Do you know how to Innovate?

I recently attended my works innovation state awards night. I think it’s great that any company both recognises the importance of employee led innovation and also that they take the time out to celebrate those innovations. The program has been running now for 4 years and has grown considerably in that time from one business unit to the entire company across all states. Brilliant! The “winners” in each state go onto the national awards to compete for the grand national awards. Last year the national champion was a talented guy from the trade marketing team who came up with Formula – an industry focused app for staff to learn to mix cocktails, brew a coffee plus more. A great way that a business can add value to another to another business!

Throughout the presentations it was great to see so many ideas from various area’s of the business that in some way helped the company along, whether that be in driving efficiency, providing value for our customer or even making sure employees are safe from occupational hazards.

All up I think it’s a great example of an innovation program succeeding.

It did however remind me of a thought I had a while ago, does your average employee know how to innovate? It’s a simple question but it talks to the heart of any innovation program. Do employee’s believe that an innovation is a bright spark that goes off while having a shower in the morning? Or perhaps they aren’t sure what the difference is between a true innovation and just “doing your job”? The latter is something I’m sure folks in IT or marketing have to think about given that in most cases they are often challenged with ways to makes things better!

But really – do you know how to innovate?

If you do – What processes do you use? Brainstorm? Mind Map? workshops?

The “lightbulb” moment is oftentimes perpetuated by urban legends. For instance, how many people actually believe that Isaac Newton had his defining thought when an apple fell on his head? Surely he would have had to have been pondering a related problem (even if) when that happened. And what about all those success stories we hear about entrepreneurs doing the zen thing and come back with great ideas? I’m sure some ideas appear like a lightning bolt but I’m even more sure that the majority of them appear after a huge amount of thinking, research and exploration. Hindsight is crystal clear and it’s easy to read these stories and think it was bound to happen.

Innovation becomes even murkier when tease apart incremental vs revolutionary ideas. Incremental is the small changes you make to an existing process or idea vs the game changers you often read about. So if you take someone else’s idea and make it better are you innovating? Taken to it’s extreme what’s the difference between creativity (making something new) and adaptation? Is anything truly new these days? Revolutionary makes headlines.

Tough questions that I’m not sure I have the answers to.Though I do know that before you embark on an enterprise innovation program you do need to have answers for them. When is an innovation above and beyond vs doing your job? To what level can you modify someone else’s idea and call it your own?

Does it really matter? Isn’t the purpose of an innovation program to excite employee’s to think outside the box and do things differently for the better of all?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

When marketing just get’s it!

Marketing is one of those dark arts that is part creative, part psychology and part luck!  I know of seasoned marketers who still keep a “Dummies Guide to Marketing” on their bookshelf to make sure they stick to the basics from time to time. We all love the reviews on the “best commercials of <insert year>” and even in Australia there’s always good commentary and debate on the creme de la creme, gold plated (and paid for in kind) Super Bowl commercials.

So I approach marketing as both a cynic but also an admirer when it’s done well. And today I came across some marketing material that I admire.

iiNet is an ISP in Australia that has always had a flair for quirkiness and have deliberately set themselves apart from the others. They’ve had an on-going theme of a geeky irishman (?) spruiking the benefits of iiNet and their marketing has always followed suit. Now I’m not necessarily advocating iiNet to potential customers, I’ve had a good service from them but I’m not the sort of person that has trouble connecting the bits, bobs, thingamagigits and doohickeys together and need to call them for support. I’ll leave others to comment on that.

They sent me this piece of advertising today and I just had to laugh and admire it. In my mind they have nailed not only my behaviour but that of my friends and family. Even if it doesn’t ring true for everyone we can all appreciate the cliche in it. In my mind they have nailed the scenario and used it to their advantage. (BTW – if you are from iiNet and are reading this – feel free to get in touch and we can talk about some remuneration ).

When marketing just get it.

Embrace the subcultures

In my last post I talked about how culture comes first for your Enterprise Social Network (ESN). Without the right culture, which is generally a product of the senior leaders, your companies social platform may flounder. However that isn’t always the case, there may be instances when someone in the organisation has taken the lead on deploying the ESN platform and stopped there. Sometimes the organisation takes a “build it and they will come approach”, perhaps project funds run out during the change management program or perhaps the change management program wasn’t successful. In any case, the end result is you have a social collaboration platform ready to be used by anyone that wants to.

This is when true magic happens.

We often hear about the Gartner adoption curve and how the innovators or early adopters are the ones that jump on board. Now here’s insight #1 – the early adopters dont need to be specific individuals, the passionate folk trail-blazing the new technologies. Early adopters can be entire groups or departments of people that recognise the power of ESN’s and can adapt it to their specific business needs.

One of the biggest “a-ha” moments for me was when a manufacturing plant became a very early adopter. They saw in the collaboration platform a “digital cork-board” where they could post shift-reports (being a 24hr operation), information on production lines and general news such as OH&S tips etc. They adopted not only the short sharp messages of the microblogs but also regular blogs and calendaring. It was an “a-ha” moment because had we spent the time talking to these people prior to implementation we would have identified the business need (sharing of information across shifts) along with the problem (lack of richness in current platforms including multi-way conversations, ease of historical conversation tracking) and found a very clear use case.

