Managing Innovation and Ideas in a Difficult Organisation
A "tip and tricks" kind of post
Working in a big corporation has its advantages and shortcomings. Depending on how these corporations are organized and, how they prioritize some areas of their business, have a high influence on how ideas are fostered and put into motion. The culture makes a great part of this equation and depending on how ideas are managed can be detrimental to its success.
Big corporations have the advantage of having several tools at one’s disposal. Access to these tools may need special authorisations from management or other decision-making people. Nevertheless, the tools might be at your disposal and the way those tools can be used depends highly on the political atmosphere of a given organisation. For that reason is important to understand well the political environment.
For example, in an organization I worked in the past, I created several Wikis for knowledge transfer within the team. Each couple of years I saw those websites being shut down due to decommissioned without a proper alternative or migration. I invested an enormous amount of time to provide my teams with easy and practical ways to write procedures, tips, and general knowledge. I saw those efforts being destroyed again and again by shutting down the tools I was using.
Highly bureaucratic organizations have a special challenge for being innovative and fostering new ideas. But they are highly dependent on the spirit the manager puts on a Team and how they perceive the quality of how those ideas handled by their manager. Providing roadblocks as a reply to an idea presented by a co-worker can set the tone of discomfort and cultivate a feeling of waste of time. Which will discourage future idea generation by that person or even their colleagues.
It is highly important to receive ideas with a positive attitude and hear carefully what your colleague wants to present to you. As a Manager, I sometimes put myself in a position of providing positive feedback to ideas that I don't feel will see the light of day. Or ideas that don't make sense to me. But these are only initial perceptions and I can be completely wrong. Or even worse, biased.
Overall the strategy is to get as much information about the idea, and with your experience, help your colleague to solidify the idea upon the first sharing. The market or the ecosystem we are working on will set the stage for the success or failure of a certain initiative. Your perception might be wrong and the only way to know if something makes sense or not is to put something to work and test it out.
But is it not a waste of time to test something that you truly expect to fail?
It depends on how you are contributing to the idea in the first place. Use your experience in your favor and cooperate with the conception and test framework. You don't need to implement something 100% to test if it makes sense to continue. Just test a small part of the idea and see what feedback you receive. If something is terrible wrong you will see it bluntly. You don't need to waste your time building the rest of the 90% of the idea to have the same conclusion.
Going back to the wiki example. On one of my newest teams, the Wiki was discontinued several years ago for the reasons listed above. Upon my arrival, I noticed the knowledge was scattered on several JIRA tickets making it even more impractical than using Word documents. But I got lucky here. One of my recruits, an experienced analyst but new in the organization, showed me another Wiki technology that was new to the organization. I already guessed it would be shut down in 2\3 years, but my colleague is not aware of this trend. I hid my frustrations on the topic and provided the ways to make the new platform a reality. Today, the level of information present on the new wiki is so good that any newcomer will have an easier learning curve into our procedures. What to do when it will be all deleted again? It will? Maybe I am so biased that eventually, this is the one that survives.
Use or knowledge of the organization in your favor. People working in big corporations tend to receive with distaste any innovation or idea, because it may increase their workload, or simply because they don't care about the outcomes and fruition of the company. You might handle people with low motivation and involvement. Be aware of that. For that reason is important to take control of the execution on your turf.
A very good idea, poorly executed, becomes a s*h& idea.
Don't lose sight of the execution and how an idea is being implemented. Make sure the person that is working on a feature is doing a good job at it. Inexperienced people have difficulty separating what is an idea that don't work from a task which is badly executed.
What to do with a lack of time and resources?
That's the first misconception right there. There is no such thing as "lack of time". Time is always provided to you. What you do on the time is based on your priorities. The first question is about how those priorities are defined? Is there a decision maker who can buy the idea? Maybe the decision maker has a close mindset and simply doesn’t care about innovation on a product or simply rejects any idea which is not sufficiently consolidated. If that's the case, build a strategy implementation and show the results of the "10% feature" testing. Sometimes seeing something working, even for a small bit goes great lengths to help build a vision.
One of my favorite tactics is the use of interns. This is where the big corporations have a big advantage. Consult how to tap into the internship programs of your organization. Interns receive with open arms ideas that are innovative and out of the box. The majority of the teams don't know what to do with an intern. If you take the lead with something that can provide very good fruition, just put an intern with the right skills on it. Don't expect a 100% product. Manage what you can achieve with the skillets at your disposal. If an idea is truly good, it will see its priority at the top eventually
Foster and Realise Achievements
Big corporations can have a very downward mentality in the sense of an "everything is wrong and not working" mentality. Create sessions where you can show progress and show that something is moving forward. This is not a fail-safe approach for people with the most discouraged mentality. Some of them will continue to be disbelievers that something will go better. But in a team, you just need to sell positivity using results bit by bit to several people. Eventually, you will turn some down-minded people to become more optimistic. You don't control how people take their lives and perceptions, but you can show them facts.
Good Innovation Management is more of a mindset. It is a way of behaving positively on an idea, contributing to its muscle and composition. Finally, create an ecosystem where those ideas can flourish. This depends entirely on you. All big corporations have deep flaws, but they also have more tools at their disposal. Tap into them to make good things happen.