of questioning me in detail about the legitimacy of the facilitation techniques I was employing, instead of focusing on the issue. Once I had resolved this, I found that we moved onto a technical discussion of stage gate innovation processes (where you segment your invention to innovation process into defined stages, and apply rules that determine progression beyond each stage). The game they wanted to play here, was to pretend that having an integrated, and shared approach to stage-gate definition and decision-making would solve the problem of innovation to drive an aggressive growth target. When I began to pressure them on the issue of innovation talent, and demolished the assumption that scientific ambition was the same thing, it became clear that creative individuals were largely marginalised and isolated within a scientific bureaucracy that was under-performing.

They wanted to avoid the fact that when it came down to people, they didn’t have the right people to deliver the kind of innovation to drive growth that the new organisation required. And that they didn’t think that it was important. Life would go on (they hoped) much as before.

Summary

Both these consulting exercises (first and second stories) had a profound effect on my thinking. I have always been a “process” man. I have developed and facilitated the co-creation of innovation processes, applied lean thinking both within and outside the automotive industry, implemented business process redesign, and even taught process leadership as a technique for making processes work within organisations. But I couldn’t avoid the obvious conclusion over time, that

1. Whilst processes are useful as a means of focusing attention and reducing the need to relearn the obvious, they cannot be a substitute for understanding the psychology of innovation.
2. Whilst history has shown us examples where innovative people with deficient processes have found a way to succeed, there are few examples of mediocre people succeeding because they had great processes.

LEADERSHIP BEYOND LEAN - FOR INNOVATION & GROWTH

To paraphrase an old quote, insanity is the expectation that old approaches will still work when the context you are operating in has changed. If managers are supposed to do things right, and leaders to do the right thing, then a recession deepens the requirement to support today’s strategy, whilst crafting its innovative replacement.

But what do you do in the interim before the new, “effective” strategy is operating? Just as the 1973 oil embargo forced the adoption of lean thinking in the Japanese automotive industry, we need to adopt a fundamentally different approach to forms of waste that we may not at first be able to see or even characterize by creating new, dynamic way of thinking about the most valuable resource that organisations possess – their people. It is ultimately through people that growth will come.

We’ve all heard of Not-Invented-Here, and I have written elsewhere about “sticky” organizations and how closed Relational Capital protects the status quo, but understanding the problem is not the same as solving it. Ordinary people are like athletes in that both have all the innate assets needed to become innovative and succeed, but few dare to systematically realise this potential by developing a form of mental fitness that reduces expensive defensive, paternalistic leadership and its partner incompetence, in order to liberate new, hidden capability to innovate and grow.

Throwing money at the recession will not solve the problem. Telling the banks to lend money just begs the question of what exactly are they going to invest in, within a recession? So what is required in order to be worth investing in?

Current Recession Context & Innovation Credo

·    Growth in a recession will come from different and better use of current resources to innovate, chiefly through our people and their talents.

·    Champions are the product of the ability to focus and control their own minds and fears to deliver outstanding behaviours combined with a conscious use of technique under difficult circumstances.

·    Successful leaders in difficult times are able to lead themselves and also influence the behaviours of those around them.

·    The problem for leaders is how to get more and different outcomes for less, by understanding how to develop and apply a form of mental and behavioural fitness to manage their own attention in order to change behaviours and expectations, more.

One of the strategic imperatives that Clive Woodward brought to British Athletics (and he knows he will never be forgiven for doing it) was to focus investment on athletes in events where they were likely to win a medal. Successful growth in a recession requires a similar approach to mental fitness to enable innovation and growth.

On 19th September 2012, Graham Williams and I will be presenting a showcase workshop on this topic, entitled "Mind Fit - To Innovate for Business Growth" at the University of Greenwich's Hamilton House in Greenwich. Details to follow. 

The Real Need for Autistic Board Members to Avoid Excessive Risk-Taking

The past few weeks have featured several articles replaying the old sex-war narrative around capitalism, on the line that a more balanced representation of women in the boardroom would have reduced risk-taking behaviour that led to the financial crash.

