Stage setting for Conflicts in Innovation Programs

Conflicts are natural and they become nasty only when they are not anticipated. Running innovation programs is no different in setting stage for all forms of conflict among agents. My idea to list some of the stage settings and prepare as a facilitator and go with a plan to move action forward, rather than kill an idea with a potential but in conflict. The categorization is naive but I hope you get a drift of how the stage gets set in different forms.

Selection Conflicts

1. In larger enterprises key problem is detecting and selecting an innovator and a family of high impact ideas. The selection process if badly designed lead to sponsoring ideas that are not going increase firm’s competitiveness.  This can set stage for considerable conflict and disengagement between selected and the left outs and may result in exits with key information or high potential ideas.
2. While detection is not an issue in smaller enterprises, a high potential idea can be in direct conflict with ownership status and the desired direction of the sole owner or promoter. If the high potential idea is not sponsored directly or given independence internally, it leads to creation of a competitor in close vicinity with the ideas.
3. Hiding white elephant projects (i.e. projects that hog both limelight and investments for a long time with some key sponsors but produces nothing more than slide decks and platitudes for the business) within large innovation programs are a common stage for conflict, and it drives away original innovators from signing up into the programs.

Management Conflicts

1. Innovators are at odds with their immediate supervisors usually, leading to conflict within teams and disengagement from ideas. When innovation programs are envisioned/developed at top management level , it is not fair to  expect the same level of understanding with managers running the program as concerns are at different levels. For the innovator working with such a manager there is conflict with what the top management spoke in a town hall meeting versus what happens on the ground. This conflict generally goes unresolved even when brought up in top management forums, usually results in less than anticipated participation for the entire innovation program.

Strategy  / Process Conflicts

1. A set strategy in place, inhibits experimentation that are directionally outside of it. This is against innovators who just like to play or experiment. If the experiment succeeds innovators typically want to build further. Specifically tackling organizational administrative systems to get approvals for strategically unaligned ideas is usually tougher. This will create a stage for conflict among weak or dated ideas that are sponsored versus newer or unproven ideas that are left out.  Seeking investment versus running stealth is a choice, until capital needs remain small and avoiding conflicts with processes. Beyond a threshold the need to go through the cumbersome budget and approval process or finding a sponsor, leads to other conflicts.

5 easy ways to kill an idea

Organizations claim they are open, innovative, smart etc, but unquestionably every organization’s ability to kill an idea easily overtakes the ability to build an idea and deliver value to customers…from what I have seen below are the 5 easy ways to kill ideas with very less action.

1. Delay till all parties forget: Really 2 kinds here, first one is, accept ideas only during a small annual window (typically called jams or camps) or second kind to have the idea submitted in a system and just let it rust or decay there. In case of smaller companies that have not invested in systems this death may very well happen in someone’s Inbox.

2. Ask for details that are already known in a different format and then ask for more: This is common in the so called knowledge intensive industries, where there is a template to submit the idea, with so much detail that by the time you actually finish filling it, someone else has implemented the idea. It manifests as mandatory fields in web forms and also in workflows of the idea itself within the system, if it goes through.

3. Dissent the person, language, package, identity and talk nothing of the idea: Here the idea submitter is typically outside of the knowledge domain, but nevertheless has the urge to give an idea to people in the domain. Submitter gets beaten by jargon, rules, constraints, and other special linguistic tools that each domain has. Usually the submitter never returns after the first conversation. Manifests as status changes in the system with complex comments or as an email response with sentences averaging ~21 words each.

4. Hide the Station Master and his Suggestion Book: Manifestations will be announcements typically sent to media or emailed across a thousand people stating, there has been 100% conversion on ideas/suggestions that came to the station master, while no one has actually see the station master. For those of you familiar with the sub-continent might have seen the notice in all railway stations.

5. Install a large Suggestion box beside the front door and throw away the key: This is the second most common; no one really bothers to open the suggestion box. Manifestations will be usually some static content marketing page stating the organization is open to ideas and may also have some primitive classification of innovations.

There are other ways like making it really hard to form groups in the organization, equate busy to value, equate IP to value, measure performance from yesterday’s hindsight etc among others,

but these are either results of processes in action for a long time or current action.

So still the above 5 are the easiest ways to kill an idea.

Ideas Dec 2009

As usual ideas are plenty and free and usually the best thing to do is share the idea and may be inspire a couple of people. You know this trait becomes a pathology if you happen to be proficient in generating ideas with a few innovation methodologies. Eventually with every opportunity you end up with numerous ideas and unable to pick the one to run with. That said predicting success or future is not my thing, still there are several selection methodologies as well, possibly in another post later on.

If you cant spark action at least clarify the concept to make it more marketable.

1. Social entrepreneurs or the citizen sector professionals are increasing widely. Much data available elsewhere on the growth of the sector. Innovative use of social media for information exchange is growing and is evident across several popular networks. First idea is to create a matrix of functional features for the sector along the lines of wikimatrix.
2. Second idea is create a framework (I realise the cliche effect that this word has) for measuring impact of change. Change measurement in the citizen sector in my opinion can be modelled along the lines of Human development index and can be further extended for specific changes. Core competency in development of trackable parameters, reliable measurement mechanisms and associated methods are needed. Narrative methods have huge applicability here.
3. Testing a series of stories with  and making a campaign that will solicit preferred behaviour is the third idea. This has both sensing side and synthesis side for actually creating the right stories for marketing.

Idea Selection

When I met with a customer exhibiting innovation capacities, she had this interesting perspective, I am quoting

“The power of an idea when run through our well oiled, efficient, process oriented delivery line, loses its potency and sometimes even its own relevance.How can we reduce the probability of this happening? Would it be possible to provide advisory services on developing an approach that will address this issue? Additionally can we develop convergence criteria for the ideas”

 This brings forth several different points,

one – when people talk about innovation it is mostly incremental in nature and the metaphor of the assembly line is prevalent even in the cutting edge financial services companies (case in point) If the process of development is that efficient you don’t need humans anymore.

 two – while the so called innovation facilitators (including yours truly) are great in coming out with numerous ideas within a short span of time, I am not clear about the convergence methods or idea selection itself.

 That said I have had some success in designing people centric short listing (facilitation methods post ideation) but the fundamental problem still remains.

 How does open innovation where ideas are even larger in number address this?

 Convergence criteria as I see a trend today is mostly directed from business who seek specific ROI proof, worked elsewhere type of inputs based on which they EVALUATE to pick ideas than really build on a crazy idea that will possibly be the next BIG thing this is not incremental this is breakthrough.

 Your ideas though in plenty and free solicited…