Most organizations have discrete formal groups and processes that use different lenses for evaluating ideas: Marketing represents the customers, finance evaluates the economics, and engineering determines feasibility for launch. They answer the questions in series, and then “throw the problem over the wall” to the next team. They may not even be aware of one another’s findings.
The principles of focused accountability or clear decision rights provide a purported rationale for this fragmented approach. Breaking up the innovation process often seems like the easiest way to make progress. However, it ignores the fact that truly effective innovation needs to integrate choices about customers, finance, and technology; without buy-in at the outset from all these groups, choices made upstream may be undone downstream. When the final decisions about launching the product must be made, the groups often find themselves at cross-purposes; either one group wins and the others lose, or they reach a rapid but weak compromise for the sake of consensus that satisfies nobody, including the customers.
More often than not, the wisest upstream choices are enabled by a timely combination of formal and informal interactions. Right at the start, convene disparate perspectives for rigorous and synchronized debate — a seemingly messy and difficult process that actually makes things easier in the long run. The answers to three major questions should determine whether an idea should be developed or not: (1) will customers want it? (2) can we produce it? and (3) will we be able to make money from it? If you are organizing this process, set up ways to bring the necessary people into one room — or, at least, on one long conference call — to talk through all these questions together. Bring different perspectives to the surface, have productive fights (substantive and candid debates), and come to the best answer. This is the only way to resolve the natural tensions between formal groups without forcing them to compromise. (As management thinkers dating back to Mary Parker Follett have noted, compromise is more likely to water down the result than get the best from conflicting ideas.) When they arrive at joint decisions, different functions feel mutually accountable for results, which inherently improves the chances for success in any process that requires handoffs and coordination later.
Authors: Jon R. Katzenbach, Zia Khan
Source: strategy+business
Subjects: Best Practices, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior
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