David Piccione.com

In my current life, I’ve found myself struggling to innovate in an environment that is typical of the modern corporation. Even given that there is a positive value placed on ideas and open thought, and that the industry is conservative and ripe for exploitation; selling, sustaining and executing innovative strategies is all but impossible.

Why is this? I’ve spent a good deal of time mulling this over this past year and have now come to the conclusion that there are certain aspects of the innovative process that can be considered critical points of failure. Any organization that has difficultly getting past even one of these areas will ultimately fail in being innovative.

What’s more, I’ve noticed that the larger a company is, the more likely it is that one of these hurdles will be impossible to surmount. It seems that the more people involved, the less likely consensus can be reached.

The Process of Innovation

First, it’s a good idea to clarify what I mean by innovation. Wikipedia’s entry does a good job of laying out a framework for this discussion.

I view successful innovation as a series of five distinct steps. Each step has different needs and requirements and because of this, the process itself can cause challenges.

The Challenge of Innovation

Innovation becomes difficult because most organizations are unwilling or unable to recognize and support the cycle as it’s described above. Often, where there is a stated “culture of innovation”, there is support for only one or two components. But each step in the cycle creates different strains and pressures on the organization, and it is easy to interpret the normal process of innovation itself as failure.

Points of Failure

As I mentioned earlier, points of failure tend to come in certain varieties. The unfortunate part of this is that seeing risk to innovation requires some rather unorthodox thinking of its own. It’s been my experience that people either get it right away, or they don’t.

Failure to Recognize the Benefit of Innovation - Perhaps the biggest reason for failure is the inability of managers and the corporation in general to see any value in innovation, either given a specific circumstance or at all.

It’s curious that some managers will have a positive opinion on growing new markets and engaging new types of customer yet will be unable to allow new processes, platforms and ideas to provide solutions.

The misunderstanding of benefits translates directly into misconceptions of risk and reward; the expectation that innovation can be measured and analyzed to a sufficient degree prior to the innovation taking place! Along with this, there is often an overconfidence in current processes and technologies. Not understanding innovation results in seeing current best practices as being the result of complex algorithms that must remain unchanged as opposed to being a collection of individual haphazard temporary measures that they often are. Not understanding innovation results in thinking that the organization is an untouchable technological leader - nobody can match our spending and current platform - as opposed to not understanding that certain customers are willing to pay a lot less for good enough.

Insistence That Innovation Must be Restrained - What often happens when a champion is allowed to innovate is that they are forced to do it with rigid limitations in place. Innovation of a new product or process has never come from capitalizing on the current way of doing business, but from inventing and experimenting with new ways of doing things.

It’s for this reason that innovation must always be conducted in isolation from regular activities if it is to be successful. If you take a look back at the cycle diagram, there is an expectation that innovative ideas will be allowed to undergo a revision process. In other words, odds are that the innovators may not get it right the first time, and may need to tweak their ideas for them to be successful. For example, perhaps the product was launched to the wrong target market, or perhaps the original process wasn’t efficient enough for the customer. Innovations need to be able to find the right balance, and this can only be done through isolation.

Often, innovations present risks that are deemed unacceptable. To mitigate this, the innovators are forced to reduce scope, thus reducing the reward. In the end, the innovation is seen at best, as a marginal improvement for great cost.

Finally, attempts at innovation that aren’t isolated are eventually brought into direct conflict with higher priorities. When an idea of how to make something better and the reality of addressing a pressing client issue conflict, it’s obvious which option resources will be applied to - rightly so. The effect however is that the innovation dies from being consistently under resourced.

Impossible Expectations of Success - Companies without a history or culture of innovation have a difficult time accepting the risk/reward equation that innovation requires. As a result, there is often an expectation that the innovation itself will do its best to reduce its exposure.

When this happens, potential high reward targets are discarded for lower paying, yet safer options. While this is good business sense in general, it defeats the whole idea of innovation. Instead, innovative efforts should be measured holistically. The sum of many investments should allow for a few hits, but also for some misses. By encouraging misses, one encourages innovation and, by extension, hits.

Expecting That Innovation Just Happens - Finally, perhaps the worst thing that corporations do is to expect that innovations just happen. Often, executives look for people within their organizations to innovate, and expect the rest to be magically created from this champion’s aura.

What these executives miss is that they must be the force driving the innovation. They must be the ones to isolate the process. They must be the ones to champion the act alone, and not focus on the result. They must recognize that it’s not enough to be a leader today, but essential to be a leader tomorrow.

Innovative leaders do this in three ways: Budgeting for innovation, isolating and developing innovators and taking calculated risks on the resulting new products and ideas themselves. In the technology field, two of the better examples of this leadership are Apple and Google. The former runs as sort of a serial innovator, putting the weight of the entire company into a particular new idea. The latter encourages distributed innovation, allowing each new product to show its merit in a limited space and grow into something larger when it is proven.

Both companies receive tremendous benefit from the innovative spirit that is explicit in the culture.

Corporate Innovation

Innovation requires a unique way of thinking that isn’t within every organization’s comfort zone. It requires an assumption of risk with the expectation of high reward. Often, a culture simply isn’t able to innovate successfully.