The Times’s Business Section, yesterday (Wednesday 28^th March) suggested that this is a naïve, simplistic view, referencing Bundesbank research which suggested that “women board members were more likely to take risks with a bank’s finances than their male counterparts”.  Swimming against the traditional sex-war narrative, the report concluded that “women determine corporate governance of banks significantly and are not marginalised by a male-dominated board culture”.

Interestingly, it was noted that risky behaviour was generally increased by the lower age of board members, but that PhD-holders brought greater stability.

Reading Michael Lewis’s brilliant “The Big Short” on the epidemic of stupidity that drove the sub-prime disaster, a key feature of those who could see what was about to happen was their shared relative autism. That is, they all shared elements of autistic behaviour common to innovative people, as one of the key protagonists discovered when his son was diagnosed with Aspergers’s syndrome, for which the typical behaviours included a lack of:

1.       Ability to read non-verbal behaviours and eye-contact.

2.       Interest in developing peer relationships and interest in socialising with other people.

Allied with a strong tendency to:

3.       Find computers and the internet appealing because they avoid 1 & 2 above,

4.       Have hobbies and interests which are often solitary, idiosyncratic and dominate their time and conversations.

What made Dr. Michael Burry unusual was that “only someone who has Asperger’s would read a subprime mortgate bond prospectus [and understand what was actually going on]”.

In conclusion, I would suggest that we need a new model for rationality when it comes to decision-making in financial institutions (and others). We need to include people who are asocial enough to apply logic in the face of social groupthink pressure to conform, and empower them to ask the real, systemic questions that the group is avoiding.

Practical Innovation Leadership - 20th September 2012

A Flash Innovation Workshop with Victor Newman and Simon Evans, Innovoflow Ltd.

Developing Responsive Fast-Twitch Muscle Training for Rugby! 

Date: 20th September 2012 @ Hamilton House, University of Greenwich         Timing: 0900-1700

Overview

Innovation Agility combines flexible thinking about your innovation process, the willingness to exploit the full range of options outside current products, services and business models, plus the ability to learn rapidly.

Agile Innovation Leadership skills are especially valuable in turbulent markets and for developing Open Innovation strategies to work with great ideas from both inside or outside the company, and also for going to market with external partners.

 This workshop provides a model (through simulation) to help innovation leaders to develop agile thinking and the necessary decision making ability to operate successfully and meet the needs of the emergent, post-recession world.

Content 

·         A warm-up task to stimulate innovative thinking.

·         Current challenges and problems with innovation.
·         Use of simulations to accelerate innovation learning.
·         Introducing the concepts of the “Innovation Eco-System” the “Idea lifecycle” and “Agile Innovation leadership”.  Discussion.
·         Learning from experience - using simulation components to illustrate examples of failed innovation initiatives and how they could have been rescued.  Participants illustrate their experiences using the simulation.
·         Constructing an optimal innovation ecosystem with constrained resources.
·         Reverse Innovation Thinking: Identifying barriers to innovation and harvesting experience to develop antidotes.
·         Who is the custodian of the eco-system?  Discussion
·         Summing up, review and take-aways.

Learning Objectives

1. To understand that innovation is at the core of all businesses
2. To understand the nature of an idea and how it survives
3. To take the broad view of innovation and ensure that ideas have the best chance of generating real value – it’s not just about coming up with ideas
4. To recognise that innovation must be “part of the day job”
5. To treat the innovation eco-system as something that requires feeding, watering and nurturing in order to be successful
6. (Most importantly!) recognise that innovation is not a free lunch -  you must invest many different types of resource

Who should attend

All SMEs or entrepreneurs who care about developing innovation agility in a turbulent environment, who realise that new ideas sometimes need new ways of thinking and working, to turn them into practical products, services and business models.

