Collaboration – A key tool to drive a culture of innovation

Innovation is defined in Wikipedia as “a change in the thought process for doing something or new stuff that is made useful”.

Its no wonder that today’s businesses are hungry for innovation. But are we taking the right approach.  The mantra of “innovate or die” echos in the halls of the less inspiring organizations who not only suffer from a lack of innovation, but also fail to attract the next generation who thrive on it.  The net-gen actively seeks innovative and creative organizations, often sacrificing income for a “cool” place to work [1].  So what can we do as leaders to foster a culture of innovation?

Drivers for Innovation

There are four main drivers for innovation in business:

• a business necessity for an innovative solution,
• creativity to invent new stuff,
• insight to make it useful and
• collaboration to pull it all together.

Creativity is defined as “the ability to generate new ideas”, that “ah-ha” moment where either a new idea is born from imagination, inspiration and genius, or from the alignment of existing ideas or concepts that were previously uncorrelated

Insight is defined as “an understanding based on identification of relationships and behaviors within a model”.  In business, insight provides an understanding of how the results of creativity can be leveraged to create a competitive advantage.

The diagram below pulls all these concepts together.  Innovation is driven by creativity, insight and collaboration.  Creativity is supported either by invention (which is rare and unpredictable) or by aligning concepts that were otherwise unconnected.

In the end, everything is supported by a culture of collaboration.

Build the Culture

As leaders, we need to create an organizational culture that fosters both insight and creativity.  Developing and capturing insights can be supported with a culture of collaboration and Collaborative Decision Management (CDM) solutions.

However, the development of a creative environment is a bit more elusive. In a creative environment, you must be ready to be wrong – Ken Robinson [2]. However, in today’s fast paced business environment, knowledge workers are given very little time for “being wrong”.

In his blog, Seth Godin characterized the typical organization that is constantly fighting with “This better work”.  “This might work,” on the other hand, is the thinking of art, innovation and insight” [3]

Experiments with rewarding creativity and innovation in organizations have often not met with success.  The fascinating YouTube video on human nature and motivation at http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc shows us that knowledge workers are not motivated by financial rewards (beyond the basics).  Rather, organizations that are recognized for their creativity and innovation (Apple, Google, etc) reward their knowledge workers with the autonomy to work on their own ideas part-time.

When there is an inspiring creative environment, you will attract the best and the brightest even with lower financial compensation. Take the Global Transportation Hub Authority (GTHA) in Regina.  In a time where Saskatchewan is having troubles attracting the skilled knowledge workers they need,  John Law CEO of the GTHA has to turn away excellent talent. Why?  The culture at his organization is innovative, fresh and collaborative. Decisions are made collaboratively, information and insights are shared openly, and the productivity at the GTHA exceeds everyone’s expectations.

Conclusion

Collaboration drives creativity and insight.  Creativity and insight drive innovation. Innovation is critical to the future of our organizations.  What we have learned from the successes in these new businesses is that developing a strong culture of collaboration is a key building block for success.

[1]  Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital.  http://dontapscott.com/

[2] Sir Ken Robinson, TED Talks.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

[3] Seth Godin,

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/06/this-better-work.html

Collaboration Determines How Much Information you need

Getting the right amount of the right information at the right time

The field of information science has always sought to deliver the right information at the right time.  But with the ever increasing volumes of good information, I suggest that we must also consider delivering the right volume of information.  The value of a decision to the business is related to the volume of information it considers.  Too little information and the the decision is ill informed.  Too much information and the decision suffers from analysis paralysis.

As suggested in the graph, there is an optimal amount of inforamtion at which the value to the business for a decision is maximized.  Decision makers that rely on their experiences and intuition tend to use less information and rush to judgment.  Decision makers that are indecisive and analytical will unnecessarily delay decisions.

Collaboration helps to determine the volumne of information needed

There is a point at which sufficient information is available to maximize the value of the decision to the business.  Decision Alignment is a process to help define that point for a specific business or even a specific decision maker.

In either case, introducing collaboration into the decision making environment always increases the value of the decision to the business.  For the impulsive decision makers that rely on less information, collaboration will help to support the decision in the absence of sufficient information.  For the analytical decision makers, collaboration will provide a supportive enviorment for the decisions and help to curb the desire to over analyze.

Although not considered in this blog entry, I wonder if there is a correlation betweent the decision making personality styles and the volume of information that they consider – as suggested in this graph.

Decision Alignment

The genesis of the Decision Alignment methodology dates back more than a decade to a time when the art of information management was beginning to emerge.  Even in the mid 90’s, it was clear that the information tsunami was going to have a significant impact on our ability to be effective in our business.  However, just like the current economic meltdown, no-one predicted the magnitude and exponential growth of the problem.  In 2008, it is estimated that more digital information was generated than in the previous 5000 years combined.  The video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8 provides an entertaining look at what it means to be living in “exponential times”.

My first company focused at the organization and delivery of information to knowledge workers in the Oil and Gas industry.  Although successful in achieving this goal, it occurred to me that providing access to trusted information was on its own not enough to achieve business value.  A necessary step yes, but not enough.

I am convinced that the real value in knowledge organizations is the decisions that are made the directly affect business performance.  Many businesses today have come to the realization that they are knowledge based, whether they are producing oil & gas, building infrastructure or developing software.

If business performance is driven by the quality of our decisions, then what are we doing to optimize our decision making abilities?

Certainly effectiveness in decision making requires the right data at the right time (and the right amount of data).  But this pre-supposes we know what questions to ask.  In the late 90’s, the field of Business Intelligence (BI) started to develop, providing the infrastructure to aggregate information from many sources into a single business focused reporting facility.  However, even today a decade later, the vast majority of BI projects have failed to deliver on expectations.  The basic problem with business intelligence applications is that outside of the finance office nobody really knows how to use them largely because most people don’t really know what kinds of questions to ask about their business.

The Decision Alignment was designed to address just this issue, focusing on the business imperatives of the organization and the alignment of operations to address those imperatives.  Once we understand the objectives of the business, we can define a set of metrics that measure progress against those objectives.  As the business environments change, so do strategies and the metrics that measure them.  So long as operations understands the business objectives and the metrics, operational decisions are aligned to achieve these goals.

There are several key components to achieving the alignment of strategy to operations:

• Published key performance indicators (KPI’s) that are defined by executive to measure progress against the strategy
• A collaborative framework where executive and operations can share information on issues
• A cultural shift to a integrative and collaborative organization
• A communications plan to keep everyone rowing in the same direction

The good news – this isn’t rocket science.