The truism that any organisation that wants to survive and thrive in today’s world must be a successful serial innovator is most acutely felt in high-tech and other knowledge based organisations where both the pace and nature of innovation are at their most extreme. ‘Innovation’ is often  considered synonymous with ‘R&D’ or ‘creativity’. But successful serial innovators do not just generate more and better ideas, but more importantly manage to deal with the ‘down in the trenches’ organisational defences that stop good ideas before they make it to market.

It’s not hard to see why this happens. Any major innovation is by definition a significant departure from what made the organisation successful in the past. Hence the new innovation will appear to be a threat to the existing organisation.

To be a successful serial innovator, creativity and ideation are definitely necessary, but they are not sufficient. An organisation that works on improving creativity without dealing with its own internal defence mechanisms will not only fail to get full benefit from its improvement efforts, but may well end up worse off than before. Why? People who receive training or coaching in new ways to enhance, unleash and harness their creativity generally return to their organisations with great enthusiasm to apply what they learned. This heightened level of enthusiasm in turn invokes an equally heightened defensive response from the organisation. Unless this response is dealt with constructively and effectively, all but the hardiest of would-be innovators simply give up. Those who don’t throw in the towel can all too easily conclude that their personal aspirations as innovators would be better served by leaving for what they see as greener pastures elsewhere. In this way organisations often lose the very people who embody their best chances for future greatness.

Consider how Chester Carlson had his photocopying technology turned down by Kodak, IBM and GE all and so went on to establish his own company - one that we know today as Xerox. Consider how Alan Kay and colleagues succeeded in creating the ‘office of the future’ at Xerox Coroporation’s own Palo Alto Research Center and Xerox failed to commercialise almost all of these innovations.

 Successful serial innovation requires a dynamic balance of alignment (people moving forward together with a shared purpose) and agility (the ability to change direction fast and frequently to create and capture new opportunities) at the heart of your organisation’s culture.

The competitive pressures on organisations today are huge. New entrants change the rules of the game with new value propositions and ways of doing business.

Innovative competitors combine new ways of doing business with emergent technologies to create powerful new platforms for performance.

Familiar fences between industries, sectors and organisations are breached, blurred or broken down completely.

As the pace and turbulence of change continues to increase exponentially, even the most established incumbents are compelled to continuously renew their relevance or die.

The (Brave) New Era

Futurists and pundits all say that the future isn’t what it used to be and that continuous and never ending change is here to stay. You can master it or be mastered by it; but you can’t ignore it. They predict that historians will look back on this time as one of fundamental change in organisations.

The terra firma of the past, was alignment in a context of stability; hence change was perceived to be a threat. Organisations responded to change at first by resisting, then restructuring in an attempt to regain a new stable performance platform through ‘change management’.

But eventually the rate of change is so great that the organisation has barely enough time to find its feet before the next wave of change hits. For many organisations that time is here; for others it is on the horizon.  .

In future, performance will come from sustained serial innovation based on a platform of alignment combined with agility in a context of continuous and never ending change. As such, change will be perceived as an opportunity and embraced as a natural and inevitable fact of life.

. Amongst the most challenging of the implications this hass for organisations is the effect on leaders, particularly those who have excelled in an old era context. The leadership skills, competences and styles that worked best in the past are markedly disticnt -and in many cases in direct conflict - with those required for the future.

Even leaders who intellectually accept and seek to personally embrace new era leadership ‘values’ can find them surprisingly difficult to live out in practice. The reasons for this include: the continued expectations from influential stakeholders who still think in old era terms; the expectations of subordinates who on the one hand want greater influence and autonomy but who may not have much experience of fulfilling the reciprocal obligations that come with these; and simply the very human and personal challenge of change.

At Aligned Agility we not only sympathise with these challenges but also support you and your colleagues in facing them.