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Innovation Training : It Can Save your Job and Your Organisation!
If you think that innovation training is only about learning how to develop new products and services then think again.
Innovation training is much more. In fact, it’s so important that it can literally save jobs and organisations.
Not convinced? Then read on.
If you look back over the last ten years, it’s likely that there have been huge changes in your organisation and in the way you do your job. Perhaps your role has been affected by the new technologies of social media. Perhaps robotics has come into your industry. Maybe a new player has shaken up your industry with a revolutionary new business model. Or the global credit crunch had a significant impact on your role and company.
So much change and as we are often told – the pace of change will only increase.
Most people don’t particularly like change. It’s uncomfortable and it can give rise to anxiety. It can make us feel insecure. So much easier then, to put it out of mind and get on with our day job as best we can.
And really, why would you want to have to think about innovation and change when it can look so daunting? You may not know how to go about it, and then there is the uncertainty surrounding the outcome - uncertainty which could impact on how you and your team are viewed in the organisation. One foot wrong with innovation and your promotion prospects may be up in smoke! Right?
Wouldn’t it be great if we could carry on with ‘business as usual’?
Even better, if we could get back some of the job security and predictability that existed in organisations twenty or thirty years ago?
Well, the bad news is – that’s not going to happen. Change, turbulent change, is here to stay. It will be driven by many things including the pace of computing and new technology development, intensifying global competition and the rise of emerging markets, socio-demographic changes and key political changes.
A New Kind of Security.
The good news is the old security may be gone but a new kind of security is possible.
Part of the reason many of us struggle to deal with the change going on around us is that we are trying to deal with it using the old tools.
At work this means we continue to use analytical thinking and the tools and processes of management science almost exclusively, to respond to challenges. This is because these are still dominant in our business and organisational culture.
But these are the tools of the 19th and 20th century - and they are no longer enough.
The 'big data crowd' may now be telling you that they have the answer. But that’s just more of the same. Big data and conventional analytics rely on working with what has gone before.
But these days, we need to be able to anticipate change and position our organisations to influence how events unfold – be that in the market, with regard to legislation or to anything else.
What’s needed, is to make use of new tools and more creative approaches. To equip managers and teams with the tools that will enable them to RESPOND to the changes. And for them to respond more effectively and more confidently.
New tools and creative approaches will help you see more in the data that you already have. New tools and creative approaches will help you to join disparate pieces of data so that new meaning arises. They will help you not to overlook very small but significant observations which may be pre-cursors of huge change.
This is the kind of help that innovation training will give you.
What’s more, innovation training will also help you access a greater variety of innovation “mindstates”, which in turn will make you better placed to respond and to capitalise on change.
For example: ways to stay open-minded to new potentially revolutionary approaches that you might have earlier dismissed as unworkable or even crazy!
Innovation Training is Responsiveness Training.
We sometimes call innovation training responsiveness training because above all it gives you a repertoire of processes and tools that are much broader and more relevant to the 21st century than conventional tools. In this way you will be better placed to respond to your competitors strikes, to new technologies and socio-economic changes etc.
In the UK the teams at Woolworths and Blockbuster video failed to do this. They would have seen changes coming but they either chose not to respond or they were poorly equipped to respond. These well-established businesses failed.
Benefits of Innovation (Responsiveness) Training.
But it does not have to be this way.
With innovation training you ‘get ahead’. In effect, you get more time to respond.
You will be better placed to ‘see’ the potential implications of competitive pressure heating up early on. This gives you more time to choose your response.
You don’t have to wait until new technologies are starting to freak you out and it's looking like your business might be decimated. You will have thought through where your customers are heading and what is influencing their thinking.
You don’t need to panic – you need to RESPOND. And that is where your responsiveness training comes in. It can help you to:-
- Recognise hidden and emergent customer needs and enable you to create a response that sees you leap ahead of the competition.
- Spot brand new opportunities at the intersection of markets
- Creatively combine data from multiple sources into high-potency insights that can take your business into new growth areas.
- Challenge the established thinking of your organisation in a constructive way, and identify ways to make your core propositions even more robust and business models even more effective.
- Re-allocate staff and re-define job roles to ensure that customers are getting the support levels they require.
When you’ve got this bigger repertoire of responses you will once again feel more secure. You’ll know in effect that you and your teams will be able to rise to whatever the world may throw at you.
And the response won’t always be a new product or new service, but sometimes it might be. And when that is the case, you will be extremely well-placed to develop that new product too.
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