Risky business
Begin scene. You wake up in a cold sweat, worrying about all the technology coming out, and don’t know what to do. Every day is another revolutionary thing in the news that feels like it is coming for your business or enables someone to use it to take your business. You feel behind and are unsure what to do about it. After staring at the ceiling for a while, a comforting thought appears. “I need a team just focused on emerging technologies! That is it!” You then drift off to sleep, comforted by the fact you have a plan—end scene.
This scene is prevalent. It can be overwhelming and exhausting to keep up, even for someone dedicated to emerging technologies. GenAI has come to dominate the zeitgeist in a short amount of time. Dedicating a team to focus on these areas is a great idea. Depending on the areas you are interested in, you might have a division with multiple teams. Let’s talk about the process of starting this up.
The standard approach involves some well-worn steps.
Define the initiative
Figure out who to select or hire to lead the initiative.
Define the budget
GO!
This is a perfectly reasonable approach. However, some pre-work must be done to enable your innovation team.
Ask yourself the following:
“Why is my organization not embracing and using this emerging technology already?”
“What do I want that I am not getting?”
These questions seem easy. A perfectly reasonable answer is that your teams have well-defined responsibilities and are operating from a place of efficiency. This is great! Companies need this. One of the most disruptive things I have seen companies do is challenge the entire org by doing everything they are doing AND trying to innovate everything, everywhere, all at once. This is not to say that you shouldn’t encourage everyone to speak up when they have an idea; you never know where the next game-changer will start. But innovation, by its very nature, is disruptive. Because of this disruptive nature, you must be deliberate when enabling your organization to innovate. It is a daunting and scary task. But this isn’t your first rodeo, and you know that you need to minimize risk, so you create a team off to the side so that your existing teams can keep running smoothly.
This is where the trap is waiting for your fresh innovation team. Think about these highly efficient teams handling your roadmap and goals well. How are they enabled to be that way? A responsible organization will have processes to enable the teams but minimize risk. Over time, these processes can become highly complex, especially as an organization grows big enough to have multiple people or departments responsible for the process steps.
Where does this impact the innovation team? Risk. Everything that comes out of an innovation team looks and sounds like risk. The very same processes that keep your other teams running smoothly will actively prevent your innovation team from accomplishing the very thing they are created to do.
This does not mean the innovation team gets a blank check and no oversight. One of the first steps should be setting up their own governance processes. Think of this as a great opportunity. You get to have a team create ways of working that could influence your other teams once those ways of working have proven themselves. Your innovation team might just innovate your organizational design on top of the areas you set them up to focus on.
Think of it this way: If you had a factory full of machines making products and decided you needed a new product, you wouldn’t just duplicate one of your existing machines. The same machine would give you the same results. You may think, “Of course, Mark, I am not a child.” This seems like a no-brainer, but it can be wildly underestimated the amount of senior leadership support that is needed to make this type of work possible.
The “Figure it out as we go” plan is also a trap. It should be the “Let’s get our full initial plan set and adjust it as issues arise.” Those two phrases sound the same, but they are very different in how they enable your innovation work. Get all of your leadership council on board and identify the support structures that are needed from each. Especially legal, finance, and HR, as they are three areas directly charged with minimizing risk. If you choose the “as we go” route, all of the setup energy is defrayed over time, and it becomes a constant battle for context explanation to handle each situation. Spend the initial energy to get everyone on the same page, and adjustments will be much easier to accomplish, which keeps your team innovating.
Now go forth and get risky! The payoffs for enabling risky work can be enormous. Be deliberate in how you approach the design of your organization, and the rewards will astound you!
