innovation fluency

Innovation Fluency: How Organizations Build the Capacity to Innovate Intentionally

Innovation Fluency is an organization’s ability to intentionally understand, manage, and sustain innovation over time. Like learning a language, fluency has both breadth (how many people can “speak innovation”) and depth (how well they can use it to make decisions). And just like language learning, organizations can choose the state of fluency they need based on their environment and goals.

Innovation Fluency shouldn’t be accidental; it’s built through intentional choices about how ideas are evaluated, tested, and implemented.

The States of Innovation Fluency

The progression moves from ad-hoc reactions to systemic, proactive innovation management. At the lowest state, innovation happens when someone has a good idea and the organization rushes to implement it. At the highest state, the organization uses collective wisdom to manage both innovation and the innovation system itself, continually improving how ideas move through the funnel.

Each fluency state reflects two dimensions:

1. The Success Outcome or how success is viewed

  • Parity: The organization responds to a need or disruption and restores stability. The nature of this parity can vary by how the much of the organization responded.
  • Renewal: The organization gains something new that meaningfully improves on its mission delivery in an integrated manner. 
  • Continuous & Systematic Adoption: The organization not only implements integrated innovations but also improves its innovation management system itself.

2. The Approach to Innovation which goes from being entirely Reactive to being wholly Proactive.

This is a result of structure and behaviors of the organization itself.

  • Ad-hoc: All hands on deck, reacting to a crisis with a single urgent idea.
  • Team-Led: A team or department drives ideas forward with limited testing.
  • Orchestrated: Management evaluates ideas from across the organization and then directs and coordinates the needed cross-functional implementation.
  • Participatory: At a regular, strategic interval, staff participate within the evaluation and prioritization portion of the process and then subgroups or teams are formed to test and implement ideas.
  • Multi-disciplinary: The whole of the organization periodically scans for needs, trends, and opportunities for improvement then evaluates and prioritizes these together. This is followed by staff self-organizing to test, implement, and improve innovations.
  • Systemic: Scanning never stops, for both environmental shifts and for improvements to the innovation system itself.
A spatial representation of how innovation states are arranged from ad-hoc to systemic. The spatial dimensions from a reactive to proactive approach and parity to continuous and systematic for success are shown.

Not Every Organization Needs the Highest State

Some environments require systemic fluency; others don’t. However, organizations that rely solely on ad-hoc innovation are banking on luck to react in time. Each state brings new behaviors, new capabilities, and a shift towards more intentional, proactive innovation.

Cultivating Innovation Fluency is a journey. Organizations can choose where they think the need to go, advance towards it, and assess their journey along the way. As their fluency grows, reliance on external coaching decreases. And like any language, fluency fades if it isn’t practiced.

Acknowledgements

While different, our thinking on the use of fluency is based around our knowledge of the Agile Fluency Project by Diana Larsen and James Shore. We are indebted to their wisdom about choices for progressing an organization’s capabilities.