What is change management?

The sweet spot where change and project management intersect is known as change management. When a company is facing change in any capacity, change management is how company leaders manage the processes, systems, structures, overall morale, and employee responsibilities during a time of transition.

Change is the only thing we know for sure will happen in life and business. Whether a company is planning for change via transformation or is unexpectedly presented with a challenge, having a protocol for change can help companies better adapt to solving problems in a shuffling dynamic.

Firms and companies have carefully created calculated principles for organizational change management to help navigate the rising challenges of transformation in the business landscape–which is unavoidable in today’s world.

Just how important is having a set of principles to use as a structured guideline? A Forbes Insights and PMI survey found that 85% of over 500 executive respondents said change management is critical to success in times of change of any kind, rather than expecting that workers will automatically react to change well in a competitive marketplace.

Compare this to Forbes Insights’ findings that more than one-third (38%) of respondents reported that their employees view change as a significant threat, and it is clear that fear of change is a problem that needs to be planned for and properly addressed.

“The key to change…is to let go of fear.” -Rosanne Cash

Fear of transition can be stifled while also setting up your company up for success by planning for change and creating your own change management plan using the following change management principles.

Six Change Management Principles

(1) Clearly identify the problem

Some change comes when we least expect it, and we must adapt accordingly. When a problem arises, it is crucial to flesh out why and how it came about and what needs to be done in order to solve it.

Some change is planned, like in the case of innovation. It might be the need for a new product, redefining a target audience, or addressing problems within a company dynamic. Whatever the problem, it must be identified and understood before it can be effectively tackled.

(2) Drive new direction with culture

Company culture is the script for how employees interact and work with one another. Change can disrupt the standard workflow and social status quo. Leaders must take culture into account to understand and overcome any resistance born in a time of transition.

Leading with culture also helps to maintain how employees connect and relate to one another, a crucial aspect to sustain during shifts so that everyone in the company is aligned.

(3) Unify top-level leadership

A company is only as reliable as the sum of all of its employees, starting from leadership. All upper-level executives and leaders must form a united front to clearly and effectively communicate the same information to lower-level employees so that the entire company is on the same page and acting congruently.

It is imperative that the corresponding information is shared throughout all levels to find success.

(4) Involve every level

Change shakes the foundation of an entire company; therefore, every employee is affected in some way. Involving mid-level employees as soon as possible opens the door for employees to express their concerns and share any logistical or technical holes they see from the start, working out any glitches.

It also serves as an opportunity for managers and leaders to consider the repercussions and effects the transformation will have on their teams and the customers at large.

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(5) Utilize change agents

Change agents are informal leaders who can help organizational leaders drive and champion change. From influential employees with a reputation of leading by example and earning the trust of others to stakeholders or veteran employees, change agents help to drive the challenging task of getting all employees on board.

Once identified, leaders should incorporate these people as a coalition. Together, they can help spread the unified message, get their teams integrated, and put people at ease.

(6) Define critical behaviors

Even with a clear vision of the problem/change at the executive level, a unified leadership front, and a coalition to help spread the word and integrate new practices, employee behavior won’t automatically change overnight. It is helpful to provide employees with the “why,” “what,” and “how” of change, as well as defined critical behaviors for them to follow immediately–within the first few days of the change.

Old patterns and habits can be hard to break, and new practices must be instilled as soon as possible for a smooth transition. This may mean training and frequent smaller meetings with managers so that they are equipped to communicate details of change and new expectations to employees.

Benefits of Strong Change Management

“The rate of change is not going to slow down any time soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades,” John P. Kotter says in his book Leading Change.

Because change is the only constant, having a robust protocol to follow to ease any size of transition sets companies up for triumph in chaos. A smooth transition internally maintains company morale and efficiency and translates directly to the external business.

According to research from Towers Watson, companies with healthy change management practices are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their competition. Being prepared to face change before it even happens immediately gives businesses a leg up on their peers.

Here are a few ways how:

1. Change management reduces the risk of project failure: Projects are more likely to fail when there is a lack of preparation. If changes are made too quickly without a proper plan for transition, or if not everyone is on board with new changes, the project can fall into chaos. A carefully constructed plan already has in mind any potential risks and is accompanied by analyzed strategies to overcome them.
2. Change management helps to eliminate confusion: A change management plan helps to reduce any trouble that may arise in transition, as each step of the change management process is detailed and outlined from the top down before implementation. This simultaneously tackles the fear of change and eliminates uncertainty about new business protocols–everyone is on the same page and adequately prepared for a shift.
3. Change management aids in maintaining a budget: Whether planned or unexpected, change is expensive! Incorporate a budget as part of your change management plan so that you don’t blindly pay for it later. Assign a cost estimate to each stage of the process. Doing so will provide an overall assessment of the cost of change and help to keep a new project on budget as it evolves.

Embrace Change to Improve Business

When an organization has a solid plan for how to embrace change, it can be used strategically to its advantage in the workplace and industry. A change management protocol can be used as an outline to evaluate and fine-tune an organization’s goals or priorities as well as to analyze how employees can help the company grow; it can be a tool used to expand and improve business overall, a steady progression of forward momentum.

“Change has a bad reputation in our society. But it isn’t all bad–not by any means. In fact, change is necessary in life–to keep us moving, to keep us growing, to keep us interested. Imagine life without change. It will be static, boring, dull,” Dr. Dennis O’Grady says in his article, The Change Game.

Looking for help with change management in your organization?

Please reach out to Voltage Control at hello@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

The post Best Practices for Organizational Change Management appeared first on Voltage Control.

At Voltage Control, we’ve done something that might be scandalous at other companies. We’ve made all meetings optional. If a team member doesn’t think they need to attend a meeting, they’re free to decline it. It’s a small gesture, but a reflection of our belief that many meetings just don’t need to happen. It leads to an increase in quick and direct conversations and, ultimately, to fewer meetings and more space and time for the things we want (and need) to do.

That’s because we’re on a personal mission to rid the world of shitty meetings. That’s something we can all rally around, correct? We all love to hate meetings, yet they keep popping up on our calendars and we keep accepting them. In January 2019, the meeting scheduling company Doodle released its The State of Meetings Report and estimated that “pointless meetings will cost companies $541 billion in 2019.” Wow.

I’m convinced this is why I see so many people energized and excited when they participate in a Design Sprints or innovation workshop: although you are technically “tied up” for five days, you are getting authentic work done. You’re making decisions. You’re progressing. You end the week with a touchable, tangible prototype. Things happened!

This is in stark contrast to people’s typical days. We’re calendar-bombed with tons of meetings that we don’t need to be in or have no context for. We show up without much attention to whether or not we can add value. Everyone ends up booked with back-to-back meetings, buffered only by a quick restroom break (whoops, now you’re late to your next meeting) and the time it takes to dial into your next phone call. When are you supposed to do the things you got assigned in your last meeting?

We’ve got things backward: we meet and then do “the work” after the meeting.

In a recent talk, I told the participants, “Do the real work in the meeting.” I felt everyone sit up in their chairs. It struck a chord. We’ve got things backward: we meet and then do “the work” after the meeting. We’re so busy talking about the work we need to do when we could be rolling up our sleeves and getting to work in the session itself.

Circular Conversations. Little Action.

What do meetings look like in your organization? Let’s talk about a couple of typical scenarios. Here’s the worst-case: Participants don’t know why you’re meeting. No one shows up with an agenda. Everyone starts talking haphazardly and conversations go in circles. No decisions get made. Everyone leaves the meeting with no idea about what happens next. Maybe they’re hoping someone else will take action.

