You Have a Process

Whether you are following a structured process or not, you have one.

It may just be something ad-hoc where someone has an idea and there is an attempt to implement it. This attempt may or may not be successful. Ad-hoc processes end up having less success than intentional ones. Just because the idea came from a spark of creativity doesn’t mean the process should be. This process doesn’t need to be complicated or lengthy.

The goal is to mitigate risk. People in organizations don’t lack innovative ideas; they lack the ability to turn ideas into successfully deployed innovations. Thus, any process needs to help them have a means of getting the desired results, or if the idea won’t, killing it before it consumes too much time and money. This process could be strategic in nature or something that is only used by individual teams or groups in your organizations. It should allow autonomy of action yet provide guiding constraints to make decisions.

Innovations themselves have a natural form of maturity they pass through. Problems get defined. Ideas get created. Ideas turn into candidate solutions, which are then tested. And successful innovations get deployed, maintained, and hopefully improved over time transforming from being a one-off novel idea to being a supportive pillar in your mission.  

How to Reduce Your Risk

Elevate visibility with a structured process to put focus on this reduction.

This maturation hints at the underlying process which simply needs to be made explicit and visible; thus intentional. This then places a focus on risk reduction. Exactly what this looks like will depend on each organization and how strategically innovation is applied. We like to call this process a funnel, because the number of ideas, your innovations, get reduced in number as they pass through it. Some ideas are just not going to get implemented as you’ll find the audience they are intended for won’t want them or they aren’t feasible in the organization. Or perhaps there are legal, ethical, or fiduciary concerns to their implementation.

Early stages of this funnel are the realm of defining the need or problem to be solved. If dealing with multiple needs, these can be prioritized. This helps the organization focus on the most important needs. This is the first step in risk reduction.

Then, ideate on options that can help meet these needs. This doesn’t have to be the one brilliant idea that just hits you, but you can deeply examine the needs of the target audience or recast a challenge into an outcome, then begin creating options to solve them.

Each of these solution options can then also be prioritized and then either tested or enacted. Enacting solutions should be focused on small incremental improvements; and yes, these are a form of innovation! ‘Larger’ ideas are riskier and should undergo testing. This is done using Lean Start-up techniques.

What Visibility Looks Like

Whether it is a team-level idea or something more strategic, visible work makes collaboration easier.

Create a physical or virtual workspace where the constraints, idea(s), status, tests, actions, and decisions are tracked in various ways. This requires the use of different kinds of visual techniques depending on what will help make progress on the idea. By making these visible, it helps the people doing this work have more autonomy in working together. Managers can see where a team is without asking for status reports and how they may be able to help. A few low burden ceremonies can bring focus to making progress and collaborating effectively using the various visual components.

A primary visualization is one showing the ideas as the progress through validation, making the risk reduction explicit. While various software products can be used for this, often post-it notes on a board serves as the best starting point. You’ll be learning and adapting your processes as you get started, so institutionalizing them in software too early can make this difficult. Additionally, since your team and organization will be learning about managing innovations in this manner, adding in learning software becomes a distraction to the needed visibility. It’s about having the intentional process in place first; one that everyone understands and use.

Our Process ‘Starter’

At Innovaya, we have made this funnel concept for the process easier to adopt using an agricultural analogy.

Survey your environment to see where you have insights or challenges to address strategically. This includes how well current innovations in place are doing. Sow ideas for new innovations to address new needs or gaps, testing whether the ideas will actually provide solutions for the intended audience and feasible for the organization. Later feasibility tests and whether the ideas can be implemented ethically and without breaking the bank are where you Grow your ideas into solutions to be implemented. Once implemented, you can Harvest the results while continually making small improvements, so they continue to bear fruit.

This starter funnel is intended to help organizations and their teams get moving quickly. As they improve their fluency, they adapt the funnel for how they want to manage the work and using terminology that fits their organization better. It also provides a great way to radiate status information within a team or across an organization’s portfolio, organizing other techniques and measures that help the organization create and maintain their intentional innovation.