Editorial
In an ideal world, every individual and business unit would be able to carve out regular time to devote to ideation and innovation. Some organizations do this well: Google’s famous 20% rule is often cited as a successful model. Dozens of companies use some variation of this model, under the framework “side-project time.”
It’s all well and good to theoretically allow that carve-out of time for innovation, but we all know workloads between teams, functions and business units vary, often substantially. Some transactional or frontline service teams may see themselves as being too time-poor to take on extra-curricular innovation activities, leading them to sacrifice their side-project time. In turn, their lack of participation leads to their voices going unheard and innovation being applied unevenly within the organization.
Team members may also come to resent not having the same opportunities to pursue innovation in their own area as colleagues in other parts of the organization do. This is a potentially dangerous development, because it creates negative sentiment that can counteract or undermine innovation and digital initiatives more broadly. Business-as-usual becomes weaponized against innovation and the teams and individuals that want to innovate. How do these teams find time for innovation? Are they not picking up their fair share of the workload?
This kind of class divide, where people feel like they’re being excluded or shut out of innovation and digital transformation, needs to be quickly recognized.
Where individuals or teams have become disenfranchised, they need to be formally brought into the fold, given a forum for their ideas to be listened to and — where warranted — have access to internal sponsorship, funding and space to realize their idea or vision.
The Downward Spiral
In a series of recent roundtable discussions with customers, we tested how organizations approach opportunities for innovation and improvement.
We wanted first to see how leaders at these organizations elicited feedback and ideas from staff, and then also the nature of their responses. If an idea was deemed valuable, how did it get implemented? What next steps were taken? We then sought to understand what impact this had on employee experience, and the extent to which it encouraged or bottlenecked innovation, process improvement and digital transformation projects.
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Our qualitative findings suggest a tale of two fortunes.
Parts of the organization felt listened to, engaged and in the “inner circle” of innovation, both being given opportunities to lead change and the space and resourcing to kick goals.
But others felt ostracized from the process, unable to meaningfully contribute ideas or participate.What this cohort did next should concern organizations everywhere: While some simply took no further interest in innovation, a proportion actively became detractors of digital progress. They were able to gather support from similarly disenfranchised individuals and teams, and use their collective voice to undermine or derail digital initiatives by not supporting them, not implementing them or arguing against them in favor of an existing or legacy process or approach.
We often read in the transformation literature how important it is to bring everyone on a journey. This case study demonstrates why. There are frequent stories of organizations learning this the hard way — and it seems some of these difficult lessons are still being learned.
Driving Change
So what can organizations with digitally disenfranchised individuals or teams do to reverse the situation? There are a number of strategies and tools to consider.
First, encourage empathy and understanding. There is a lack of empathy for people who want to innovate because someone’s still got to be here to keep the lights on — but those lights might eventually get switched off if there’s no innovation, creating a Catch-22. Innovation is bigger than any one individual or team. Everyone needs to be aligned and engaged for big-picture digital or process innovation programs to succeed.
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Second — and this is especially important for leaders — identify passion for innovation from across the organization and encourage it by providing a mechanism to road test different ideas. Create a sandbox environment, map out an MVP, get ideas out into the organization to the people that live and breathe your business and ask for feedback on ways to optimize and improve the current landscape. Good ideas can come from anywhere, even relatively time-poor teams.
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Third, keep things manageable and agile. Too many programs become too big, too quickly. Successful organizations split large teams into smaller, dynamic groups that tackle bite-sized portions of a larger problem. This avoids multi-stage programs and layers of approvals. The same advice goes for individuals: You don’t need to own the full transformation outcome, just the part you know best. That may be 10 steps out of a 100-step process; but if you can de-bottleneck and simplify that part, not only will the overall experience improve, but it’ll encourage others responsible for upstream and downstream portions to do the same.
Finally, you can’t improve a process you haven’t documented. When processes are mapped out, they are easier to understand. The different opportunities for innovation and improvement are more transparent, and granular feedback loops can be built-in, such that everyone can be assured they are being listened to.
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