Earlier, I wrote a series that looked at finding inflection points and capitalizing on innovation. If you use the tools described there, you’ll find fertile ground for the innovation that your organization has the capacity to deliver.
After deciding how to capitalize on inflection points, you’ll need to decide 1) which project to prioritize and 2) how to make the resources available to execute on them.
Get help with the fuzzy front end
In the process of innovation, a smart first move is to get the concept reduced to a very real tangible product or service on paper. To do this well, I recommend you get someone from outside your team to come in and do a facilitated session using powerful questions, business mapping and ecosystem tools. If you are trying to select a few innovations from a potential pool, your expert can help you use these techniques to narrow things down and get some general paper sketches of your finalists. Those general sketches can then form the base for the more detailed exploration of the hypothetical steps that exist between the idea and the final product or service.
Once you have your detailed hypothesis, your expert can help you with a thorough scrub, using a guided process to look for all the gaps and assumptions in the steps between the idea and the customer-useable product or service. Your outside expert should then help you assemble a prioritized set of steps to de-risk your model and get ready for more substantial investment. These de risking activities need to be completed before funding the balance of the development effort.
Finally, you need to put a real dollar value on the innovation so you have a tool to weigh your investment tradeoff decisions. Be realistic in what this new product or service will do for your business. What is its net present value? You can do a real return on investment on your innovation agenda and compare it to other ways to use your capital and precious resources. This analysis should help you make a final selection of the innovations that you would like to fund in the coming year.
Now, all that stands between you and quality implementation are the right resources. This requires giving your best people more than a day or two in the conference room. How can this happen?
How to free up your best and brightest for the important stuff
1) Cull the Ranks (of Projects)
You now have the example of how your facilitator guided you through the ruthless examination of your business model assumptions. It’s time to turn that keen eye on the work that you have in the queue for your regular activity. First, stack rank your current activities based on their real value, with an emphasis on the current cash flow that the activity contributes to the organization. If the activity isn’t a cash cow or doesn’t generate an enthusiastic, “Yes, we use this!,” then put it on the list of things to be sidelined or cut. Andrea Lee says that each project is either a h*ll yes or a no. Get rid of the gray zone.
Nearly every organization has activities that everyone at the working level sees as yesterday’s news, yet year after year they keep getting funded. Go through these now, using some variation of the delphi sort. If the project in question is either very personal or very political, bring back your consultant. They will tell you the truth.
2) Capitalize on Released Energy
Remember the movie 300? It was a fictional depiction of the battle of Thermopylae fought between the Greeks and the Persians. The Persians outnumbered the Greeks by something like 50:1, yet they held their ground. The Greeks knew their homeland and culture were being threatened, making them a formidable enemy in the face of the mercenary forces.
If you have been around business for any time at all, you have witnessed the amazing amount of latent energy there is inside an organization when a crisis hits. I was an operations director some time ago when our entire domestic factory was flooded due to an environmental system malfunction – including a class 10 clean room. It was amazing to see how quickly we were able to clean and restore operations using 24/7 planning and execution. Because of this, only a few days of production were missed – and no critical customer deliveries. The irony is that only days beforehand, we had believed that we were just barely able to make the requested ship volumes with the manpower on hand – it’s amazing what people can achieve in crisis.
If you examine the enthusiasm underlying the innovation and detect that it has that kind of emotional component, go with it. When sufficient numbers of people are willing to step out – let them. You will find depth and bench strength in your team that you didn’t know you had. I am not talking about Pollyannaish optimism, but sufficient reserve capacity to get the derisking work done well.
3) Bring on the Blitz
The lean movement has picked up on the power of this technique by setting up cross-functional work cells called Scrums. Using some form of kanban techniques, Scrums keep work in progress to a minimum by helping to ensure that everyone can immediately connect their current work to key goals and outcomes. Setting short cycle activity plans that take you from key prototype to key prototype is a very powerful technique. It is similar to what we discussed above, but is different in that we plan for these waves of forward progress and make provision for the burst of effort required to meet the goal.
4) Strategically Move the Work Out
If more sustained effort is required than the above techniques can provide, look for bottlenecks. How can you free up talent to undertake the necessary work? Do you have people deployed on lower value tasks than what your innovation will yield?
A typical example here is the phase where you usually put your key customer researchers on the road to validate your paper product before you commit the significant product development funds for the first tangible prototype. Could you hire an outside customer survey organization to take up the routine work while your best team focuses on your best and most innovative customers and distribution partners? This will likely be a win-win, as your best people will appreciate that you trust them with sensitive assignments – and your most forward thinking partners will see you as a leader.
Concrete Action Brings Clarity
Having a monetized, clear paper product is the key – the more tangible the work – the better the outcome. Bring as much real runway level experience to the table as possible and hire outsiders as required. Top class people are worth the insight that they bring; they possess the perspective and information to illuminate blind spots that your team would miss because of their current focus on your ongoing operation.
What are your experiences in finding that top class cross functional team to deliver on the vision? Please drop me an email, or tweet me your thoughts.
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