The Innovation Without Tears Manifesto

why how and what of innovation without tears

Why Do I do It?

Many visitors to this blog will have encountered Simon Sinek. He is famous for the phrase ‘Start with the Why’. It would therefore seem arrogant not to take his advice. So here is the Why, How and What of my Innovation Without Tears manifesto.

If you want to know more about the Why, How and What of Innovation, then please read on. If you are impatient then go straight to the Why? page on this website and book a consultation with me.

Before I go too far I wonder if any of the issues listed below are familiar.

“We are stuck and don’t know what to try next”
“COVID has devastated our business.”
“We’d like to innovate but we don’t know how.”
“We’re not sure we can afford Innovation.”
“We are under increased pressure to produce results.”
“We do not understand Innovation.”

So what, you might be saying. Yes, we all have issues but it is the action we take that matters. I firmly believe that the answer lies with Innovation and Reinvention. The difference between the two lies not in the attitudes, behaviours and actions we take but in the scope and extent of what we do.

Let me give you an example. During COVID many teaching and learning establishments swapped to online learning. The scope was not large at the start, moving a few courses online and the costs and effort involved were not that large. This was Reinvention or what some might call incremental Innovation.

Then there were individuals and companies who began streaming their activities, appearing more like broadcasters. They had offerings for both online and face to face. They had introduced ways of collaborative working, assessment and marking so that any client, anywhere in the world could buy their services. There are those that have gone even further with the scope and intensity. All these people have been Innovating.

The above examples purely illustrate a point. You can apply Reinvention or Innovation within any industry you like, no matter how creative or regulated it may be.

This is in effect change, but why is it better? First of all, it allows you to change your course of action and thrive (or at worst survive). Usually, you create competitive advantage because you are making better use of the people within your business and tacit (internal) knowledge is not easily copied. It is also fun and fits neatly into hybrid working and portfolio careers.

You might also be tempted by business advisers who tell you to stick to what you know and be a bit more logical about your approach. If you take the logical approach then once you have tried all the things that are familiar to you then the next step is to start with some of the unfamiliar. It is therefore logical to be illogical! However this unfamiliar territory is not as scary or risky as some of the larger consultancies would have you believe.

The benefits are easy to see but here is the real Why? If you can find ways of easing the pain and removing the stress of making these changes, help people feel less lost and confused by dividing things into tasks that are easily doable, then it is much less scary. In some cases, we can change what you deliver and make use of your current delivery mechanisms.

So let us keep it simple, pain and stress free and communicate every step of the way. That is why I personally use the expression Innovation Without Tears.

How Do I do It?

The route to Innovation Without Tears is to break things down into manageable chunks and reduce risk (and sometimes cost) by obtaining as much information as possible about your business and how it works so that we know where your Innovation potential is at its highest and where any development activities need to be carried out.

In order to make this simple, I created my Innovation Equation which breaks Innovation down into easily measurable (and hence manageable) components. Read more about Innovation Measurement.

In order to challenge the status quo and make your interventions pain free, all information gathering is completed electronically with simple questionnaires. There are no pencils and computer scoring of multiple choice questions. As much demographic information is collected as possible so we can assess potential at different levels, within business functions or across geographic locations.Find out more about How?

Before any projects or programs get underway you must determine exactly where you stand right now. If necessary this activity can be undertaken again to measure the difference.

All of this information is combined with any background information previously supplied by your business and turned into a comprehensive picture (or report if you like) of your current position.

Any reports should be totally clear and transparent, no waffle, just a presentation of the facts along with any assumptions that have been made. This will ensure that as many people as possible are on board when things begin to change. This need not just be senior management, anyone with an interest should be encouraged to take a look.

Planning is of course key, but to get a good plan in place when lots of people are involved? The answer is to gather input via storyboards (or similar) and by expressing plans in a format that everyone understands. As your business is working with a little ambiguity then plans will reflect this. Maybe costs will be plus/minus 5% or profit within a range.

Everything must be brought out into the open so that there is nothing unexpected.

What Do I do?

Click on the link to download an example of Derek’s work Selther Case Story.

The link above will provide a short document that will give you an idea about exactly what I do (and what others should be doing for you). In summary, you need a way of analysing Innovation potential as a useful starting point for your Innovation or Reinvention program. It will also save a lot of time and effort by focusing resources on the places where they are needed.

