I believe the most important organizational competency is the ability to efficiently consume information, reflect, and act; to
adapt. The days of the suggestion box are gone; things move too quickly and are too complex to wait for suggestions alone; instead leaders should find ways to structurally create opportunities for people to find and improve products or services (a la Hack-A-Thons), or by finding innovative ways to tap into the “wisdom of the crowds”.
Gary Hamel pens an interesting piece on Best Buy’s efforts around crowd sourcing more accurate forecasting estimates by opening up the process to associates from its stores. By diversifying the skills and perspectives of forecasters you end up incorporating their various opinions, filters, biases, and channels of unique information into something that statistically has greater accuracy than simply relying on a core group of like-skilled individuals working on similar processes and probably under a similar worldview.
It’s a great example of middle management innovating within a large enterprise. Some quick tips based on the Best Buy experience:
– Minimize your political risk: stay away initially from anything dealing with very high visibility initiatives or those involving compensation
– Start with volunteers: “design your initial management experiment in a way that minimizes the number of permissions you need to get, while maximizing the chances of learning something new and useful.”
– Make it a game; keep it informal: It’s less threatening to those running the current approach
– Run the new process in parallel with the old: You’ll need the data to see if indeed progress continues over time
– Iterate: start small and grow based on success
What things are you doing in your organization to actively crowd source new perspectives, or to carve out time for individuals to create improvements to your products, services, or infrastructure? Innovation happens because of your
culture,
leadership, and treatment of your staff. I’d be happy to help you find ways to boost your bottom line by improving knowledge flow and growing your leaders’ capacity.
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