Leadership
5
The Innovation Revolution should be led by Employees, not created for them.
Another part of this tenet is that change needs to be intentional. It’s not about shaking things up for the sake of variety. It’s about analyzing where change is most needed and letting employees take the lead. I call this intentional change or change with a little c, not a big C. The point is that change shouldn’t be too broad. Most innovation programs fail because they’re unrealistic; they try to do too much, and they’re unclear about what they’re really trying to create. You must be specific about what you want to change about your culture and what behaviors you want to see flourish. Focus on and tackle three to four critical skills or behaviors instead of a laundry list of them. If you let employees lead, this will happen far more organically.
Little Changes, Big Impact
If you’ve already tried other top-down innovation programs, announcing another set of big changes will be met with resistance and frustration, as people immediately anticipate the additional work these programs always seem to entail. The grandiose overhauls that so many traditional innovation-enhancing programs insist upon just scare people and make them feel overwhelmed.
With this approach, you won’t make a grand announcement about your plans to innovate or overwhelm your organization with a massive overhaul. You’re just going to start innovating right away, in small ways that will generate quick wins. And in the aggregate, your small changes will have a massive impact. It’s often little everyday things that most annoy people in the course of their daily work, so these make the perfect starting point when tackling change. I call these Little BIGS—little changes, big impacts. We’ve found that a quiet, almost stealthy approach is often most effective. Change should be experienced—not just announced. Charging a group to simply start shaking things up and then modeling behaviors yourself is a more powerful way to get people to accept that change is possible than hanging a poster in the cafeteria. As employees at all levels are encouraged to provoke change, they will subtly influence their peers in ways that create a powerful groundswell. It all starts with Little BIGS.
Evolve and Iterate
Finally, change means different things to different people and different organizations can accept varying amounts of change at varying paces. This is another reason why one-size-fits-all doesn’t work. As you roll out these tools and exercises, you’ll learn things about your organization, your fellow employ-
-ees, and yourself. You’ll need to incorporate that new knowledge and continually evolve in your approach.
Employees must be empowered to use a flexible toolkit of exercises, tips, tricks, and prompts that enable them to start activating change in the context of their own organization. Trial and error are imperative to determining what works, along with seeking out the expertise and feedback of your teams, clients, and partners. That may mean hearing things you would rather not. But even if you find you’ve made a misstep, it will be easy to correct because you won’t be grappling with massive programs. You’ll have started small, so you can quickly observe what’s working well and then adjust as you move forward.
This is what I’ve learned about what it takes to make change stick and ensure your hopes for innovation materialize. But before you jump in and start trying to shake things up, it’s helpful to gauge how open to change you—your organization, your team, or you as an individual—are today. Is your culture as a whole stifling innovation, or will just a small tweak here and there get your cylinders firing wildly again? Does your organization possess the right skills to take on tomorrow? What skills and behaviors do you already possess and where can you improve? You can take stock of your innovation situation by taking the futurethink Innovation Capabilities Diagnostic – you can download this for free by visiting www.futurethink.com/research-tools-library/ and downloading the Cheat Sheet.
Lisa Bodell is the CEO of futurethink (www.futurethink.com) and author of Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution.
Visit futurethink.com/freepreview for a free preview of the book.
For more on Innovative leadership, please visit www.tmgovu.org