The strategic imperative has been communicated and a team is formed but progress is slow to non-existent. What’s the matter? Everyone inside and outside the team agrees something must be done, so why is it starting to feel like the problem is too big for us? It seems like personal agendas are getting in the way. It’s not clear […]
Don’t Just Fail Fast — Learn Fast! Fail with a Purpose!
Your projects are running into problems late in the development process. They are fully staffed and some of them even look to be moving on pace through the use of daily stand-up meetings, visual management and obeya rooms and then – BAM! – a problem arises which requires significant back-tracking in the design, a resetting […]
Commitment Starts with Understanding What You Are Signing up For
In talking about the last “C” of Clarity, Confidence and Commitment, I want to focus on the importance of trust and the power of knowledge over ignorance. As was pointed out in Scott Atkin’s last blog post, when attempting to encourage necessary innovation within an organization, it is not sufficient to simply say “Act entrepreneurially, let’s […]
Realizing Innovation: It Takes a Village!
When executive management looks to improve a company’s innovation capability, their gaze typically settles on the group of technical folks; engineers, scientists and/or programmers collectively called something like R&D, Development or Engineering. I suppose this is a reasonable place to start, but true improvement needs to extend beyond the technical team as can be seen […]
Does It Deserve to Be Called Innovation? Does It Really Matter?
Innovation means different things to different people. The definitions range from simply a new idea or invention to bringing that idea to life in a market or even restricting the definition to include only those things that achieve significant change in the world. We often think of innovations as things we couldn’t have imagined before […]