Benefits to you and your business

·         Acquire a new and practical way of discussing and thinking openly about the way you innovate in your organisation.
·         Discover how to design and test a comprehensive innovation eco-system to ensure ideas are supported throughout their whole lifecycle to generate maximum value
·         An opportunity to share experiences of successful or failed innovation approaches and how to learn from them
·         Have an enjoyable learning day, much of which can be taken back to your business
·         To start to build a relationship with the Centre for Entrerprise & Innovation which could lead to other opportunities

How do you sell innovation to current business leaders?

We are in an interesting situation. Businesses that could be investing in innovation are holding onto their cash and waiting to see how the global economy plays out. That’s one explanation. I have another.

There’s an old consulting joke that goes like this:

Question - How many consultants does it take to change a light-bulb?

Answer - The number of consultants is immaterial, the key issue is that the light-bulb has got to want to change!

Let’s unpack the current context:  what have we got?

• POLITICIANS: Who borrowed irresponsibly to create artificial economic growth & buy elections through unsustainable public service expansion and vanity projects.
• BUSINESS LEADERS: Who successfully rode artificial growth-curves but don’t know how to grow businesses in a recession.
• ORGANISATIONS: With Products/ Services & Business Models at the wrong end of the S cash-curve, who are betting their pensions and bonuses on product extensions.

And we have even got CONSULTANTS who can see the need to move out of EFFICIENCY strategies and into EFFECTIVENESS strategies but cannot package a new paradigm & don’t know how to sell it to current leaders, but we either innovate or we die and we cannot borrow our way into growth.

We can sell transactional efficiency, product optimisation process consulting BUT we know that having the right people with the right psychology will make a lot of the KPI architecture completely irrelevant. Unfortunately at the top, we have people (probably not really leaders in the true sense) who can play political games in a growth phase, but who may not be the right people to grow the business in the current environment through innovation.

So how can we sell change in order to innovate to people who don’t understand what it means?  We could possibly begin with the linguistic trick that launched Lean Thinking. The word “lean” was powerful because of the implication that those who didn’t adopt it were fat (organisations). We need a similar linguistic trick that carries a hidden insult for non-consumers to act as a Trojan Horse to begin a literally vital, viral makeover.

The Pace of Innovation Leadership

At last a Knowledge and Innovation Management Book in the military context.

I must recommend Mark Urban’s recent book “Task Force Black” (‘The Explosive True Story of The SAS and the Secret War in Iraq’: Little, Brown; 2010). What appears to be another book about the war in Iraq, is actually a book about Strategic Knowledge Management and a leading practitioner.

What is fascinating about Urban’s account of the Special Air Service contribution to the “hidden” war against Al-Qaeda and related insurgent groups are the innovations around knowledge management that Stan McChrystal wove together, which have potential for establishing and maintaining innovation leadership within a volatile global market.

It is the integration of surveillance technologies, elite teams, and information management to change the pace of decision-making that is noteworthy. Major-General Stan McChrystal realised that it would take a military social network to defeat a cultural insurgent network, and consciously accelerated the pace of data-gathering and interpretation, cutting out the traditional siloed, and layered, “Chinese Whispers” migration of intelligence aggregation, analysis and synthesis through creating his own intelligence network, with its own media in the form of intranet spaces to display it in, that could be accessed and interpreted by participants in real time.

Fundamentally, McChrysal consciously took Boyd’s OODA loop philosophy out of its traditional air combat context (Boyd’s fighter-pilot proposition being that in order to win in air combat, the first combatant with a superior pace to their Observe-Orient- Decide- Act cycle, is the winner), connected it with energy and applied it hunting down insurgent cells, to roll up structured networks faster than they could respond, and thus “win” or at least destroy the opposition’s ability to dictate the pace of the war.
Implications

If we simplify innovation thinking to at least 3 basic thinking rules: move, test, and break; then McChrystal and his disciples have added a fourth element to demonstrate that so-called “asymmetric” networked warfare can be defeated, as long as military leadership has the courage and energy to
1.Move: consciously changing perspective –to empathise, to think like an insurgent, understand where and how they are being manufactured, as well as their victims;
2.Test: explore current assumptions around purpose, context and rationale for yourself and the insurgent, remodelling these to work with better assumptions, deliberately discarding obsolete thinking and structures; and finally:
3.Break: consciously game-breaking or changing the rules to create new opportunities, recognising when to flex your rules of engagement, when and at what pace to change the rules of the current game, in order to win.
4.Up the Pace: use 1-3 to change the quality of thinking and decision making whilst accelerating the pace of decision-making, so that the opposition cannot compete with you.

