As the holidays slow to a close, organizations are beginning to look inside and set their goals and agendas for the upcoming year. These decisions and conversations are being had in times of increasing economic uncertainty, calls for more sustainable processes, and more competitive markets. While these times may be financially daunting for organizations, these are also times of opportunity where the right investment in change and innovation can be the differentiator between growth and decline. Below I explain three key steps that organizations can take in 2023 to build a more resilient and innovative organization. I have come to these three behaviors through assessing various organizations across industry over the last 4 years.
1. Assess and understand the innovation mindset and resiliency across your organization
Understanding how your organization thinks about innovation and incorporates into daily activities and strategy is the first step to building an innovation muscle. There are a variety of tools that can be used to gather this all-important information, ranging from interactive surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.. Questions should center around “openness to change and thinking outside of the box” to “what type of innovation is used in day-to-day processes” and even “how are brainstorming sessions held”. Asking these questions to the right leaders/stakeholders across the organization will not only highlight strengths/gaps in innovative thinking, but also help identify change champions that believe in the power of innovation and its deepened need within the organization.
2. Ready your leadership and change champion network
To change the way an organization thinks about innovation and adopts innovation, a group of fearless leaders with strong networks and pull must be engaged and activated as change champions. Without the right leadership sponsorship, any organization-wide change becomes extremely difficult. This group of leaders or change champions will be strong advocates for innovation, involved with creating strategy, and must be equipped with strong talking points on why now? why this? and how do we do this? Leaders will share this messaging with those who report up to them and have such messaging cascaded through the organization.
3. Build an innovation strategy that incentivizes and invests in innovative thinking and learning opportunities
Once the right leaders are onboard and there is a clear picture of innovation readiness/openness across the organization, an innovation strategy must be designed. Such a strategy will include town halls, learning requirements, and rewards for raising innovative ideas. Some activities will be tailored to specific groups of the organization, seeing that some may need to more support as they adopt innovative thinking into day-to-day practice.
In any case, the sooner an organization assesses their innovative muscle and prioritizes building innovative capabilities the more effective they will be in adopting to market change, responding to customer needs, and moving with technology.
