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.

Fitting KM

Business drive comes in different flavors,

1 Take state bank of india that is predominantly process driven average age of employees is in the high 40s and there is a huge wave of retirements upcoming, and without understanding of the processes it will be difficult to improve productivity beyond a point at branch level. Other than the usual training, employees seem to have no access to other learning methods, and networks seem to form only around personal magnets, people who get transferred most or as part of some union or an executive initiative. Really there is no in built support for natural communities to form and develop. Is this not a problem that KM can solve?

2 Or Idiom whose business is really creative endeavors When we vis,ited Idiom (equivalent of Ideo in India and has done some great work) the entire KM system (they don’t call it that) was with one librarian (they don’t call him that), who simply knew from the company’s history what work had they done and where we can find references (which are typically pieces of design). None of this is re-used, just because of the nature of their business. What they do with these design artifacts is observe how it had evolved and retain them as props to tell better stories and give all employees a sense of history. Much of their ground floor in the Bangalore office is occupied by these artifacts, it is really a walk down memory lane. Is this not great KM?

3 Or a Qualcomm that is purely technology driven, Where weak signals on technology evolution direction need to be surfaced and magnified. Tremendous scope for multiple safe-fail experiments outside the scope and investment of RD department that will have direct business tie-in. Most likely there is already something brewing, is it not necessary to know where techies are putting their time outside of their day job just on pure passion? If we came to know of it, will the company invest to just encourage it. (OK lets for a moment forget privacy, IP concerns etc). Is this out of bounds for KM? Point I am trying to make is “fitting KM” comes from understanding the organization drive, nature of business and culture and designing actions to suit the motives at ground level. I am sure then KM will not be called “intervention”.

SBI Think BIG, Think Global

This post is dated far back from 2007, when I entered into an open competition held within SBI. Most of the below strategies, I think was strongly influenced by the orange papers I was regularly reading then. Many of them still have the potential, some of them are no more relevant. Here it goes…

Think BIG, Think Global

Suggesting strategies with regard to core concerns of the Bank (SBI)

For Increase in market share

Adopting a diversified business, financial services model with support at micro level to include brokers, co-operative units, NBFCs, insurance companies and others A new set of distributors will always get a new set of customers, which in turn will help the Bank grow. As revenues from cities are saturating the Bank should tap new areas with product pushes. A very similar model is now being increasingly adopted by mutual fund houses for rural areas, which would be looking at the Bank for partnership. This can be emulated by the Bank to partner with other micro finance institutions.

Increasing overseas business banking support With the popular success of Antwerp branch supporting diamond businesses, which had a whopping $3.8 m for the first half this year compared to the $3.3 m for full last year, the Bank should focus on identifying key businesses where there is a requirement for financing Indian companies overseas. The appetite of Indian companies entering into various M&A activities in Europe and Latin America increasing, these are the next green pastures for the Bank.

Increasing core credit across Industry sectors specifically Power, Infrastructure and Roads. Total bank credit in infrastructure stood at only 20% at Rs. 108787 crores and the domestic banks serve only 7.5% of the total $320 bn requirement as pegged by the government. With strong lobbying and push for reinstatement of the tax sop under section 10(23)G existing growth in infrastructure exposure should be maintained even if it means to raise fund overseas.

Understanding specific needs of customer and equipping systems to service consistently through different delivery channels. With technology enablement it was possible for large private sector banks to reduce branch transactions from 90% in 2000 to less than 25% in 2006; this in turn translates into bigger available bandwidth for the Bank resources to concentrate on specific customer needs. Bulk of transactions currently happening over the counter in branches need to move to various delivery channels like ATMs, kiosks, internet, mobile phone and call center. It is critical to define consistent service levels across these channels.

Defining customizable work flows for varied needs across markets, sectors, regions at branch level. The key differentiator in today’s market to customer satisfaction and retention is primarily how quickly the system is responding to changing needs. At the branch level work flows should be flexible and customizable depending on factors like sector, region, or market it serves.

Driving new banking product ideas from customers. The input that a needy customer can give to the Bank regarding a new product or service is valuable and there needs to be an idea management system in place to collect, evaluate,  conduct feasibility analysis and due diligence.