Your company board should be given this information directly so that decision making is made simpler.

What comes next is variable. I can use my Project management experience to help with project or program management, and deliver workshops and seminars to help with cultural change alongside change agents (think ripples spreading out on a pond). Domino Knowedgware and Intelligent Growth are just two of the methods that can be used here.

The Secret To Innovation

The secret to innovation is …. that there is no secret! There are a few things to consider but these are definitely not secret.

Also, please do not believe that Innovation is the preserve of a select few, the Innovation Gurus that have sprung up everywhere. As the great Charles Handy once said ‘guru is just an American word for charlatan’.

Once you have worked out what works for you, simply practise and repeat. There are however a couple of things to remember.

To start with you will need:

A strategy – Innovation is enhanced greatly by a clearly articulated and communicated strategy. Innovation is not an end in itself, rather a means to an end.

A process – You can ‘wing it’ or adopt some sort of process. I must admit to being a fan of the former as long as there are guidelines. Beware of rigid processes though as you can end up just copying what someone else has done. If you don’t completely understand the context you may get nowhere fast. It matters less what the process is and more that there is a process. This means everybody has to know what happens next and what role they must play to make innovation happen. Communication is key as with Strategy.

To be Cross Functional and Team Based – Innovation is not the responsibility of any single department or individual. Innovation touches every part of a company (hence the link to strategy) and needs the broadest possible understanding from every part of your business.

To have Customer Focus – Winning companies are tuned in to the needs of their customer. There is a huge difference between providing a customer with what you think they want and what they actually need or want. You need to step into their shoes.

And here are four top tips for anyone getting to grips with Innovation:

1. There are no short cuts, the world is littered with those who have tried something similar to you but have tried the short cut. .

2. Complacency is your enemy. If you are doing something ground breaking, don’t stop when it ‘sort of works’. You will be optimising mediocrity. Be willing to experiment to get what you want.

3. Life will get uncomfortable (very). Thomas Edison’s quote regarding the ratio of inspiration to perspiration within genius. Be ready to perspire once you have been inspired.

4. To succeed you will need a lot of ideas. In my workshops, I find that out of every 10 really crazy ideas there is only one weird idea that is worth thinking about further. And out of every 10 weird ideas, there may only be one worth devoting resources to. In reality, the overall ratio might be nearer 1000 to 1 than 100 to 1.

I hope that none of the above has scared you at all. You can do all of this without the help of ‘gurus’. A sounding board might help though!

The Plastic Bottle Problem

If you live in the UK you will be more than aware of the COP26 conference but did you watch Panorama this week? If not you should catch it on the BBC iPlayer.

For those outside the UK, the program was entitled Coca-Cola’s 100 billion bottle problem. It is a huge problem, there are billions of single use plastic bottles created by the Coca-Cola company that are littering the world.

Tempting as it is, this is not a lambasting of the company, just an attempt to highlight the problem. To be fair they have said that they will recycle a bottle for each one they sell. But there is a catch, they cannot collect and recycle enough of them!

So what happens to them? Well, the banner picture for this article is just one example of the rubbish tips where single use plastic is found in huge piles (this is in Kampala, Uganda). Worse still, local people scavenge there to find these bottles and get paid a pittance to do so, 4 pence per kilo and they collect 3 kilos per day!

With no child care, the adults are forced to bring their children with them. And yes, they work too, barefoot in hot, smelly and sometimes dangerous conditions.

There are many factors in play here:

Coca Cola cannot collect enough bottles to recycle
Fossil fuels are used to produce new plastic
Cheap labour is used by middlemen to retrieve plastic
Everyone gets rich apart from the workers and their children

This is where a little bit of Systems Thinking (or as I like to call it, joining up the dots) comes in. How about this is a suggestion?

Someone designs a cart, maybe like a golf buggy or with tracks like a tank. It could be solar powered and be capable of traversing rubbish heaps. Such a vehicle, combined with better picking technology (not hands) would allow workers to retrieve much more waste in a day and hence earn more.

Companies such as Coca Cola would get more plastic back to recycle which would cut down on fossil fuel use and result in less plastic clogging up our environment.

But, I hear you say, this is still exploitation. Well, what tends to happen when sometimes tough and thankless tasks are carried out, we find that the workers are often very resourceful and will find ways to improve things. So whilst we might start off with my theoretical cart, we may finish up with something completely different. We might even be able to cut out the middleman too.

