We need to know when to collaborate and when to operate independently. The collaborative project also needs to be worthy of the effort. Is the potential return going to give us enough value for all the work required?
Collaboration is rewarding and nearly always produces huge synergy for those involved but it is a trap when it is pursued purely for its own buzz. Teamwork is so difficult to be worthwhile, it must produce multiple benefits and significantly advance the core values and competencies of our organization. Both innovation and collaboration goes off track and often turns into a huge waste whenever it moves away from our collective competencies and our best expertise. We are “safe” in terms of corporate risk when we stick to what we really know well.
Good collaboration emphasizes both performance from decentralized work and performance from collaborative work. Some of the best work comes from sitting in a quiet place and doing our own thinking. It is possible to so over collaborate that the richness of individual ingenuity gets washed away into some kind of groupthink. Often achievement must be found in individual work and once developed, and then can later be shared collaboratively. There must be a fine blend, properly ordered, between individual and group work.
Some organizations based on their entrenched culture are just not set up for collaboration. The learning curve is too hard unless a productive effort can be made to change the culture. Such companies have their unique ways of getting things done and it won’t be through teams. Usually independence and competition rule that workplace. When collaboration is attempted it is characterized by high friction and a poor focus on results.
The other major problem comes from centralized decision-making, top-down one-way communication, and command-and-control methodologies. In this type of culture high individual achievement precludes horizontal cooperation and teamwork; thus it often turns out to be an exercise in futility.
Build an Innovation or Project “Zone”
Innovation or project success is not so much about the superhuman hero-inventor as it is about the collective wisdom and processes of free-wheeling teams. Yet innovation is driven by leaders with passion, curiosity and undeniable hope. Social networks, intentional collaboration and structured idea-recombining interactions (& activities) is where leadership thrives, shifts, and rotates; as teams are nurtured, encouraged and challenged, they inevitably create unforeseen insight and extraordinary commercial value.
The "Zone" is a place where people can move ideas from concept to reality. The Zone thrives amidst uncertainty, constraint and scarcity. It is the resourcefulness by which we rethink how we create value. It's the place where risk is carefully managed and experiments are made with small amounts of money. The zone can be a physical place in a building or it can be the building of a new open-minded passion led culture.
The Innovation Zone is a "reward" place. People find meaning there. They find individual and collective significance. They discover a new sense of identity. They expect recognition. They get feedback of a special sort. People in the innovation/project zone function at higher levels. They are also willing to become subservient to an important idea or those leading that idea. Some special few take on the role of Intrapreneur - - a dedicated worker on a specific project either as a volunteer of their free time and weekends, or as a laser-focused full-time employee of their initiative. Such intrapreneurs are the ones who earn bonuses and or royalties. However, most people in the zone prefer non-monetary incentives to keep the motivational pump gushing.
Customer Centered
In addition to collaboration, there needs to be a focus on customer desires and frustrations. There is a simple tool to identify our customers' most pressing and important needs. Such clarity about what customers will pay a premium for is the basis for developing breakthrough products and services. (See Market Targeting & Decision Making.) Once found we can hone in on what we do with these valuable newly-found, critical insights we are going to target.
The Need for Focus
Big ideas come from insights that center on solving customer problems. Not everyone would agree with this; some think that the best ideas come from wild and woolly brainstorming, unfocused ideas that get way "outside the box". However, the facts speak otherwise. Researchers have shown that over half of the commonly used brainstorming techniques, intended for corporate creativity, don't work and can actually take you completely off point. Amongst the worst are activities that focus solely on imagination exercises, expression of feelings, free associations and imagery. These tools may actually reduce the output of ideas that can work.
The corporate suggestion box can similarly be a black hole that stifles innovation as soon as employees figure out their best ideas frequently end up in oblivion. This means ending up with too many unfocused ideas that wastes precious time and resources. The result is a struggle to evaluate, sort, categorize and then manage all these random submissions, in a vain attempt to select the ideas "most likely to succeed". No wonder, a 2010 Denning Dunham study revealed that only one in twenty five business innovation initiatives meet with any degree of success.
Similar problems arise with online forums, ideation programs, venturing units, and various other schemes to generate ideas. What they all lack is context and a framework for guiding creative energy. None of these concepts work in isolation; they all need to be part of a process, a synergistic system.
The Need for Structure
As a rule of thumb, most corporate innovation starts out with a bang and then dies quicker than the latest business fad. Why? One reason is that people find it easier to put forward ideas they already have than to go to the critical work of coming up with new ones. “Thinking is hard - - that's why so few people do it" Henry Ford is reputed to have said.
A second reason is that not enough commitment is given by senior management to make the initiative work: "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" Without real leadership, very little of anything goes anywhere.