So insight #2 is embrace the sub-cultures. Dont assume that the entire organisation has a particular culture and that every department or group will act the same way. While i’ve seen some tightly controlled deployments the danger with that is that you’ll corral disparate business teams into an accepted framework. The flip side is that an open self-service platform whereby anyone can create their own communities might provide you with some surprises while learning a little more about the business.

I’m not a change manager but the obvious other aspect of this insight is that you need to be aware of these differences in your change and training programs. Work out the “what’s in it for me” message for as many of the sub-cultures as you can and iteratively adapt the message as you see the evolving use cases.

So while the company culture  plays a big part in mass adoption there’ll no doubt be some great opportunities and some surprises when you embrace the sub-cultures.

Culture comes first for a social enterprise!

As noted in my last post I’ll be speaking on a panel at the Connected Enterprise 2012 conference in November. The topics I’ll be talking on are:

• Challenges and risks of a ubiquitous working environment
• How to build and leverage collaborative teams
• How to implement and maintain adoption of collaborative technologies
• How to use social media for effective talent recruitment
• How to lead a connected and collaborative enterprise

 My next few posts will explore some of those area’s and the first post is something that spans pretty much all aspects – Culture.

The word culture is derived from “to cultivate” and it’s in this sense we need to think about it. Trying to change the organisation culture is an often-cited wispy and nebulous challenge for various reasons. The one thing you’ll read is that organisation culture is as a direct result of the leaders. We all know that a sales focused CEO will drive a culture of competitiveness and profit seeking behavior and conversely an enigmatic energy driven leader will drive the same.

One of my first career jobs was at a multi-national ERP software company. When I joined there were urban legends and stories about the founder and CEO pulling off one of the biggest deals in the companies history in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt! I believe that to be case because that type of “don’t take life too seriously” attitude permeated the company resulting in a fun, dynamic and tight knitted group of people, many of whom I’m still in touch with 15 years later. This culture was cultivated from the top down!

Take a look at Forbes top 100 most innovative companies. It’s no surprise that the article talks about the innovative index of the leader in relation to the company – they go hand in hand.

So it is with Social and collaborative organisations. For an enterprise social network (ESN) to really work people need to see it driven from the top. I’ve read of only a few instances that a grassroots movement has gained enough traction to ripple through the organisation and when it has it’s because a member of the executive team has spotted the benefits and evangelised it.

This recent Brainyard post cites 3 things that would need to change for a company to adopt social.

• 29% – shift the company culture
• 20% – designating a person to make it happen
• 15% – setting aside a budget for social technologies.

It’s easy to see that all 3 of these could be accomplished by a single senior leader taking up the cause. They can lead by example and cultivate a collaborative culture, they can allocate resources and champion the work and they have the power over the purse-strings to make it happen.

If a company doesn’t already have a sharing and collaborative culture then implementing an ESN isn’t going to change that. It’s a tool that enables the underlying values and a competitive “knowledge-is-power” organisation will hear little else but chirping crickets on their social platform.

In my next post I’ll share some examples I’ve seen of great Social Leadership, some disabling behaviours and some ways to start changing the culture.

Connected Enterprise 2012

Earlier this year I was approach via LinkedIn to be on the advisory board for an upcoming Social Enterprise conference. I’ve been involved in conferences in the past. Sometimes setting them up and running from the conference floor to the comm’s room in my techie days, sometimes as a speaker! But this was the first time helping set the agenda so I jumped at the opportunity to use all the research and industry knowledge I’d built up deploying our enterprise social network at work.

The process was quite simple – comment and expand on a draft agenda – review the 2nd pass that included the other advisory board members comments – then recommend some relevant speakers.

I was pretty impressed with the advisory board, not only because I was pretty much the only non-C-Level but also because of the calibre of companies and thought leaders involved. A great cross-section of industries were represented which meant that the agenda was off to a great start in ensuring it was tailored to the intended audience.

When the final agenda and speaker list came out I was once again pretty happy with what we had pulled together. Some industry heavy-weights (IMHO) were included such as Brian Solis (@briansolis) – the well known thought leader and author, Ross Dawson (@rossdawson) – a Sydney based futurist and seasoned speaker, Cory Banks (@corza) – an enigmatic speaker and collaboration expert and Thierry de Baillon (@tdebaillon) – author and industry guru. Not to mention a similarly great cross-section of industry leaders from well-known companies.

The full line up can be found here and I’ve uploaded the conference agenda here.

I’ll also be speaking as part of the panel for “Collaborative Readiness – designing the social workplace“. I’ll come armed with challenges, successes and hopefully some interesting insights from a real world deployment of an enterprise social network! The next few posts will be around some of those topics but if you have any thoughts, questions or comments be sure to let me know and I’ll try to get them answered.

Of course, be sure to come to Melbourne on the 21st and 22nd of November for the conference. I really believe this will be on the best social business events this year!

How to explain Crowdsourcing to someone who listens to music!

