The Innovation Has Landed – What Neil Armstrong Can Teach Us About Delivering Innovation

Unsurprisingly, following the death last month, of a deeply unassuming Neil Armstrong, a mini outbreak of moon landing nostalgia has been released.   Now I am really not a space geek, but, having been born in the 1960’s, I can’t help but get caught up in the emotion surrounding the Landing of the Apollo 11 crew on the moon.  Now, whilst I love the romance of the “it’s one small step...” speech what has really caught my imagination and interest is the less well known story of the moments prior to touchdown.

Due to a computer malfunction, the Lunar Landing Module was steering itself away from the designated landing area towards a boulder-strewn area outside the originally planned “landing ellipse”.  (And this is the old school bit I really love) By looking out of the windows Armstrong realised the imminent danger and acted.  With alarms ringing out in the craft, Armstrong took semi-automatic control of the Lunar Module and with Aldrin calling out altitude and velocity data, landed at 20:17 on July 20 with only about 25 seconds of fuel left – thus salvaging the landing.

So what does all this have to do with Innovation?  Well, earlier this week I was having lunch with a previous mentor of mine who had just retired from a global technology services company having held the reins on Innovation there for the last 5 years.   What was fascinating was, as we compared notes, we both conceded that often the hardest part of successfully delivering Innovation is what we called “the last few metres”.  Just like Neil Armstrong we concluded that the best planning in the world cannot ever quite perfectly prepare you for the conditions you meet when trying to “land” a new innovation with its new user base.

Both of us were able to recount story after story of disasters, narrowly averted disasters and damp squibs that were down to the inability of the innovating organisation to manage the change and engage the user base with the new technology, operating model or product.   Many of you will remember the debacle of the launch of Heathrow’s Terminal 5.  Terminal 5 is now a fabulous, modern, slick airport terminal but its launch was massively blighted by huge failures in its security and baggage handling capabilities when it first opened.  The assumption was that everything would just work.  It didn’t and chaos rained, costing those involved some considerable sums of money.  Now T5 is an apocryphal tale but, from our sharing, we can utterly attest to the fact that week in, week out firms are wasting the money they have spent in design, development and testing by failing to manage the final implementation and user uptake.

The funny thing was that it wasn’t that people hadn’t thought about delivering the appropriate marketing, training, retooling or effort required to generate user uptake – it was rather that they just hadn’t done anywhere near enough of it at the right time.  We all seem to have a natural tendency to underestimate both what and how much it will take – in terms of effort and cost.

So, to those of you who are trying to deliver big, innovative, transformational changes – please, please, please do not scrimp on the “last few metres” and make sure you have enough support to land your innoavtion or repent at your leisure.

Thankfully for NASA, the USA and mini space nuts all over the world, enough contingency was built in to the landing protocols to avert disaster and we can remember with fondness the life and times of Neil Armstrong – still teaching us how to land 40+ years on.  Thanks Neil.

Perfecting Innovation in a Digital World - Simon Cowell, Will.i.am and the X-factor for technology

This month the press have been covering the soon to be launched “X-factor for Geeks” – the new TV concept being sponsored by the self-confessed technophile Will.i.am and the entertainment mogul Simon Cowell (see links below).  The idea, whilst still clearly in development, seems to aim to do for the unknown entrepreneur, building gadgets in their garage, what Simon Cowell currently does for would-be singers, crooning into a hairbrush in their bedrooms.  

Now the cynics amongst you are possibly thinking – “TV train wreck - Won’t this be a bit like running a junior Dragon’s Den – but with groovier music and lighting?”   Well, it may turn out that way but I don’t think it will.  Here’s why. 

One of the biggest and most commonly reported issues that my clients report to me when they are trying to deliver innovation is this – “How do I carry out cost-effective User Acceptance Testing on my prototype products at a large enough scale to be conclusive.”    This is a tricky and very real problem for most businesses – but not for Simon Cowell.  His formula for the modern TV talent show is the absolute pinnacle of genius when it comes to doing massive, cost-effective user acceptance testing.  At its simplest, he creates a showcase for his talents and then invites the millions of potential end users, via digital channels (texts, phone, apps etc), to pay to provide their assessment of the talent they are reviewing (genius).   Now there is an awful lot more to it than that but, you can bet your bottom dollar that when the new Geek Factor show is aired, at the heart of it will be a version of this grand scale, money making, user acceptance testing.

