Within big companies everybody wants to be an innovator. Innovation projects are started by executives and managers across the board and all of them want their teams to come up with the next big thing. Unfortunately, no matter how well equipped these teams are in terms of skills, talent, and resources, one of the reasons why many of these projects end up going nowhere is because these teams have terrible decision-makers as stakeholders. Here are some symptoms:
- Different project sponsors have problems aligning among themselves and they take too much time to make a decision on the direction of the project
- Same sponsors spend an inefficient amount of time waiting to syndicate results with the involved executives and when the long awaited meeting happens no clear decision is made
- Teams completely demoralized by all the constant changes in project scope, timelines, and resources
Needless to say, when I came across Scott Anthony's post "3 ways to fail cheap", I felt someone finally had the guts to talk about the not so rosy aspects of executing innovation.
"Increase the pace of decision making. Entrepreneurs with clearly bad ideas typically don't have the luxury of spending money on those ideas for too long. Companies, however, can let bad ideas linger for inordinate amounts of time because of slow decision-making processes. Shutting down flawed projects early avoids needless spending — and focuses resources on the best ideas."
The lesson here is that internal innovation teams who are ready to tackle any big hairy problem need managers and executives that can think in an agile way, make decisions quickly and enable the teams to move at the speed that is required.
On the contrary, managers who take a lot of time making decisions, are unfocused on their point of view, and fail at requesting prompt decisions from their superiors are just simply condemned to fail for good.
Photo by Sam UL
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So true. Made me think of an article by Roger Martin, dean of Rotman's, "Why decisions need design":
ReplyDelete"If the primary "product" of the most expensive chunk of the modern corporation is decisions, then how effective is the corporation at decision production? Is the defect rate on decisions low? Do the subsequent users of the decisions find the decisions to be of high quality, easy to use, and compelling? Is the cost of generating the decision lower or higher than the value of the decision?
If decision production is such a big deal, corporations should be paying very close attention to design of decisions -- as much or more attention than they pay to product or service design. In my experience, they aren't. Corporate decision factories feature extremely low-quality decision design."
I am currently in a project which has too many chiefs and too little Indians, and it shows directly in the outcome so far. Design is not a democracy, there is a clear need of a strong decision maker to keep focus and steer clear of too many compromises, only that way can you come to a truly good solution.