Structure of Upcoming Book
Why do we need a new book and a new methodology for Innovation?
For the past generation of innovation and project management, many organizations have leveraged some combination of formal methodologies (like Agile and Waterfall). Even with education, certifications, and repetition in practice, projects feel more difficult than they should. Innovation failure rates remain high. Over the past decade, many organizations have slipped into a culture of meeting gridlock and email overload, with no clear path to escape. Finally, culture is important, and many conversations about culture remain ambiguous and detached from day-to-day realities.
Conventional methodologies are software-oriented. What makes innovation difficult is not software. What makes innovation difficult is the people - how we interact, collaborate, compete, and govern each other. It’s time for a people-oriented methodology. You must innovate how you innovate.
Straightforward tools exist to resolve these issues.
My upcoming book, with the working title “Innovation Elegance: Transcending Agile With Ruthlessness and Grace,” educates you on these tools. The book is organized into three areas: the WHY, WHAT, and HOW to innovate with elegance. These blog posts are appetizers for the book.
Your organization might not literally BE a factory, but you should manage your innovation work like a factory because you care about all the same things that a generic factory cares about: economics, speed, quality, waste, vigilance, variability, automation, autonomy, ease, and elasticity). Anything less-than-healthy or dysfunctional in your culture impacts your factory. The factory metaphor is instrumental to minimize dysfunction in your culture. Connect the dots between traits of your culture to these ten dimensions of your factory. This is culture … disguised as a factory.
Your organization cannot meet and email its way to success. You must document things, outside email, in a collaborative manner. Five Verbs is all you need to organize and complete your documentation with ruthless accountability - Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute. This site organizes three categories for these assets: project-independent, project-specific, and technology. These documents are valuable for months, even years, effectively making them assets. Executing this Ruthless Factory results in a valuable Asset Portfolio. This is culture … disguised as a template.
The Ruthless Factory is critical for success, but on its own, it’s dry, sterile, and unforgiving. An innovation methodology needs some creativity, empathy, passion, and purpose. Customers and employees want some pizzazz. Applying basic lessons from Performing Arts accomplishes this.
Although your innovation team is not literally a symphony, you should manage it like one, because you want all the same positive culture traits. Connect the dots between traits of your culture to dimensions of Music, Dance, Improv, Theater, Martial Arts, and Parenting. Whether you are a world-famous playwright, a local musician, or a parent of five, the results of your Graceful Factory also comprise an Asset Portfolio. This is culture … disguised as a symphony.
Through these tools, my hope is that you can lead innovation, with confidence, with elegance, and with success for all stakeholders feeling inevitable.
Formal positioning statement
For Change Leaders ready to transcend conventional management disciplines, Elegance is the innovation methodology that leads to a breath-taking stakeholder experience and inevitable success, unlike existing methodologies, so that leaders can maximize value via the ruthlessness of an Asset Portfolio and the grace of the Performing Arts.