Drop Innovation to succeed!

Innovation is a barrier to success. I have seen, again and again, where Innovation is the main blocker to the successful delivery of business value. Here are some of my learning and recommendations on how to avoid Innovation to succeed.

Innovation is the catch-cry of the decade. Innovate or perish. But Innovation is often the focus area that kills a delivery project.

I am seeing Innovation (with a capital I) as a noose around otherwise sound delivery projects' necks. This is Innovation as a Goal and it is a killer.

What are we talking about here?

Take a company I know. They have genuine Business Goals at risk, especially around falling Market Share. They need to mitigate these risks. With partially baked ideas as to why their share is falling they pull together a think tank of people from within the exec and business to ideate and envision the problem and design-think the solution.

And the problem? "We are not Innovative enough. Our customers want more Innovation. We need to Innovate. Innovation is the Goal!" So, what is the result? The project's targets are things like SOA is the Goal, As-a-Service or Public Cloud is the Goal, Reuse is Goal. We have been dragged down to Technology ideals and things we understand. No sign of the real customer challenges we can add value too.

Okaaay... This is not the first time I have heard this type of thinking and I am sure you have too. Innovation is one of several placeholders for real Goals. I've even heard these within the same organisation, for the same project, from different areas of the same team.

I want to tell you that NONE of these innovative Technology approaches is the Goal. All of them are tools, with which to build solutions to mitigate risks to genuine Business Goals. They are not the Goal itself.

So, what happens when we substitute real Goals for a "panacea" technical solution? We lose sight of what we are trying to mitigate with the investment in the project. Why the project exists. Why we are investing the companies money in this work. The delivery of Business Value.

Once the real Goals are substituted by design tools or solutions, our decision making has lost its compass. The purpose is cloudy and the measure of success is vague.

We must Innovate! What is that, a mobile app, perhaps? Moving to the "cloud"? Online forms? Who knows without the Business Value Goal to guide us.

Do we really believe that a vague Goal like Innovation can fix everything? I consider it lazy thinking. What is the result, projects with vague solutions as the goal, at least the ones I have observed, will hit a wall with time or costs. At that point, scope starts to be tightened and the missing Business driver slips even further away from being delivered.

Don't get me wrong here, lowercase i innovation is important - it is essential to lifting a good solution to a transformative one, but it must be in the right place. Innovation is a tool to meet your goals, not the goal itself. So, for me this, we must create converged conversations with the business. This is why I developed the 3D Investment Planning Process (I'll talk more about this in another article) which will:

• Define: Really define the business problem - often the missing link and never done - and don't forget to ask "Why?".
• Develop: Now that we have the real dilemma to address for our business. We have the context within which to grab the toolkits of innovation, design thinking, envisioning, and technology evolutions to address and transform the real business value. Technology is now the Business Enabler!
• Deliver: Ensure that the Business Why remains at the centre of the planning, governance, and delivery teams' thinking, and critically decision-making around project delivery.

Innovation, and the methodologies to create it, is an amazing thing but in the right context, and I have seen this in practice. It is NOT THE GOAL, the starting point, but a tool for moving from a good solution to a Business dilemma, to a transformation of Business thinking and value.

So, what do you think - do you agree? Should we ensure that Innovation is never the Goal? I am interested in your thoughts below.

Photo by Anton Shuvalov: Unsplash