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| The Gurteen Knowledge Website |
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Innovation CafesWhere Practitioners learn to make their own rules |
 
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THE INNOVATION DILEMMA You are aware that innovation is essential to business success, but what can you actually do about it? You know that bringing in a team of consultants to audit your business around its ability and potential to innovate will lead to some important home truths being embalmed within a report that moulders in the organisational file 13. You probably know the answer to their questions already: that middle and functional management groups kill most of your innovation and that the present political stability of the organisation is based on continuing to allocate resources to leaders of declining products and services. You also know that introducing an external consultant’s language and model of innovation is the fastest way to build up internal resistance and sabotage by leaders, partners and employees. Your leaders’ attitude to innovation is close to St. Augustine of Hippo’s on chastity when he prayed: Oh Lord make me chaste, but not yet. But you know that you must innovate or die, but how do you give people credible permission to talk intelligently and honestly about innovation without having to excise them from the body of the business as political saboteurs? Everyone knows that innovation is key, but it remains easier to squeeze the margins and go for minor differentiation around existing products than to do something new. You want a conversation around innovation without the risk of upsetting your people or triggering defensive behaviours. You want to innovate and yet you know that whilst there are pressures to do something, there are even stronger, immediate pressures to maintain the status quo. One of the key tactics for overcoming NIH (not-invented-here) is to begin to shift your culture by introducing opportunities to build an authentic language that describes the problems as well as creating a climate of possibility for new alternatives. If a culture is the by-product of stabilising a successful technology based upon new knowledge that confers advantage, then that culture cannot shift without developing its own language of innovation. You are probably sick of Staff Attitude Surveys and the resulting communication exercises where leaders talk at their audiences in the name of engagement. You’ve tried Values, Leader Behaviours, Seven Habits, or “death by powerpoint”. You’ve chanted the slogan, you’ve got the T-shirt, the sticker, and the banner and the posters are up in the reception area. But even though you tick the box on your personal goals, you know that the real problem around innovation hasn’t been solved. The problem is that at the moment, the innovation opportunity hasn’t been defined by your people, the language of the problem and the language of the solution hasn’t been articulated. And everyone is so busy running trying to stand still, that they haven’t got the time to think about the alternatives, discuss or even give them a name. So now’s the time to consider an licensing a kind of conversation that builds knowledge-pull instead of knowledge-push through asking open questions that don’t initiate defensive behaviours around the status-quo. INNOVATION CAFES Victor Newman and David Gurteen decided to design Innovation Cafes (iCafes) building on the power of the knowledge café approach by designing rapid, documentable and dynamic conversations that encourage new practitioner behaviours to drive innovation within individuals and organizations. iCafes are designed to be delivered at the organisation’s preferred location, within a 2-hour facilitated session. There are 2 types of Innovation Café: open and focused. Open iCafes are designed for mixed audiences; whilst focused iCafes are delivered to dedicated work groups, teams or specific organizations. It’s a truism, that we probably know more than we can say, and that we don’t know what we know until some asks us a good question. It is also a problem that the literature of management can seem to encourage a myth of competence that ignores failure instead of learning from it. Innovation Cafes begin by asking questions to identify what doesn’t work now and turning it into usable knowledge for an immediate future. The entry innovation café workshop is designed to demonstrate how a new kind of conversation can quickly lead to documented, useable tactics in authentic language based both on candour as well as can-do. This is done initially by focusing discussion upon failure and encouraging participants to design an innovation process with every imaginable flaw within it. Participants identify the top 3 most powerful elements guaranteeing failure within their collection and are invited to reverse these through constructing antidote tactics expressed in some detail (based on Montgomery’s rule of three: that if you deal with the top 3 issues, everything else will sort itself out). Practical experience of running these iCafe opening workshops has shown how the thematic lessons to be learnt and applied differ within each organization. Facilitators are now encouraged not to retain documented output of iCafes for themselves, initially because of the confidential nature of discussions, but later to reduce the tendency to influence participants by giving inadvertent cues as to “correct” or generic learnings and reducing the power of the learning. Subsequent iCafes continue to explore tacit knowledge about failure and turn it into new, authentic rules about innovation by extending the iCafe approach to explore and learn from NIH (not-invented-here), visualizing an “Innovation Machine”, building innovating behaviours and constructing new freedoms to think and operate outside the present limited strategic box. The way we manage what we know about innovation or putting new ideas to work, is key to our continued survival and success. No business formula lasts forever and by the time the guru’s new book has been published, it’s already obsolete. Since rules are made to be broken, the questions become:  
are bringing iCafes to life.
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