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.

How to deal with Avoid Task and Seek Attention behaviours?

Below 2 behaviors are common in the workplace that is necessary for every change agent to understand. They are critical to every change and system roll out.

Task Avoidance Behavior

Task avoidance behavior manifests as excuses even when there is agreement that the system or change is a worthwhile thing to try. There are many games like the Yes, but… that makes it difficult to spark action. To work around this issue, what I do typically is keep collecting excuses, and for each of the excuses find what “the precious” is, it could be time, effort, attention, presence among many others and gift them free.

Attention Seeking Behavior

Attention seeking is not really a problem, but it requires significant effort usually in the form of habits to sustain action. Social media actions like "like", +1 or transactional superlatives like "awesome" or even a simple "pat on the back", “Bravo” are undervalued. So to sustain attention it is necessary to come up with ideas that are high pedestal and keep coming up with ideas for different actions. If the prize or attention is easily gamed then it diminishes in value and no longer encourages action. So here the change agents’ job is to come up with large number of ideas using simple techniques like Forced Association, on what is available and direct attention to the action and not the pedestal.

For all of you trying to use perception…

For all of you trying to use perception mapping, please understand it is not an effort to construct reality from perceptions surfaced in a meeting. Nobody wants to live in a world created by just perceptions. But rather the effort is to make sense of what more than 1 person in a group had as a perception and how it affects the thinking of a group and really intervening only so much to change that. Reality changes perceptions, and sometimes rarely perceptions do change reality, but you don’t necessarily try that.
If there are collector point perceptions understand that it is group think, if there are contradictions understand the reality is itself contradictory, and understand that loops that are long are really imaginary if the group itself is not in any proximity. In any case there is value in the mapping and changing the picture or representation of reality that you always had.

Being Open

This is an often touched thread in my field of work; the thread of transparency in organizations.

When we deploy closed systems people ask questions around

How can I make this system open to a large number of people so knowledge sharing/discussion can happen?

When we deploy open systems people ask questions around

How can I make this system closed to a limited number of people so we can have our relevant (read private) conversations?

The platform/system will depend on the current popularity and someplace where they have no presence usually. Features, need for user functionality discussions tend to take back seat while we finish conclusively on the open/closed argument (mostly never happens in a single sitting mind you, as people want to bounce ideas internally “closed”).

Just because I CAN be more open does not mean I will be open. Why do people tend to have this warped reasoning when it comes to open information has always intrigued me, here are some

1. Fear of being misunderstood by a large number of unknown people

This fear is real, I have tried convincing people to write about a specific viewpoint that they so clearly articulate in 1 on 1 meetings, but they never had the courage to put it down on paper. This could also be a problem of language (in articulation and being unambiguous)

2. Fear of hijack of a personal idea by anyone of the large number of unknown people

If I am about to mobilize resources on an idea, I have to convey the idea as clearly as possible and if I am in a leverage mode I will have to leave room for idea building, trimming, refinement or even a change in direction. If I am that possessive about the private idea, I will cut a cd, open a bank locker and put it in, possibly throw the key in deep sea. No need to discuss further and selection of platform does not arise.

3. Hesitation to deal with the plausibly large amount of feedback that can come

Let us get real, any open information system is rampant with lurkers, 1 in 100 comment and take conversations further. This is a one reason why non-text entry user actions like “like”, “RT”, “Share” have come up.

If someone had to say something meaningful on a thread, I am all ears, I should probably bring him on board because he cared to respond.

4. Confidence/Arrogance that ideas from the select group is the best possible (both in time (best ever) and space (best on earth))

No need to discuss further and selection of platform does not arise here as well.

May be I am oversimplifying openness/transparency, what do you think? Think openly please.

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…

Project Artifact as Boundary Object

A project can be visualized as a opportunity for interfusion of multiple different identities of people. These identities stem from role performed in the project, technology specialization/association of the project team member, affiliation with customer through proximity on location/role/relations, among many other identities.

A general agreement to collaborate across these different roles is realized as a need in most cases and there are contractual tie ups (could be a real agreement, or defined by role and individual responsibilities) between several pairs of parties, customer-service provider, manager-resource, practice-resource, onsite-offshore. Real progress on work usually involves actions by project team members across different identities.

When identities fuse across, there is a need for objects that are “Common Point of Reference that can have different meanings attached to it, while can act as a means for coordination, alignment and translation, while catering to different concerns simultaneously” 

That was a definition of Boundary Object, all emphasis indicate the key characteristics.

Within Knowledge Management there are real good examples of boundary objects, below are some

1. wiki page on wikipedia
2. Knowledge Map of a project/community
3. a story/anecdote

 If you are on a project it is likely that your deliverable, usually an artifact is also being used as a boundary object. But no one thought about it that way yet…and you compromised, some symptoms below

1. Have you ever noticed the indifference with which core process groups fill out or create templates, while the end users of the templates find it hard to use it for any real purpose
2. Even when you send a status report that goes through the hierarchy will the “head” be able to make sense of the original concern that you wanted to be acted on or was it all lost in translation
3. Dev team seems to be at ease with the seemingly random project wiki, while the business team finds it real hard to get anything out or the other way around, is the wiki really that pliable
4. The tester does not seem to be all concerned with the reds in the project plan, while the PM is unable to catch the significance of a red flag in a key test case

Mark Weiser spent the best part of his life working on Ubiquitous computing. He has another noted work as well in which he indicates all social and knowledge work is all about reducing the problem to reach an agreement , where he explains reality distortion with the classic archetype the Dilbert. And there are measures that you can use, to reduce Reality Distortion and for those academically oriented there are complex equation to represent them, but I like the cartoons better.

 The real issue I think is, can we design boundary objects and reduce the reality distortion differences over a period of time?

Commitment Versus Compliance part 1

Case 1

Imagine this situation where you put together a bunch of mandates at various levels of management, till it reaches the last employee on knowledge capture or learning. May be you can just make a random metric based on contributions (you could complicate it by adding usage, pass through, linking, commenting, etc) to your organization’s knowledge base and give sufficient room to game for employees to have fun which anyway will happen!

Call it currency, credit, kunit, knol or whatever. And then set a target for people and indicate that it will influence somehow their variable pay. Don’t even have to promise anything!!

Case 2

Imagine another situation where you connect people with each other in the context of an unknown and allow them to build knowledge based on a mutual commitment they have.

No carrots, gold biscuits or credits. Just the connection.

QuaLity (very subjective) of knowledge or synthesized content (if any) that comes out from Case 2 is invariably higher than what comes out of Case 1.

QuaNTity that comes from just adopting Case 1 is way higher than Case 2.

Is this a TRIZ contradiction or what…open the contradiction matrix please

Parameter we want to improve is Production Spec/Quality/Means

Explanation: intended to be general in terms of quality of what is produced, and means by which it is achieved, can be both tangible and intangible

Parameter that worsens is Amount of Information

Explanation: though not needed some synonyms might help knowledge, memory, volume, archive, library, repository, search. Actually even antonyms are ok in TRIZ.

TRIZ Principles that are identified for the contradiction are

13 Other way around

Invert actions used

Make movable parts fixed or fixed part moving

Turn System process object upside down

32 Colour Changes

Change colour of object/environment

Change transparency of system or environment

15 Dynamization

Allow system characteristics to change to be optimal or find an optimal operating condition

Divide systems into part capable of movement relative to each other

Make system movable, flexible

23 Feedback

Introduce feedback

If already used change magnitude or influence

24 Intermediary

Use an intermediary carrier article or process

18 Resonance

Find resonant frequency

Ideas on the contradiction stated are now flowing from the TRIZ principles,…coming up soon