Innovation – What It Really Is and What Makes It Work

You can watch this on video if you’d prefer to see me go through it rather than read.

Innovation.  We all know it.  There’s a fair chance it’s even one of your ‘values’. 

What makes a huge difference to success in this area is understanding what we really are doing, and what we need to look at for it to work.

Luc Hoebeke’s Work Domains

My go-to person in this field is Luc Hoebeke – brilliant thinker and consultant from Belgium who wrote a wonderful book Making Work Systems Better, which he kindly made available on the internet (click the link).

Luc gives us a way to look at work using what he calls domains.  It’s kind of hierarchical in that each later domain provides the conditions for the earlier domain to exist…but not hierarchical as you know it, because each domain is also it’s own complete system.   They don’t ‘manage’ each other.

The real work is (often) not about the system

My work with my clients who have built their own businesses often looks like org design and work systems.

But that’s just the surface.

Someone who is talented and entrepreneurial enough to build a business from their own kitchen table to being able to cover the lease agreement for offices that house 30+ staff has no trouble understanding the work.

That’s not the issue, and heading to another seminar, or listening to someone like me describe what has to happen is not going help.  It’s the equivalent of reading more recipe books as a method to get some food on the table.

The challenge is to see this work as the business priority.  And there are multiple signals available that can be used as a way to put this work off until later.  Cash flow is a great one, and might even be the case.  Organising a group of people to do great work is definitely no longer an issue if we can’t make payroll.  Pressing needs of what we might call ‘pillar’ clients is another.

The simple yet powerful meeting structure

You need to focus on today. You need to focus on tomorrow. You need engagement from your people to get both done.

Nothing here you don’t already know.  So….

Need a method? Just schedule these meetings. Things will be better.

Weekly: Optimisation meeting.

Get together to look at graphs that show performance according to customer experience, cost and sustainability. Resolve issues and monitor the effects of changes you have been making.

The question here: how do we make this show run as it was intended? Read more…

What Exactly Is The Strategy Role?

Santos and Josh know strategy

(This one’s a longer read, perhaps save it for later or have a read at home.  Cheers, Adam)

Hey Adam,

Wondering if you can help me – my organisation has created a Strategy role and put me in it. I’ve got some generic KRAs, but a lot of room to design my own ‘value-add’. Would appreciate your view on what you see the value of such a role is.

OK, let’s talk about what the role isn’t to start with.

The strategy role is not there to take sole accountability for delivering strategy!  

Do not take on this accountability alone, either explicitly, or implicitly. It’s going to be tempting as you’re going to want to show that you’re valuable, and the core areas will gladly hand you accountability for the future to get it off their plate! It will seem like a win/win, but this degenerates into a lose/lose every time as you’ll be crying “no one here thinks of the future”, they’ll be crying “Strategy doesn’t understand I’ve got real numbers to hit here”, and the CEO will be crying “why can’t we all just get along!”

Strategy is delivered by those that either currently make or do the things customers use, or by new areas that will make or do the things customer use in the future. In other words, strategy is ultimately delivered by Sales and Operations areas (whatever you call them),even in you are involved along the way.  Not you on your own.

What Strategy Is There To Do

So if Strategy doesn’t deliver strategy on it’s own, what does it do?

It ensures both the happening of, and the quality of, the conversations necessary to both develop and implement strategy that will see the organisation continue to be both valuable and viable in it’s community.

Don’t get fooled by the simple sentence – the more simple and straightforward the sentence, the more complex and involved the actual execution (‘land someone on the moon and bring them back safely by the end of the decade‘….simple right?). These conversations are why you exist, but getting them happening requires you to do the following:

Take The Mystery Out Of Strategy. Read more…

A Talk – Designing for Quality Leadership

Something different this time around – a talk!  I spoke recently at the Leadership, Culture and Governance Symposium put on by Aged & Community Services Australia in Adelaide.

The topic – Designing for Quality Leadership   The point?  Leadership depends as much on your organisational design as it does the people in the jobs, so….stop fidgeting and start building something! 

Click here to watch.  Goes for about 40 minutes, and sorry about the hissing at the start – that blissfully goes away at 4:15.

It’s the stuff we teach in detail in our workshops and our online learning so you can design departments and enterprises where people can do great work.

And…if you’d like to see what was on the screen, or want the super-quick version,  click here to see the slides.  I’ve written short explanations on many of them so they make sense even without the presentation itself.

Feel free to download and distribute the slides to those who might be interested if you think it might help create a conversation that makes your place better.

Thanks to Derek Dittrich from ACSA and Tim Levett for the video production.

As always, if there is anything I can help with, just let me know.

Cheers!

Board too risk-averse for innovation? Then bark up this tree…

The first job of a Board is to make sure the organisation continues to be viable.  And if you’ve been good in the ‘Added-Value Domain’ for a while (the work domain that’s about constructing the networks, systems and everything else required to deliver value to customers today and tomorrow)…it’s going to take a lot to start messing with that.

And so it should.  If the magazines Science or Nature allowed any old idea to get published…credibility of the whole science profession takes a nose-dive.  You’ve got to prove yourself before we start changing the laws of nature!

But as we also know, eventually what we produce in the Added-Value Domain is going to have to change as values change….and the connection comes from what we call the Innovation Domain of work.  The point of this work is for values and trends to be revealed in decisions to provide fundamentally new value to possibly new clients.

It’s different to the Added-Value Domain….but ends up in the Added-Value Domain.

(If you’d like to read more on these Domains, check out Luc Hoebeke’s wonderful work Making Work Systems Better)

Here’s the trick – the attributes of good work in the Added-Value Domain are fundamentally different to that in the Innovation Domain.  But if we don’t see this, and in particular, if we present information to Boards using the same criteria for both Domains….we are automatically set up for ‘no’.   Read more…