The Art of Innovation Leadership

Innovation Leadership is an art because it involves understanding and managing 4 behavioural dimensions which have, until recently, remained hidden. Whilst we are probably familiar with Sun Tzu’s and Marcus Aurelius’s maxims on the importance of self-knowledge, the psychology of Innovation Leadership has not been available in a practical form that could help leaders and organisations, until now when we need it.

Blind Drivers of Innovation
Understanding innovation leadership is a bit like driving a car. At present, most organisations manage their psychology of innovation like drivers of cars who happen to be blind. It is possible to become relatively successful at leading an organisation through the medium of traditional performance measures. These are much like the cues that a blind driver uses to stay in the correct lane on the motorway. By listening to the sound cues of irregular bumping of tyres over cat’s eyes on one side of the car, and the screeching noise of the other side of the car grinding along the side of the oncoming traffic or stationary vehicles or building, a crude form of progress can be managed; even if getting onto and off the motorway is problemmatic. Every year, there are stories of blind drivers in remote rural areas (usually with a child or drunk giving instructions from the passenger seat) being chased and halted by astounded traffic police. It clearly can be done, and is being done, more or less: but does it make sense? And is it acceptable?

Not being in control of your own innovation leadership behaviour as a leader, is like leading your team or organization as though it is a car that you choose to drive with your eyes closed. Most people have no idea what their innovation leadership profile is. They are in effect, blind leaders of innovation. We are probably all familiar with the idea that it is not what leaders say, but how leaders actually behave that has the most impact on organisations, and that it is their behaviour that sends the strongest messages and provides the most powerful cues as to what defines successful performance in the organisation.

The key to successful leadership of innovation begins with understanding

• The 4 Innovation Leadership Behaviours (ILB),
• The limitations of where you are now (in terms of your actual ILB profile)
• The nature of the challenge (in terms of your preferred ILB profile), and
• Being hungry enough to want to change, to take control, to do something about it.

For some leaders, the idea of developing an understanding of their own ILB profiles (actual and preferred) can be intimidating, much as primitive tribes were afraid that photography would steal their souls, or that to study and seek to understand the behavioural patterns might destroy the power of a secret formula by exposing it. But as they say at the Royal Air Force’s Parachute Training School: “Knowledge Dispels Fear”. And this knowledge is essential, and if you have it then it becomes possible to ask yourself:

1.What will it take to move out of efficiency strategies into effectiveness strategies?
2. What can I contribute to making this organisation more successful?
3. What kind of innovation leadership should I be working on?
4. How can I develop myself to make a difference, and become more effective?
 
The 4 Innovation Leadership Behaviours (ILBs)
For innovation to occur in an organization, you need a mix of at least 4 generic types of Innovating Leadership Behaviours – Creators, Translators, Stabilisors and Navigators. When planned for, encouraged and balanced correctly they can promote and deliver continuous innovation.

They are:

Creators - Who provide the source of new, disruptive ideas.
Translators - Who connect new ideas to new opportunities.
Stabilisors - Who build quality delivery systems for products and services.
Navigators - Who anticipate what’s coming, know when to get in, when to get out, and how to manage it.

The 4 Innovating Leadership Behaviours are extreme stereotypes and usually (but not always) I find that leaders’ profiles have proportions of all four in their own characteristic “portfolio” depending on the limitations of their experience, work environment and their natural work preferences.

Conclusion
Understanding the implications of leaders' ILB patterns is a powerful source of information on the limitations of the existing strategy and what is going to be required to move out of efficiency and survival into effectiveness and growth, in difficult times.

