Love Innovating, Again: Organizational Change

Penelope Barr at UXDX Community: Unleashing Change and Creativity. Video: https://youtu.be/jMi71644_2w

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Innovating with purpose

[00:00:01] Hello, my name is Penelope Barr. I'm here to speak to you about innovating with purpose, overcoming challenges and fostering fulfillment in organizational change. You know how when you start a new role, or you're working as a change maker in an organization, often you're confronted by small teams, small budgets, tight time frames and high expectations. These factors together make innovating hard.

[00:00:34] But what I've been doing is researching and speaking to other change makers to uncover their best stories on how to change, and to hunt out the most effective tools, tips and techniques. In fact, I found several similarities within organizations and among change makers, and I've collated this body of knowledge into my upcoming book, Love Innovating Again, and into a podcast and new service to help change makers working within organizations to better set up for success.

[00:01:07] So who am I? Well, basically I run a portfolio career which I call 633. This means I work six months of the year as an interim exec, I travel for three months, and for the other three months I create either a product or I begin a book, and I manage my startups and my communities along the way.

[00:01:34] So today I'm going to talk to you about my leadership purpose, discuss some organizational realities in which we work, share with you why the antidote to these is love, and also discuss some tips, tools and techniques. My purpose is to come to work with a sense of purpose and leave with a sense of accomplishment, and this is what I try to engender for the teams that I work with.

[00:02:07] Leading change is a two-fold process. It's a challenge of leading yourself and an organization, and doing so can be lonely at times. It can be hard. So sometimes it can feel like the risks to you and your career, and to your organization, outweigh the rewards. You're not alone if this is how you're feeling. The promise of innovation is often elusive. That uncertainty, unknowns and ambiguity, although exciting for some of the time, become energy sapping if that's how you live every day.

[00:02:46] Innovating, like finding love, is hard. Regardless of whether you're an innovator, an entrepreneur, a UX person, a product developer, a change agent, your success is reliant on your ability to persevere, to sustain your energy, your optimism, your resilience and creativity for championing a change in a system that's often pitted against you, because it's largely driven by the status quo and by maintaining this status quo.

[00:03:20] So the question I ask is, could it be easier, and if so, how do you make it so your teams come to work knowing their why? They come to work to do hard things, to lead and inspire, to help organizations connect, adapt and flourish. But maybe they're also looking for a little more help.

The corporate innovation paradox

[00:03:40] Corporate innovation is a paradox. Innovators work within the environment they're trying to change. This is the power of their insight and also the constraint. So if you want to change, you're therefore putting yourself in the way of a system which is operating pretty well, thank you. It's not perfect or great, but it's serving the needs of enough people to keep going. So innovators in this circumstance need to be brave.

[00:04:10] One of the first jobs for people coming into organizations such as this is to overcome organizational resistance and fear. Although innovation is often deemed critical by many organizations, it's often not at the top table. It might be deemed a bit of a whim, something that can be put down and picked up again as needs must, and as desire overcomes any kind of resistance. Therefore, for some innovators working within organizations, especially if you're one of the first and having to set the tone, life can be a little precarious.

[00:04:55] So let's have a look at some of the other barriers that you might be confronting. It's not a surprise to say that they all start with a lack of. So a lack of vision for innovation and change, of alignment, of a standardized fit for purpose approach, of an approach to managing uncertainty, and a lack of longer term horizon thinking.

[00:05:21] So the primary remedy to overcome these barriers is love. The optimal prescription for ailing organizations today. Don't take this as medical advice, consult your doctor. So what do I mean by love? Leverage, learning, optimize, operationalize, validate, value, experiment and embed.

Leverage: start with the small annoying problems

[00:05:47] Let's start with leverage. When you're looking to help an organization on its innovation change journey, one of the first places to start is to search for the small annoying problems, the boring, the mundane, the repetitive tasks that people have to do, the things that people complain about, that your customers write to you about, that they talk to you about, that they call you about. These are where you can start to prove your worth, and once you do you're going to then leverage that early momentum.

[00:06:27] Several years ago when I was working in the UK, I was brought in to develop some online applications. I'd done similar initiatives in Australia and New Zealand, so I had a pretty good idea of the process and what we should be expecting in terms of throughput and metrics. When I analyzed what was happening across the UK, though, the metrics weren't as I would have expected, and so I went back and looked end to end and tried to look for the blocker.

[00:07:02] What I found was a team that thought they were doing the right thing. They had basically purchased enough infrastructure for half the team, thinking that they were being measured on cost constraint, when really they hadn't recognized that they were in a revenue generating play. So whilst they could have been rewarded for their judicious spending, what I did was I came in then and purchased the machines, which meant we were spending money, but the result was a three-fold increase in throughput and obviously an increase in revenue.

