PM Weekly - Innovation is a Company-Wide Affair
Pretotype for Corporate Culture Change
I’ve been training people in organisations for the past 10 years on innovation, entrepreneurship and sales effectiveness. In the last 5 years I worked with organisations and startups on innovation and early validation of innovation ideas. Most recently I’ve been mentoring business leaders to achieve their personal and professional goals.
In all my activities I realised the centrality of people in organisations, and I’ve become frustrated at how often people in organisations are treated as mere cogs in a business machine. New innovation processes and tools are treated as mere plug-ins to existing, outdated processes, regardless of people.
In today’s ever-changing business environment innovation is crucial for competitiveness, but it is not just about new processes or new tools. Change and innovation in organisations happen through people.
These days we are living first-hand a massive change in how companies compete, mostly driven by the rapid and accelerating evolution of technology. Adaptability drives companies’ competitiveness together with the ability to change fast in response to external stimuli.
The traditional top-down, command and control paradigm in organisation is showing its limitations. Successful companies embrace a new paradigm where the organisation’s strategy requires constant experimentation in real life, admits and welcomes failure as a tool to learn from real life, leverages employees’ individual talents by empowering them to act on the innovation strategy itself.
Despite driven by technological advances, the new strategy focuses much more than before on empowering individuals. The organisation is becoming flatter, someone says “liquid,” and definitely more human. The new corporate culture geared towards innovation and the new attitude of empowered employees are the roots of an organisation’s ability to innovate and compete.
But beware!
Don’t ever try to change an old-school organisation overnight.
Don’t ever think that just implementing a new innovation process will solve your problems.
Don’t ever think that new innovation tools could do anything to change the status quo.
The very first thing to do is to change the corporate culture.
Help and encourage managers to take a different perspective on their role in the company, from being the boss to leading and empowering people.
Help and encourage people to get rid of any passive attitude and take responsibility for delivering value.
In the past I made all the mistakes above whenever I tried to help companies implement Pretotyping processes and tools without first making sure that the corporate culture was ready.
A simple Pretotype workshop can seriously impact corporate culture for change
Conversely, I was surprised to see how much a simple Pretotype workshop— done by middle managers and top managers together to validate different possible strategic decisions —can impact corporate culture itself!
The workshop is built around a challenge from top to middle managers: given these strategic objectives, what actions should we implement to make them happen? Middle managers use Pretotyping to suggest and validate several possible ideas.
Why is it so good for corporate culture?
For Middle Managers:
- they get the chance to express their own ideas
- they are not bound by top-down decisions
- they can show their own enthusiasm and commitment for the success of the company
- they feel involved in strategic decisions
- they have a sense of immediate progress
- they get their hands dirty with the things they know best
- they have licence to fail
For Top Managers:
- they see middle managers proactively create value
- they get front-line experience built into strategic decisions
- they see immediate action and experimentation
- they get real life validation for safer implementation of the selected ideas
- they learn to accept failure as a learning tool
I’m convinced that this is the best way to experiment with new models for innovation like Pretotyping, while at the same time propel the kind of corporate culture changes needed to thrive in the current competitive environment!
I’m Leonardo Zangrando.
I’m passionate about unlocking potential in people and organisations.
I help transform organisations and increase their innovation leverage.
I help people fulfil their true potential and become what they can BE.
Follow me on Twitter and meet me #IRL at Launch22 incubator in London.
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