So, what can the rest of us, who don’t have our own TV empires, do to tackle the Innovators conundrum of running cost effective user testing at scale.   The answer is that we need to think like Simon Cowell and learn the lessons from the cleverly engineered processes behind his talent show formats.   Over the last 6 months at Capgemini we have poured major effort and brainpower into deconstructing and then reconstructing the process of Innovation to be able to create a cost-effective process that delivers a reliable flow of innovation.   What we concluded was - we need to “think like Cowell” and see the innovation process as a “production”.   We needed to design and build a scaleable Innovation capability based on the production company concepts that sit behind the current plethora of Saturday night talent shows.

And... after many months of designing, prototyping, piloting and testing the good news is that we at Capgemini have now successfully created our own Innovation production service that utilises a plethora of the new digital media to keep costs low and outputs high – we even think we have cracked the problem of conducting cost effective, large scale user acceptance testing.  Hurrah!

Ironically what is both gratifying and a little irritating for us is that whilst we’ve been looking at the entertainment industry for inspiration on the process of business innovation; Will.i.am and Simon Cowell have clearly been looking at business innovation as the subject matter for their next entertainment venture.

So, if you are struggling to drive innovation within your own organisation and would like to discuss further how this innovation production service could work for you and you don’t have Simon Cowell’s phone number then please do get in touch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19799707

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9578273/Simon-Cowell-and-Will.i.am-to-launch-hunt-for-new-Bill-Gates.html

Unleashing a winning spirit - the search for Seve

Throughout the long summer of 2012 those of us who live in the UK have been treated to an unprecedented cornucopia of sporting excellence and delight.   Bradley Wiggins wins the Tour de France, Team GB excel at the Olympics and the Paralympics, Andy Murray wins the US Open and now to round it all out beautifully the European team mount one of the greatest come backs of all time to regain the Ryder Cup.  Wow! 

I've loved it all and have revelled in the shared sporting euphoria that the country has dined out on during some very difficult economic times.  Of course, as a student of "performance" I have also been inspired to get my head around the factors that have created this athletic prowess.  What is clear, is that the factors that deliver success are many - current physical fitness, coaching support and training regime, physical capability, access to facilities and personal desire - and then there is the strange, powerful, unpredictable "winning spirit" that can galvanise a team or an individual to perform at new levels of intensity and flow.  But what releases this longed for, willow the wisp spirit and transforms a good performance into a truly outstanding one? 

At times the spirit can be catalysed by the passionate support of a partisan crowd (witness the performances of the GB athletes in London 2012 and the performance of the USA golfers on the first two days of the Ryder Cup).  At others it can be catalysed by the desire to "do it" for a departed parent or friend (witness the European golfers inspired to perform by the memory of Seve Ballesteros and Gemma Gibbons the GB judo player who did it for her Mum) and on occasion it is catalysed by the desire to "deliver for the team" (witness Ian Poulter the heroic Ryder Cup golfer and Derek Redmond the team GB 400m runner who often seemed so much better in the relay than in the individual event).  Interestingly, on closer inspection, the nature of these diverse catalysts share similar properties - they have an external focus, are rich with meaning, emotional and supersede the sport - these are what seem to be the crucial elements for unleashing the winning spirit. 

Of course the challenge to me as a business leader pondering this is clear.  How do I uncover the catalyst for unleashing the winning spirit in my business?   I want to see the Olympian spirit released in my teams and my business - to do it I need to identify the external, meaningful and emotional themes that the people of my business can recognise and respond to.  I need to find my organisations very own Seve to guide and inspire us and unleash more of our winning spirit.  Of course, the joy and frustration of it all is there is no formula I can follow and the catalysts will need to be constantly changed or reinvented if the spirit is to be regularly released.  It is a beautiful paradox that makes the living of life an excitement and a joy.  It is, however, far more than just an esoteric musing – it is the Number 1 job of the leader - a business imperative that far too few of us fail to see and rise to.   To fail on uncovering these themes is to fail on bringing motivation and meaning to our businesses and teams.  For me life is too short to waste it on mediocrity and barren professionalism - I love being part of something inspirational.

I'm going to enjoy looking for our own Seve...