Cultivating the innovators in your midst

Morning Manager
Harvey Schacter

Cultivating the innovators in your midst

In Harvard Business Review, consultants Jeffrey Cohn, John Katzenbach and Gus Vlak set out a six-stage process for finding breakthrough innovators and grooming them within an organization.

Scour ranks for raw talent
In most large organizations, the future innovators are hidden from senior management and deeply embedded in line jobs. You need to seek them out and at least temporarily disengage them from their duties. The best innovators have strong cognitive abilities; they zero in on important points and don't waste time on peripheral issues. They never rest on their laurels, and are always looking for ways to improve themselves and the processes around them. They have an independent mind, but also work well with others.

Have the right folks
Once you have spotted the candidates, you need to determine which ones actually have the innovator's spark and flair. Many of the companies the consultants explored - including Thomson Reuters PLC , Pitney Bowes Inc. and Visa Inc. - put them through one-on-one interviews, often conducted by outside assessment and leadership development experts. They are presented with a series of complex real-world scenarios from which some key information is omitted to gauge how they can weed through ambiguity - and then, as additional information is added, they are assessed for how they evaluate the potential impact.
"Can she turn that critical eye inward and change positions when warranted by the evidence, or does she cling tightly to past beliefs and mental models? True innovators never let pride or former success get in the way of a better solution," the consultants note. Also important: Can the candidate clearly and convincingly defend a decision and sell a point of view?

Work with live ammo
Give innovators real projects to work on to prove they can recognize promising ideas and lead cross-functional teams of experts to develop those ideas. During this effort, assure them access to top management so their abilities and progress can be watched. One global industrial products company in Britain also insists rising innovators spend a stint in the sales department. It's viewed as a good way to help the innovators understand what makes customers tick and sharpen the sales skills they will need to spearhead large-scale innovation down the road.

Provide multiple mentors
Pair innovators with carefully selected mentors who can groom them and offer advice on how to deal with people and situations the innovators will encounter turning their ideas into reality. In traditional mentoring situations, the mentor and acolyte stay together for a long time, but successful organizations are encouraging rising innovators to seek out different mentors over time. This gives them access to more ideas, and more flexibility to find the advice to fit a particular situation.

Foster peer networks
As well as providing mentors, give the innovators a chance to meet and talk with each other about their experiences. The opportunity to discuss with peers how they handle issues and the stress of innovation will be fruitful.

Replant them in the middle
After the innovators have been identified and developed - with mentors and peer networks in place - replant them in the middle of the organizational chart with ambiguous job responsibilities so that they will be free to act as innovation hubs, running with ideas and developing them through contacts they have developed. Formulate career paths for them that are suited to their abilities.

Dr. Sheth & Ratan Tata

This is a camera phone snapshot of a billboard in Mumbai of a CNBC special event for the founder of the ICA Institute, Dr. Jagdish Sheth, and chairman of India's largest conglomerate, the Tata Group, Ratan Tata.

Thiagi on Increasing Interactivity in Webcasts

I just attended ISPI's Skillcast on Increasing Interactivity in Webcasts with Thiagi, mine and many others favorite educative mentor.

He went over his basics- let the inmates run the asylum, look for ways to collaborate instead of compete and avoid jumping to conclusions. And always contradict yourself, but don't ever disagree.

Some tips from the webinar:

Drawing on his improv philosophy of training, here are his points on the "Yes!" attitude:

• Trust participants
• Accept everything
• Keep eyes on the prize
• Treat useful and useless inputs the same way
• Incorporate all relevant inputs
• Modify irrelevant inputs & incorporate them

He demonstrated this process with a card trick bywhich he leads the volunteer to the card he wants her to pick and magically reveals "her" choice.

He next asked participants to answer a question, then predict the most popular answers. What was the question?

Why do most webinars suck?

.... somewhere around this point I got called away from my desk and grabbed an apple...

Came back to discussion about giving a lesson on stereotyping through the diversion tactics of magic.

He ended with a very interesting exercise where he was showing 3 numbers on the screen then asked participants to submit a set of numbers that would be like this 3. He was using a term to say what it was, but who can understand him? "Jovel" juvel" something like that.

Examples he displayed:
5-10-11
20-40-41

So, he says- everyone submit a jovel or juvel. He probably explained more at the beginning but I had gotten distracted by texting on my I-phone.

I just submitted my husband's favorite number, my favorite number and the first one that came to mind. 11-37-42

The host read off several submissions... 1-2-3, 2-4-5, 3-6-7
Then he said, and someone submitted this one which is wrong... 11-37-42

And Thiagi said, Wait, it is right it is a "jo*uhl" Everyone thinks they have detected a pattern when they see the examples I presented n-n*2-n*2+1. So they submit what they think is a right answer.

But actually, he says, if you want to really test a theory, then you should submit something different. Because actually, a "jo*uhl" is just any 3 integers listed in ascending order.

Wish I could say I was "pushing the limits" with my submission, but I was just not paying very good attention. I would certainly have patted myself on the back for recognizing the pattern and submitted one to match had I been listening.

Take away... good results can come from barely listening to Thiagi.