Where do you find yourself, once in this lifetime?
During this pandemic, numerous organizations are trying to find their footing.
Where do you find yourself in the image above?
Are you on the left side or the right side?
Are you in an optimization or exploration mindset?
There are some large enterprise organizations that are not feeling the implications of this pandemic. In rare cases, they are trying to optimize their performance. Six-Sigma and improvement programs that squeeze efficiencies wherever possible are core to this way of thinking.
In some cases, large enterprise organizations might try and use a ‘Lean Six Sigma’ approach to navigating their way through this once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.
Lean Six Sigma Wikipedia Definition:
Lean Six Sigma is a method that relies on a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing waste and reducing variation.
Six Sigma/Lean Six Sigma is an approach that is set up for failure — because a ‘mindset of optimization’, focused on removing waste assumes business and operations are stable and defined. If your customer base, operations, or employee base has been affected by COVID, you are on a different journey than the one you were on before the pandemic hit. How can an organization determine what is wasteful and what is critical, if it does not have a baseline to compare it to? This pandemic has also shown us the peril in extracting the maximum value from products and operations. When we are cut to the bone, we cannot go any deeper.
Most of us are dealing with a changing environment and are trying to get our bearings. If you’re like a majority of us, you are trying to foster a mindset of exploration — trying to keep your head above the water and figure out how it all is going to work.
A mindset of exploration is required because at this point, for most of us, our pre-pandemic business model is no longer working. Humans are fighting for their survival, and the businesses they work in are trying to operate with disruptions to all aspects of their business and customer base.
If you are a startup, you might be adjusting your business model/delivery model/operations model ( aka a pivot). Larger organizations might be running open innovation/digital transformation programs or have key executives and resources devoted to quasi-skunkworks programs to chart a new path towards the future. These programs help organizations determine how to operate amidst uncertainty.
Lean Startup is the core of this way of thinking — and as methodology follows the Build — >Measure — > Learn cycle, which is the scientific method applied to determine how to de-risk the unknown.
Emergent business models yield products that express the minimum viable product to determine minimum viable value — and then build from there.
There is a rich interplay between Lean Startup and Open Innovation. Lean Startup offers a process model for pursuing Inside-out open innovation. Yet Lean Startup processes must be adapted if they are to work inside large companies. These changes must be made on multiple levels, from innovation processes, to recombination of the business model, to the culture of the large organization, and even the very mindset used by the organization towards its current and possible future business models. Open innovation embodies some very Lean attributes itself, and can alleviate some of the internal tensions in launching a new business model experiment inside a large firm — at least at the early stages. With a suitably Open Innovation-informed Lean Startup approach, innovation units in large firms can find the early customers they need to engage their internal business units, and get their projects through the Valley of Death inside the company to achieve new growth in new areas for the company.
Where do you find yourself? Need some help? Drop us a line, start@humble.vc.
Remember, time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us.