Establishing wealth management for customers with strong branch loyalty with various banking and investment products. Wealth management for customers is a growing area in retail banking; it even goes to the level of managing bank accounts of next generation of customers who have a strong branch loyalty. This loyal customer base gives a ground for pushing innovative products and services.

Deployment of human resources with local knowledge for distribution of banking products and services. To speak the local language and knowing whom to talk to are key differentiators and Bank can do this by deploying local resources for distribution of products and services. The Bank can even partner with the India Post to further its reach and increase its customer base.

Global and Universal Problems

Dennis Meadows in his great lecture at Santa Fe makes the distinction of 2 kinds of problems

Type 1 Global Problems are those that affects everyone and needs concerted action from big players like nations, for any possibility of solving them. He puts nuclear proliferation, terrorism, oil depletion etc in this category.

Type 2 Universal Problems are those that affects everyone but can be solved by local action. He puts groundwater contamination, urban air pollution etc in this category.

My feeling is in organizations people tend to use existence of global problems as reasons to not take action on universal problems.

Global problems include the ever escaping top management approvals, blanket buy in for an initiative etc.

Some even predict the upcoming REVOLUTION as solution to global problems.

Innovation is all about being able to solve those universal problems with local solutions, without being bogged down by global problems.

And local solutions emerge only from safe-fail experiments.

AAR on Innovating on Demand

Recently did a contract on innovation and there were several lessons learnt. This post is an After Action Review on that. AAR is a powerful tool for reflection developed within the US army a long time ago and has taken many forms in KM across industries.

If you are intending to do AAR 4 questions to ask are
1. What did you expect to happen
2. What actually happened
3. Why was there a difference
4. What have you learned
Here it goes

1. Don’t be too quick to sign the contract, I call this ‘allowing the wine to breathe’. We expected clarity from customer side as well as the consultant side about the terms. But in reality it was not all that clear and we happened to commit what was never intended to be delivered. This phase is important because lack of clarity in contractual terms inherently leads to dissatisfied customers. Specifically getting sign off terms right for innovation engagements is tricky.
2. Timing the project and Time in the project, just like any market getting both timing and time right together is almost impossible. Generic advice here is get in early and be in for the long haul. Face time with end users was very minimal against our expectation. So if you do not do this right you would be doing unwanted things for people who don’t have even the time to look at the outputs. Also getting in early ensures you get the right intractable problem to work on and increasing face time as well.
3. Open and closed, when I say ‘open’ I mean innovating without constraints which I feel is really pointless given the environment of most industries. If you are asked to innovate without constraints look around it may actually be a joke. It is important to let constraints shape an idea, while not influence the way we think (converging early). My feeling is constraints have to be thought of like limits in calculus, most business contexts are constrained and articulating these are best done by users.
When I say ‘closed’ I mean the boundary of innovation is really fixed, i.e. innovating on a box that already exists. Contractually designing sign off criteria on closed type innovations are much easier and constraints are easily articulated.
4. Delivery versus Facilitation, is another argument that is popular, my feeling is unless immersion in context is complete, innovation is impossible. I agree being a methods guru and floating complex facilitation techniques to make people come out with their own ideas is advantageous because 1. you do not have to make a case for the ideas 2. acceptance within groups on their own ideas is higher than externally provided ideas 3. to really immerse in context of the customer takes a very long time. But selling this sort of a thing is bound to be slippery as outcomes emerge and there is no possibility to predict the outcomes.

Another scar and medal to wear I guess, life moves on…

My Technology Videos

There was this series of videos done by Discovery Channel on personal innovations in India. I first encountered them while Prof Anil K Gupta gave a talk at our office on innovation.

I love the amphibious cycle example in the below video starting 3.05.

There are more videos from the same series

Enjoy…

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…

9 Windows

Deficiencies of 9 Windows in being able to capture the flows between levels of systems or with respect to time. This in turn leads to diminished understnading of the whole dependencies and possible interconnectivity between them. Has some one been able to overcome this by specific practices.