The recipe for building breakthroughs
As the world accelerates, and competitive differentiation is no longer enough, the pressure is on to solve tougher problems faster, better and cheaper. In a rush to stay relevant, organizations default to searching for the foolproof plan to adopt or new method to try. Books get bought, trainers hired, speakers invited in, and consultancies are tasked with acting as guides in navigating the murky waters. Then the boxes get checked, sparkly events get put on, and money gets spent, but often with little real results. Tremendous amount of investment is misplaced on efforts that have limited impact in truly helping an organization grow in new ways. Adopting the latest method or process may be useful for training broadly, but alone, it’s often ineffective. Going through the motions of innovation and development means the underlying issues get overlooked, including effective resourcing, focus, and organizational power dynamics.
The true secret to take on big change, is in focusing the right team, on a great challenge, and supporting them with a platform to make progress. It’s in getting these elements right, and mixing them together well, that increases likelihood of maximizing efforts. The art of attacking the new and pursuing development with real intent depends on them. Often the best consultancies are masters in architecting these 3 factors, spending most of their time fine-tuning them behind the scenes. These are the secrets that don’t get packaged and sold, but are critical to repeated successes across organizations of all shapes and sizes.
Big impact is driven by careful design of the: Challenge + Team + Platform
Setting an ambitious challenge
Setting an effective challenge starts with a big goal. “A compelling direction” that is fueled by human insight with wide potential for impact rallies energy around it and creates clarity of purpose. Moonshots have become a trademark of an ambitious world changing intention. It’s a call to action that’s bigger than the project or organization.
“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.” — Charles “Boss” Kettering
A great problem frame is a new way of looking at the world, a means of stepping back and asking why. It can be the lens for the entire project, and the anchor for shared goals. It’s the north star question to pursue. It challenges assumptions — resets the intention, a problem becomes an opportunity, a weakness a strength, and an impossibility a reality. For instance, in solving the wicked problem of health, it means reframing what is seen as “health,” challenging our assumptions of the roles of patients and clinicians and what it means to design for wellbeing. Reframing the problem allowed Apple to rethink what a phone could be, Twitter to change how people engage in news, and Zipcar and Uber to open up new options for urban mobility.
“A true Big Hairy Audacious Goal is clear and compelling, serves as unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit.” — Collins and Porras
Building a great team
A killer team is made up of a small core of multidisciplinary, dedicated players, with clear roles. Creating a mix of builders, explorers and analysts, helps to integrate necessary perspectives rather than putting them at odds. These could be roughly translated into familiar roles like engineer, researcher, designer and business operations. They all bring a unique and essential lens to creating something new.
Creating the right mix of capabilities and establishing accountability are crucial, but it turns out you can have all the right people at the table and still fail. One of the most critical factors to team success is in building trust. It’s this invisible, and hard to pin down quality, that ultimately shapes success. Google has recently revealed the part trust plays after studying what a “perfect” team looks like. People need to feel comfortable with their teammates, that they are out to support one another, not out to compete, try to undermine, or humiliate — behaviors that too often emerge in the workplace. Trust becomes the difference between a truly collaborative team and a collection of individuals. Rather than the typical assumptions of who was on the team, or how they were structured, Google found that it was the norms and behaviors that revealed the most. The role things like empathy, equality, and safety played made the difference between a good team and a great team.
Setting the roles, rules and norms, starts up front. Establishing operating principles, rules of collaboration, and openly sharing personal goals as a team, can help set the ground work for building a feeling of safety, creating shared understanding and future behaviors as a group.
Shaping the platform for progress
A platform to make progress allows room for reflection, focused effort and structured feedback. Shaping the learning, reviewing, and building activities of the team creates the scaffolding for action and reflection, rhythm and momentum. The platform organizes resources and stakeholders around the team effectively, orchestrating their involvement at just the right moment. Milestones and deadlines mark the cadence with opportunities to widen the participation, share work and get valuable feedback.
Carefully designing the create/learn cycle isn’t a matter of adhering to the latest framework, it leans on whatever method is most appropriate for the challenge at hand. At the earliest stages of development, design thinking, lean, and agile often get confused and misapplied, or are so tightly adhered to that opportunities are missed and the dominant dogma becomes limiting. The best methods can be combined and complimented, and they are best adapted to what a challenge and team needs to succeed. The principles of user focus, outcome driven, continuous learning, and team collaboration, are the more important common factors to lean on.
IBM Design has created it’s own unique language and approach to development tailored to their needs as an organization. The Bluemix project has been incredibly successful example of applying new practices based on it’s use of “sponsor users, playbacks and hills.” Playbacks, moments of feedback and reflection, are one key to their practice.
Playbacks are “iconic milestones that align teams, stakeholders and clients around scenarios that demonstrate the value of an offering. Playbacks enable teams to capture feedback and ideas from stakeholders, check progress against Hills, review designs and communicate the current state of work.”
The options for setting up a platform for progress and organizing resources around action have multiplied — whether it’s an accelerator, incubator, innovation lab, competition or open innovation. While it’s tempting to pull something off the shelf, often carving a unique and distinct path, not trying to rubber stamp an existing model, is more effective. Focusing on the critical questions and the foundational activities of learning-creating cycles cuts through established practices and helps shape what’s most effective in making progress to the challenge at hand.
The land of growth and innovation is littered with the latest trendy tools and process. Too little attention is paid to setting the context and conditions for success. The unique combination, and careful attention to how the team is shaped, challenge is framed and platform established, will often be defining factors in the potential for creating impact. Look closely and these are what engines of change are designed to do — master these three factors in order to harness their potential more fully, and line them up around big goals.