Chunking, or The Leader's Rule of 3

This innovation leadership tool is about rapidly identifying the vital few issues and obstacles that need to be managed or dealt with, and allocating attention and resources to them.

The “Rule of 3” is an idea I engineered from studying leadership, change and innovation. It’s the product of combining Pareto’s Principle, Williams’ close observation of Field Marshall Montgomery’s characteristic approach to getting things done and Max Atkinson’s research on successful speech-making.

Pareto’s Principle suggests that 80% of the effects observed in a situation are caused by a mere 20% of the population. His original 1906 observation was that 80% of the wealth in Switzerland was held by only 20% of the population. This has become a quality method for identifying the most powerful variables in a situation which need to be controlled to manage failure.

Field-Marshall Montgomery: Brigadier Williams serving as Montgomery’s Intelligence Chief [i] noticed his preference for 3-part lists as a means of simplifying complex issues and concentrating resources. In Hamilton's biography of Montgomery[ii] , he notes that in the last year of WW2 Monty was constantly trying to stop the Americans attacking across a broad front to incur 100,000 casualties instead of concentrating at a few points, feinting at one and then making the main effort at another. As Monty said in a letter after the command performance scandal of the Battle of Bulge: "We have failed to date by trying to do too many things and not giving enough resources to any of them to ensure success..."

Max Atkinson[iii] points out the power of leaders simplifying big issues through 3-part focused lists in his analysis of powerful political speeches, particularly their “air of unity or completeness”. It is as though we are programmed to listen more deeply to a 3-part list when we know it is coming, and that audience interruptions tend to occur after 3 points have been stated within a longer list.

Chunking as a Technique (or Identifying and Working on the Vital Few)
This technique is designed to gain a rapid understanding of the vital few issues that need to be managed to be successful. It requires use of the Creative Silence technique to brainstorm all the problems and obstacles involved in delivering the goal.

The goal or the aim must be clearly stated. The team must have had time to immerse themselves in the data involved in the situation.

In preparation a flipchart sheet needs to be prepared with the word “Start” at the top and “Finish” at the bottom, everyone must have pink post-its (for brainstorming issues or obstacles to delivering the goal) and black medium pens to write with. You invite the group to silently brainstorm the issues or obstacles that need to be managed to deliver success. They share these, 3 at a time. You apply CGSM (Common, Ground, Special, Missing) and concentrate the groupings to simplify the themes down to at least 3, with a hidden willingness if necessary to reduce to 2 or expand to 4 or 5, depending on the nature of the challenge. These pink issues or obstacles post-its are then put in an approximate sequence to the left of the vertical arrow connecting “Start” and “Finish”.

Having broken down the issues or obstacles to the vital few (possibly the top 3), then break your team into 3 parts, and allocate 10 minutes for the 3 sub-teams to work concurrently on developing solutions for overcoming the top 3 issues, writing their solutions onto blue post-its and positioning these to the right of the vertical arrow, parallel to issue or obstacle they deal with.

Invite the sub-teams to share these and for the others to add value to their prototype solutions. Identify or vote on the optimal solutions. Use the 3-part list of obstacles and matched solutions in your communication strategy.

[i] Howarth, T.E.B (1985) Monty At Close Quarters, Leo Cooper/ Secker & Warburg: London/ New York, p22.
[ii] Hamilton, N. (1987) Monty: The Field-Marshall, Vol.3; Hodder & Stoughton, p254.
[iii] Atkinson, M. (1984) Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics, pp57-72.

Innovation, Passion, Sex, Leadership and Rock'n Roll

Peter Cook's recent book: "Sex, Leadership and Rock'n Roll" is a commentary on the importance of combining two key elements of leading innovation (of leading people to do new things and leading them to learn to do old things in a new way), of learning to connect with the stuff of passion (ie. sex and rock and roll) in order to innovate. Obviously business isn't rock'n roll, but there are compatible elements that usefully explain successful, innovating organisations.

