Building Hybrid Process & Learning Program
We have the privilege of working with organizational leaders on many highly strategic innovation capacity building projects, that due to confidentiality, cannot always be shown while the work is in progress or sometimes even after. Such is the nature of our customized innovation capacity building work. From time to time we can provide a few glimpses into this work stream.
We were recently asked to fix an "Innovation Playbook" created by a high profile competitor that seemed to make no sense at all to the client, but had been very costly. The client had boxes of the books that were not being used. At hundreds of pages in length it was barely functional. We were happy to engage.
"Innovation Playbooks" seem to be everywhere right now but many look like generic cookie-cutter productions with layers and layers of noise and not much signal. We recognize that "Innovation Playbooks" do not, in themselves, represent meaningful skill-building or capacity building although they seem to be often sold this way in the marketplace today.
We began by unpacking what was there and quickly came to the realization that the proposed "Innovation Playbook" process, when unpacked had 25+ steps, many of which made no sense and this was being proposed as acceleration!
With our global client expressing interest in aspects of multiple processes we designed a new approach for them that encapsulated the best of several methods including human-centered design, creative problem solving, agile and google sprint. (Stay tuned to future posts on the attributes.) We then utilized this method as the foundation for their new internal learning program, new skill-building materials and a new internal innovation acceleration academy. Among the considerations was the connecting of the process to the organizations strategic objectives, its diversity of organizational challenges and to the goals of creating cognatively inclusive culture. Its a multiple step dance that most "Innovation Playbooks" miss.
Within days of completion, incoming participants were actively engaged in the new workshop acceleration system that was attracting a lot of attention inside the organization.
With so much hype and confusion in the marketplace, around design thinking and other methods, a simple clarification of what came from where and for what purpose, can be very helpful to participants expected by the organization to make accelerated progress. In other words: Don't expect acceleration if your process and learning materials are a confusing mess!
We have been involved in innovation acceleration since we created the Innovation Acceleration Labs at Scient years ago. We happily still count numerous colleagues from that era among our active clients today.
We love capacity building and learning program design work. Always happy to have conversations with organizational leaders who need a collaborative thinking partner for such initiatives.
Not only did we write a book on the subject of innovation process design but we have active research in this direction assembling process models for book 2 of Innovation Methods Mapping now in progress with visible examples posted to the Lab on the book site. All very useful when it comes to helping organizational leaders create an approach that is meaningful to them without reinventing the wheel.
We also integrate ongoing learnings into our own hybrid Humantific methodology that we teach in our Complexity Navigation Program. Due to awareness of rising complexity and continuous change happening in the marketplace today we are seeing lots of interest in the subjects of both Navigating Complexity and Visualizing Complexity which are both part of what organizational leaders learn about in Humantific Academy.
Questions? Send us an email: kickitup (at) humantific (dot) com