Insights & strategies for “young” in-house innovation teams aka. don’t make the same mistakes we did.
Prior to joining the corporate sector this year, I worked in the public sector for over 10 years. My last four years were spent as a founding member of a pioneering team of design thinkers, tasked to influence public agencies to be more citizen-centric in how they went about things.
Our team’s mandate was simple: to drive design thinking mindsets and methods, as part of a wider push for innovation to drive the improvement of the policies and services we delivered to the public. We were a small team of four people, housed in a much larger organisation.
Recently, as I caught up with two former colleagues, it dawned on me that everything we learned as a team could be worth sharing with others facing similar situations. So here are four important lessons we learned.
1. Don’t forget home base, and remember to pay it forward
Innovation teams have a mandate to create something of value for their clients and sponsors. But while surging ahead to deliver results is important, your team might forget to engage colleagues in other departments right inside your own organisation.
Check if your team is spending at least 10–15% of its time engaging your own colleagues and middle management. This could be through 2-hour introductory workshops, or reporting the results of your projects at town halls or an annual “innovation roadshow”. You could even try having ‘drop-in hours’ where anyone can come unannounced and get free consultation from your team.
Adopting a strategy of “paying it forward” will allow more serendipitous moments to occur. One year, our colleagues from a HR team dropped by on a whim. They wanted our advice on how to improve their focus group sessions. This was completely unplanned, but we had earned a reputation for being open and friendly colleagues who loved to share ideas. We spent 90 minutes chatting with this team, looking at their interview questions, scrubbing out technical jargon, eliminating close-ended questions, and adding a card sorting activity.
We unearthed fears about language barriers and managed to open up a traditional interview approach, e.g. “What challenges do you face in your job?”, into one that felt more like a friendly chat, e.g. “Tell me about a typical day at work?” and “What makes you smile at work?”. This led the team to generate much richer results and inspired much better recommendations, which the team manage to push through. The team even went on to win an innovation award for this project and was cited by management for their innovative mindset and willingness to adopt new tools.
2. Be well-supported, not just well-liked
Many new innovation teams start out with ZERO credibility. Quite often, team members might be fresh hires new to the organization — viewed with a mixture of anticipation and suspicion. A common refrain might go: “You just got here, what do you know about the company?”.
It is critical to the long-term survival of your team that you pay attention to whether your team is well-supported and well-liked. Consider this 2-by-2 matrix:
Which quadrant is your team in right now? And which quadrant do you want your team to be in? The tricky part is figuring out which quadrant your team is currently in and why. Find ways to collect survey data, and get feedback from stakeholders, past clients, and people within your larger organisation. Speak to people who you can trust to be honest and candid with you, and uncover the “hard truth” of whether you are respected or feared, liked or just ignored.
3: Use numbers and stories when sharing your impact; code switch when necessary
How do you know your work is making impact? Do others know the value that you are creating for them? This brings us to the critical task of measuring and communicating results effectively.
While it’s great to say that your service is more customer-centric or the experience provided is more intuitive or enjoyable, what does that actually translate to in terms of end results? More customers? Happier customers? What is the value to the bottom line of the business?
Your team must learn to anticipate and track what your team’s efforts will translate into, and find ways to measure the value you create. Define both quantitative and qualitative measurements as early as you can, they could range from revenue or profit generated, to savings in cost and time, or even safety and productivity. It could even extend to how staff feel about their work, for example, we received feedback from staff that they felt an increased level of engagement with their work, after they had participated in an innovation project.
After collecting these measurements, the next step is to share them.
If your audience is listening for numbers and statistics, don’t just speak in the language of empathy, insights and customer experience. Conversely, don’t let your entire sharing sound like an annual report. Even amidst great statistics, don’t let your customers’ voice be lost. Remember to use the power of storytelling, human stories, visuals, videos and infographics. Always remember to share how your solution has helped at least one person.
Lastly, beyond sharing successes, talking about your team’s failures and the lessons from each project can be a useful if counterintuitive way to gain credibility and even create long-term culture change in your organisation. If your team displays the humility and courage to share what’s not working, other teams might also find the courage to do so in your future projects.
4: Get smarter each time (but still ‘break things’ with purpose)
Here’s a provocation. If your team is not getting smarter about what works well and what doesn’t, after each engagement, then something is wrong.
Putting it simply: whatever you do this year, don’t let it be a carbon copy of last year. As a team, are you constantly experimenting? Get data and learn what works and what doesn’t. Equally important, give yourselves the time and breathing space to reflect, digest, and evolve your methods and tools.
As a pioneer in-house innovation team, we didn’t have a “playbook” to rely on. Our team took pride in taking risks, and finding ways to experiment. It became quite normal to seek feedback from participants in every project and workshop that we ran, so we could constantly tweak our tools and processes.
Our first year, we tried our best to be “gung ho”. For example, when we wanted to make every minute of a 2-day workshop count, so why not make lunch itself an empathy experience? We took away our participants’ cutlery and asked them to build new ones from the prototyping supplies we provided.
Boy, were they upset. Every team did a terrible job. The quotable quote, “I hate the taste of plastic in my food”. Oops.
Realising our mistake, we decided we could still make lunch a learning activity. At the next workshop, we provide participants with cutlery, except they had to make cutlery for us (the workshop facilitators) instead. The difference was amazing! This time round we had many ingenious designs and the participants had a good lesson in how to rapidly prototype (albeit at our expense!).
Subsequent years, we experimented with different consultancy models, ranging from a full-on “we do everything for our client”, to trying to scale with a “train the trainer” approach. We experimented with the duration and scope of the work we took on, from weeks to months, to week-long “design sprints”, and working with and without key partners like schools and consultancies.
Being a small team meant we could operate with flexibility and handle the constant change in strategy and tactics. It wasn’t always easy, and at times we even argued. Still, we understood that it was for the greater good, we needed to experiment, learn and adapt. It helped to have team check-ins and honest feedback from bosses, and the occasional half-day retreat for fun and reflection. In hindsight, I wish we recruited a few external mentors, who could have brought us perspective from the world of start-ups and entrepreneurs, as this would have helped us in our own development.
Parting thoughts: for any innovation team, know that the “path to success” is a design challenge in itself.
Looking back, I think if we had framed the approach to setting up and running a successful innovation team as a design problem, many of the design tools and techniques we use and love would fall into place naturally.
Just like how design is an iterative process of trying, failing fast and bouncing back, the work to develop a successful innovation team is also an iterative learning process that is filled with complexity, ambiguity and potential failure. And if that isn’t a terrifying, daunting but exciting task, I don’t know what is!
ps: If you have ideas or comments, please leave them in the comments section below! Thanks!
Leon Voon has been involved in developing the innovation capabilities of teams and a creative culture in organisations for over five years, first at The Human Experience Lab, and now, with the Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT). He writes in his own personal capacity and his views do not reflect the views of his current or past employers.
The Coop is an open platform to spread knowhow and field-tested learnings amongst the growing community of practice within and beyond Singapore. We’ll feature and serve people in our ecosystem who are invested in accelerating fluency across diverse methodologies and tools for improving policy, service and operational challenges from design, data to transformation. Follow us and stay tuned! — Jason & Shan, The Coop Editors
