Tag Archives: innovation

Managing an Innovation Team

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Managing an Innovation Team by Walter McIntyre

Innovation is as much about failure as it is success.  Innovation thrives in a culture that is open to challenging the status quo and allowing employees to make mistakes as new ideas are generated. Organizations that do not tolerate failure simply cannot innovate in a way that we would call successful.

Managing an organization that has an innovative culture can be stressful, as there is bound to be friction as new ideas rub up against established ways of doing things and other employee’s ideas. This friction is good if managed right.  This means creating a safe environment for commenting on ideas, introducing ideas and “sharpening the sword” against each other.

Here are a few tactics for creating and maintaining an innovative environment.

Demand Speed

Faster completion of project tasks and phases, ideas backed by “one pager” documents, short meetings that have agendas and “cut to the chase” will underscore how business is done. Innovation is sometimes based upon rolling out ideas, testing them and moving on as quickly as possible.

Define the Gap

By defining the gap or opportunity where you want to focus your energies, you can keep the team on target.  Make sure that the customer plays a part in defining the opportunity or gap. The ultimate waste of time is to work on something that the targeted audience does not care about.

Get Outside the Box

Spend more time listening to customers (and potential customers).  Spend time watching and listening to competitors.  Include mavens in the targeted markets, new suppliers and folks outside the innovation expertise window in your idea evaluation process.  The point is to broaden the footprint of your organization’s thinking.

Don’t Get Caught Up in Small Stuff

Successful writers do not edit while they write.  They get the creativity flowing first and correct later. This defines innovation in writing (a totally innovative process).  From a business point of view, focusing on the idea and its supporting, or detracting, points, is the path to innovation.  Avoid getting caught up in spelling, grammar, color, etc.  There will be time for that when you are ready to present outside the innovation group.

Be Part of the Team

One of the characteristics of a high performance work group is the lack of visible evidence of a command and control network within the innovation team.  This facilitates trust, communication and conservation of time.  When a leader is out among those they lead, there is a reduced need for formal reporting and meetings.

Challenge People to Learn

Assign employees to projects teams that are working on ideas outside of their expertise.  This enables fresh ideas to be introduced and forces more thorough discussions.  Additionally, this expands the talent and knowledge footprint for your employees.

Innovation and Creativity in Motion

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Many of the activities and strategies we use to innovate and manage are actually road blocks to creativity and innovation. Certainly, the enforcement of a time line and being cost conscience, are important, but only in respect to their appropriate place in the life cycle of a product or service.  When applied to the creative and innovative phases in this life cycle, they are disruptive and cause sub-optimization.

Innovation is a creative process that requires open-mindedness and a safe environment.  Creativity and innovation are processes that rely upon failure and the ability to learn from failure. You cannot create or innovate where failure is unacceptable or penalized.

Formatted business meetings and project management meetings are not events for innovation. They are events for business management. Important?  Yes, but not in the innovative process.  In these venues, failure is a negative thing and, “when will the project be completed?”, is the primary question. In the innovative stages of a project “what to do?” or “how to do it?” are the main questions.  Other thoughts get in the way.

What I am about to say will make control oriented managers uncomfortable.  You cannot control creativity, you can only feed it or starve it.  When a work group or team is in the creative or innovative mode, just get out-of-the-way. Command and control must give way to facilitation. You are better off guarding the door to keep creativity starving people and systems out until it is time for them.

When a work group or team is working in the creative and innovative phases of a project, questions like who gets the credit, cost, who is smarter, and how fast can we get done,  take a back seat to collaboration. It is an inclusive environment instead of an exclusive one.

Here are some ideas to support creativity and innovation. First, casual dialogue centered loosely around a topic opens up the possibility of seeing things from multiple perspectives, thus eliminating an error in parallax. This is the way great minds like Einstein’s worked. It is also how high-performance work teams think.

It’s not about discussing a specific aspect of the project so much as it is a general meandering dialogue. There is more storytelling and analogies than would take place in a typical development or project meeting.  Meetings away from one’s work desk or controls are great for this type of thinking.

It is a safe environment where people are allowed to get out of the box. People who are not the exerts on a particular topic get to offer their perspective, forcing the experts on that topic to think through a response to their questions and suggestions. It is a movement away from what we think we believe, to true understanding. The result is innovation and creativity in motion.

Second, there need to be creativity/innovation zones in the work areas.  These are spaces where folks can talk, argue and “sharpen the sword” with each other.  Employees do not go there to work, they go there to think creatively.  This space is divided into group “think tank” areas and individual “thinking out of the box” areas.  They are not anyone’s personal space, they are not scheduled spaces, and they are only for the creative/innovative processes and folks.

Lastly, encourage dialog between workgroup/team members that have little format, other that a place and time.  As a line manager, you may want to stay out of these meetings and be informed by way standing project meetings later. This is definitely a “watched pot never boils” situation.  Manage creativity and innovation by staying out of the middle of it.  This means facilitation instead of control.

Editing Your Silo

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“Editing your silo” is about gravitating to your own belief system compatible information, instead of challenging your believe system. Stated another way, it is tuning your thoughts and words to arguing your perspective as opposed to drilling down to why you, and others, believe what they believe. Are you editing your silo? If you focus more on the minutia of the social strata of who and why someone has a particular perspective, instead of trying to understand the perspective itself, you are probably editing your silo. “All my friends believe this”, “I am only friends with others who believe like me”, or “I believe this, therefore I am right”.

Doubt is the driving force of both innovation and faith. The innovative process, like faith in your belief system, is strengthened through challenges. Just like exercise develops your body’s strength and stamina, allowing for doubt and belief system challenges develops the quality of your ideas and the depth of your faith.

Sync’ing is a way to exit “editing your silo” thinking. Sync’ing is about listening to and seeking to understand others first, then trying to be understood yourself second (Stephen Covey). Sync’ing your knowledge, information and perceptions with others brings alignment by way of shrinking the differences between people’s perspectives. There will always be differing perspectives between people, but understanding will allow appreciation of the differences instead of fearing the differences.

One of the main reasons behind the failure to bring a good idea from concept to profit production is silo editing. Innovators that fail to get out of their self made box (fail to sync with others) also typically fail to obtain, or use, the contextual information that will convert facts to truth. This manifests itself as thinking for the customer, prospect or teammate instead of sync’ing with their perspectives. Two heads are better than one only if they are synced and working together. The result is often a hybrid idea or perspective that employees the best of the various view points. This is the back bone of consultative sales. It is also the back bone of innovative idea generation and innovative engineering.