Bridging old work and new work for innovation with impact

Last year, I had a very practical challenge. One of our company priorities was “Enhance virtual collaboration and reduce travel cost.” A very reasonable goal in times of climate change, one might say. Yet, if pushed upon the organization in a rather traditional hierarchical way, guess what? It doesn’t really make people happy and everyone is just focusing on the cost topic. So my colleague Mohamed El-Mahdi and I decided to try out something new. We wanted to shift the focus away from travel cost. And at the same time involve employees more proactively in creating and using solutions for virtual collaboration. And we succeeded to create the desired impact.

The accelerator connects line organization, communities , innovators and customers to increase the impact of ideas and initiatives for Siemens based on a joint purpose.

What is the nice thing about the accelerator and why do we need more?

“I often hear management saying: ‘We are not in the way of bottom up and self-organized communities’. I am convinced: It’s not enough anymore to not be in the way. We have to use both worlds to be fast enough with our innovations and to have a sustainable impact as a company.”

In today’s organizations, communities and self-organized teams are there in any case, as is the line organization. Just in very rare cases there is a direct link to work together. From my point of view, a lot of business potential is lost. And we spend too much energy on trying to transform the way of working, organizational structures and the mindset of the people. What I propose is to simply combine both worlds in a synergistic way. And still, the promising side effect is, that you are increasing the chance that people’s minds are becoming more open towards transformation and that more seeds of the new way of working are planted in the heads and hearts of those people who are more accustomed to the traditional way of working. As described in Hadeel Bilal’s article, this smart usage and interaction between the systems, which are co-existing anyways in an organization, is also an important link into the organization’s future.

By building an acceleration bridge between old and new, everyone can stay in his or her preferred way of working. Picture credit: www.canva.com

Let’s be real. And what about the business impact of this ‘soft’ stuff?

After six months together, the team has created a user experience flow for smart collaboration services with additional saving potential for the company and the planet. We are now looking for a service owner (keep your fingers crossed — we have a promising candidate) to scale up the initial prototypes of a landing and learning page, a meeting point optimizer, a video streaming solution and several more. And then of course there is also an increased customer satisfaction and the feedback of our participants manifesting itself in these small moments that make my heart glow with joy. Like people saying in our meetings “This is the best meeting of the day”. Or the story of an engineer working in Berlin who gets a direct call from the manager in Munich who wants to understand the impediment he is facing in more detail to improve the service quality.

Now the practical stuff: How did our accelerator look like in real life?

The official project team in the line organization for the company priority had been installed right at the beginning with the announcement. In addition, we started a call for action in our internal social network to look for supporters a bit later. A bi-weekly call was our first prototype, intended to create transparency in both ways: What’s going on in the line organization? Which ideas and prototypes are already out there? What do the users need?

“And from there on we continuously adapted our own way of working. We introduced new formats based on the feedback of our participants and the own tensions we felt. The accelerator itself never stood still.”

If I had to summarize the main functions of the accelerator, I think something like the following list would come out of it:

• Align interests for a common purpose in a biweekly moderated call
• Create a protected environment for rapid prototyping and experiments, always focusing on the impact for the overall company
• Share information to make prototypes and user needs visible
• Provide know-how on transformation and new ways of working
• Inspire each other internally and also by connecting with external stakeholders
• Articulate impediments and collaborate to solve them by using our joint network

You want to create one of your own? Yeah !!! :-)

First, it is important to say that this article is not a blueprint — copy and paste won’t work. Yet, I think it’s enough to give it a try. First, you need a topic you want to accelerate. You need something that cannot be solved by one stakeholder alone. I recommend a topic that hurts, that is really tricky and complex. We picked up ours because it was emotionally difficult and besides the innovative part, it also required a mindset shift of employees to go hand in hand. The other very important criteria was that it had been an official company priority with high relevance for the line organization.

“In addition to the topic, you need the right people with the right mindset creating the right atmosphere who hold the space.”

In our case we started with a duet, extended over time to a quartet. One of us with a big network in the line organization, the other with a big network in the self-organized communities. In the accelerator itself we created an atmosphere of trust, transparency and communication on eye level. And now don’t tell me that you don’t have the right people. Believe me: there are people out there. And if you can’t find them, I’ll help you find the right ones!

The bonus track

While I was writing this article, this Tweet was published. I thought it’s nice to share it as well as the audible equivalent to the accelerator — where old and new work meet each other in the space of music …