Rock'n roll, like business is old and yet it is eternally new whenever a new practitioner comes along with some passion (and a willingness to mine the gold of sexual imagery, or at least romance) who can successfully manipulate a few variables and change the context. David Bowie managed it by taking William Burrough's consciously random cut'n paste manipulation of printed text and visual fashion imagery, with a willingness to adopt an ambiguous sexual persona. And the rest is history, and millions made.

Peter makes some key observations that leaders need to take on board, that discipline and creativity need each other, but that if you don't have ingredient "X" you won't get invited back to the next gig, that if you don't have the passion that lifts others and the ability to "play" in the moment, the passion that helps others to be great in turn, you cannot lead: you can only preside.

As Ken Olsen said: "Leaders do the right thing, managers do things right". And it takes passion to do the right thing because you are probably going to be seen as behaving unreasonably by people who have no sense of the importance of doing something different, now: before it is too late.

Q&A with Peter Cook: Sex, Leadership and Rock'n Roll: http://dontcompromise.askeurope.com/2009/09/03/humdynger/

Innovation Processes are Useful, but Innovative People are Essential

There is an assumption in many organisations that focusing on innovation processes is a kind of industrialisation of innovation, that with the right processes, then you don’t need to worry about employing genuinely innovative people, anyone can and will be successful within a great process.

And it’s true, up to a point: especially when the focus is upon optimising existing products and services. But when the environment changes radically, then the issue of having the right people to innovate becomes important.

I have noticed that innovation consultancies tend to focus upon time-intensive innovation process consultation with a few useful techniques thrown in. This is because whilst they help to focus attention on developing a shared understanding of an agreed approach to turning an invention into an innovation, and on the need to understand customers’ needs, such consulting enables at least 5 additional benefits:

• Consultancies can sell high-priced consulting time, acquire practice and gain another case study to use with new clients,
• The illusion of purposeful activity without having to question the customer’s existing strategic assumptions, political hierarchies, and investment rationales,
• Gives confidence to an employing customer with academic mindset that measures good intentions by the size of investment,
• Enables leadership to sponsor the solution to a problem that appears to be solveable, rather than forcing leadership to work on the real problem that they prefer not to discuss,
• Reinforces the myth of leadership knowing what it is doing.

Whilst I disagree with the attractive book-selling post-rationalist approach of Jim Collins in “Good To Great” (2001) and Tom Peters & Rob Waterman in “In Search of Excellence” in retrofitting plausible success models onto case studies which subsequently decayed a few months or years later in public, both hint at the importance of getting the right people involved in changing an organisation. As Collins puts it, leaders must understand: “the importance of getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus, and (only) then (figuring) out where to drive it.” More revealingly, on the same page, Collins observes that “a company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people”.

But what and who are the right people, how do I recognise them; and what do I do about myself?

It's People Who Innovate

We either innovate or we die. We broadly accept this dictum. But what do we choose to do about it? And on reflection, do our choices make real sense?

First Story

A few years ago, I was working with the consulting arm of a national healthcare system on the issue of the low rate of adoption of innovations developed at centres for excellence into local practice. I have always been intrigued by the joined issues of the psychology of incompetence and the form that resistance to change can take, often known as Not-Invented-Here (NIH) culture.

I ran an exercise involving both local practitioners and government consultants, and we came up with some powerful and interesting lessons for accelerating adoption of innovations. Being a big fan of the rule of 3 (the idea that if you can identify the top 3 issues and resolve these, then the remainder will probably take care of themselves), I facilitated the exercise to identify the 3 most powerful influencers of local adoption of innovations:

1. Use the language of the people who are going to implement the innovation, don’t use MBA language. Consultant language has a tendency to alienate user audiences and trigger powerful NIH behaviours. If you can, employ a typical “user” of the solution who has strong links with the audience that you want to influence, and who expresses themselves authentically.

2. Demonstrate the real results gained to show it’s worth doing: ideally, try to show benefits not only to the customer, but also to the user who makes the innovation happen.