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’”― Dave Barry

Now the best-case scenario, or maybe call it your standard, run-of-the-mill meeting: someone’s pulled together a meeting agenda and sent it out beforehand. You have a focused discussion. You conclude with a handful of action items and people have tasks they need to do after. But, even in this situation, I’ve seen the process go awry. Meetings aren’t always adequately documented. There’s misunderstanding after about the direction or next steps. People start working on items discussed in the meeting, but something gets lost in translation.

Let’s stop saving the work for when everyone disperses back to their desks.

Beyond an annoying 30 minutes in your day, what’s so bad about these scenarios? Work eventually gets done. It’s easier this way. We might be accustomed to it, but it’s not efficient, it’s not effective, and it’s certainly not an inspiring way to work. Let’s stop saving the work for when everyone disperses back to their desks. If you want to bring the spirit of innovation into your daily work, push yourself and others to start doing the work in the meeting. I think one of the best ways to do that is to bring a prototype to every meeting.

“The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.”– Thomas Sowell, American writer and economist

No Prototype. No Meeting.

This concept of “no prototype, no meeting” isn’t new. At the design consultancy IDEO, they’ve long talked about something called “Boyle’s Law.” Named for Dennis Boyle — an IDEO engineer with over 50 patents — the law states that you should “Never attend a meeting without a prototype.” Allan Chochinov, Chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Products of Design, also wrote about his hatred of meetings and even created a Chrome and Slack extension that automatically changes the word “meeting” to “review” when you try to book a meeting.

While the conversation about the importance of prototyping has been around for a while, I don’t think it’s taken deep root yet. There’s still a lot of room for the concept to spread in organizations and workplaces.

Scared of Prototyping?

Before we dig in further, I must talk about what I mean when I talk about prototypes. The term prototype can be daunting. Historically, prototypes were mock-ups of something physical — let’s say a new chair or piece of electronic hardware. Today, when we think about prototypes, we usually think of digital prototypes. With the explosion of prototyping tools, it’s incredibly easy to build true-to-life, clickable prototypes that give the look-and-feel of a digital interaction.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings” — Tom & David Kelley

However, it can be much more “low fidelity” than that. Prototypes take many shapes and formats. While you can certainly push yourself to learn a prototyping platform like Sketch or Figma, you don’t have to. Use the skills you currently have to make your prototype. Leverage the tools that are most comfortable for you. If you’re a product manager, strategist, or writer, you might write a brief, draft a storyboard, or create a sample pitch deck about the project you’re working on. If you’re a developer, maybe you code something quickly to get a sense of how an interaction will work. If you’re a designer, you could bring a wireframe or mood board.

The takeaway is: prototypes don’t have to be complicated. They can be quite simple. Test whether your new, two-pound product is too heavy by asking customers to carry around a two-pound weight for a couple of hours. Want to know if 3 x 5 inches is the best size for your new smartphone? Cut out a 3 x 5 piece of wood and carry it around in your pocket to see how it feels. The important thing is to focus on the question you are trying to answer or what abstract concept you need to make more tangible.

Why We Resist and Why We Shouldn’t

Saying we should bring prototypes to meetings sounds excellent, but I know that it can be scary for some. We resist putting things down on paper. We’re reluctant to get our ideas out there. We’re afraid to be judged. We’re afraid someone will think we’re a fraud. It’s hard to take the first step and make your thoughts visible for critique. It requires you to feel safe sharing something that isn’t fully formed. If your workplace doesn’t encourage that type of vulnerability, this is a fantastic way for you to start demonstrating the type of behavior and attitudes you want others to mirror.

And, when you force yourself to push through that fear, I think you’ll find your worries don’t come true. When you show up with a prototype, most people are delighted rather than critical. Because now, there’s something to rally around, to build off of, to shape, to make even better. Mostly, people are just appreciative that you brought something to the table and put a stake in the ground.

Challenge Yourself

When you start focusing on doing work in the meeting, not after the meeting, a couple of things happen.

• First, your meetings aren’t so dull. They turn into working sessions, not slogs. There are concrete things to talk about. Everyone’s excited and engaged.
• Second, more gets done. The prototype pushes things along just enough to get the ball rolling. It drives momentum and action.
• Third, there’s more clarity about where you’re going and why. There’s something to reference.
• Lastly, I find this way of working is more inclusive. If everyone is encouraged to bring a prototype, everyone can have a voice. Plus, others can use your prototype to build and co-create, which means that the ideas with the most merit emerge.

So, if you want to start doing more work in the meeting and less meeting and then working, consider a “no prototype, no meeting” rule. Take baby steps and tell your team that you’re trying it for single meeting or for a week. Or, start the habit yourself and you’ll likely see it spread like wildfire through your team.

The post Do the Work in the Meeting, Not After appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

If you remember the early days of the internet, you probably have fond memories of one of Barry O’Reilly’s first employers—Citysearch. Barry was coding HTML for the site in the late 90s: “I always joke that my greatest gift to the technology industry was when I stopped writing code. 20% of the time I’d go home feeling buzzed and energized; the other 80%, I would feel frustrated and angry.” Since then, Barry has found what truly energizes him—working with business leaders and teams to “invent the future, not fear it.”

Barry expanded on his shift from coding to advising and consulting: “As I was working in startups, I found that I loved technology, but I didn’t love the coding as much. I gravitated to product management and figuring out ‘should we build it’ rather than ‘can we build it?’ That sparked my curiosity more and took me down the path of leading product development teams.”

In his current work as a consultant, entrepreneur, and author, Barry has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. Barry is the author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and co-author of the international bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. He is an internationally sought-after speaker, frequent writer, and contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Barry hosts the Unlearn Podcast and is faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity’s executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco, and throughout the globe. He also sits on the advisory boards of Just3Things and AgileCraft, recently acquired by Atlassian.

It starts with alignment

Barry and I began our conversation talking about how important it is for a company’s innovation strategy to be linked to their corporate strategy and objectives. Issues arise when there is a mismatch: when technologists find a technology first and then look for ways to apply it, or when strategists go after solving a business problem, but it’s the wrong direction.

“It’s about building interesting solutions to solve interesting problems. When you have problem and solution definition, there is alignment and clarity on what to focus on — and that leads to better innovation. If anyone is operating in a silo, if there’s no coordination between what both sides are doing, if both aren’t actively exploring their problem spaces, then you’re not going to get interesting innovation happening.” Once you have that alignment, you can move into building your product and testing it with users.

“When you have problem and solution definition, there is alignment and clarity on what to focus on — and that leads to better innovation.”

Information is currency

Barry defines innovation as, “Breakthroughs prompted by new information that impact understanding, mindset, and behavior.” The notion of information is one of the keywords in this definition as Barry believes that “the currency of pure innovation is information.”

“The currency of pure innovation is information.”

Your customer testing provides the signal or feedback that your innovation is working or not. “Through customer testing, you get new information. As you’re going through that cycle, your currency is information based on your experiments. This information gives you a signal to either keep investing, stop investing, or do something else.”

He continued: “If you go through that cycle enough times, eventually you end up with a product that could generate value [other than information.] One value might be revenue. Up until that point, you’re paying for information as to whether you should keep investing. I think people lose sight of that. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Feedback, or performing desired behavior by customers, is a leading indicator.”

“Revenue is a lagging indicator. Feedback from customers is a leading indicator of their intent to buy something later.”

