Building an Innovation Ecosystem Part 5: Getting Stuff Done
Have you ever wondered if your innovation efforts are going anywhere, or if they will actually produce anything at scale?
These are fair questions. Some argue innovation efforts only have value to an organization if they advance the mission, or put another way, if they actually get stuff done. I agree, with one important caveat — when it comes to innovation, valuable change is the “stuff” to get done as it were. That change can come in the form of a better product, service, business practice, or organizational culture. In this sense, getting stuff done reliably, repeatedly, and at scale comes down to whether your organization’s efforts to generate change are structured, disciplined, and intentional.
Of all the components necessary for building an innovation ecosystem, structure, discipline, and intent are among the most important. Having only one or two of these attributes is not enough, however. From my observations, most large organizations have plenty of structured “idea” and “requirements” processes intended to spark innovation, but rarely are these processes are either disciplined or intentional.
Much of the tech industry has found a way to integrate all three attributes to innovate at scale. A big reasons for their success are contemporary business practices like Design Thinking, Agile, and Lean Startup. These methodologies give practitioners a series of steps and venues to focus innovation efforts. That doesn’t mean, however, they are a shortcut to success vis-a-vis innovation or getting stuff done. It’s important to understand where these methods facilitate structure, discipline, and intent, and where they fall short.
Take Lean Startup, for example. In his books, Eric Ries outlines a build-measure-learn cycle for innovation. Essentially, the way an organization builds, measures, learns — and quickly repeats the process — will define an organization’s ability to innovate continuously and reliably. For the record, I’m a fan of Lean Startup, which essentially is adaptation of John Boyd’s Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, or OODA, loop — a useful concept for both the military and private sector in understanding competitive advantage. That said, practitioners often favor the step-by-step aspects of Lean Startup and other concepts, but lose sight of the core ideas. Teams can get wrapped up in Scrum without ever focusing on the Agile Manifesto, for example.
I had a conversation about that point with Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and member of the Defense Innovation Board, when he visited my organization last February. We discussed ways our unit adopted aspects of Agile and Lean Startup to our innovation efforts. Schmidt said, “That’s all fine, but don’t get too wrapped up in these practices. In the early days of Google, none of these were around.” He said, when it came to innovation, they would hold weekly meetings and simply ask 1) does it work, 2) does it work better than what we had before, 3) are people using it, 4) and for all of the above, how do we know? Put another way, methodologies are not a substitute for guiding principles like the four points above, which outline the operating philosophy that provides the basis for organizational discipline.
Another critique of contemporary methodologies is they are overly focused on eliminating process waste. In a commentary on Lean, author Simon Sinek argues Lean is about people, not efficiency. His point is not all waste is bad, especially if it’s helpful in building a community. Water cooler chat leads to increased productivity, and similar social bonding activities can lead to more innovation. It’s worth noting Lean gets its origin from the Toyota Production System, and business scholars often focus on Toyota’s methodology while overlooking the company’s community-building efforts and their effect on innovation. If you want to innovate, adopting a new business practice or procedure will not be enough if you haven’t purposefully built a community around a purpose or a problem, i.e., the core of an organization’s intent.
The point is to not pick on Lean or any other methodology, but to point out the need to find and balance structure, discipline, and intent when it comes to innovation. A productive innovation ecosystem will require process, but it will also requires flexibility. In earlier posts, I decried the focus on process-following over problem-solving. To be clear, I was not diminishing the need or value of process, but criticizing the blind regimentation that often kills innovative ideas.
An innovation ecosystem will reliably and repeatedly produce valuable change at scale if it’s structured, disciplined, and intentional. Structure comes from the methodology an organization chooses for its innovation efforts. These can and should change based on fluid situations or new understanding. Plus, there’s nothing wrong with cherry-picking from multiple methodologies if it makes sense. Discipline comes from the operating philosophy an organization develops for its people. This should focus on principles of behaviors and beliefs that change less frequently. Intent comes from the shared understanding of an organization’s problems and purpose. This should change even less frequently, and in many cases, not at all. Structure is process-focused, discipline is people-focused, and intent is problem/purpose-focused. Getting stuff done requires an organization to find the right balance and integration among all three.
One final point — in the pursuit of innovation, the change we create is often different than the change we seek. The key is creating change that is valuable — recognizing when you’ve done it — and acknowledging how your path to structure, discipline, and intent made it so. Now, time to get stuff done.
The views expressed are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Air Force or Department of Defense.