[00:07:45] The other results were a team that was further engaged, that saw that you can make things possible by pointing out problems, and also then became the people who really promoted this initiative and the success that they'd had in automating away boring and repetitive problems. So they were the people that really helped drive momentum throughout that organization.

[00:08:15] So once you've identified something impactful, you really need to maximize the opportunity and the goodwill that comes with that to help you really build and sustain momentum. A critical component of that is finding your people. I advocate developing a personal success board, and this is a group of people, as you can see here by the titles, that are going to be challenging you but also supporting you. They may be drawn from within the organization, but they may also come from outside.

[00:08:57] With this group in play you're further empowered to engage your enterprise in a change journey. One of the additional ways to do that is to create an innovation engagement model. This helps you strategically identify the larger, more impactful problems to solve, but also helps you identify who you need to engage to help you further understand problems and opportunities within the organization, and who is going to help you to achieve the objectives. So you want to understand what problems there are, what are the current and desired capabilities within the organization, and what are the growth plans.

Learn: build an environment of learn-it-alls

[00:09:43] That brings us to learn. There's a real danger when you start to really encourage and engage in a change journey, to position yourself as an expert. When working in innovation, you're overridingly uncertain, and you don't know what you don't know. So the innovation process therefore is a learning process, and when leading this process it really pays dividends to be open. You need to set the conditions for as much learning as possible, as quickly as possible.

[00:10:25] You need capable people, but more importantly you need people interested in learning. So ideally you're creating an environment of learn-it-alls rather than know-it-alls. It's great that you know how to make change, but you need to bring other people along on the journey, or otherwise you're not going to achieve it at all.

[00:10:49] So how do you create an environment for learning? Well, slowly and then quickly. You need to understand what good learning and what good failure look like. You need to create an environment of psychological safety, so people can speak openly and truthfully without fear of reprisal, and can continue seeking new opportunities to support learning and innovation. One of the ways to do this is to start with a listening tour. You're looking to understand, where are people now, where do they want to be, what are their fears, what are the gaps between where they are and where they want to be, and how do they think you can help, and how might they help you?

[00:11:35] Another way to learn more about your organization is to conduct an innovation readiness audit. This is where you understand individuals and teams. Sometimes people say that they're willing, which is fantastic, that they're willing to innovate, but what you're really trying to uncover is, are they ready to do so? What else do they need in their arsenal? So I advocate using this tool when you're contemplating joining an organization, based on the knowledge that you have, and at particular milestones.

Optimize: align vision and strategy

[00:12:10] Once you've succeeded in identifying something impactful, you need to really maximize that goodwill to start building and sustaining the momentum, and then parlaying that into what's next. And what's next is optimize. Once you've undertaken the organizational audit, you're then ready to assess the organizational vision and strategy in light of the information that you found. Alongside this you should also be developing your personal vision as a driver for change, so that you can ensure that you're aligned, rather than undertaking some scattergun approaches, which are going to be harder to gain traction and sustain change.

[00:13:03] So in developing the foundation for change, you may at this stage be confronted by ongoing resistance, and you're going to be confronted by the innovator's dilemma. You're going to be able to see around your organization's corners a bit better than most, but a combination of the focus on everyday operations, fear and change inertia, for example, means that across the organization it might be hard for you to break through.

[00:13:33] Recently, when working in a professional services organization, I'd done a huge amount of work to broaden the change agenda, and I was really pleased that I'd been able to include innovation as part of the strategic planning process. As you're probably aware, getting ready for strategy and investment planning is an organization-wide activity and it takes a lot of work. I'd done that work. I put in a huge amount of work briefing managing partners, doing a lot of prep, talking to teams about how they may need to think differently and what would be required of them that was going to be different.

[00:14:12] So the day finally arrived. I was very excited and I was starting my welcome, which was then interrupted by the managing partner, fair enough. However, what he said was, hmm, I've been giving this a lot of thought, we're too busy to innovate at the moment, so we might wait till next year. You can imagine my surprise. If you're not growing, you're standing still. If your focus is only on today, who's thinking about tomorrow? It's fair to say that the potential of that organization was not realized.

Operationalize: a standardized end-to-end approach

[00:14:52] So now we're at operationalize. There are a couple of areas where many organizations spend important but sometimes unnecessary time, and that's in agreeing, or not agreeing, an innovation definition, and failing to create an end-to-end, fit for purpose, standardized approach to innovating and delivering. Without these in place there's going to be wasteful repetition, and you may also miss some buying signals.

