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Innovation in the World of Projects

This first chapter is focused on the understanding of the typical innovation in the project ecosystem. It is intended to highlight foundational innovation success principles that help the leader to design experience-driven future work environments with the diverse stakeholders’ views and inputs in mind. This is intended to enable setting the stage for the Experience-Driven way of innovating to be built as a natural muscle for operating in such a project economy of today and into the future.

In a world that demands excellence in innovation and in delivering digital transformations, where digitalization continues to scale, the return on experiences (ROEs) that we create could directly contribute to the aspirational growth targets and the achievement of the most impactful missions.

Key Learnings

• Understand the value of how developing a holistic view successfully supports innovation.
• Explore a case study that looks at the critical people and behavioral shifts.
• Understanding the new strategist leader and its impact on successful transformation.
• Learn from a movie example how to develop the critical views that expedite your movement toward being an impactful, experience-driven conductor.
• Start addressing how this work’s hypotheses link to driving innovation and aligning around the dynamic needs of customers and stakeholders.

1.1 The Holistic View

What makes committing to continual innovation challenging is sometimes linked to the short-term lens that organizational leaders possess. For impactful and sustainable innovation, the focus needs to be holistic in order to see the potential over the horizon. The commitment and investment required to incubate ideas that ultimately could create the next unicorn is a difficult one. This is where being holistic comes in.

One of the critical reasons why holistic view matters is the fact that we can see beyond what is in front of us or what is obvious. It requires us to be obsessed with the problem. It is the commitment to slow down to go faster. By thinking holistically, we uncover every angle that has a strategic impact on where the innovation projects could take us and the surrounding assumptions and constraints that could hinder their success. Holistic also means that we consider the entire ecosystem that will be the birthplace for these projects.

1.1.1 Developing the Holistic View

Understanding innovation portfolio interactions complexity and finding ways to simplify it is critical. Having a holistic view has continued to be one of those most talked-about capabilities for leaders involved in managing portfolios of programs and projects. In describing an affective project manager, this quality is usually listed among the top ones. Yet, although commonly mentioned, it is seldom well practiced, nor properly invested into.

Ways to describe this capability could be big picture, end-to-end thinking, stepping outside the box, and seeing beyond the obvious. Developing the holistic view is an intentional practice. It requires us to first recognize its importance and then dedicate relentless focus to building it.

As highlighted in Figure 1.1, the abovementioned ways of describing the holistic view could be highlighted by the picture in the figure, especially the balloons floating on the top of that busy city that seems to have been built at the foot of a mountain range or something similar. Being in the balloon allows the leader to see holistically. By stepping away from the details on the ground, the leader can see the effectiveness of the city design, or the lack hereof, and could see opportunities to innovate solutions to problems that might not have been seen before, while you are so close and are in the midst of the many busy landscapes of high-rise buildings. This capacity of stepping away and zooming out sounds simple, yet it becomes more and more challenging in today’s busy and noisy work environments.

Figure 1.1 Holistic View Sample. Credit: KELLEPICS/Pixabay.

The figure also shows the importance of sharpening the focus from multiple angles. Having multiple balloons reflects viewing a given scenario from different angles and possibly creating a mix of objective ideas for the beginnings of innovation. This will remain an increasingly important power in the future of work.

1.1.2 Connecting to the Movies

Strategy for executing change is difficult. In Remember the Titans, Denzel Washington had to exercise being holistically strategic in building a true integration culture that was lacking, yet necessary for inspiring a joint view of success for that true story Virginia school football team.

Figure 1.2 shows the stakeholders that Denzel (Coach Boone) had to work across and align as a true holistic leader should. The figure reflects the potential complexity in maintaining the strategic clarity for the football team across such diverse body of stakeholders. Denzel had to continually adjust his lens and update what the next strategic move looked like while reflecting that in necessary big-picture directional changes.

Figure 1.2 Holistic Leader’s Stakeholders Strategic Links.

The sample of key stakeholders shown is all part of Coach Boone’s portfolio. Handling each of these stakeholder entities was almost like an individual project for him. Building an integrated culture and overcoming racism required a natural cascade of consistent behaviors in his interactions with the players and others in the stakeholders group.

As an example, the players’ grouping required him to exercise discipline and resilience on the path of building a strong team. He had to overcome personal limitations and biases and find creative ways to build critical trust and bonds among the players. This is an example of an experience-driven culture where the players had to experience what it takes to live in the world of another player of a different skin color. These rich experiences enabled the building of a well-knitted team.

Coach Boone had to maintain a holistic view that drove his season’s success and supported the critical integrator role that was required to break down the team’s and other stakeholders’ silos.

Tip

Invest in developing a holistic view that enables the teams to experience better understanding of how their roles contribute to innovative outcomes across the portfolio.

1.2 Portfolios of Projects Matter

Although most organizations understand the importance of viewing their business in the form of a portfolio, not many excel in applying the principles of portfolio management and seeing this as a strategic competency. This assumption could limit the organizational ability for achieving the balanced use of resources across the portfolio. It could directly affect the scaling of innovation if we miss out on including the right projects in the portfolio mix. If handled positively, designing and executing against the right portfolio becomes a natural organization muscle that is to be matured over time and that brings the data, people, and technology in alignment with critical choices and their associated priorities.

In an interview with Mary Palmieri, with Amazon, Principal PM, AI Content Thought Leader, she shares the following views about building the portfolio management muscle:

It’s almost business fundamentals you’re looking at then, it’s what levers can you pull to drive top line and bottom-line growth and how can you improve operations and performance to move quicker and better. I mean that’s just like about iterating the view of success.

Talking about portfolio management the same way, like the Project Management Institute (PMI) away, which is a portfolio of initiatives projects, is a best practice because you do need to all be speaking the same language and getting alignment on the inputs and the outputs. For maturing Key Performance Indicators KPIs, I think it’s diving deep into the use case and really getting present to what you’re trying to accomplish.

On my own program, I’m owning the content acquisition program, so I’ve almost had to define a language for the organization on what it means to acquire content, how to measure the success of digital assets and content management, and all that stuff that’s almost like it’s a new language. I think there’s the common business framework, but then it’s like you’re in your own little country, you’re making up your own little tribal language that you and your team need to start speaking, and you also need to educate senior leaders on that language.

Tip

Portfolio management is a strategic muscle. Executives have to grasp its language to ensure that strategic choice-making becomes an attribute of the organizational culture.

1.3 The Speed of Innovating

Clock speed is the norm in industry today. This means that the demand for fast innovation and creation is only increasing. The good news is that computing capabilities and the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and other simulating capabilities are all contributing to our ability to adapt facts and predict what’s coming.

Time is not our friend when it comes to major climate and environmental changes, which places more pressure on the critical importance of innovation.

As in our...