BankerVision

Its not about faith any more

Sadly, I have heard today another innovation effort I’ve been following has died aborning. They got so close, too.

Well, maybe not died, but “put on hold”, which is the usual line you get from senior execs who haven’t quite been able to take the leap of faith that’s needed to execute an innovation effort.

There’s been a lot of this, lately. I think organisations in recovery lose their will to innovate as their bottom lines recover. As I’ve said before, really game-changing innovation happens only when there’s a some kind of stress that upsets the status quo. The rest of the time, most firms are satisfied to have incrementalism, which they can get from Lean or Six Sigma as easily as they can from innovation efforts.

Innovation takes a leap of faith.

You have to believe that if you don’t innovate you’ll be out of business.

You have to believe that if do, you’ll reach new levels of success. 

And you need to believe this despite the fact that everything’s working fine right now.

Some religions ask you to believe in less and give you more evidence.

We may be heading for an innovation economy, but rationalists will never make business decisions based on faith.  Oh, some visionaries have done, but the majority are innovation atheists.

The next few years are going to be tough for the innovation community, because mushy case studies and anecdotal successes are never going to convince rationalists that what’s going on is valuable. Especially when everything is getting back on an even keel without the leap of faith.

We need hard evidence. If you invest this, you’re going to get that. And its worked in a predictable way in these situations.

We need accountants running the innovation process. I know the horror that the creatives reading this will feel, but the discipline of innovation is not a creative process. It’s about running the numbers, about a business capability that needs to be measured and reported on like any other.

Its time for innovators to get boring. Even better, for them to become accountants.

Promotions Cultures & Innovation

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed working for Government*, it is there’s an endemic promotions culture here, far worse than anything I’ve seen anywhere else.

A promotions culture is what you get when the main objective of everything you do at work is to get to the next grade level. For some people, that’s a financial incentive more than anything else. Others want that promotion for the status and power that goes with it. A few, very few, want to be at the next level so they have an opportunity to make a bigger difference.

A sign of a promotions culture is everyone talks about the “career limiting move”.

I don’t believe in career limiting moves, though of course if it is evident that someone isn’t ready or capable of the next role, that’s something else. I mean, you have to prove that you’re ready for the next role if you want to get the next role.

Proving you’re ready requires a little bit of risk taking. In healthy corporate cultures, that’s behavior which is rewarded.

Not so in a promotion culture.

In a promotion culture, you are rewarded for being as similar as possible to the group of people who decide your next promotion. It is human nature to like those who are similar to us, so pretending to be as similar to your boss as possible is sensible.

In a promotion culture, you are rewarded for showing that you steer a steady course, one that doesn’t rock the boat. It is human nature for bosses to like it when their lives are easy, so promoting those that make it so is an easy decision.

And in a promotion culture, longevity of service, dedication to the organization as it is today, and conformance to all corporate norms is behavior that’s rewarded. A maverick might destabilize the steady progression of everyone else, so being the same as everyone else is the behavior that’s wanted.

You’ll all know where I’m going with this. Promotions cultures destroy any organizational capability to innovate, because they act to petrify the present status quo.

What can you do if you’re stuck in a promotions culture?

The best advice, I think, is find someone who’s senior who didn’t get senior by virtue of the promotions culture. They’ll have a different perspective on things than everyone else, and be willing to take a few more risks.

I consider myself lucky that my boss is in that category. He came into the Department from the outside, and has allowed me the liberty to do things I really doubt few others get.

If you aren’t lucky enough to be in that position though, what else can you do?

I think the choice is really very simple. You are either on the promotions bandwagon, or you’re off it.

In the former case, you should accept that you aren’t able to make any meaningful change, or take risks, or create a better future. Those things are incompatible with getting promoted.

If you’re off the promotions bandwagon, on the other hand, you can do all those things with impunity. You won’t be rewarded for doing so, of course, since rewards are reserved for those on the bandwagon. But you’ll have the chance to make a really significant difference.

Since I’ve joined the Government, promotions have become much harder to get by virtue of the fact that the resources available are being scaled back. And guess what? There’s lots more risk taking and innovative behavior going on. People are being far less conformant. They’re recognizing the old rewards system is changing.

Isn’t that an interesting outcome from public sector austerity?

