Compassion-Driven Innovation

12 Steps for Breakthrough Success

Nicole Reineke, Debra Slapak, Hanna Yehuda

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781637421628
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sviluppo organizzativo
• Index: Business

This book is for pathfinders— product, services, business, and nonprofit managers searching for ways to reach beyond the artificial barriers that constrain innovation and make "work" harder. Inspired by real life trailblazers and their own experiences, the authors decode the secrets of achieving breakthrough success at both organizational and interpersonal levels. Learn to use their methodology with the help of checklists and detailed examples that will transform your thinking and skills.

Stage 1: Include

Introduction to the Include Stage

Figure 2.1 The Include stage

The Include (I) stage begins with forming a team that clarifies and unites around your theme or directive and learns from the genius that exists among members and readily available external sources (Figure 2.1). The team then crafts a story describing the affected personas and what their work or life is like as a result of challenges related to your theme. At the end of this stage, you will have created your initial proto-persona, proto-maps, and listed your assertions. You will be ready to interact with the external world as informed members of a community to gather unbiased feedback.

The next section illustrates a real-world example of using this checklist in the Include stage.

Include Checklist

Knowing what you are about to do can help you understand the how and why. For this reason, we provide a checklist at each stage that highlights the tasks to be completed. Don’t worry; we’ll explain what each of these checklist items mean and give you tips for getting started.

Identify your project.

Form your team.

Consider the initial problem the project is trying to solve.

Decide on the innovation type.

Determine discipline areas and skills of interest.

Build the team.

Learn what exists.

Craft your theme(s) as a team.

Perform state-of-the-art research.

Assert what you know.

Identify proto-personas.

Create proto-maps.

Write what you know.

Example of Innovation: Africa’s Include Stage

Think about an organization such as Innovation: Africa when Sivan first set out to change the living conditions that she saw on a business trip to Africa. The theme she decided to follow is helping villages that are remote from the capital, remote from the grid, and are experiencing water scarcity. How might she have set about the Include stage? Jot down your own ideas and then compare them to these: The team leader forms a team that includes cross-discipline internal members and local experts who understand the challenges villagers face, along with possible high priority solutions, such as delivery of electricity or clean water. The team might consist of a project leader, solar and hydro engineers, and government and relief workers familiar with the living conditions and terrain of the area. The team documents the conditions which are more difficult, what has been done so far, and why that failed to meet expectations. They combine this information with data from secondary sources to quickly create situational awareness and a best guess about what problems to solve and how to solve them.

Identify Your Project

The Compassion-Driven Innovation methodology assumes that you are working on a project or have an idea of an area you are trying to improve. If you do not have an assigned project or mission, consider a project you are currently working on. What is the goal of the project? Are you trying to solve a specific problem? Hopefully that was a simple question to answer. If not, consider why the project exists. Describe what is expected from your team. Is there a specific type of challenge you want to solve? What is the timeframe for project completion?

Having a general idea of why you are innovating is required for deciding who to invite to the team.

Form Your Team

Forming a team is a luxury. Revel in it for a moment. You are in a situation in which you have the time, resources, and support to bring people together. While you are contemplating improvement, so many of our small business brethren are in a sinking ship using a paper cup to bail water, forced to make decisions in the moment, alone. Recognize how truly fortunate you are. Commemorate this opportunity by looking beyond the colleagues from your department or your last few projects.

Think deeply about who you can and should invite in because of their potential to contribute to this project. Look for new perspectives and expertise from people highly motivated to create meaningful change by exercising compassion for customers, team members, and themselves. The team members should be enthusiastic about having discussions on the topic you are exploring and demonstrate a collaborative and compassionate spirit. Teams can thrive if they are comfortable sharing, learning, and pivoting together as their understanding of a challenge or problem increases.

Over the years, we have experienced other cyclical innovation methodologies and thinking paradigms. They can leave team members feeling expendable and isolated. While some methodologies consider empathy for the customer, we have seen times that the practice of those methodologies is done at the expense of the team members’ mental and emotional well-being. Innovation without compassion for the team may produce great short-term results, but it leads to burnout and alienates the very people you need to make your organization successful.

Some organizations build innovation teams augmented with people from outside their company or organization. Others prefer recruiting only internal team members from diverse areas of expertise. Both approaches can be and have been successful.

Team forming and collaboration that is open to outside partnerships is widely researched by innovation luminary Henry Chesbrough. In cases in which an organization is receptive to external collaboration, we recommend taking the time to read Chesbrough’s brilliant work on Open Innovation.¹ Should you choose open innovation, you will want to consider the various ways your organization is willing to bring innovation to market before you embark on team forming.

Internal team forming is equally well studied. These teams must include people with the accountability and skillset to drive your project forward. Research on forming effective innovation teams suggests that all team members have the basic skills of communication and interpersonal connection, because a single point of communication or bottleneck in communication is shown to decrease innovative team output. If you are interested in additional research, Google has published additional components of a good internal team.²

If you are reading this while in the midst of a project in which team members are already engaged, we do not recommend that you vote them off the island “Survivor-style” to make room for more informed, stronger, faster, or otherwise better equipped team members. No one is perfect, and rarely will ...