When you think of innovation impact you must think about outcomes. Depending on the specific outcomes you are seeking to achieve, you will likely perform a multidimensional assessment at the idea level to help you map your innovation portfolio. However, when it comes to the overall impact of your innovations efforts, I believe that impactful innovation at the business level usually comes down to two major metrics: the impact on the people you lead, and the impact on the business results you produce.
Looking at a simple spectrum for each of those, you can have low to high engagement with your teams in terms of the successful implementation of innovation initiatives, and you can have poor to great business results. Converting these metrics into a two-by-two matrix allows you to examine the characteristics of each of the quadrants, so you can better define your current state and potential actions to increase impact.
High engagement with poor results: The Party Zone
If you have high engagement with your teams, there’s lots of energy, post-its are flying… but, you are not seeing a lot of results yet, then you likely are in what I call the Party Zone. Everyone is having a blast, culture is great, everyone loves it, but you are not currently realising tangible value from it. This is generally where we find the majority, particularly when initiatives are driven purely from a culture-enhancing lens.
Don’t get me wrong, I am the first one to propose and support a people-centric approach, but if you make the efforts exclusively about engagement you risk performing what’s commonly described as innovation theatre. This situation will feel good for a bit until it doesn’t. If you want to be able to build something that lasts from which people genuinely benefit from engaging with, then business results in alignment with your strategy are a must.
Great results with low engagement: The Stress Zone
On the other hand, you might have an approach where you are maximising business results, focusing on efficiencies and driving a performance culture…but, people are not as engaged with your initiatives. You have their hands and feet, but not their hearts and minds. If that’s the case, you might be in what I call the Stress Zone.
Some companies find themselves here at the starting point, when they implement the initiative but with a heavy focus on results, eroding the experience elements that make it so valuable. This is the ‘innovate or else’ approach, where lots of things are happening and therefore some results are likely, but they might be more of the incremental improvement type and less about true transformation and value creation.
You can also find yourself here as a result of spending too much time in the Party Zone and then having to scramble to realise business value before the board decides to shut the whole thing down unless you can show them the benefits – and show them soon.
Low engagement and poor results: The Frustration Zone
Now if for some reason you find that engagement is low and you are not quite getting any value, you may be in what I call the Frustration Zone. This can happen at the very beginning, when the original culture is harder to influence, people don’t see the value in pursuing this approach yet, and the small wins are still some distance away, so there’s nothing wrong with starting here. But you can also stay here if there was never any real support from the top to begin with, and this is priority number 12 (aka – not a priority).
You can get here as a result of coming from the Party Zone when the original people run out of steam and there’s no succession because there’s no results to support career progression. You can only sustain the party for so long before you need to recharge, and having a solid talent pipeline to sustain the efforts will only happen if people see real benefits in jumping in.
Another way you can find your company here is by coming from the Stress Zone because people are so burnt out that they simply cannot care about producing the results anymore. The level of focus required for the initial results would have likely come from a handful of really committed people that were trying hard to prove it to the business first, with the hope that engagement could be built from it. Only they never got there because no one can sustain that drive for so long without support from existing teams and culture.
You are not alone.
If any quadrant so far or the transitions between them sound familiar, that’s ok. Stop here for a second and consider, which one of these do you feel relates more closely to your situation? Are you perhaps tilting too much towards culture-building at the expense of results? Or the other way around? Or none?
Great results through high engagement: The Impact Zone
The final quadrant is where you have a high level of engagement by the teams, they see the value for the business and themselves, they create momentum behind it, and get more people involved. This is what I call the Impact Zone, and this is where I would like each and every one of you to take your businesses into.
When teams are in this quadrant, they generate shifts in the way you approach clients and customers, the way you serve them, the way you arrange the company to execute, and you enter the virtuous cycle of testing, learning, and iterating that produces great business results.
A proposed way forward
What happens if you find yourself outside of the Impact Zone? What actions might you be able to take to help define a plan of action to take you there? Here is a non-exhaustive list of steps to help you define where it would make the most sense to focus your efforts first:
- Evaluate your current state
- Determine which way you need to go by defining clear success criteria
- Evaluate the true level of support from the top – budget allocations, who’s vocal about it, who’s sponsoring it, is it featured prominently in your strategy, etc.
- Ensure the leadership team’s definition of success and yours are aligned by agreeing on the process (milestones, gateways, etc.) rather than the results – this one is key.
- Define the team structure for your efforts based on the agreed success criteria
- From the agreed process and success criteria, derive expected behaviours, metrics, and KPIs that would support them. This needs to be up and down. Embed these into your existing and regular performance-related processes.
- Test. Learn. Iterate.
What each of these steps entails will be specific to your situation and context, so you can use them as a framework to explore and define the most relevant actions and their associated timelines and owners. It is all about gaining clarity on your available options so you can increase the confidence in your decisions. This in turn allows you to take control of your actions and results.
What is one action you can implement this week as a result of reading this article? Give it a go and let me know how you go!
