Freedom to Operate: how to escape the strategy box

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INNOVATION CAFES

• Where practitioners make their own rules
• This opening innovation café workshop
  demonstrates a conversation that leads to
  documented, useable tactics in authentic language
  within 2 hours.

Victor Newman knowledgeworks_at_aol.com
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iCafe Menu

• Typical Open iCafe
• Discovering and building your own innovation
  rules by the power of conversation.
• Focused continuation iCafe topic cycle
• iCafe 2 Implementing Innovation by building
  tactics to overcome NIH cultures
• iCafe 3 Visualising the Innovation Machine to
  design a winning capabilities into your
  organisation
• iCafe 4 Building Innovating Behaviours working
  on your Innovating Behaviours Profile at a
  personal, workgroup and organizational level.
• iCafe 5 Designing New Freedoms to Innovate.

Understanding the constraining assumptions of
your existing emergent strategy and creatively
smashing them
Rediscovering the hidden value in your
organization to visualize its obsolescence and
replacement
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Discovering and Building Your Own Innovation
Rules through the Power of Conversation
- Learning to discover and apply knowledge that
you didnt know you had
Victor Newman knowledgeworks_at_aol.com
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rationale

• The way we manage what we know about innovation
  is key to our continued survival and success
• No business formula lasts forever rules are made
  to be broken the question is what are the new
  rules going to be, and wouldnt you rather invent
  them yourself?
• Innovation cafes are about asking audiences new
  questions to articulate difficult topics around
  innovating building new, usable knowledge and a
  genuine intention to act.

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3 knowledge imperatives

• H2 manage what we already know (thats worth
  knowing)
• H2 to learn faster than the competition and
  integrate it into our processes
• H2 create new forms of knowledge that deliver new
  market value

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Potential power of tacit knowledge

• If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times
  as profitable
• Lew Platt, former HP CEO

"Tacit knowledge is undocumented expertise
within an organisation which may be essential to
its effective operation. Polyani, 1958
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NIH typical project management culture
Build learning muscles
Create the learning space based on your process
for people to fill

• Dont you try any of that that KM stuff on me
• I dont mind learning just as long as it
  doesnt involve doing any extra work or having to
  do something new
• These people are smart. But they will never
  forgive you for being clever. So dont give em a
  100 solution. Provide a 30 solution within a
  logical framework in which they can figure out
  the missing 70 and populate it with their own
  contribution and feel they own it (3070 Rule).
• How much does it cost to reinvent the obvious
  locally, when a global, generic solution already
  exists? How much is localised ego actually
  costing us? (strawman prototypes)

Sell the learning space based on your process by
demonstrating that it meets their needs and
reflects their language
NIH Not Invented Here
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The reinforcing cycle of change incompetence

• More Consultant-Speak
• Alienation the language of the solution is not
  the language of the problem owner, nor of the
  potentially engaged participant
• Catch the Saboteur
• Problem owners or participants often cannot
  explore the problem without appearing to be an
  organisational saboteur
• Escape the Trap Create a new conversational
  space
• how to explore the limitations of existing
  methods without becoming a saboteur and
• how to build learning into your methods that
  uses your own solution-language.

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Learning stories

• Its not so much the technique, its more about
  the intention
• iCafes work on Storytellings 5 variables
• Credibility/ status of storyteller
• Listeners
• Hunger/ intention to act
• Role audience or actor?
• Recognition of the relevance of the story and
  lesson
• Shared Context until you have experienced a
  particular situation, you cannot understand the
  advice (30/70 technique)
• How can we help people to tell their own
  stories.. At least to talk about their own
  experiences and foster an intention to act?

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Those nine dots
Innovating Thinking
Traditionally, this exercise in creative thinking
begins by asking you to find ways of drawing 4
continuous, straight lines to connect all nine
dots
. . . . . . . . .
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Learning from the Box

• You keep drawing your 4 lines within the box,
  but you cannot solve the problem

. . . . . . . . .

• Move outside the Box, look back on it with a
  strangers eyes (deliberately shift your
  perspective)

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Using emotions Head Heart

• Head Hurts Something is wrong, but I cannot
  articulate it at the moment
• Heart Aches Ive been here before. I recognise
  this situation from similar events in the past. I
  know that if I dont say something against this
  now, I will regret my silence today!

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Use your dark side Work with and explore your
cynicism1, then change direction2
Use your dark side

• Dive Deep Work with your native cynicism to
  explore what you already know about failure
• Deliberately Reverse Take the causes within the
  logic of failure you have constructed, and
  engineer it out of the situation
• Absenteeism
• Predator

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Building learning into your innovation method

• Step 1 FAILURE
• Visualise Failure
• - List what you know about how to guarantee that
  an innovation project or initiative fails

• Step 2 SUCCESS
• Reverse the Failure
• Now do the opposite (of what would guarantee
  failure) to build an approach to innovating that
  that works!
• Consider 5W/1H so that.. phrases

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What happened?

• Why cant we talk about failure openly?
• And what does this mean, or make inevitable?
• What will you consider doing differently in the
  future?