No. 3 – 6 January 2024 – Read on DuxNotes.com – Free version
It’s the beginning of the new year and many of us are relaxing, reflecting and recharging to take on the year ahead.
It’s something I’m doing, too. Here are the things I’ve been thinking about this week, with some tips and actions we can easily adopt.
Wishing you all the best for 2024!
From DuxNotes
How do you enable creativity?
Creativity is essential to competing and winning.
A truly competitive organisation needs creativity and ideas to survive, thrive and win. Leaders need to keep an open mind to find new paths that are more productive, less risky, avoid barriers that hadn’t previously been seen, and deliver outcomes faster. That’s part of strategy. What do great leaders and competitive organisations do? Who does well at enabling creativity? How am I enabling the creativity of people around me? What steps can I take as a leader?
Read more…
How do you measure innovation outcomes?
The thinking patterns and behaviours that got us to here are insufficient to take us to where we need to go.
Innovation is about improving the way you solve problems and create new value to outperform competition. It should deliver strategic competitive advantage. You should be able to measure the benefits each innovation activity is delivering. Kill what doesn’t work. Double down and expand what does. It should help you outperform and overwhelm the opposition, faster than competitors can comprehend and effectively respond, and be fittest in the environment.
Accelerated value creation is the key – however you measure “value”.
How do you set innovation goals?
Innovation should be core to your strategy.
Simple things to remember. Be clear about your goals. Innovation is about doing things differently – or doing different things – to get better outcomes. KISS. Be clear about what type of innovation outcomes you’re pursuing: incremental or disruptive. Fund your innovation activity. If you don’t have a budget then it’s not part of strategy.
Innovation outcomes are about productivity enhancement.
90% of everything is crap – Sturgeon’s Law
What does it mean for your strategy?
Sturgeon was a science fiction writer observing the quality of writing in the 1950s. His law is like the 80/20 rule, or Pareto’s Principle, which observes that 80% of the result comes from 20% of the effort. What if you could stop doing the 90% of crap things inside your organisation? What matters most? What would you stop doing? Where should you start?
If you don’t make changes, how does it help your competitors?
What is your dominant logic?
How you see the world is how you relate to the world.
Every person has a dominant logic. It comprises the beliefs, heuristics, biases and learned understandings of the world gained through education and experience of the environment. Altogether, it’s a fundamental lens through which the world is perceived. Every organisation has a dominant logic, and it influences culture and straetegy and outcomes. An organisation’s dominant logic is expressed by the stories it tells and what it does in the world. What’s the problem with dominant logic? What can leaders do to test dominant logic? How do advisors help, and the importance of updating your maps.
Leaders with fixed thinking put the organisation at risk of extinction.
On leadership
Heuristic: The ability for an organisation to adapt is defined by its leaders.
Corollary: Leaders with fixed thinking put the organisation at risk of extinction.
You don’t have “situational awareness” if you can’t comprehend reality or adapt to what you see.
No matter how hard you tell a man something he will not believe it unless he already believes it.
John M. Del Vecchio. The Thirteenth Valley
Things I’ve been reading
Butterfly ideas. How to create space to for people to try on new baby ideas instead of rejecting them immediately.
Why does DARPA work? Australia is building the Australian Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA). I used to lead the CSIRO-DARPA relationship, so interesting to see another perspective that can help Australia with disruptive innovation and capability operationalisation.
De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. A few years back I helped develop a process which used some of De Bono’s other tools (POs) to break dominant logic thinking patterns and develop a process for generating disruptive innovation concepts.
One simple habit. Something Warren Buffett does that gives differentiated outcomes.
Speed and Acceleration. It’s not about keeping up, it’s about moving faster than competitors can respond.
Living on our luck. Re-reading Donald Horne’s analysis of Australia, The Lucky Country. Still (and even more) relevant than when first published in 1964, sixty years ago this year.
Education is what, when and why to do things. Training is how to do it. An awesome book by Richard W. Hamming. read it.
Hopefully you’ll find something useful in DuxNotes. And if you do, please share it.
#LetsLead
Thanks for coming along.
Ben.
PS. Drop me an email if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear from you. ben.sorensen@gmail.com