In the beginning stages of a project, your indicators of success are in stories and information: “When you’re doing innovation, you’re investing in information. You’re paying for information; you do experiments to gather information, to test your hypothesis. And then you use that information and to make more investment decisions.”

Throughout this cycle of testing, learning, and iteration, Barry stresses the importance of capturing what’s been learned. He calls this an after-action report or learning review: “We sit down and see what people have discovered as a result of trying a new behavior. What worked, what didn’t, what happened as they expected, what was different? Where is the new information? All of this is about discoveries.”

Barry encourages companies to formally capture and process the feedback they’re getting from customers or users to guide them forward: “What were the effects that you observed when you performed the experiment? What led to the desired outcomes you wanted? What unintended consequences did you discover? That leads you to the final step: what are you going to do differently? What actions are you going to take? How are you going to scale out, scale back, or iterate your next action or behavior?”

ExecCamp

Barry has created a program called ExecCamp to help companies innovate in a way that is slightly different than the typical transformation approach. In a previous job—running transformation for a global HR company— Barry observed that innovation initiatives were happening on the “edge of the organization.”

He explained: “We were having interesting successes and failures building new products or services, but they only drove a tiny bit of innovation in the company. It was innovation on the edge of the organization. It wasn’t changing the system. We had nodes of the company that would innovate, but the company as a whole wasn’t innovating.”

“Instead of leaders telling their teams to start acting differently, leaders are the ones that start acting differently.”

This led him to think about new ways that he could inspire innovation at a systemic level. He decided that he needed to inspire innovation at the leadership level: “If the leadership team is demonstrating and trying new behaviors, it can have a systemic network effect on the whole company. Every one models the behaviors that they see in leadership. I thought that maybe the [typical transformation approach] was wrong. Instead of leaders telling their teams to start acting differently, leaders are the ones that start acting differently.”

Barry explains his vision for ExecCamp. “We create an experience where leaders go outside their comfort zone. They not only build and learn new skills but go through a personal innovation process. They actually transform through that process. They go back to be coaches in their company to help other innovation initiatives succeed.”

Barry now runs these programs regularly: “It’s essentially an immersion experience for leadership teams to learn by doing; to get comfortable with being uncomfortable; to try new behaviors and build new products and services. Also, it’s about unlearning their existing behavior.”

He shared how ExecCamp worked for one company. He convinced eight leaders from the International Airlines Group to leave the business for two months to launch new businesses designed to disrupt the airline industry. While a huge commitment for the leaders, the payback was huge as well: “Great innovations came out of that: they created the first identity management tool for blockchain. They launched a venture capital firm Hangar 51, which is the first venture capital firm in the airline industry; they made all their APIs and assets available to startups to build new products and services. It’s unleashed a whole raft of products. But the biggest impact has been the shift in leadership mindset from going through that program.”

Out of the comfort zone

We talked about how Barry approaches getting execs out of their comfort zone. He always wants to do it in a way that makes them feel safe, even while pushing them. “There’s always a tension between being uncomfortable, but not feeling so stretched that they’re in danger. There are high levels of safety. I always say ‘Think big. Start small. Learn fast.’ You need to think big and be audacious about your aspirations or outcomes. But you start small to get there so you can learn fast. By starting small, you’re safe to fail.”

One way he pushes leaders out of their comfort zone is to have them get closer to their customer’s point of few. For example, he once asked a leadership team from a phone company to go out and sign up for a new phone service in two hours. That shift in point-of-view can be radical for executives: “Those unlearning moments are invaluable if they’re behaving differently. It shifts their perspective and ultimately shift their mindset and encourages them to continue to shift their behavior.”

“You have to start acting differently to experience the world differently.”

This is what Barry describes as “unlearning,” which he wrote a whole book about. “You have to start acting differently to experience the world differently, to get new information to change the way you think about the world, shift your mindset, and then keep changing your behaviors. That’s the power of this whole system of unlearning that I’ve been coaching people with.”

Downstream effects

Today, one of the dangers of innovation that Barry identifies is that we don’t necessarily know how products are going to be used by customers in the future. “People are building products and they’re being used in ways that they hadn’t even thought of or anticipated. The behavior of the system is emergent; and, the behaviors of the system’s users are also emergent. It means people might use your product in ways you hadn’t thought of. A simple example is Facebook. Political entities are leveraging that platform to influence people, but in ways that the people who designed Facebook probably didn’t intend or think about.”

As we build more complex systems, Barry anticipates that these unexpected, emergent behaviors will continue to challenge us: “It’s important that you build-in mechanisms to understand how people are using your products and services. Are they using it in ways that you intended? If they are using it in unintended ways, is that aligned to the values of the product and service you’re trying to build? I think good product management now means that you need to think about both of those sides of the equation.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Information is Currency appeared first on Voltage Control.

We’re hosting Greg for an upcoming Cascades Workshop on November 21, 2019 in Austin. Please join us.

Instigating impactful change—either altering the entire world or your corner of it—can seem daunting and impossible, especially if you’re not in a place of charismatic leadership or have a persuasive marketing plan for a million-dollar idea. However, the true power of change is actually in the collaboration of multiple networks, according to writer, speaker, and innovative adviser Greg Satell. After a life- and career-changing experience that led to fifteen years of research studying how to create change, Greg has discovered a method of specific cascades that have the ability to allow real change to form, from renewing a company, disrupting an industry, or reshaping an entire society.

Kiev, Ukraine, 2004 during The Orange Revolution: This is where Greg received the first spark of inspiration to investigate and study how to create transformational change. As the leader of a major news organization in Kiev at the time, Greg was intrigued by the self-organizing collective action of the millions of Ukrainians who gathered to protest Ukraine’s presidency, known as the “orange revolution.”

On the evening of November 22, 2004, hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in a sea of orange apparel and flags in an effort to stop the ruling elite from falsifying the election in Kiev’s Independence Square, chanting, “Together we are many! We cannot be defeated!” This would lead to 17 days of collaborative peaceful protest efforts of millions nationwide, and the revolution would come to be a victory for “people power.” The successful efforts created from an alliance of a powerful civic movement, a masterful political opposition group, and a determined middle class made the uprising a significant new landmark in eastern European post-communist history.

“I found it amazing how thousands of people who would ordinarily be doing very different things would all of a sudden stop what they were doing and start doing the same thing all at once in almost complete unison,” Greg said of the construction of mass protests around the country.

Intrigued by the miraculous process he witnessed to create powerful unity, Greg started to contemplate and analyze the workings of such collective power to make change. Looking at the Ukrainian community as well as the hundreds of employees he personally oversaw in his business at the time, Greg questioned if there was a calculated method to get people to unify and embrace common initiatives. A couple of years later in Silicon Valley, he used the resources of his digital business at his disposal as well as new-learned knowledge of social networks to begin researching network theory. What he discovered was a nearly complete mathematical explanation for the workings of The Orange Revolution, why and how the successful unification of millions was possible. Greg was hooked, and he spent the next 15 years studying how to create change.

“When somebody is trying to do something like a digital transformation or a corporate turnaround like IBM, Gandhi isn’t the first thing you think about, or Martin Luther King,”

Greg articulates these findings in his recent book, Cascades, a systematic guide to driving transformational change. He draws upon the wisdom of past and present movements to showcase the shortcomings and successes of change. Most people wouldn’t think to look at the teachings of historical or social movements to learn how to be successful in business. “When somebody is trying to do something like a digital transformation or a corporate turnaround like IBM, Gandhi isn’t the first thing you think about, or Martin Luther King,” Greg said. “But one of the nice things about social and political movements is that they’re so well documented. With corporate and industrial transformations, we usually only find out about them, first, when they’re successful. We hardly ever hear about the failures, unless it’s some absolutely tragic failure.”