[00:15:26] Without knowing the type of innovation that would define success for you and your organization, you're likely to potentially try to achieve something that's not possible or not desired. If you're a new function or a small team, thinking about industry changing initiatives may not be the best place to start, whereas incremental initiatives could be the thing that is going to earn you respect and allow you to start building momentum.

[00:15:56] In every organization I've worked in, I've had to co-design a customized end-to-end approach. They all include similar components to those listed here, and start from insights and end up in go-to-market initiatives. You are probably the same.

Validate: kiss, kick or kill

[00:16:19] Along this process you're looking for opportunities to validate. So to validate your ideas, to develop and validate product increments, to develop your market strategies, et cetera. So the repeatable validation process I advocate, and I've created, is called kiss, kick, kill.

[00:16:49] What you're looking to do here is to kiss ideas and support those through the steps in your development process. If you don't quite have enough information, you might want to kick your idea or the initiative back and do a little bit more work. But if you find that an idea just doesn't align, if it's going to be too expensive, it's going to take too long to do, and it's just not right for you, kill it. Really stand up, be brave and say no.

[00:17:29] Sometimes people like to put these ideas back on your backlog, and they say things like, oh, we'll just do a little bit more discovery on that. Discovery is work. So what you want to do is make a call as soon as possible on an initiative if it's not aligned.

Value: know what your organization deems important

[00:17:48] That brings us to value. How you can help make some of those validation decisions is really having a good handle on what your organization deems important. So what's the organization's innovation ambition? If you've done the work internally to understand problems and opportunities, and then you've assessed what you've learned and what the organization wants to deliver against the strategic intent, risk appetite, funding support, internal capability and delivery cadence, you're going to have a pretty good idea about the likelihood of success of being able to deliver the desired change agenda.

[00:18:28] Recently I worked in an organization that was under extreme competitive and industry pressure. My approach therefore was to focus on waste minimization and reviewing the customer experience to encourage retention. I wanted to focus on operational effectiveness and help the organization in its hour of need. Many senior leaders, though, were really looking at this as a breakout time, a time to create something standout and industry changing. Whilst I applauded this grand vision, the organization didn't have the capability, it didn't have any funding to even bring people in to help, and it was also operating in really tight time frames in terms of being able to engender success.

[00:19:22] So in this instance I undertook some additional analysis, because I was still getting a lot of pressure to think differently and try to think out of the box. However, I really felt it wasn't the time. So what I did was I assessed the quality and quantity of initiatives that had been delivered over the previous few years, and with this information and this analysis I was then able to present the case that actually, at the moment, this wasn't the time to be thinking differently and to be innovating in an outlandish way. This was the time to start thinking from an operational effectiveness perspective, and think through what can be delivered today to support today, and then tomorrow.

Experiment and embed

[00:20:09] Really, what this came down to was thinking through what could be experimented with, and thinking through how better to set up an experimentation culture, which is something that I advocate when you're going on a change journey with an organization. So you're looking to then minimize time, money and effort and really help expedite your innovation assessment and delivery.

[00:20:37] For me, when I'm thinking through innovation, I'm thinking at three different levels. I want to think from a pain point perspective. I want to think about who I'm targeting, what the expected benefits are likely to be, and then what are the assumptions that I need to call out that will then either support or stop an initiative. I want to then move to the second step, which is around prioritization of those assumptions, so we're looking at assumptions on a risk and known-unknown matrix, and then I'm wanting to understand the riskiest assumptions.

[00:21:22] What we do then is think through a range of hypotheses, develop validated experiments by using experimentation canvases, so that we can understand whether or not we should invest more time, money and effort in idea A versus idea B. Once we've done this work, then we're also thinking through how do we embed, how do we enable adoption, and how do we measure and prove success through the process.

[00:21:57] Integrating any initiative takes time, skill and results in opportunity costs, so we need to be clear on which innovation risks we're mitigating with any initiative. We also really want to understand how best to measure any initiative. There are countless ways you can measure. I've included a couple of metrics here, but this will depend on what your organization's innovation ambition is and what your initiative actually is.

[00:22:30] People love achieving and being able to showcase how long something takes, how much it costs, how you delivered along the journey. That helps really build innovation literacy within your organization, so I advocate starting your metrics approach right from the beginning of any initiative.

[00:22:51] So you can tell, I hope, that I love innovating, but I'm always looking for ways to make it easier, ways to better establish relationships and continuous improvement opportunities, so that we together can succeed better. I hope I've provided a taste of some improvement opportunities for you today, and shown that even in tight markets you have choices. If you'd like to continue the conversation, which I'd love to do, please feel free to contact me on my website or via LinkedIn. I'd be very happy to talk about how together we love innovating again, and how we can become better change makers today and tomorrow. Thank you.