Many of us are familiar with the transformation life cycle exemplified through MSP®. Our change programmes can be reasonably straight forwards with respect to the imagination needed. The creativity is on orchestrating, aligning, selling, motivating, delivering, communicating etc. We might not need to be very innovative – we may be in simple transformation management domain.
However, there are transformations that are not known, where there is no model / framework. We may be doing near fundamental invention which carries risk and expense. We may also have a series of opportunities offered by circumstance or technology that we can possibly exploit where the business concept hasn’t even been ‘imagineered’ yet.
We can set resources aside for invention – but how do we encourage, steer, empower, process and act quickly upon the original suggestion that is not coming from a direction we normally expect it from? It is said ‘Innovate or die’, but innovate too much and we destabilise our business. Having just coped with Wave 1 COVID where we’ve had no choice but to innovate and seen benefits – how do we build innovation into our culture, ecosystem and technology to manage left field opportunity as a norm?