The Ideas Drought

January 9, 2022 Laura Cheftel

Ideas are like electricity - to make the most of them, it’s important to reduce resistance and distance during their transferral. Below we provide a case study of how a mature company overcame their ideas drought to restore their innovation ‘mojo’.

A few years ago, we worked with a mature European tech company with 1,000 bright motivated employees. The CEO was convinced that the fountain of new ideas was running dry. In an effort to restart it, he communicated clearly throughout the company, in town halls, and cascaded down through line managers that, “We are an ideas company! As engineers, you should be suggesting great ideas through the internal ideas management system.” But none were forthcoming.

An innovation mirage

We spent two weeks in the organisation and had many conversations about the ideas drought. And, through these conversations, we discovered a big part of the problem: there was a good deal of cynicism. But why?

First, because ideas had to be funneled to the top of the organisation to be decided on and actioned. The effect was twofold:

The time between the flash of genius from an employee and a decision being made was lengthy, and demoralising. By the time the idea was actioned, the entrepreneurial spark that animated the person with the idea was often gone, and that person had even moved onto another function where the idea was no longer important to them.
The funnel acted a bit like a game of telephone. The proposer's involvement with the idea ended when he put it into the system. By the time it came out the other end, it had been through several transmutations and was no longer recognisable to the proposer. More importantly, it seldom connected squarely with the customer need that the proposer, being on the frontline, was uniquely positioned to appreciate.

Second, because most ideas never got any meaningful feedback. The top of an organisation has a strategic focus, and most of these ideas (despite being good ones) fell outside that strategic focus. This had three consequences:

Good ideas that in aggregate could improve the organisation’s performance, even if they weren’t strategic priorities, were lost.
Because there were less people at the top of an organisation than anywhere else, there simply wasn’t time to provide proper feedback or even acknowledgement that the idea had been received. This lack of feedback made proposers believe that the openness to their ideas by senior management was fake, engendering further cynicism.
The reason the CEO had brought us in there (he really did want new ideas from the front line) was hit and miss. It was never guaranteed that these ideas would be relevant to what he needed.

What did we do?

1) We got permission to create a triage system:

60% of ideas could be actioned within the team: So long as ideas fell within parameters of cost, risk and self-containment, the new guidance was that team leads could action these on a pilot basis without further permissions.
30% of ideas required cross-team collaboration: These took longer, but a small number was manageable.
10% of ideas needed to go “up the organisation”: These ideas were ones that needed organisation-level decision making or change in order to be tested.

2) We created a simple 3-weekly process for team leads to solicit ideas from their own teams, rapidly act on or reject the idea. This included simple rules for determining whether they could “just do it” at their team level.

This 3-weekly process ensured teams owned their own implementation of agreed ideas on a simple kanban board and shared results so other teams could adopt the successes.

For cross-team ideas, an ambassador was identified for each team, whose job it was to work with other team ambassadors where an idea genuinely required cross-team work before being trialled.

An idea that succeeded once piloted could be brought to the attention of the wider organisation and rolled out, but this only happened once it had been rapidly executed and proved to be a success at a more local level.

3) For ideas that needed to go up the organisation, we worked with the CEO to move towards a “question of the month” approach. The CEO would pick a strategic problem he was facing and put out a question. This reduced the total number of ideas, but increased their relevance and strategic value, meaning there was time to give feedback. Faith in leadership's sincerity about soliciting ideas was restored.

Did it work?

Yes.

The result of this triage system was that the average time for an idea to go from suggestion to decision was three times faster. For the bulk of ideas, proposers could see how decisions on their ideas were made, because their own teams were involved in deciding and providing feedback. This momentum rebooted the flow of ideas.

Some of these ideas were small, but in aggregate were significant. In the case of the tech company, a single idea about automatically resetting cache at a regular schedule decreased online transaction time, increasing completion and generating an additional $4M returns.

In the case of an energy client, communicating the economics updates to operational teams in language they could understand enabled them to anticipate production reprioritisation, creating $MM returns.

Key Takeaways

Ideas are like electricity. The further they have to travel through the organisation, the less voltage they’ll have at the other end. Try to make the distance between the idea and the test execution as short as possible and as flat as possible.
De-risk the test execution by clearly defining which ideas can be tested without the need for further permissions. Paradoxically, defined limits around what is acceptable increases people’s creative confidence to make suggestions. Fuzzy limits leave people guessing about whether an idea is permissible and so prompts the idea to be scaled back and made more conservative.
When senior management do call for suggestions, make sure it is a sufficiently focused question that responses justify time spent providing feedback. This will get you better value ideas, and build trust in your receptiveness to ideas.

Need to rediscover your innovation mojo? Get in touch to speak to one of our directors and explore our highly interactive Venture Sprints® or Strategy Sprints™.

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