Different Kinds of Innovation Objective

When setting the scene for any training we like to give two levels of objective:

1) Learning objectives- building practical skills to put to work on real ideas

2) Mindset change- to take back to the day to day as much as innovation and share across the org!

In one of our recent sessions we focussed our training on getting ready for real customer development; but the mindset shift was perhaps even bigger.

We ask teams to think about:

1) How they can build their own tools as a cohort: so that they multiply the culture shift, support each other when the going gets tough and boost the energy when they’re all pushing and hustling constantly!

2) Wearing a new hat: challenging themselves to think like real founders, take the right risks and not get stuck in the mentality of “but that’s the way we always do it” or “that didn’t work last time we tried it”

3) Sharing learnings: within the cohort to short cut speed of execution and across the organisation to build towards real culture change

And finally… We ask them to start building their personal resilience at what we think of as getting “comfortable being uncomfortable”.

Innovation is uncertain by its nature, so it should never be comfortable.

We need to build a mindset where we trust in our process and principles that we are working on the right thing for right now- and therefore can become more comfortable with the fact that everything we are working on is risky- because we know we are working as fast as we can to de-risk it, with prioritised focus on what will kill us first!

Some of these softer objectives require more subjective measures, you can start to track by looking at thing like:

• Cohort engagement on tools like Teams/Slack: who is actively engaging and how: who shares regularly; are the cohort asking for help and offering it to each other?
• Knowledge sharing events: are teams organising their own events back in the org: lunch and learns or evening meetups where they summarise key learnings?
• How are teams reaching out to others in the organisation for help? How do they bring them onboard if there’s resistance to a new way of working?
• What is the engagement like in sessions: are they asking good questions? When they work on their own how do they play back their own understanding of the approaches? Do they begin to coach and correct each other and themselves when they fall into common traps?

These are just a few of the objectives and metrics we use… I’d love to hear what your innovation teams are tracking/looking for and trying to engineer. What have you found helps or hinders this process of mindset shift and skills adoption?