* I feel I must point out, for any hacks who decide to hatchet me for having a blog daring to comment, that these pages are a private effort not reflecting the views of the Department, or any present or future employer. Yes, I sometimes sail deliberately close to the wind, but I do it with intent, ‘cause sometimes the best way to drive change is talk about it openly. And in case this post isn’t evidence enough, I want you all to know I opted out of the promotions culture on about, um, day 2. Follow #welovebaskers on Twitter.

Reboot business as usual

I think it is time we considered taking radical steps.

The problem, you see, is that even though everyone says innovation is important, that it’ll be the driver of all future competitive advantage, and those organisations that fail to innovate will die, no one really believes it. Or at least, they don’t believe it in their hearts, even if they accept it with their brains.

Their hearts are wedded to business as usual, and with good reason. That’s what pays the bills. Or keeps the lights on, if you happen to be a support organsiation of some kind.

I went to visit an organization in Madrid yesterday* one of the few examples of a company I can find that’s actually had it’s corporate heart won over as well as its mind. For them, business as usual is innovation. Everything they do is directed towards it. Everyone pulls in the same direction, even at the frontline. And they’re reaping big, big rewards, even thinking of expanding internationally.

I’m not telling you who it is, but, I will say this: incredibly, it’s a bank.

Before they had their change of heart, they were an organization in crisis and had little choice but to try something new. 

Most organisations aren’t in crisis, so there’s not much chance they’ll be forced to try doing different. Even in the banking system which was in crisis, it wasn’t a big enough crisis to cause much to change. A pity really. I say that knowing the incredible economic pain an even worse collapse would have caused. 

But we’re talking about safeguarding the future here, not protecting the past.

Anyway, as I said, I think it is time to take radical steps. We have to convince people’s hearts as well as their minds that doing everything differently is the new business as usual. Since everything else we’ve tried has failed to do that, maybe its time we engineered a crisis.

I think the step we should take is this: lets reboot business as usual. 

What I mean by that is deny business-as-usual resources, take away the crutches that make it work in its ok-is-good-enough way,  and force it into change. Deliberately goad it into finding ways to survive. Continually test it,  knowing that the price of failure is game-over.

There’s been years of this in IT organsiations, of course. The constant drive to cut costs, to do more with less. To perform or be out-sourced. The technology driven productivity gains that many organsiations have enjoyed have been a result of this drive. But do you, for one moment, imagine that left to itself and without an externally imposed drive to cut costs and do more with less, IT would have done any of this? 

No matter how well-meaning the people involved, I just can’t see it. When you are flush with resources, you sit back and enjoy using them.

On the other hand, my observation is people, when faced with a crisis, almost always find extraordinary ways to do great things. They shine in a way that few do when there’s no critical imperative driving them forward. They may not be comfortable, but they are amazing.

So I think we need to reboot business-as-usual in order to win the hearts as well as minds to the cause of innovation. Do the reboot gradually, but do it deliberately. Take away one crutch at a time until everything is on the brink of collapse.

Except I bet it won’t collapse. Something new and amazing will emerge instead. 

Such a reboot, of course, requires a leap of faith. And that requires very enlightened management, management willing to gamble because they believe rather than know. 

But as an innovator I know this: business-as-usual is the new enemy of economic growth. Not everything done the old way is bad, but when you add everything done the old way together, what you have is rotten to the core.

* For Daily Mail hacks, and any in the general public who might be incensed that I’d dare to travel internationally to visit someone for innovation work, I want you to know that I’ve taken annual leave today. And that my travel expenses are being met by the company I’m visiting. Follow #welovebaskers on Twitter.

The (other) innovators dilemma

Everyone knows sooner or later some upstart is going to come along with something that disrupts your business. And everyone knows that the chances of executing a "disrupt yourself" strategy to avoid the upstart it is practically impossible, because you have all these incumbent people hell bent on preserving what's working now. That's the innovators' dilemma.

But there's another innovator's dilemma and it is this:

Faced with a disruptor, should you jump ship or persevere where you are, trying to save the future?

The qustion really boils down to something pretty basic: do you have the guts to wreck the present business to save the future when almost everyone has failed before you?  

Saving the future is the real mission of the corporate innovator.

Saving the future means standing up to the most powerful people in a organisation and letting them know they're part of the problem.

Because there is very significant personal risk in doing this, very few innovators rise to the saving-the-future challenge. 

And, as a result, almost all organisations face the original innovators dilemma eventually.