By studying the failures and triumphs of past movements, the structure of any mass change can be calculated, according to Greg. He found that societies have three different “buckets” of creating change, of which they treat as completely separate entities: political activism, social movements, and organization, and industrial transformation. However, combining the concepts and drawing from the wisdom of lessons learned from the various institutions can make the most effective change, he says.

“What I found in my research is [political activism, social movements, and industrial transformation] are actually very, very similar. And we can learn a lot from looking at social and political movements about how to create transformations in business,” Greg said.

Lessons Learned from Social and Political Movements

So, what can social and political movements teach us about creating change in business? A lot, according to Greg. He found numerous parallels between successful industrial or organizational transformations and social or political movements, which he outlines in his book. The following are what he identifies as the crucial components of creating and maintaining transformational change:

1. Identify a Keystone Change: start with a clear and tangible goal that involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change.
2. Understand and anticipate your opposition: one of the most overlooked aspects of creating significant change that often blindsides companies, according to Greg, and one of the most important factors to actively consider.
3. Network the movement: identify and implement how to best connect groups of people with a shared intersectional purpose.
4. Indoctrinate a genome of values: build a foundation of trust and shared purpose that common values foster.
5. Build platforms for participation, mobilization and connection: create the environment for change and spread the word!
6. Surviving victory: how to maintain the change and avoid backlash/movement decline.

Identifying Keystone Change in Business

Let’s look at a real-world example of keystone change—one of the most important but most difficult tasks of creating change, Greg says. A keystone change is the movement and transformation of the foundation of a policy, system, society, business, etc. Altering a long-standing, powerful system takes some serious work, hence the difficulty to pull it off. The Women’s Movement of the 19th Century and the LGBT Movement, for example, both took decades to arrive at keystone change. But (in light of keystone change) due to the tireless efforts of millions and the radically affluent appeal to each movement’s shared values of equality and human rights, both movements took flight and gained wins.

Greg has found this concept of keystone change in every single successful industrial or organizational transformation he studied, even though nearly all of the organizations did not recognize it as such at the time, he says. Take the cloud transformation at Experian: a new CIO, Barry Libenson, was tasked to answer the request of customers to have real-time access to data in 2015. In order to do that, Barry identified the company would need to completely change its technology infrastructure from a traditional architecture to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. This raised major concern for opposition. One of the largest credit bureaus in the world with important and sensitive information in a highly regulated industry changing its entire infrastructure brought up questions of security and losing control of its business model. How did he pull it off? Barry first identified the keystone change as internal APIs, which weren’t as threatening as a direct transfer to the cloud at the time. He rallied popular opinion around the idea, growing a cadre of people already on-board and excited to implement an agile development approach needed for the cloud versus a more traditional waterfall development approach. When the use of internal APIs was successful and people were able to see the idea work in action, he found it much easier to then gain the support to transition to a more comprehensive cloud approach with external APIs.

“You have to attract people, you can’t coerce. You can’t bribe or coerce transformation.”

“You have to attract people, you can’t coerce. You can’t bribe or coerce transformation,” Greg says. “People really have to believe in change, and you need to change minds. And you do that by building up local majorities. People will tend to adopt the opinions and ideas of people around them.”

How to Implement Change In Your Business

All of Greg’s research and findings can be applied to any business. In fact, Greg travels around the country advising companies on innovation and hosting workshops to show companies exactly how, based on the premises of Cascades.

Want to learn more? Join Greg and Voltage Control for a “Cascades” Workshop

You can join us for the Cascades Workshop on November 21, 2019 here in Austin, where Greg will teach a full day of how to navigate and drive change in today’s “era of disruption.” You will learn the specific strategy–each step in the Cascades’ process–to create a movement that drives transformational change, and then put the ideas to work during hands-on activities. Greg will also share stories from his research; learn how dozens of people and organizations have created truly historic impact. Join us, and learn the skills necessary for transformation.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post How to Create Transformational Change in Business appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

Innovation consultant Tendayi Viki is the author of The Corporate Startup, The Lean Product Lifecycle and is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer, where he “works with leaders to help them rethink how they manage innovation.”

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Tendayi moved to London when he was 24. Creating and creativity have been central themes in his career. In the early days, this took the form of rapping, which he did until he finished college: “Once I stopped creating, I got interested in the process of creating. Creativity became an interest of mine and then connecting it with business and innovation. I used to write songs. It was a good way to get lost in an artistic pursuit, that calmness you get when you’re writing. I think that’s translated to writing books and articles.”

Tendayi’s fascinating career spans academia and business. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology, an MBA, and is a regular contributing writer for Forbes. In his 12 years in academia, he taught at the University of Kent where he is now Honorary Senior Lecturer. During his time at Pearson, he co-designed Pearson’s Product Lifecycle, which is an innovation framework that won the Best Innovation Program 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards in New York.

To What End?

Having worked inside many companies, Tendayi has seen many corporate innovation programs. Across the board, he’s seen one thing that he identifies as a common weakness: “The exclusive focus on ideation.” He explained further: “Ideas are not the same as innovation. Great ideas have to be married to good business models.”

“Ideas are not the same as innovation. Great ideas have to be married to good business models.”

So while hack-a-thons and ideation workshops might be excellent tools, Tendayi encourages companies to always factor in the business aspect: “It always feels as if they think a business question will kill creativity.” This business-minded perspective loops back to his days as a rapper: “It comes from my period as a musician. You can choose to be a starving artist if you want to. Or, you can choose to balance that art with some commercial savviness.”

Tendayi also taps into his psychology degree when it comes to consulting with leaders on innovation. “One of the things we say in psychology is that the first step in any therapy is self-awareness. Self-awareness by itself can be curative. It’s a question that few business leaders ask: To what end? We’re doing a hack-a-thon — to what end? We’re doing an ideation jam — to what end?”

“Any innovation activity should be an expression of your strategic intent.”

Tendayi urges companies to start by solidifying their specific “why” before diving into idea generation: “Any innovation activity should be an expression of your strategic intent. Once you answer — ‘to what end?’— you get to the center of why you want to innovate.”

Test & Learn

Tendayi also urges companies not to let their good ideas stall out after they’ve come up with them. “After these events, everybody goes back to their desk and turns on their day job. What do you do after a hackathon? You have to start thinking: how do we bring this idea to life? Bringing this idea to life means more than just making a product. It’s making a product, figuring out how to sell the product, figuring out whether there’s a customer job to be done. Figuring out what the customers are willing to pay to have those problems solved.”

Tendayi believes in having a solid perspective on how you’re going to build your product; however, he’s not a proponent of creating inflexible and supposedly infallible business cases to be executed against. “When we say go find a business model that works, we mean — go test the idea with the possibility that the idea could fail. Go out there, and you test your assumptions; then you might learn from something that works, or you might learn something that doesn’t work. The point is to bring all those lessons and use them to form your next set of decisions.”

“Test your assumptions; then you might learn from something that works, or you might learn something that doesn’t work.”

This more iterative, test-and-learn approach to building products is one that organizations have to cultivate. “It’s hard to make decisions months down the road. You have to make decisions as learnings emerge. It’s a practice that organizations have to have embedded inside their organization — to allow people to be able to do things like that.”

