Strategy requires difficult choices are made, and to be truly effective there must be time constraints.
Achieve this…. By…….
The view many have of innovation is a free for all, unconstrained by the usually corporate constraints of time, budget, and resource availability.
Nonsence.
BEHAG is a term often used in strategy to define a long term ‘what by when’. The classic example being Kennedy’s BEHAG to put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade, made in 1961. The advances in the following 8 years were staggering.
Those advances came from within the framework of the strategic BEHAG, and therefore had time and resource constraints. By contrast, budget seemed to be available to pursue any potentially useful contribution to the reduction of risk in any part of the project, while ensuring the objective was met.
A similar scenario has played out recently with the extraordinarily fast development of Covid vaccines. What would in less constrained times have taken a decade, was squeezed into 18 months. In addition, a new and untried technology Messenger RNA was brought to the market in addition to the vaccines emerging from the existing technology base.
There must be lessons for leaders in there somewhere.
Lesson 1. Budget.
When budgets are unconstrained, multiple paths can be trialled in parallel, and the most promising selected, rather than trialling in sequence which not only takes longer but captures the probability of ‘sunk cost thinking’.
Lesson 2. Risk.
Risk has many faces. Personal, corporate, financial, and reputation. We are a risk averse species, and given the opportunity will minimise those risks, with the result that little that is genuinely new emerges. Remove the constraint of risk, indeed, make risk almost mandatory, and the usual constraints on thinking are removed.
Lesson 3. Outcomes.
Defining exactly the outcome required when that outcome seems inconsistent with existing possible outcomes focusses attention and creativity and on stripping the challenge back to its basics. The jargon would call it ‘thinking from first principles.’ It encourages people to think about a problem in fundamentally different ways.
Lesson 4. Time.
We humans work best when we are on a timetable. It is however a two-edged sword. When time constraints are seen as impossible, it induces stress and a range of productivity killing behaviours, so is not helpful. By contrast, having time constraints enables prioritising and the allocation of accountability, both very helpful to achieving an outcome. When combined with the freedom to experiment, for the individual or group to discover the ‘how’ the outcome is to be achieved in the time frame, it becomes an encouragement to creativity.
These four drivers are like a balloon. You can exert pressure on one point and the shape changes. Putting pressure on multiple points creates internal pressure as well as modifying the shape. There exists within the way these four drivers are combined a vast range of choices to be made. Therein lies the link to strategy, which is also a series of choices.
Therefore, the core choice is the role that innovation will play in the achievement of a corporate objective. Depending on that choice, you can exert pressure on the ‘innovation balloon’ that best fits with the wide range of other choices made in articulating a strategy. Innovation becomes just one of the processes that needs to be in place, rather than the ‘outside normal hours’ status that it often carries. The implications for this integration into the strategic and management timetables have many impacts. Most particularly it will impact the way KPI’s are set and managed. KPI’s are usually set in functional silos, a practice which will be at odds with the incorporation of innovation into cross functional choices, and the implementation of those choices.
Innovation is the lifeblood of commercial sustainability, and few do it well. To be one of those few, you must to quote Apple advertising, ‘Think different’
