Sink or swim: now is the time for strategic change & innovation

The pandemic is forcing businesses to innovate at an unprecedented pace.  The survivors can make innovation a long-term core strength by combining their experiences with newly proven principles.

Covid-19 is the ultimate ‘burning platform’, a powerful driver of strategic change.  Companies have shifted their business models almost overnight and made, in days, major changes in IT and ways of working that would normally have taken months.  Creative thinking and rapid prototyping overrode objections and bureaucracy. Innovation became a survival skill, but what were its key lessons? 

Understand the power of constraints

Often, innovation is seen as creativity plus implementation.  People take an issue, do some open-ended brainstorming, and enact a novel solution that meets the need. But, it turns out that we innovate best when given a difficult objective and tough constraints[1].  Covid-19 did that.  Businesses faced challenges like, ‘Establish a new delivery channel to serve vulnerable customers and launch it in 48 hours’.  Imagine if they’d had 48 weeks; we know they’d have used all of them and might not have produced a better result.  Constraints that drove new thinking and fast implementation. 

Form teams with diverse thinking

Leaders struggle to manage crises, or even simply respond to them if they try to control everything.  It makes them feel secure and, they believe, reassures fearful employees. That traditional approach[2] can work in emergencies – like a fire evacuation – where a well-planned procedure must be executed.  But in unfamiliar situations, it breaks down. Leaders can’t know enough fast enough to create new solutions themselves. Innovation means involving people at all levels - which fails if they all think the same way.  Therefore, leaders must explicitly involve diverse views, capabilities and experiences.  Demographic diversity will help and is important in its own terms, but the priority is to involve people who can see things differently and promote new solutions[3]. 

Enter, inclusive leadership: sharing power and decision making with others less powerful and fostering feelings of inclusion[4,5]. Through encouragement, recognition, respect and fair treatment, inclusive leadership significantly improves team innovation[6]. Creating safe spaces where diverse thinking is applauded and all employees feel valued is critical:

• Be curious: Seek out others’ perspectives and ideas regularly. 
• Amplify the quiet voices: Do you hear from everyone? Can you invite the views of quieter members more or ask for views in a different forum (by email or 1:1?).
• Reflect on your response: Do you dismiss others’ ideas too soon? Even if dismissed on merit, how could your reaction have affected the likelihood they will bring their next, best idea to you? Be open and respond neutrally, non-judgementally.
• Be clear why ideas were chosen; have a clear rationale. This includes everyone in the thought process. 
• Encourage constructive challenge and mistakes: Welcome improvements to ideas and create situations designed for experimentation and mistake-making. Better yet, admit your own mistakes. 

Learn what worked for you and why

When projects go wrong there’s the inevitable post-mortem – with or without blame, depending on your culture – to find out why.  But the lessons of success are often lost.  The pandemic offers a unique opportunity to work out how you achieved what you did.  Individual debriefing, surveys, team storyboarding, and cause/effect mapping all help discover the processes, assumptions and thinking that can inform future innovation.

Innovation becomes a core post-pandemic capability when you can discover the sources of your success, combine them with constraint-based, diverse thinking, and use motivators that unleash a team’s creativity wherever they are working.  And if you are still in the thick of Covid-19, it’s still possible to start building that capability now.