Until the present environment is one that avoids the common traps mentioned here, innovators are safer to restrain their actions. Create the culture that allows for innovation first, and you’ll be better able to build the next big thing.

If you take a look at my about page, you’ll see that I spent 5 years in the Canadian Army, primarily with 1PPCLI. I found the experience enjoyable for the most part, and looking back some ten years (!) later I realize that I learned a lot about myself, people in general, and the world around me.

If you’ve been exposed to military life at all, specifically the infantry, you know that there are basically two constants: things that go boom and leadership. The army lives and breathes leadership. It is constantly looking to harness the power of effective leaders, and continually examining failures with the way it approaches situations or people. To this day, I’ve yet to find an organization that is as adaptable and open about these things the way the military was.

Today, I thought I would take the time to share some of the things the army taught me about how to be a leader.

Lead By Looking Down

It’s common to see leaders in modern corporations look to advance up the ladder as fast as possible. Often, they do so with little regard for their peers and charges. Being an infantry section commander taught me that what good leaders do is concern themselves not with the opinions of their superiors, but with those of their juniors.

This constant regard, respect and sense of responsibility for those under your command translates into high performing teams, and high performing teams get noticed by themselves. Military leaders at all levels become very attached to the welfare and plight of their men. Sometimes, this attachment is so great that losing people in battle can have lasting traumatic effects on the leader.

This respect for those at the bottom of the pile makes its way into all sorts of actions that add up to form a bond between leader and team that simply isn’t seen in the corporate world. An environment that allows team members to feel that they will be put ahead of the interests of the leader is such a comfort that performance improves a great deal simply because it exists.

Your Team Will Decide Your Worth, In Fact They Already Have

Soldiers can be quite a particular bunch. They play favourites and are extremely hard to please. I suppose when you’re placing your life in the hands of a 23 year old you tend to be pretty particular. Because of this, inept leaders in infantry units are not exactly well kept secrets, at least among the men and women on the ground. Any soldier can tell you who the good leaders in their larger unit are. More than that though, most of them could tell you whom among their peers should be promoted into a leadership role.

It’s this understanding and perception of leadership among peers that ends up forgiving the mistakes of the respected, and ignoring the accomplishments of those who don’t quite cut it. I’ve seen many satisfactory would be leaders fails miserably because of the simple fact that their soldiers didn’t think them adequate to be their peer, let a lone their leader.

The lesson here is that soldiers are people, and that although not all of us will wear our dislike on our sleeves, this type of attitude can be extremely damaging to the leader and the team when it is shown. The simple way to correct for this is for the leader to earn respect. They need to know what they can do and what the have difficulty with and respect the ability and confidence of those they lead.

Earning respect takes time. It comes from building relationships and allowing yourself to be evaluated as a peer, and not just a leader.

If Nobody Died, It isn’t That Big a Deal

In other words, don’t sweat the small stuff.

A simple but true adage that affects every person on the team. The army is a stressful place. Somebody is always yelling. Situations are loud dangerous and confusing. Something always needs to be done. Everything is important to somebody important. Part of the position of the leader is to deflect and channel all of this noise into workable action items for their team. It doesn’t work to simply pass on commands from others, a leader must also filter the priority of tasks into those that are important, those that are somewhat less so, and those that the team doesn’t need to be aware of; either not at all, or simply not at the current time.

Allowing your team to manage stress by giving them less to worry about is a great way to keep them focused and performing. The key factor for success here is learning how to properly prioritize and shelter your team well. Too much information about the irrelevant is bad, but too little information (or information provided without enough time to react) is even worse.

You Might Receive a Sudden Promotion

In combat, people die. The thing is, the people shooting at you have a knack of consistently finding leaders and removing them from the equation. The only way to defeat this effect is to quite simply make everyone a leader. That means that every person needs to know the job of their senior in such a way that they will be able to take over when the time comes.

The military establishes a very clear hierarchy - even between those of the same rank - to achieve this. There were many times that we had a good chuckle about Joe Private being delegated the leader of himself when everyone else was dead and gone.

I wouldn’t think that corporate life would ever need something so detailed. After all, it’s not often that you’ll have three or four members of an eight person team suddenly cease to exist. The principle however is sound, and it provides not only a clear path of succession, but a vision and understanding of the leader’s expectations of his or her team.

This isn’t done anywhere close to enough outside of the military, in my opinion.

If You’ve Overstepped Your Authority, Someone Will Let You Know

I used to get the same general review every year: “Shows potential, should be promoted at earliest opportunity, needs to learn to use initiative more often.” Nearing the end of my stint, it was starting to get a little repetitive, so much so that I began to think that it was just what people wrote if they couldn’t think of an area that you needed to improve on. These days, I know the truth - you can never use your initiative enough.

In the army, leaders are so overwhelmed with information that the less they need to worry about details, the happier they will be. Whether in a junior leadership role, or simply a senior team member, making decisions and acting reasonably with available information was never frowned upon. Sometimes the wrong call was made. Sometimes things didn’t turn out as planned. Regardless, I can never remember a time when anyone was disciplined for taking the initiative and acting in the absence of a higher authority or existing command. I certainly wasn’t.

