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.

What is Management by Walking Around?

Otherwise called Genchi Genbutsu is a feature of the Toyota Production System. After all, if we are going to pick the metaphor of assembly line/manufacturing to even knowledge centric delivery processes, better learn from the best right. Management by Walking Around (MBWA) has been around for a while, in fact one of the best examples I have heard was from Ramesh Dorairaj (VP AMS MindTree), who cited from his NTPC days of having a manager who practiced MBWA. This manager takes place of a sub ordinate who is on leave to do all the tasks, handle situations, have lunch with the sub ordinate’s group and pretty much go through the entire day on his absent sub-ordinates schedule. These are in effect rituals that every employee goes through and managers tend to forget as they do only management (whatever that means) not real work, to be in touch with those rituals is an intimate way to understand what is “work”.

In IT industry it has become even simpler, to do MBWA all you need to do is set a rule that will forward emails (in effect tasks/decision items that others create for you) to your willing boss when you are out of office. This is a great way to build integrity, trust and relationships within teams that will be scales higher than your last team building activity that typically involves jumping into high chlorine waters, or throwing paint at each other or some such nonsense.

So in effect "increasing the chance that actual issues and unplanned events will be observed first hand and are managed immediately". These points are points of knowledge creation that managers take for granted, and proceed to act as if they do not matter. This sense making is not through an MIS report or from a status reporting presentation, but from issues, constraints, problems as it happens real time. Bonus in this strategy is there will be no back log to process when you return from your vacation. You return the favor for your boss on his vacation. And you also get to do tasks of the next level and build your own capability to handle it.

I know we as humans are great at excusing ourselves (from even the radical sounding ideas such as this one), but I still feel there is genuine productivity gain from plain transparency in work places. Think about it…

Context Switching

This is something K Manager job demands.
Making sense of a business demands in depth understanding of context. You do this once, twice, every day. And then increasing scope just means you have increased the number of contexts that you will cater to. That results in gradual loss of relevance to customers and lack of depth in adoption, now all your services are only lip services. Success then on is left to serendipity and that rare person to make sense of a what the “KM people” are saying.
Choice is simple to limit/not the contexts.

2 KM Definitions

Joe on actKM

“I think Knowledge Management is activity intended to enhance knowledge processing, while Knowledge Science is the “scientific discipline” (whatever that is) attempting to produce the highest quality knowledge about how to seek, recognize, and formulate problems (in the sense of knowledge gaps), produce new knowledge, and integrate that knowledge. So, I think these fields are two different things, but that Knowledge Managers might do Knowledge Science from time to time as part of their KM activities, and that they certainly should support the development of knowledge science since it will greatly support their own work. “

Dave Snowden on CE

“Now don’t get me wrong, the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:

1. To support effective decision making
2. To create the conditions for innovation”