Share Music by laihiu, on Flickr

For the last few years i’ve been the face of Social Media at work, in particular our internal social media strategy. What that means is lots of workshops, discussions and above all sessions of explaining various concepts like blogs, wikis etc. While I sometimes get a shock when a seemingly tech savvy person tells me they “aren’t a Facebook person” or “they don’t have a computer at home” I understand that consumer social media, and indeed the internet is like cooking at home, some people do it, other’s don’t.

Regardless of whether or not they are a Facebook person, at work we want them to reap the benefits of a collaborative platform. To do that you have no doubt read that calling your social intranet “Facebook for work” is about the surest way is drive people away in the shortest amount of time. Always tying the initiative back to WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) is key coupled, with simple training and above all simple contextual and relevant explanations.

It’s with that in mind that I’m always on the look out for real world examples of technology concepts. My mind must slowly be organising itself in this context because the other day I told my 2.5 year old daughter that the dishwasher was “like a shower for dirty dishes” (I was trying to head off a crying session because I was putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher).

My latest tie back to the real world is around crowd sourcing. I was on the bus and the driver had Pink Floyd “Wish you were here” playing. I’m a bit of a fan of Pink Floyd but I wouldn’t say I know all the “b-sides” or more obscure tracks. In fact I’d say all songs that I like you probably like (assuming you are a pink floyd fan) because they are the most famous. There’s no doubt a lot of crazy stat’s and models that show why they are the most famous but in it’s simplest form.

• The song is released and a number of people proclaim they like it
• Because those early people liked it other’s will start playing it more – your friends might pick it up and share it, radio stations will play etc
• It spreads among music listeners more and more
• Radio stations play it more often
• It might get picked up on a TV commercial
• etc etc

In effect, unless you take the next step and dig into the b-sides or buy the albums and listen them through, you have crowd sourced your music selection because of it’s general appeal and widespread use. You have crowd sourced it because the crowds have deemed that that song or artist is worthy and generally you’ll implicitly trust the crowds. Again the reason’s why you like the same music are debatable – some say it’s groupthink or evolutionary response to wanting to be part of crowd, other’s might argue that the power of the masses & statistic will bubble anything that has the widest appeal to the top. Off topic for this post but interesting to raise is once you scratch the surface on any of these theories you realise that despite the seemingly global appeal you’ll always get sub-groups of sub-groups of sub-groups, each being driven by the same factors of crowd acceptance etc.

Just like social media, in the music listening world there are the people out the front scouring for the latest and greatest. There are people that are watching those frontrunners ready to eagerly consume and share the content. Then there are the masses that find content simply because it’s so widespread. It might be on the news, in the paper, your friends might be talking about it. And when your mum share’s it on Facebook you know it’s hit mainstream.

My concept probably needs a little more work to tie it back to the commonly associated activity for crowd scouring – ideas & innovation – however starting with music sharing is probably a good place to start in explaining a fancy word for ubiquitous activity.

Visualisation of knowledge.

Technical sounding title I know but really it’s all about showing information (knowledge) in a graphical way. It’s a technique that, in my experience, is highly regarded let little used.

I was leading a workshop a while back with IT and Marketing coming together to map the user journey for a new application. For me this is one of the first steps to designing the application, understanding how we expect to go from point A (download and open the app perhaps) to point Z (redeem, check out etc) and provides the building blocks for both the programmers and the creative teams.

In the workshop the first thing I did was open Visio, started asking questions and mapping it into a simple workflow. This simple visualisation technique highlighted 2 things. First, it really brought to the fore the differences in people thinking of how the user will travel the app. Secondly, as the workflow unfolded there was lots of “Ahhs”, “wows” and “I need to learn to do this” simply because the visual map conveyed so much information. At the end of the workshop we had something tangible to share with other stakeholders.

I often refer back to this excellent tool that highlights, in a periodic table format, the different visualisation techniques you can use. It’s  little old now and could perhaps be refreshed a little but I think it’s still worth the look. It lists out the commonly known gannt charts, mind maps, simple tables & pie charts. It also lists out the techniques you have probably seen and intuitively understand (that’s the beauty of visual techniques) but may not have in your kit bag.

I’m going to set myself a challenge to use at least once each of the techniques over the next 12months. It’ll no doubt require some adaptation to fit my needs but I’m sure by doing so i’ll achieve at least 3 things:

1. A better understanding of the technique
2. A better understanding of the process / topic / relationship I’m trying to understand
3. A helpful way to convey knowledge in a simple meaningful way.

Here’s a few videos from Martin Eppler at http://www.visual-literacy.org/, a researcher in knowledge management, visualisation & communication, to explain some of the benefits of these techniques.

What visualisation tools do you use? I’d love to hear some use cases for the various tools and where they have worked or perhaps didnt work so well.

[Edit]

A few colleagues have provided the following links via LinkedIn.

• Thanks to Ainsley Gilles (@AinsleyGilkes) for reminding me of this link http://blog.visual.ly/ It’s another great resource for honing your visual skills
• Miles Ashton shared this BBC production “The Beauty of Diagrams” that I’ll need to track down, in particular the episode “Florence Nightingale“

[End Edit]