Change Is Difficult. Not To Change is Fatal
“The competitiveness of any organization depends on two things: #1 the efficiency with which it does it’s work in comparison to it’s rivals and #2 the speed at which it innovates new and superior products/services/experiences”.
I love that declaration … I only wish I knew where I cut and pasted it from! For me, it does a great job of explaining the difference between fighting to get a bigger piece of the pie and baking a whole new pie. As an innovator, I help organizations make pie.
Every company has, at some point, been that wide-eyed, product centered firm eager to scale up and make millions. Start-up culture is all about the long hours for the big pay-off. As companies mature, they come to understand the advantage of developing processes to reliably build their product and dependably deliver it to audiences who will pay for it. Eventually, running a tight ship takes over the entrepreneurial “hero culture” and leaders come to know that remaining responsive to the voice of the customer is the best way to stay fresh in the minds of those customers.
Up until very recently, the hard work that “process people” do has been enough for large companies to remain competitive; but not anymore. Advances in technology have changed people’s minds, changed minds have created a different expectation, and different expectations have created cultural shifts so large that the old way of doing business is no longer enough. Our current infrastructure was built with a different set of assumption. Organization that can adapt will survive.
Innovation is a practice that increases the adaptive capacity of an organization. It’s not an “insert coin, get a unicorn” kind of endeavor. It is an investment in thinking differently in order to handle the growing complexity of the new marketplace in order to survive in this new normal. It happens at all levels through a purpose fit set of process & practice, roles & responsibilities, hard skills & human skills, work products & artifacts and most importantly metrics. It is the unlearning and learning again of what we care about, what we believe to be true and how we do things. Creating an innovative organization means nurturing the values, mindsets and behaviors that keep companies adaptive enough to navigate the seismic shocks of our times.