3. Recruit people who think innovating is part of everyday work. Try to employ people who want to innovate, or at the very least make it clear that work is going to involve a continual interest in improving and changing performance.

On reflection, the lessons can be reduced to 3 words: language, benefits and perhaps they are all about the psychology of innovation.

Second Story

At the beginning of 2008, I was working with the Heads of Innovation of 2 businesses which had recently been acquired. I was facilitating a series of discussions about the future shape and direction of innovation strategy in the newly-merged organisation. On the surface, these Heads of Innovation were complying, but in reality they were stressed, and naturally jockeying for dominance and succession or for golden exits. The official outcome was going to be their agreed strategy for doubling turnover through innovation within 3 years. After 2 sessions together, I found that they were playing the old scientist game of questioning me in detail about the legitimacy of the facilitation techniques I was employing, instead of focusing on the issue. Once I had resolved this, I found that we moved onto a technical discussion of stage gate innovation processes (where you segment your invention to innovation process into defined stages, and apply rules that determine progression beyond each stage). The game they wanted to play here, was to pretend that having an integrated, and shared approach to stage-gate definition and decision-making would solve the problem of innovation to drive an aggressive growth target. When I began to pressure them on the issue of innovation talent, and demolished the assumption that scientific ambition was the same thing, it became clear that creative individuals were largely marginalised and isolated within a scientific bureaucracy that was under-performing.

They wanted to avoid the fact that when it came down to people, they didn’t have the right people to deliver the kind of innovation to drive growth that the new organisation required. And that they didn’t think that it was important. Life would go on (they hoped) much as before.

Conclusion

Both these consulting exercises (first and second stories) had a profound effect on my thinking. I have always been a “process” man. I have developed and facilitated the co-creation of innovation processes, applied lean thinking both within and outside the automotive industry, implemented business process redesign, and even taught process leadership as a technique for making processes work within organisations. But I couldn’t avoid the obvious conclusion over time, that

1. Whilst processes are useful as a means of focusing attention and reducing the need to relearn the obvious, they cannot be a substitute for understanding the psychology of innovation.

2. Whilst history has shown us examples where innovative people with deficient processes have found a way to succeed, there are few examples of mediocre people succeeding because they had great processes.

Process Leadership: The First Discipline

Processes are useful mechanisms for focusing attention on important and complex situations involving chains of activity:

1. They help leaders and teams manage attention by offering a deliberate sequence of key steps in an appropriate order to reduce failure.
2. They embody key lessons from the past in an accessible format.
3. They reduce the need to reinvent the obvious with new groups and new situations.

While we probably believe that we understand what processes do for us, do we understand the necessary psychology of leadership required to make this happen?

"Process leadership" is the ability that great leaders have to manage the day-to-day tactics of getting things done while putting those tactics and tasks within larger, strategic processes that ensure that the right stuff gets done in the right way, at the right time, through adherence to an overarching, logical approach.

Process leadership is about learning how to manage the adrenaline rush that can pull you into taking over other people's jobs and destroying their confidence and capabilities by interventions that diminish them. We've all worked with bosses who were fundamentally happiest on the line taking over their subordinate managers' and leaders' work, but who were unable to step back to mentor and model the kind of behaviors that build leadership and integrity in others.

Process leadership is a form of conscious confidence developed by growing three abilities:

• The ability to ask great questions at the right time, in the right order;
• The ability to move into a "helicopter" perspective at the drop of a hat, consciously locating activities and priorities within a larger, process context; and
• The ability to realize when the current approach is delivering diminishing returns or doesn't match the emerging situation, combined with the courage and confidence to say "stop" and ask for a different approach.

It is a truism that, when organizations find that they can't solve the real problem that determines their future survival, they will find a problem that they can solve without having to smash existing social relationships and change technologies, and they will work on it instead. This is a symptom of what I call "sticky" organizations--organizations with highly evolved "consent and evade" approaches to change (where top leaders agree to change and then return to their business units to block it), organizations with a history of shooting the messenger and announcing victory before the implementation can be measured.