Tendayi’s seen this learn-as-you-go innovation model hindered by two things. First, large businesses have their core business to run. “There’s always a siren call of revenue and more profit in growing the core business. Also, a lot of companies tend to be organized around their main business model.”

Second, decision making and internal processes can also stand in the way of innovation: “There’s a bureaucracy on how to make decisions. The process that leaders require from their employees before they can decide to release money or get ideas funded can either constrain or accelerate your innovation.”

Two Portfolios

While companies may feel that they are reducing risk by having complex processes in place to determine what innovation gets funded, Tendayi sees it as false hope: “Those processes don’t mitigate risk. If I’m an innovation team and I make up a business case, and it’s convincing, you’ll give me all the money, and I could lose it all. Innovation failure is still high in places where they have these business cases. And then they can get strict, which means they only invest in what’s already succeeded in the past. Then companies end up working on things they’ve always worked on.”

Because of the inherent riskiness of innovation endeavors, Tendayi encourages businesses to think of two distinct portfolios. “There’s the portfolio that is the core portfolio where you’re exploiting your current advantages for scale, growth, and revenue. Then there’s a separate portfolio that is your innovations portfolio where you’re exploring new opportunities.”

These two portfolios, which he called the “explore” and “exploit” portfolios, need to be managed differently. The core, exploit portfolio is about cutting costs and growing revenue. On the other hand, with the explore portfolio, Tendayi says: “You protect funding for innovation. You make an incremental bet — small bets that scale as the teams get traction. You use innovation metrics to track success — customer traction, customer need, early sign-ups, retention, and questions like ‘Are we close to profitability or finding a business model that works?’ All of these things are important for tracking your innovation portfolio.”

“With the development of innovation accounting and innovation metrics, leaders don’t have to be patient. They can be patient for profit and revenue, but they can show people progress towards that.” —Tendayi Viki

Tendayi urges companies to have patience as they wait to see how innovation programs are performing. Companies aren’t used to measuring innovation projects: “Historically we’ve only used revenue and profit and customer numbers to measure the success of a product. We tell our leaders to be patient with innovation because it takes a long time to hit that revenue moment. With the development of innovation accounting and innovation metrics, leaders don’t have to be patient. They can be patient for profit and revenue, but they can show people progress towards that.” By tracking things like customer desirability and viability, “innovators can show leaders that if they keep on investing, they’re gonna get closer and closer to a revenue moment.”

Transformation Versus Product Innovation

The behavior change that’s required to support internal innovation at many companies has to be intentional. “You have to do that in a very systematic way. You can’t just say ‘I’m going to change my organization.’ You have to be much more systematic about working with early adopters inside your business and developing those relationships. I’ve noticed that innovators are impatient when it comes to transformation. But it does take time.”

Because of this, Tendayi sees a distinction between the innovators working on new products and services and those that work on the organizational structure to support internal innovation. “In most of the companies I work with, I say, ‘Let’s distinguish these two teams.’ You need a group of people that are responsible for building the innovation system and the innovation architecture. That’s what they do, and they don’t get involved directly in building products. They support the building of the product by building out the innovation architecture. I think that’s critical.”

“Think about the teams that are working on growth and building products as the flowers. Think about the innovation architecture as the garden in which those flowers sit.” — Tendayi Viki

He expanded on this notion with a useful metaphor: “Think about the teams that are working on growth and building products as the flowers. Think about the innovation architecture as the garden in which those flowers sit. The place where the innovations are nurtured and can grow to the light.”

*

Currently, Tendayi is working on two new books, Right Question, Right Time and Pirates in the Navy.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post The Two Business Portfolios appeared first on Voltage Control.

Earlier this year, I was interviewed by David Holley, the national correspondent at Xconomy, and he wrote about my transformation through fitness and entrepreneurship. About a month later, Eli Wood, one of Voltage Control’s master facilitators, led a group of local CTOs and me through an exploration on purpose. During this exercise, fueled by the reflections from David’s interview, it became apparent that my life’s work has been about change and transformation.

You could say I’m a change junkie; I love continuous improvement, and I’m always curious to reveal inefficiencies and find a way to improve. When I look back, I see that all my career choices have been about change management strategies at some level. And now, as a facilitator, I’m helping companies through change every day.

The topic of change also drove the creation of my first book, Beyond the Prototype: A roadmap for navigating the fuzzy area between ideas and outcomes. (I’m excited to share that it will be available September 12, 2019.) Beyond the Prototype is a field guide that picks up the Design Sprint story where Jake Knapp left off. I wrote the book because, after running Design Sprints for companies both large and small, I found one common truth: while Sprints create lots of momentum and reveal the path forward, few companies are able to execute on the post-Sprint journey successfully.

That’s because the path after a Sprint isn’t as prescriptive or precise. It’s a gray area. It’s fuzzy. In this gap between ideas and execution, things can grind to a halt or worse, fall apart. I wrote Beyond the Prototype to help bridge the gap from ideation to execution so that you don’t find yourself looking back at the results of your Sprint wondering if you’ll ever take action on them.

Change management strategies & transformation

My approaches are rooted in change management and transformation philosophy. Change takes patience and commitment; you cannot expect to flip a switch and see things metamorphose before your eyes. It’s often the case that you work, toil, and exhaustively-pursue change. Only then does it seems to happen “overnight” as if by magic. Change is akin to a social movement within your company. There has to be a tipping point, and enough momentum has to build for the entire system to give way.

Change is akin to a social movement within your company. There has to be a tipping point and enough momentum has to build in order for the entire system to give way.

This process can take a long time, and many complicating factors can arise along the way. We must be resilient and pliable (aka agile) so that we can embrace the unexpected in our change initiative. Wouldn’t it be ironic if we opposed change while trying to implement it?

“The idea of VUCA has since been embraced by leaders in all sectors of society to describe the nature of the world in which they operate: the accelerating rate of change (volatility), the lack of predictability (uncertainty), the interconnectedness, of cause-and-effect forces (complexity) and the strong potential for misreads (ambiguity).” — From “Understanding the Challenges of a VUCA Environment” by Brigadier General George Forsythe, Karen Kuhla and Daniel Rice

Continuous transformation is the idea of continually scanning and probing to uncover organizational incongruencies and unmet needs. Just as we manage our products, so must we manage our organization and how we build products. While strategy and purpose are paramount, if we don’t focus inward on the “how” we will never reach out desired outcomes. There are countless articles and books on change management principles, innovation, and organizational strategy, but in this article, I’d focus on the primary driver of change: the employee.

Let’s consider three elements of the employee experience that are my top change management principles: Structure, Incentives, and Story.

My Three Change Management Principles

1. Structure

As Safi Bahcall author of Loonshots says, “If culture eats strategy for breakfast, structure eats strategy for lunch.” Structure is not only how your org chart looks but also how people interact and the architectures that emerge. Often, without the correct team structure in place, change can’t happen.

Conway’s Law tells us that: “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” Named after a computer programmer, Conway’s Law is the belief that your organizational structure will determine the type of products you’re able to produce. That’s because existing architecture is hard to shift. This is where some companies struggle with culture change. You can’t simply move desks or change up the office floor plan and expect innovation. More systemic structural changes are likely necessary. You may have to restructure thing like: how your group is formed, how reporting works, or how teams communicate and collaborate to support the new vision you’ve laid out.

It’s crucial that you discover and empower the people in your organization that are hungry to support your change initiatives.