Third, innovation happens too often on an ad hoc basis rather than as a business process. Periodically, serendipity and good luck produce surprisingly good results. However, these one-hit wonders - - because of their very success and monetary reward - - only set the company up to fail later. Random success cannot be duplicated. When the one-hit wonder dies of old age, the infrastructure to support it becomes a very heavy burden that too often sinks the company.
Sustainable innovation, that can drive the business forward, needs to be set up as a system (in which skill, expertise and knowledge are deeply embedded into the enterprise). Without such a system the output will be sporadic at best. Learning will turn out to be negligible, execution will be mediocre and results anemic.
Further, without an in-place system (including well-structured, highly-committed innovation teams) employees will constantly face capacity, time and motivation issues around their participation. Such ad hoc innovation will usually lead to continuous power struggles for needed resources.
Building the Innovation System
An innovation system can be put in progressively over time, in a step-by-step fashion. So let's return to what we do with our newly found, critical insights. The goal is to consistently generate exceptional ideas that can actually transform a part of our company's value chain. In other words, while innovation can spawn new products and services, that is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be really done to ultimately revolutionize our organization.
It's not so much new ideas as it is new practices and methods that will revitalize our organization. That means we are harvesting exciting new business models, processes, formulas, marketing approaches, and a dozen other key business components. It all starts with applying innovation to our understanding of the needs customers desperately want help with.
Innovation can be boiled down to the collective power of collaboration. Long-term, stable innovation teams must be part of any innovation system. These special teams exist to understand and create new customer insights.
Such game-changing flashes of insight can almost always be traced back to a team’s dedication, hard work and collaboration. It is almost always a story of group genius. Rarely, if ever, can such creative insight be traced back to a single lone guru.
Realizing full creative potential comes when widely diverse team members exchange perspectives in a safe, free-flowing, timeless state… as they combine and recombine what has previously worked for them in their very different worlds of the past. Simply put, innovation is all about recombination. In many cases, team collaboration results from “living together, eating together, and discussing their project constantly”, in a playful but almost obsessive way.
10 Team Building Principles
How do we get these types of innovation teams working? Here are 10 important basics:
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Encourage the best people to volunteer:
The financial rewards, the status, the power, the promotions all seem to come from the company's main existing business, the performance engine that fuels the rest of the company. Yet the really turned-on people work for more than the usual incentives. They want to make a difference. They want to create. They want to have impact. They want the self-satisfaction of knowing they are making the world a better place. -
Populate the team with a cross-section of the company:
Innovation teams need to be not only talented but also diverse. Not so much diverse by ethnicity (which can be quite important) as much as diverse by variety of business function and perspective. Understand that it is the recombination of successful ideas from different industries and domains that gives potency to an innovation recipe. Depending on the size and the nature of the organization, innovation team players can be part-time or full-time, rotational or permanent, single focus or multi project. In other words, the members of an innovation team can be drawn from anywhere in the company (or even from outside the company); they can be assigned to the team temporarily or permanently. They can work on the innovation projects full-time or part-time; they can work on one team or several teams; just one project or maybe three or four. -
As much as possible keep the teams stable and permanent:
Like a fine wine, teams improve with age. Trust, harmony and synergy must be learned. Collaborative teamwork is orchestrated by combining personal knowledge-based skills, soft interpersonal finesse, and the humility to put team output above personal success. -
Develop the team charter from both top-down and bottom-up:
Direction from above - - which connects the team to the vision, values and passion ( or “fire”) of the organization - - can provide the discipline, focus and energy to build excitement into the innovation process. When a new group forms, everyone on the team is going to come with hidden personal agendas, fears, and certain character/personality flaws. In order to bring trust, safety and fun to their interactive processes, it is important that the team build their own set of protocols and rules. Attitude cannot be dictated but teams can learn ways to bring the best out in each other. -
Make asking new and better questions a primary function of the team:
Breakthrough ideas come from reframing the way we think about problems. Good reframing is a result of better questions. The way old problems were approached needs to be abandoned. Fresh perspectives will allow new problems to be posed and reframed as groundbreaking questions, questions that no one has ever thought to pose before. Quality questions lead to new exploration in potentially fertile ground. Old “harmful” assumptions may be discovered and addressed leading to a new found freedom. -
Put a few collaborative techniques in place:
Teams need to be taught collaborative techniques. Theatre-type Improv and the "Yes, and…" method are two examples of such. The Improv technique brings out spontaneity as each team member is inspired to add to an evolving story (or idea); each builds on the previous member’s creation in the same way as improvising comedians perform on stage to deliver a completely original fantasy. The "Yes, and…" rule was developed by Pixar to deal with the delicate egos of people who had to be inventive and ingenious in their everyday work. By starting with the word “yes”, a critic delivering constructive feedback would first affirm the new creation, and then suggest a way it could be a little better. This device kept the artists in high gear on a day by day basis. Every innovation team has to improve their own methods and techniques that help their ideas flow. -
