INTRODUCTION: UNICORNS VS ZOMBIES

© Richard Johnston.

It was a perfect day to meet zombies.

Inside the idyllic rural campus of England's prestigious Henley Business School, 40 executives were jostling for position along a line that I had marked out on the floor:

'More unicorn' at one end, a term that's come to mean a hot, most-wanted, $1bn innovation powerhouse.

'More zombie' at the other, meaning a decaying monolith staggering into the future.

The task: Stand in the place on that spectrum that best describes your organisation.

There were a lot of self-declared zombies out that day.

But the truth is there are a lot of zombies out every day. Research shows that company lifespans are shrinking fast.1 But it's not just companies. The experience of working inside an off-kilter company can be deadly for the people inside, too. Simply being at work is now the fifth biggest killer in the United States because of the illnesses that stem from rising workplace stress.2

So what's driving this zombie advance?

Clinging to What Kills Us

Imagine standing on the edge of a chasm that is widening before your eyes. Your side of the chasm is crumbling fast. Getting to the other side is your only chance of survival. There is a rope in your hand that you could use to swing across. But fear stops you from jumping and keeps you rooted to the spot, gripping on to that rope for dear life. Meanwhile, the ground crumbles beneath your feet. The wider the chasm yawns, the riskier the swing, the greater the fear, the less likely that you'll leap.

A little Indiana Jones, maybe. But that 'holding on' instinct, that false sense of security of hanging on to what we know, sets off a chain reaction of subtle and painful demise inside many organisations: declining margins; efficiency initiatives that mean more work for fewer people; an exhausted and disengaged workforce that is continually putting out fires; sales teams who would rather lead with discounts than push the new, longer lead-time solutions; and less appetite and resourcing for innovation which is ultimately what gets us across the chasm.

Over the last 25 years I've seen variations of this scenario play out inside companies of all shapes and sizes. But I've also observed two factors that can make a huge difference to the inevitability of innovation and high performance showing up:

1. Move Some Different Needles

We get what we measure, and we measure what we value. So what are we overvaluing that opens the doors to zombieism?

In most companies, a minor business model tremor creates a standard, anxiety-driven knee-jerk response: 'Grab the cash while you can.'

'The prevailing mindset inside most boardrooms is "We love money,"' says Ben Sullivan, Managing Director of bibliotheca UK, a library technology company. 'It's too easy to say "yes" to this quarter's numbers at the expense of developing the ideas that the future needs. No-one ever frames it in such black-and-white terms, but deep down, the dopamine hit of a short-term cash injection usually feels too good to resist.'

Yet the twenty-first-century rate of change means that business model tremors are now an everyday occurrence. The short-term, cash-grabbing response is often triggered by the anxiety of having nothing in the new product pipeline. And it is anxiety's sibling, fear, that stops companies from backing the more risky ideas that the future pipelines need. It's a circular paradox resulting in companies that are literally scaring themselves to death.

Organisations need to put in place counterbalances to resist the short-term, control freakism that shuts down any appetite for innovation that ventures beyond the status quo.

'Incremental improvement guarantees obsolescence over time, especially in fast changing industries,' says Joi Ito, the former Director of the MIT Media Lab.

We need some new dials and needles in our corporate dashboards. Ones that compel us to make the decisions that our future needs us to make today; those specifically relating to better performance around innovation and change.

2. Demystify the 'How' of Innovation

'Don't tell me why, don't tell me what, just tell me how to get innovation moving in this place,' is how I was once greeted by a frustrated CEO who was smarting from a recent, failed innovation initiative.

It's the underlying narrative inside most organisations that I meet. More specifically, whilst organisations tend to want more overall innovation, their greatest need is a bigger bag of bolder ideas that could become tomorrow's cash cows. So where are they hiding?

Well, if we define culture as 'what is ordinary', we can't realistically expect many 'extraordinary' ideas to emerge and thrive from business-as-usual operations. 'Extraordinary' creates an understandably allergic reaction from the status quo. It's a life form likely to mess with our repeatable, predictable ways of working.

(An interesting anagram of Be Less Zombie is 'blob seizes me'. It's how I imagine a bold idea feels when it encounters corporate bureaucracy.)

It's not surprising that the bold ideas cupboard is pretty empty in most organisations.

Hmmm.Looks like we'll need to discount our way out of this one again, Winston.

Innovation has a reputation for being a black art, but it's really not. Yet because so few companies have designed a deliberate system for repeatable innovation, its ad hoc nature causes it to fail, or at best deliver more of the same.

After coaching hundreds of innovation projects around the world and mixed with my own research and that of other experts, I've discovered that bolder innovation becomes a more inevitable and repeatable outcome when teams and organisations focus on six areas, each of which has a simple 'turn-on' path.

Turn It On framework © Elvin Turner

Innovation Strategy Ad hoc innovators tend to be continually frustrated. A clear innovation strategy, on the other hand, galvanises the whole business behind it.

Process A clear, efficient and effective innovation process that everyone understands. Give everyone a roadmap for their ideas.

Capabilities Deliberately acquiring and developing the capabilities needed to deliver today whilst discovering and designing tomorrow.

Resourcing Dynamically allocating sufficient and appropriate resources to incremental and disruptive growth initiatives. With the right process in place, this often results in significantly reduced resource wastage in innovation.

Culture Calibrating the culture and climate to the innovation outcome, rather than one-blob-fits-all. Incremental ideas are generally tweaks, working with relatively well-known cause and effect dynamics. It's predictable and feels safe, so metrics around certainty of outcome are appropriate. Bold ideas, on the other hand, have high failure rates, so they need a context which gives them a higher chance of making it out of the building alive than status quo operations usually afford.

Leadership Equipping and incentivising senior managers to orchestrate appropriate levels of innovation and entrepreneurship.

When these six elements combine to become a deliberate innovation system, companies give themselves the greatest possible chance of thriving today and showing up in the future.

Turn it on, then turn it up My aim with this book is to help you succeed where most companies fail: to turn on innovation and to keep it turned on with proven tools that you can tailor for your context. Establish foundations, get some quick wins, build confidence.and then turn up the scale and sophistication as and when you need them.

What's more, every organisation is unique. Whilst the tools I'm sharing are universally applicable, beyond a certain point in your journey towards greater innovation performance, only you can know what's right for your specific context. This book helps you turn on innovation, but beyond a certain point only you can turn it up.

What works for Apple is unlikely to work in exactly the same way for you. Discovering and developing your unique innovation DNA is a pathway towards competitive advantage that few companies deliberately pursue.

Not for Geeks Finally, this is not a book for innovation geeks. It's for everyday business people who need practical tools, ideas, workshop formats and coaching tips to turn on innovation. So I've deliberately written this in short, sharp chapters with practical advice that you can try out immediately. (Sorry fellow geeks, not much innovation jargon in here - I hope.)

This book is based on what I've learned from companies that are recalibrating themselves to pursue sustainable, profitable relevance.

They are creating healthier organisations, happier people and more hopeful futures.

They are being less...