Another thing to consider is identifying the change agents within your team. Who can be your catalysts, your allies, your intrapreneurs? Discover and empower the people in your organization who are hungry to support your change initiatives, both current and emergent. Empower these people to go forth, do things differently, and help spread the word.

Try This: Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder Mapping is one activity you can do to start reflecting on the people who should (and shouldn’t) be involved in your change initiative and how. Check out this article for a good intro and explanation of how to do it.

2. Incentives

Another critical change management step is determining incentives. When you’re trying to inspire employees to champion your innovation initiative, be aware of what’s in it for them. What can you do to excite your team and make them feel like the process is beneficial for them as well as the larger organization? I encourage companies to find ways to align the projects with what employees are looking for — personal growth, professional growth, building new skills. Let your team know that they’ll be getting something out of this change too. The company will change and grow, and they will grow and change positively as well.

In design work, we often plot out our user’s journey and think of the ways we can delight them at every moment with our product or services. What if we did the same for our internal team? Plot out your project plan and deliberately plan the milestones, moments of reflection, and moments to celebrate and pause on your big journey.

Try This: Empathy Mapping

Empathy Mapping is typically done for our end-users, but employees and internal teams working on a critical initiative are users too. Treat employees with the same respect and uncover their essential needs and wants to better design a path forward that responds to these desires. Do an Empathy Mapping exercise to uncover what your employees or colleagues need, want, and do.

3. Story

The third and final aspect of change management that I’ve found to be invaluable is the story. How are you telling the story of your project or initiative to your team, key stakeholders, or company at large? Without deliberately, and continuously, crafting that story, things can get away from you. As part of your change management strategy, decide early on how and when you will communicate the status and progress of your project: is there a regular email? A website that gets updated? An informative blog post with pictures and links? An all-company Slack? Think about the best ways to share the ups-and-downs of your work with others and be open to hearing feedback coming from the outside as well.

The reason story and narrative is so important to change is that the biggest cause of internal resistance is ambiguity. Ambiguity is unavoidable in projects, but it is controllable. Knowing this, plan for uncertainty and build ways to combat it where possible. Set clear expectations about project scope, milestones, the process, and desired outcomes.

Try This: Guardian of Change

Guardian of Change allows you to quickly facilitate and get the group to agree on what they are going to tell their superiors and other stakeholders. Through this activity, you create an elevator pitch, your super-short summary of what was accomplished during a meeting or workshop. Learn more at MGRush.

Let’s talk about change management strategies.

Voltage Control offers innovation consulting, design sprint facilitation, and design thinking training. Please reach out to us at info@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk.

The post My Life as a Change Junkie appeared first on Voltage Control.

Growing up, Deborah Jann was an only child and lived in a neighborhood with very few children her age, so she began to entertain herself by creating stories, games, activities, and continually looked for ways of doing things faster and easier. To say she set herself up to be an innovation guru from an early age may be an understatement.

She had no idea that a random three-hour car ride with two total strangers would lead her to create a new experience for creative problem solving, but that is just what it did. When Deborah offered a ride to two fellow conference attendees to the airport near her home, she discovered they all had challenges both professionally and personally that they could work through and solve together. At the end of the inspiring ride, the term “carpool innovation” sparked an idea that led to what she called Roll Out.

“While you’ve got the passing scenery, neuroscience, and you’ve got people who are all open-minded to helping one another, we had gone through the creative problem-solving process while we were driving. As I’m driving away after having an amazing, very impactful three hours with two strangers, I drove away, and I said, ‘That was so cool, what if I were to scale this?’”

Rolling innovation

Deborah immediately starting thinking about how she could capture what had just happened on that car ride to the airport. How could she bring this into the work she was already doing within her company? She started looking at transportation options from buses to limos; the idea was that an event could take place at a destination, but how much could be done on the way to the destination? Why not use downtime to facilitate conversation, transformation, and allow strangers to help one another?

Why not use downtime to facilitate conversation, transformation and allow strangers to help one another?

“The transformation that happens just by people working with one another. They were all strangers; they were all individuals that wanted to try to have some breakthrough thinking on their challenges. The way I designed it was that everybody had a takeaway, everybody had an action plan on what they could do to move forward more productively on these challenges.”

While the idea was a popular one and people loved the concept, citing logistical problems and safety concerns, the plan had to be scrapped.

“But the type of work that I was doing, I don’t do it on the bus anymore, but I had so many people when I would talk to them about the Roll Out, they said, ‘I love the way you think Deborah. I love the process. What if we take the bus out of it?’”

Eventually, she was able to adapt her process, her design, and her IP to set up programs in more traditional settings or by challenging people to choose a less typical location. “I did a strategic planning event in an art gallery. We would move into different parts of the gallery to do different steps of the process so that they had the visuals as inspiration for how to look at their strategic plan in a different light. I tried to emulate the [bus] experience by having a more original location.”

You can check out a video on her Roll Out concept here.

Everyone can be an innovator

Deborah finds it curious when companies have an innovation committee, given that every employee has the power to innovate, whether by challenging the status quo or by adding new value.

“Everybody has it within their capability to make a minor refinement to an existing process or product.”

She believes that problems or complaints are simply nothing more than opportunities or needs that are not being met. When a company has an innovation committee or deems certain people responsible for innovation, they do a disservice because everybody has the power to innovate. Innovation shouldn’t be a box that has to be checked off.

Many innovation committees seem to work under the pretense that innovation only comes from the top or senior staff, but Deborah believes that best practice would be that you’re driving innovation from the top. “While everybody has it within them to innovate, do they necessarily feel empowered? Are they rewarded and recognized when they are innovating or if they bring forth ideas? How are we going to drive innovation, and how are we going to make sure that we’re rewarding and recognizing innovation, and that we have an innovation process?”

Deborah shared how she would propose a company shift from an innovation committee to team-wide innovation. Her first step would be not to call it an innovation committee. It needs a new name. “ I think coming up with a name for something congruent with either the values of the company, the strategic direction, the purpose, the focus so that everybody is feeling inspired to be in service of that focus.” Then she would task them with how they could work in collaboration with senior leadership, to drive innovation through the company.

And if your company already has an innovation committee, you can quickly reshape and re-purpose. “It could be that you have different people on the innovation committee responsibility for different projects. Maybe one is in charge of organizing hack-a-thons, and others in charge of deciding how innovation should be rewarded and recognized. They could be each having their own, and engaging the rest of the organization, and coming up with ideas that ultimately are presented. That’s how I could see it work out, that it’s not them making all the decisions, but they’re canvassing the organization. They’re the team lead, so they’re responsible for an area, they’re not accountable. Ultimately leadership is accountable, but they are responsible for different components or elements of driving innovation.”

How can you measure success?

While it is nice to think that generating a bunch of ideas will lead to new business, how can you measure whether the ideas being put forth are good for business or driving everyone in the right direction? How can you tell if you need to change course?

Deborah says there may be many different ways to measure the success of ideas: “They’re measuring it with some psychometric instrument, doing some gap analysis, probably aggregate reporting. Then, targeted intervention around development. Whether it’s leadership development or a values refresh, and then being able to attach that to performance targets and performance reviews to show demonstrated behaviors in that area.”

Putting some model into practice will help the company determine what initiatives are making a difference and which ones might not be hitting their mark. Even being more focused as to what types of meetings you are having and their purpose will better drive success.