Between meetings keeps the communication flowing with a few simple tools:
E-mail and telephone work best; there is a variety of project and idea-organizing software out there which can be very helpful. Be careful though because such software can also cause the work to bog down. What goes on between meetings is at least as important as what goes on in meetings. “Eat, drink, breathe the project”, alone and with each other; that's what can develop… and that's a good thing. -
Teach the team to listen to each other on a very deep level:
The usual team behavior sees the participants primarily engrossed in planning their own words and proposals. That’s the ego at work hoping to soon show how smart it can be. True listening has to do with a very high level of respect, admiration or even awe, for the person-hood and unique importance of the one advancing some type of relevant information. From listening comes trust, from trust harmony, and from harmony comes flow. -
Make the goal to be constantly building on each other's ideas:
That's what makes the whole team go. Deep listening extends the ideas (that have just been proposed) into a new combination, a new joint creation. The teamwork required to do this is often unacknowledged or even invisible, yet there is always a common focus and dedicated goal that is always at the forefront. Lots of small ideas lead to a series of sparks; no one comes up with that single flash of insight because the overarching critical insight is built from those sparks over time. -
Let the team know they have the luxury of time:
When it comes to innovation patience is a virtue. It's called incubation. The unconscious mind needs time and space to yield its brilliant output. No one may demand of it constantly. Each member’s current creative action will only take on special meaning later, after it is been woven into different ideas, created by the other team members. Meaning comes from better and better context. Ideas, and later insights, become more important as they are considered, reinterpreted and applied by the rest of the team. Team dialogue builds trust as a sequence of small ideas leads to new thinking spaces; eventually, a long chain of small incremental ideas leads to a critical insight. The combination of key insights is what leads to breakthrough innovation. So given time and incubation, the team can help the business combine just the right ideas in just the right structure.
Three Steps Forward
So what can our innovation team do with newly found, critical insights about the customer’s pressing and very important needs? Both customers and employees feel the need to belong; they seek to "hang" with a group of people that have the same "whys" as they do. The attraction factor comes from "companies" (groups) that know why they're in business, what their founding purposes and values are. They are the ones who know why their customers buy from them. They don't have to discount, persuade or manipulate - - their clients identify with them in deep-seated emotional loyalty and trust. The inspiration of "why" gives people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe. The "how" and the "what" is a result of seeking to realize such beliefs, principles and dreams.
So with our newly found, critical insights we can do 3 things.
First of all, we have to overcome our own inertia to continue doing things the way they have always been done and replace it with a conviction and a personal vision for finding a better way with more fitting ideas. It means building new dreams and abandoning the old ones. It means being dissatisfied with the good because you want to create the great.
Second, we focus everyone in the company on our core competencies as we look for ways to meet the so very rapidly changing demands of our market place; fluctuating economic realities, and quickly evolving social contexts will do nothing but keep surprising us. This means we must constantly be helping our colleagues become more aware of their critical skills and how we can lead in using them. Distraction and the lack of focus is the most common cause of mediocrity and ultimately failure.
This means everyone in the organization needs to constantly ask "Why do our customers buy from us? Why do they really need us? What do they yearn for?" Then we ask, "What can we do about that?"
In other words, everyone needs to be able to access (and assess) our distinct inventory of skills and know-how. In applying them, we learn to innovate not by asking what do we make but rather by asking what do we do – what do we really accomplish for our customers. Core competencies refer to deeply rooted capacities for understanding and adding value; these skills always outlive products and services. It is this know-how that helps us weather our ever-changing world and marketplace. It is our attitudes that drive dreams into realities.
Our job is to mobilize those competencies to solve problems that have never been solved before. Innovation is mobilizing collaboration and collective thinking. It is about stirring up the critical thinking and idea generation needed to create a new tomorrow. It is this energy and focus at the top that ensures innovative effort flows throughout the organization.
Thirdly, with the extra energy from a clear why, we lead by example, demonstrate our conviction by articulating our new vision, mission, and intent in running our company. Our soapbox is not so much what we say but rather how we act as we personify our convictions and dreams. By action we attract individuals - - collaborators - - in the form of coworkers, colleagues and our assortment of bosses. Our craziness may threaten many incumbents in our organization who have a personal stake in the status quo. So we will need courage to stay the course and sustain the drive to find a better way.
Both customers and employees feel the need to belong; they seek to "hang" with a group of people that have the same "whys" as they do. The attraction factor comes from "companies" (groups) that know why they're in business, what their founding purposes and values are. They are the ones who know why their customers buy from them. They don't have to discount, persuade or manipulate - - their clients identify with them in deep-seated emotional loyalty and trust. The inspiration of "why" gives people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe. Understanding the "how" and the "what" is a tool by which we can realize such beliefs, principles and dreams.
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