When organisations are often too ponderous to innovate, what proven approaches exist to bridge the internal gap between the opposing needs of entrepreneurialism and operationalism?
This talk will explore emerging approaches that utilise the internal tensions between innovators and conservative communities. We’ll explore the importance of designing for team structures and communication pathways that are driven by cognitive load, social capital and end-to-end value creation.
These approaches create the conditions that will support risk-taking, enable greater agility and increase market competitiveness.
The Closing the Entrepreneurial Gap talk will describe how leaders should create space where entrepreneurs can be protected from the operators who may impose conditions and procedures poorly designed for the innovation.
Themes
The rate of organisational adaptability must be greater than the market’s
The barriers to innovation, such as operational culture, stifles the emergence of entrepreneurialism
The myths and mistakes organisations make when attempting to create innovation and alignment
Utilising the natural tension between traditionalists and entrepreneurs to create lasting innovation
Creating end-to-end value using team topologies which considers cognitive load and clear collaboration lines
Research and personal stories of how organisations have overcome scepticism and have achieved innovation and greater business agility
This workshop introduces Wardley Mapping as a technique to understand the chain of components an organisation needs to serve user needs. It creates situational awareness by mapping the maturity of each component, and the visibility of the component to the user. It allowing organisations to better strategise and improve their effectiveness and competitiveness.
The workshop can be delivered in 60 to 120 minutes. It’s team-based and can be run for any number of teams.
In this example, mapping helps the CIO communicate the need to embed new activities to increase business agility and innovation.
The envisioning workshop is a group facilitation activity which:
Co-creates a shared business vision to unite behind
Identifies and prioritises strategies which are faithful to the vision
Generates the momentum to test and execute the strategic objectives
It helps ensure the co-created vision, strategic alignment and execution are in keeping with the elements described in Starting an Engagement.
Setup and Agenda
Participants should be the leadership team, stakeholders and key representatives from the execution team (aka delivery team). Ideally, there should be between five and nine participants, plus the workshop facilitator(s).
Duration: Typically 3-4 hours
Agenda
Co-creation of the vision statement
Identify measures of success
Brainstorm strategies which will help deliver the vision
Prioritise strategies
Setup cadence and move into execution
Co-creation of the vision statement
To gain alignment it’s important that all participants co-create the vision. The vision describes an ambitious and motivational future-state for the business. This vision is written as a vision statement, which has the following qualities:
Succinct – one or two sentences
Visionary – Drives motivation to create a beneficial future-state
Works on the team’s behalf – Help to communicate and gain alignment across the business
Aligns the team with their stakeholders
Easy for everyone in the business to understand
Scoped – removes any erroneous activities such as pet projects
To move with velocity to drive profitable growth and become an even better McDonald’s serving more customers delicious food each day around the world.
McDonald’s Vision Statement
We’ll save money by eliminating impediments to deliver a frictionless customer experience, which empowers our front-of-house colleagues.
A Vision Statement created by a team in a FTSE 100 company
Identify measures of success
Brainstorm and agree on three or four measures of success. These ensure the right benefits, behavioural changes and consequences will be achieved which will support the vision.
Some examples of measures of success:
Reduce the cost to serve
Increase customer retention
Increase customer satisfaction
Increase incremental sales
Reduce carbon emissions across the vehicle fleet
Measures of success should be found within the vision statement. The following measures of success are implied in the McDonald’s vision statement:
Profit growth
Customer growth
Customer satisfaction
Global scope
Brainstorm strategies which will help deliver the vision
Now facilitate the participants to brainstorm a number of strategies which will meet some or all of the measures of success, which they believe will help to fulfil the vision.
If the vision is transformational, encourage the creation of strategies which will test long-held assumptions.
Participants can write their strategies individually or in pairs. Each strategy idea should be written on post-it notes. Once participants have written a few each, remove any which the participants agree are duplicates.
A strategy is something which gives consistency over time and contains the essence of how you’re going to be different
Gary Hamel’s definition of strategy
Prioritise strategies
These strategies should now be ordered relative to each other. They should be ordered by their degree of perceived value towards achieving the vision, and by the perceived complexity of achieving the strategy.
There are a number of ways to understand and measure complexity. For example, consider Liz Keogh’s Estimating Complexity and my RUDE technique.
This stage of the workshop creates a spread of strategies where the following can be identified and discussed:
High-value strategies which are likely to have little complexity to deliver
High-value strategies which are complex to deliver
Low-value strategies which have little complexity to deliver
Low-value strategies which are complex to deliver
Participants should then reflect on the distribution of strategies, and be encouraged to debate, modify, reposition, and possibly remove strategies. This helps the participants create an ordered backlog of strategies.
Setup cadence and move into execution
Since each strategy has a degree of uncertainty, each strategy should be treated as a hypothesis to be proven or disproven through rapid experiments. Therefore, following the workshop, with close support of their leaders and stakeholders, execution teams should test and learn whether the strategies can be achieved.
These strategies should be tested through the innovations, products and services built by the execution teams. A Lean Startup approach should be employed utilising concepts such as the Minimum Viable Product. In partnership with the workshop participants, teams should be disciplined and ruthless in discontinuing ideas which don’t meet the strategic objectives.
A possible set of evaluation criteria can be the one described by the Ash Maurya:
Desirability: The innovation, product or service solves a problem for the beneficiaries of the product or service
Viability: The innovation, product or service fulfils its strategic objective
Feasible: The innovation, product or service can be built and sustained
Ash Maurya (leanstack.com)
Another set of criteria could be testing for problem-solution fit and product-marketfit.
A final stage of the workshop is for the participants to agree on how to brief and support execution teams to address two or three strategies from the top of the strategy backlog.
The continuation of existing strategies, innovations, products and services should be judged against their alignment to the vision and its measures of success.
A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision
Eric Ries
A cadence structure should be agreed and set-up for the participants to regularly meet, review and adjust the strategic fit to the vision. This should be done in union with the execution teams.
To ensure on-going alignment and support for execution teams, execution teams should be encouraged to make use of visual management techniques which demonstrates how their current and future work is testing the agreed strategies. The Cone-shaped Backlog is one such visual management technique.
The cone-shaped backlog ensures alignment to the vision, strategies and measures of success
In this talk learn how the Project/Programme Portfolio Office can support their business in recognising and handling uncertainty. Learn how the PMO can coordinate the balance and flow of initiatives through each stage of the delivery lifecycle, through to delivery of value.