“Is the meeting a brainstorming meeting to generate new ideas? In which case, we want to defer judgment for a while in that meeting. Or is it a reporting meeting, which is a very different type of thinking? Or, are we here to make decisions, to knock things off the list? You’re probably going to have a better meeting if you’re all thinking about it in the same way. What are you trying to achieve?”

“I think having meetings run more efficiently and having them more organized according to applying different types of thinking, will lead to more productive meetings.”

Deborah also mentioned that you have to weigh the accuracy and efficiency of your decision. This is a big part of the process of bringing success to your ideas. “Do you have a well thought-out decision, but you took so long you missed your window of opportunity? Or is it that you didn’t do enough work on the front end? You didn’t have enough of an original idea? Or you didn’t do your homework or gather enough research, and now you put something out that was flawed in logic, and superficial.”

When asking Deborah how she would structure a successful innovation program, she stated: “Innovation needs to be driven at the senior level. We know from Dr. Brett Richards that systems like the OGI (Organizational Growth Indicator) can measure an organization’s adaptive capacity and ability to create new value through innovation. Involving leadership, having innovation processes like design thinking or CPS in place, and communicating innovation efforts, learnings, and successes are key ways to raise engagement and drive innovation.”

Deborah’s Innovation Silver Bullets

1. Socializing ideas (including co-creation)
2. Using marketing techniques to create buzz and results

“It’s like the Hollywood script. I’ve got an idea, but it’s a great idea in my mind. I’m only going to find out if it’s a good idea if I start to share it. Then you get feedback. Then you tweak it and try it again. You socialize it so that when you present it to the key stakeholders, you’ve already anticipated some of the objections and you’re going to have a better chance of success.”

While Deborah has had some great success, she has had some fails along the way that taught her a lot. She heard some great advice from an innovation leader from Disney at a conference that stuck with her. “She had this great expression: ‘Have affairs with your ideas, don’t marry them.’ Going back to the Roll Out idea, I married that idea — I didn’t have an affair with it. I was convinced that it was going to be the new way, that it was going to be cool, that it was going to go viral. I didn’t listen to some of the feedback because I was convinced this was a winning idea. Had I had an affair with it, I could have saved myself some time and money.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Measurable Results Through Memorable Experiences appeared first on Voltage Control.

Our philosophy is that nobody is as smart as everybody. We teach you the tools to work better, together. Through our workshops, teams learn how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge.

Three Ways to Engage

1. Facilitation Bootcamp | The Jumpstart

Get a quick, but effective, orientation to innovation facilitation techniques.

What it includes:

• Full-day workshop to lead your team through foundational innovation methods
• One-hour planning meeting to customize activities
• One-hour event retrospective

2. Facilitation Intensive | The Deeper Dive

Rapidly adopt facilitation techniques through hands-on experience with a real business problem.

What it includes:

• Two full-day workshops based on a key business challenge
• Two one-hour planning meetings to customize activities to your needs
• Email and Slack facilitation coaching
• Bi-weekly office hours for one month

3. Facilitation Transformation | The Big Shift

Build an internal facilitation capability or develop an innovation program in-house.

What it includes:

• Four full-day custom workshops based on your specific business challenges
• Six one-hour exploratory meetings to understand your needs and define opportunities for transformation
• Email and Slack facilitation coaching
• Weekly office hours and mentoring for six months

Why Innovation Immersion?

1. Learn Through Doing

2. Spark a Customer-First Attitude

3. Build a Culture of Experimentation & Innovation

4. Discover How Shared Decision Making Can Lead to Better Outcomes

Our methodologies include: Agile, Lean, Design Thinking, Design Sprints, prototyping, and Liberating Structures.

We also offer…
Conference Activation | The Keynote

Light the fire for innovation in your company with an interactive keynote at your next corporate summit or executive retreat. Perfect for introducing teams to innovation transformation and inspiring new ways of thinking, through a lively, hands-on experience.

Let’s talk! Contact Douglas at douglas@voltagecontrol.com if you are interested in working with us on an Innovation Immersion program or keynote speaking event. We are happy to build a custom program based on your needs.

The post Innovation Immersion — Practical Training Workshops & Coaching appeared first on Voltage Control.

Ruts are easy. Easy to fall in, easy to stay in. After all, it’s the path of least resistance, the easy way…maybe not forward, but at least not backward.

By definition innovation is moving forward, and that is the goal. No matter what industry you’re in, innovation is the way to be seen, to move forward, and to love your job again.

But how can you begin to innovate in your field and stand out among your colleagues? Let’s take a look at five ways to innovate at work.

Use the Bad News

No one likes negative feedback or complaints from clients. But there are two ways to react to negativity. One is to push back, ignore the problem, and get defensive. But, that means nothing will change for the better.

Or, you can use the negativity as a force for change. Complaints and negative feedback are ready-made brainstorming sessions. Instead of looking for areas in which to be better, you have them handed to you. And you know they are areas that matter to your clients because your clients are the ones who let you know.

By innovating around areas of challenge you can be more productive and find creative solutions to problems that could cause long-term harm to your business.

It will also help you come across as a problem-solver and someone who is in tune with client needs; willing to go the extra mile to ensure great service and value.

Use the Buddy System

A buddy system is a solid approach when it comes to problem-solving at work. Trying to innovate with just one brain works fine. But double the neurons firing means double the innovative power.

Your innovation partner should be someone you trust and someone who shares your vision in your field. Apathy breeds apathy, so avoid co-workers who just seem to be cruising. You want someone with passion, someone with ethics, and someone who isn’t afraid of change.

Once you’ve found them, you can bounce ideas off each other. You can bring a fresh perspective and learn to see from other points of view you may not have considered.

Get Out of the Box

No, really. Get out of the box. The literal cubicle or office that pens you in each day — get out of it.

Go outside, around the corner, down the sidewalk. The simple act of changing your scenery can help you see things in a new light.

And getting outside, getting moving, can help your brain wake up from its normal drudgery and start pumping out innovative ideas.

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come from anywhere. And if you limit yourself to only the walls of your office or the cerebral walls of your brain, you miss fleeting opportunities for inspiration.

Something as simple as a street sign can trigger a flood of inspiration that could fuel your next big idea.

Not to mention that movement combats the side effects of a sedentary office lifestyle. So, if you want to innovate, don’t forget to change your scenery every once in a while.

Use What Inspires

Everyone has people or things that spark their creativity. Maybe it’s a place, or a quote, or certain colors or images. Every person is different and finds creativity in different places.

Whatever inspires you, whatever gets that creative energy going, surround yourself with it.

Learn how to make a vision board, or use your cubicle walls as a canvas, covering it with images or words that inspire.

When you are surrounded by inspirational things, you won’t be able to help but have a constant flow of ideas and innovative musings.

Never Stop Growing

No industry is stagnant. This is a good thing. If we don’t change and grow, we can’t get better. It’s true for business, and it’s true for people.

So as your industry changes and evolves, make sure you change and evolve with it. Attend conferences, listen to TedTalks, and take advantage of continuing education opportunities wherever they are.

And don’t limit yourself to growth opportunities in your industry. Attend classes outside the scope of your own sector. Read books for fun, listen to podcasts, or take a course on something you’ve always wanted to learn. The human brain loves to make connections. As you fill it with new information, it will use that to create fresh and innovative solutions and ideas.

Learning to Innovate at Work

Innovation in the workplace is crucial to growth and competition.

Being someone who can innovate at work is crucial to personal growth and advancement. Learning to use your creativity to solve problems and create innovative new solutions helps you stand apart from the crowd.