All we (or Coca Cola) has to do is provide some seed funding or maybe some tech to get the ball rolling.

I’m not saying that this is even a workable solution but we should be thinking about how we can connect different things in order to solve multiple related problems. In this case recycling, pollution, overuse of fossil fuels, cheap labour and poverty.

Systems Thinking And Saving The Planet

Looking at the post title you might be forgiven for thinking that I have gone mad. Please bear with me for a few minutes.

This week I attended an online lecture all about Smart Cities which also touched on technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things just in case you missed this acronym).

We have a tendency to fixate on technology because it apparently gives us something such as speed, connectivity, big data or simply control.

The main learning point for me was not the technology, although it can help. The main point was about the systemic nature of smart cities.

The technology is no good if we track the movement of people but don’t plug this into public transport or traffic management or if we generate lots of heat in manufacturing but fail to divert this for other uses such as heating houses.

Everything must be considered and be part of the system.

For a really good example use Google and lookup Copenhagen on the internet. But as someone said, a city is not a computer.

So far I have mentioned Systems Thinking and IoT, but what about Save The Planet?

Last night was the inaugural Earthshot Prize event where 5 projects each get £1 million to scale up their ideas to help save the planet. This is the first of 10 annual events that we all hope will help our planet.

As people get inspired, the applications each year will get more and more interesting. I was going to use the word ‘innovative’ but they need not be. Last night we had some great ideas from growing coral rapidly, producing clean hydrogen and helping protect and grow rain forests.

And one of the things that connected all of them, even though they did not know it whilst developing their ideas, was the fact that they were all part of a system!

The coral is a habitat for marine creatures and reefs help to dissipate wave energy, the clean hydrogen will help fuel us without hurting the planet and creating more rainforests will help clean our climate.

These things do not compete, they all work together.

So apart from asking readers to take part in preserving the planet, what is the point?

Systems Thinking used to be fashionable, like Design Thinking or Innovation but it is important. Most of what we experience is part of a system, nothing works on its own.

To prove this think of something complex like a game of chess. Yes, you can play yourself but in a system, individual components tend to behave differently when they are all plugged together.

Hence the reason for the image at the top of this email. The first time you came across Monopoly you probably took it out of the box, read the instructions and created a strategy as to how you would win.

When you sat down to play with several others I am guessing that the game did not go according to plan. You might still have won but the other players (system components) had an effect.

As individuals, we are all part of a system (the planet) and as business owners, we might also be part of a system (consider where your business boundary really is) without realising it.

So give Systems Thinking a whirl and see if the whole can be made greater than the sum of the parts (and don’t forget to look up Copenhagen as a smart city example)!

Reinvention, the first step

Regular visitors will have been used to me talking about ReThinking which is my umbrella term that covers both Reinvention and Innovation.

These two require similar but not identical skills and behaviours. The biggest difference though, is scale and timescale.

Reinvention covers the near or very near future and has a relatively small scope whilst Innovation has a large scope and a time scale which is long, or as some say ‘over the horizon’.

Here I am concerned with Reinvention, what some might call ‘pivoting’ (a largely meaningless term which everyone claims to understand but which I have never seen a definition for).

The first 3 steps on the Reinvention path are Anticipating Change, Designing Change and Implementing Change.

I have a simple but useful tool that can help you assess how ready you are to work in these three areas. Please ask if you wish to know more.

Let us look at the first step, Anticipating Change. Here are 5 questions, if you answer yes to any of them then you have issues. The more times you answer ‘yes’ the more work you have to do, unfortunately. All is not lost but you should act swiftly.

Here are the questions:

Does your business get insights and/or warnings from the same sources (suppliers, customers, trade publications, etc) and rarely go in search of unusual sources of information?

Are you and other employees rarely asked to share insights and reflections on potential threats, disruptions, or opportunities for your business?

When insights and warnings of disruptions (note this means disruptive events not the power being turned off!) are encountered, are they only shared with a small group of people?

Does your business only start reacting when confronted with an unfolding crisis or series of unexpected events rather than try to anticipate a threat or opportunity and be proactive?

Does your business take insufficient time for reflection, creative thinking, or being proactive?

If you want to know more about how to assess your readiness for Designing Change and Implementing Change then please get in touch and ask for my ‘Are You Future Fit’ download.

Derek Cheshire

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