Make the call, make it fast and make it right. You need to be able to think on your feet, and you need to be able to make a decision and advance to your goal. If you aren’t moving, you lose momentum, and losing momentum can be the difference between success and failure.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I learned so much during my time with the military, and it formed the foundation of skills that I continue to build on. These topics I touched on here are only snippets of information, but at the same time they’re valuable to new leaders, and seldom seen - or learned - in civilian corporations.

If you want to become the worst leader in history, don’t ever make any decisions. As a leader, this is basically your bread and butter. Making the call (and taking the fall) is what you get paid for.

Making decisions is hard work though. Everyone wants to make the right call at the right time, and nobody wants to be the goat, especially if it means that your team will suffer for it. Many, many people have developed countless techniques and methods to help you make the right call. Most of them do little to help with the actual decision at hand.

What they do in spades however is make you feel better about the choices you make. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not that’s a good thing. Feeling good about your decision is one thing, and I’d suggest doing whatever it is you like best. The more important issue though is making the right call. The only way you’ll do that is with a combination of experience, instinct and process.

Personally, when I find myself in a position where I need to make a decision, I tend to use the following process. I’d recommend it to anyone if you haven’t already found one of your own that works consistently.

Scope the Decision

The first thing you should do is properly scope your decision. In a single phrase, what’s the decision you have to make? What are the outcomes you are choosing between? Is this the right decision to be making, or is it only a symptom of a larger call that you - or somebody else - is putting off? Make sure you’re making the right call on the right thing.

Along with this, you should take a few minutes to evaluate your authority to make the decision. Are you the right person to make this call? If not, who should? Be careful though not to use your perceived lack of authority to avoid the problem altogether. Unless you know that your superiors will get thoroughly upset that you didn’t consult with them prior to making the decision, buck up and take action.

Gather Information

Once you’ve assumed authority and defined the decision to be made, start to gather as much information about the problem your decision is expected to resolve. The amount of information to be gathered directly corresponds to the immediacy and importance of the decision being made. On one hand, strategic and large impact decisions can benefit from using a SWOT analysis or similar tool, while immediate and tactical decisions will use less formal techniques, such as a brainstorming session.

The important thing here is to limit your information gathering to the scope of the problem. If you are doing a SWOT analysis to decide what outfit to wear to a meeting, you’re gathering too much information. You’ll never have all the information, learn to act without it.

Forecast Expected Outcomes

Once you’ve learned as much as you can - given constraints - about an issue, it’s time to forecast the expected outcomes of your options. For a great many people, this involves a simple pro/con list. It gets a little ridiculous when you start adding numbers and looking for some mathematical formula for the “best” decision. To each their own though.

Myself, I paint three scenarios: best case, worst case, and mean/average outcome. I’ve outlined a simple version of this below for the trivial problem of whether or not to wear a suit to a client meeting:

For most decisions that you make, either the best or worst case will be something you will want to avoid completely. In the case above, it looks like if I needed to make a mistake, I’d be better off overdressed. (FYI: You almost always are!)

There are two other components to the process here that are often key to arriving at the correct course of action, as well as often overlooked in the classic mathematical methods. Instinct and experience are valuable allies when making a decision and should never be overlooked. Often, a gut feel is the only distinguishing factor between two choices of equal merit. Gained experience will enhance your instincts and give you a better feel for a situation based on similar occurrences in the past. Both are instrumental in the process and should never be overlooked.

Sleep on It

In my former life as a soldier, I could only dream of having the luxury of this much time in making a decision. Making major decisions with life or death consequences is par for the course in that environment, and the stress is almost unbearable. Working in a business environment, it’s truly rare when you can’t say, “Let me get back to you tomorrow.” Nothing is so earth shatteringly urgent that it can’t bare some sober second thought.

While sleeping on it is great taken literally, what you’re really trying to accomplish here is the act of stepping away from the problem after thinking it through initially, then resuming the process. With my example above, for instance, it may seem on first glance that wearing a suit is the best option. Perhaps though you are a designer, and your brand is hip and edgy. After sleeping on it, you return to the process with the thinking that wearing a suit takes away from your brand, and thus the image you want to portray.

In the least, sleeping on an issue gives you extra confidence in your first instinct, and is a great way to allow yourself the freedom to make a gut call.

Act!

Finally, all of the above is for naught if you don’t actually carry through with your thinking and act. This is by far the hardest of the steps, and also the most important. Often, we know exactly what needs to be done, having analyzed it over and over in our heads, but by never acting, we never make the decision.

Once you have chosen, it’s important to always look forward. Pause for analysis of past turning points only as a means of self improvement, and never as a part of future decision processes. In other words, don’t get into the trap of the Sunk cost fallacy with your decision making.

I’ve used this technique to make some very major choices in my personal and professional life. Although I’ve sometimes made the “wrong” decision, I’ve always been comfortable in acting on future choices because of the strength of this solid thought process.