Now, we’ve given you a place to start. But maybe you need a little extra help or want to push your employees to innovate and start flexing those creative muscles.

Innovators create innovators, and we would love to help create innovators with you. For more on workshops to kickstart innovation in your company, contact us for a complimentary consultation today!

The post Break Out of the Office Stereotype: Here are 5 Ways to Stand Out and Innovate at Work appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Brett Richards, author of the book Growth Through Disruption, is focused on demystifying innovation and providing leaders with a clear path to drive innovation within their organizations. After years of studying cognitive styles, Brett believes that organizations have mindsets or thinking styles that are distinct from individual or team mindsets.

“Understanding a mindset within an organization is really, in my view, extremely important because it strongly affects the way in which an organization goes about responding to the challenges it’s facing in its operating environment.”

Driving growth through innovation often requires some level of transformation within the organization. For Brett, that transformation must start by understanding the current mindset — something he views as distinct from explorations of organizational climate and culture — to determine where change is needed. “A mindset influences how we view things. It influences what we pay attention to and what we don’t pay attention to, how we filter, how we interpret, how we ascribe meaning to competitive threats or changes in regulations that are happening in the market.”

Assessing innovation readiness

Inherent in the concept of organizational mindset is the idea that organizations function as a system rather than a collection of individually functioning parts. With that in mind, Brett’s research on organizational development has culminated in a new, quantitative tool to assess an organization’s ability to create new value called the Organizational Growth Indicator (OGI). The OGI begins with an online assessment completed by a broad array of leaders and key contributors within the organization. “The power of the tool is that it provides an organization with a number which [describes] their current level of capability to drive and create new value and support effective transformation.” Organizations are evaluated for how they leverage four mindsets and eight orientations and receive a score from 0–100%.

“Much of what happens and influences an organization’s actual ability to innovate and grow are invisible dynamics that we can’t always see underneath the hood. What the OGI does is shine a light on these intangible yet vital factors that influence the extent to which the organization can activate its strategy and vision successfully.”

By providing leaders with quantitative metrics to back up what many good leaders intuitively know, the OGI fosters objective conversations with teams around strengths and what may be getting in their way.

Brett has heard the adage “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and, while he believes culture is a crucial factor, it doesn’t present the full picture. Qualitative tools like culture surveys “describe what your culture is. That’s helpful, but it’s not telling the organization what their actual ability is to affect change or to shift culture. The OGI not only describes and gives a mirror to what your cultural mindset is, but it simultaneously speaks to the ability.”

The assessment can be taken by employees across an organization. Brett emphasizes 100% participation from senior executives and director teams as well as at least 80% participation from management teams. Once the assessment is completed, Brett analyzes the results and reviews them with the leadership team to identify remedies. The insights discussed can be broken down by senior executive team and leadership level or location for precise and informative feedback on where teams are strong and where there are opportunities for improvement. Brett has found the tool to work across a variety of industries, with organizations large and small, and in Europe and Asia as well.

In practice, Brett has observed how the OGI links to actual performance metrics. “Drawing on theory and then through application, I’ve created five tiers that relate an organization’s score to real revenue growth rates within organizations.” For example, a tier three organization (one with a score of 48–56%) can expect revenue growth of 1–9%. A tier four organization moves to 10–24% growth.

Innovation isn’t effective in isolation

Viewing an organization as an integrated system, Brett sees innovation viewed and conducted in isolation as a misguided approach. Counterintuitively, even companies with large research and development teams and budgets can still struggle with growth through innovation. “The great ideas that come out of R&D have to be socialized and integrated and transformed into the broader organization. If the organizational system is not supportive of that, then the organization’s ultimate ability to drive value into the market will be compromised despite having a tremendously powerful R&D wing within the organization.”

To mitigate problems where innovative efforts languish from lack of integration, Brett says the first step is acknowledging and understanding the nature of organizations as systems. “It gets to a very basic root cause of failing to [see] just how important understanding an organization as a system is to supporting organizational transformation and growth.” This is why Brett views ad-hoc programs as ineffective in driving change.

Organizations seeking change often resort to hiring outside consultants for training initiatives focused on leadership teams. “This is a classic example of an ad hoc solution, a mechanistically-minded thinking process which fails to understand that, for all intents and purposes, you’re throwing away your money.” The training often serves as a band-aid and organizations are left wondering why they don’t see improvements as a result. “A lot of organizations throw training at stuff because it’s easy to do. It can be excellent training, but if it’s not integrated within that organizational system, then we’ve got a problem.”

While organizations understand that leadership is important, the apparent working equation that leaders plus training equals improved organizational performance is lacking. Once leaders complete the training and return to the organizational system they realize that, despite their investment, they’re not seeing a big impact. “You get frustration [from] the leaders who are going through this awesome development. They go back into the organization, but it’s not supported in the broad sense. The new organizational performance equation must start with organization — it’s organization plus leaders plus training equals improved performance.”

Innovation for survival

When it comes to measuring innovation efforts specifically, Brett seeks to identify metrics that matter to the organization’s survival. One aspect of a company’s survival relies on innovation itself. “The problem is that organizations don’t understand that innovation is probably the most significant predictor of an organization’s ability to thrive successfully into the future. Organizations that don’t innovate — they’re dead.”

“Organizations don’t understand that innovation is probably the most significant predictor of an organization’s ability to thrive successfully into the future.”

In his book, he calls out thirteen inconvenient truths related to organizational innovation — namely, “an inability to break the bonds of short-term thinking at the leadership level will kill innovation.” Reluctance to set aside funds exclusively for innovation can rob organizations of their future survival.“What happens is that because of short-term thinking they build a system where they can borrow money from the pool of unsecured money for innovation so that they can satisfy some of their short-term operational requirements. It’s really just because a slush fund to move around.”

To support and increase the ability to innovate, organizations must ensure they have a clearly articulated innovation strategy that is integrated into their overall business strategy.

“Until you have your innovation strategy fully embedded and linked to your overall business strategy, you’re setting yourself up for less effective action.”

The OGI measures the extent to which an organization’s innovation strategy is articulated and understood as well as whether it is adaptive and responsive enough to meet the needs of the changes occurring in the market. For example, in the case of hospitals, innovation may look different. Innovation requires risk and a hospital’s goal is to reduce risk as much as possible to save lives. “What becomes important within a hospital system is to be extremely clear and articulate about what we mean by innovation in the hospital system. Innovation within a hospital context has to do with things like patient experience or efficiency, driving efficiencies within the organization.”

Not only does measurement through tools like the OGI serve to provide valuable data on an organization, but it also serves as a means for necessary conversations. Those conversations can help elucidate where key problems lie. For example, is the executive team in agreement on what the organization needs to do to drive innovation? What do leaders think innovation looks like at the company? “If you’re truly serious about improving your organization’s ability to grow through new value creation and adaptive transformation, you have to take a serious look at the organizational system and what are the factors that are influencing and/or constraining your organization’s ability to do that.”

In addition to establishing benchmarks and areas to focus improvements, Brett says the OGI can be used in successive iterations to evaluate those improvements. “The organization can add in ten custom questions to the OGI analysis and that enables the organization to evaluate the impact of certain training or organizational development initiatives.” OGI scores are correlated with people’s participation in the training to see if there has been any lift in the scores for those groups. By measuring mindsets and the effects of organizational development initiatives, Brett seeks to provide a tool to organizations for understanding the nature of their system and identifying actionable ways to increase their ability to innovate and thrive into the future.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

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