It is not easy to overcome this entrenched behaviour of sticky organisations. We may be fortunate that in General Petraeus in Iraq, we have a recent example of a leader who, at a strategic level, is capable of managing a conscious thinking process on a complex situation; who can apply the three process leadership abilities to balance his attention around a discrete problem-solving process; and who can work this process to arrive at alternative strategies, instead of enforcing fixed solutions to an emerging context like Warner Brothers' Wile E. Coyote in his perpetual and futile pursuit of the Road Runner.

Resilient Leaders and Emergent Knowledge

Emergent Knowledge is the knowledge we discover when we ask the right question, in the right way about the right issue at the right time, and we discover something new and potentially powerful at that particular moment in time.

Emergent Knowledge is timely knowledge about the changing nature of reality at one moment in time, where we either act upon it and create a new opportunity, or we ignore it in the name of social stability and pay the price in terms of organisational decay, wasted resources and weakness.

There are two old jokes about consultants and change management.

The first joke asks: how many consultants does it take to change a light-bulb? The answer is: that the number of consultants is immaterial, the light-bulb has got to want to change.

The second joke observes that consultants are people who take your watch and then charge to tell you the time. Whilst there is an element of truth in this observation, it needs to be articulated in a slightly deeper way. What is core to this observation is that when consultants deliver their work in the form of a structured report, it has elements that are very familiar: the story that it tells and its conclusions are recognisable. It is this recognition of report content that that makes the executive summary familiar.

Introducing consultants into the organisation, permitting them to ask questions in terms of purpose, process, position and outcomes makes it possible for them to articulate the potential, emergent knowledge within a shared context, at a particular time, and in asking their questions, they trigger their audience’s thinking along their line of research and prepare their audience to recognise the answers subsequently presented.

This is why testing the Emergent Knowledge underpinning a strategy in participants’ heads is so important, needs to be done quickly (in order to fit the context, and reduce decay) and why having an inflexible model can be a killer with an agile competitors, and increasingly changeable customers.

We live in a changing and dynamic environment. The traditional dichotomy of tacit/ explicit knowledge is insufficient to cope with the need to renew and redefine purpose and strategy. Resilient leaders need to include Emergent Knowledge techniques in their thinking in order to survive as well as grow organisation’s willingness to want to change. Successful, resilient leadership depends on the ability to elicit and articulate the emergent choices organisations face, daily.

Time Management Means Something Is Wrong

I was once asked to design a time management course for a global engineering organisation. After interviewing staff for two days I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t continue the exercise because I realised that time management was itself literally a waste of time. I learnt that time-management was no substitute for a clear business focus or strategy within which people could manage themselves.

The next variant of inadvertent leader incompetence is where in effect a leader says to their followers: “I can’t solve this problem alone, I need your help”; and followers in the meantime say: “I can’t get focused until you tell me what the plan is”. And so it goes, round and round. In the meantime the internal stock of confidence in leader and leadership decays with every day that the real problems of the organisation remain untreated. It is as though the fundamental problem that the organisation needs to get to grips with, the linked problems of innovation and power, is like a greasy pig which the leadership of the organisation wants to cook and eat, but is unwilling to allow itself to get dirty and bloody wrestling with in the dirt, when so far all that they have had to deal with is small rodents who like getting trapped.

Leaders must be able to frame the problems around innovating, and lead the process that unpacks the necessary dependencies that must be managed to deliver successful innovating, even if they don't understand the future.

The real problem of innovating is the absence of leaders willing to create a situation where the everyday allocation of power and resources has to be actively considered as though last year or the previous decade never happened, and to consciously share power with those who can innovate for the greater good of the organisation, even if they don't look like us.

IMPLICATIONS

1 If you are worried about time-management, then your strategy is weak.
2 If you want to eat the bacon, you’d better plan on getting dirty and,
3 You just might need to involve some other folks, and share the bacon with them.