Practically none survive it.

Innovation and performance management

Hat tip to Stefan Lindegard who quotes David Nordfors post speaking to the challenges of the corporate innovator:

“When someone tries to innovate within a traditional organization,

few will understand what he/she is doing,

but everybody will understand who is a trouble-maker.

After the innovation has been embraced by the organization,

few will remember who started it,

but everybody will remember who was a trouble-maker.

This is the dilemma encountered by many intrapreneurs -

they risk punishment for success.”

If you accept the above - and it's really hard not to if you've ever tried to drive innovation in a large organisation - it is possible to conclude that if noone remembers you as a troublemaker, then you haven't been innovating. 

And what follows is innovators will rarely, if ever, fit well with a traditional performance management system. 

I have to be honest with you and admit I've sat in performance review meetings and lowballed troublemakers. The reason? The trouble they caused wasn't actually helping me, regardless of whether it was helping someone else. The problem perhaps, is that the benefit coming from the trouble-maker isn't often visible. There is such a thing, after all, as  a troublemaker who is just a troublemaker.

Anyway, as a result, the innovator-troublemaker is pretty likely to miss out on promotions, financial rewards, and other forms of internal recognition. I have, often. My own experience tells me its nothing unusual for innovators, in fact, to be more recognised outside their organisations than inside for the work they do. 

This seems to be true regardless of how much support the innovator has from executive management. It is a direct result of the skew performance management systems have to rewarding those behaviours that keep a business running today.

If there is an answer, I think it must be that performance management systems need to be realigned to reinforce behaviours that keep the business runnning tomorrow. Not today. Today can take care of itself.

That's a leap of faith, of course, and one I think few managers, especially in command-and-control organisations will be comfortable with. Experience - probably an oxymoron with the rate of change in workplaces today - tells them they need to metricate and manage everything, and tomorrow is far, far too far away.

Kate Bennet on innovation

Kate Bennet has written an excellent post on her experiences working in our innovation team. She brings out 11 points - all of which hit the mark - on how to make an innovation function work in a large organisation.  Its excellent, so go and have a look.

The last Windows ever

As many of you know, we've recently done a deal with Fujitstu to refresh our desktop estate. We're going to have the latest Office, the latest Windows, and all of it will be delivered via the network to clever thin client terminals or thin spec notebooks. Considering we're presently struggling along with XP, this will be a bit of a leap from where we are presently. 

I 'd imagine we'll have this new environment - or an incremental iteration of it - for maybe a decade. Perhaps a bit more. It takes that long for a desktop operating environment to get so long in the tooth that no matter what you do you can't keep it going any longer. And we'll keep it that long because the costs of getting a working desktop in the first place are so absurdly high that doing anything else is completely irresponsible.

Personally, I think it likely this is  the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys, though. 

The reason? I think they'll be fewer workloads that actually require a heavy deskop stack. Today, of course, we have all this legacy that's coupled to the desktop, but in a decade, I really doubt that will be the case. Most stuff will arrive via the browser.

Furthermore, its not impossible to imagine that they'll be ubiquitous wirless networking everywhere, even those difficult places outreach workers sometimes have to go. So we won't need a heavy desktop stack in order to make sure offline works.

And, in a decade, our security colleagues will no doubt have found clever ways to let us do all this without the fortress stuff they presently require of us.

Can you really imagine we'd need much more than a tablet-like device in such an enviornment? I can't.

Oh, I know there'll still be some occasions you'll need everything local, maybe developing apps for example, but by far the greatest marjority of our workers won't need that stuff.

The real question, I think, is what Microsoft will do to restore the value of Windows. In the past, their strategy has been to shift the operating system up the value chain, taking more specialised functionality from apps and embedding it in the base platform. They did that with Internet Explorer, for example. With messaging queueing and transaction services, and a whole pile of other things that were once separate apps.

That's obviously over because most of the action is now happening in the datacentre (or the cloud). 

From a strategic point of view, if you're designing the future technology estate of a large organisation, that last thing it makes sense to do in this kind of context is build stuff that depends on a desktop stack. Furthermore, decoupling legacy from the desktop stack also has to be on the agenda, because you just can't count on that stack being relevent in 10 years time.  

It feels funny, doesn't it, thinking about Windows in the context of it being irrelevent, after all these years we've relied on it. I guess it proves, again, that change is the only constant.