Cense

Innovation to Impact

Do You Need a Chief Learning Officer?

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Innovation is learning transformed into value, by design.

– Cameron Norman, Cense Ltd.

Organizations develop c-suite level roles because of a recognized need for focused strategic action and attention toward a particular aspect of their operations. Finance, Operations, Technology are just some of the areas that have developed into C-level roles and offices in many businesses and non-profits.

What about learning? As with many c-suite portfolios, learning touches everyone in an organization and serves as the fundamental mechanism for resilience, flexibility, and innovation. It’s curious that this role doesn’t exist, which is why we developed it ourselves.

A Chief Learning Officer is someone who is responsible for advancing your organization’s understanding of itself, its innovation activities related to its strategy, and its impact.

Why a CLO?

If your organization is substantially affected by changing markets, social and cultural changes, environmental and health threats, or shifts in human or technological resources, you need a CLO.

Learning is about ensuring you’ve got the sensory capacity to take in what is going on around you to monitor activities inside and outside your organization and within the market. It blends together monitoring and evaluation (M & E) with strategic foresight so you can see what you’ve done, where you are, and where things are going.

A CLO is responsible for not only ensuring you have M & E and trend data but that you use it. The CLO ensures that evidence is brought to the table to guide strategy and support innovation — which is learning transformed into value, by design.

Combined with foresight data, this also means ensuring that your organization calibrates its strategy to suit its needs, changing conditions, and ensures its operations and direction is aimed at the future, not the past. As ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once said about why he was so great at his game: he skated where the puck is going, not where it’s been.

The CLO role focuses the organization on these insights.

Building on Strengths

Lastly — and just as importantly — the CLO is responsible for fostering a culture of learning within the organization. This involves ensuring that the talents and skills within the organization are recognized, that staff are provided with the opportunity to share what they know to increase the capacity of the organization as a whole, and that new knowledge, skills, and insights are brought in from the outside.

This job is about knowledge and skills integration. It’s about getting the return on the investments made on people, processes, and innovation as a whole. It’s getting the very best from your best.

Best of all, any organization can do this and create this role for themselves and place learning on the same level as other c-suite priorities as we enter an age of transformation and change. Be ready.

If you want to establish a CLO office in your organization or want a fractional CLO to serve in this role, contact us. Our CLO service is designed for this and is aimed at supporting organizations in becoming their best through learning.

Perspective Taking: The Power of Ten

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Great innovators often see problems or solutions that others miss. This is as much about perception as it is anything else.

To illustrate the power of perception, consider the famous perceptual illusion below which profiles a young girl and an old woman (or “wife” and “mother in law”). The image, which dates back to 1888, shows how the same image can produce two very different stories about the subject matter.

There’s a way to create the same effect by looking at a situation through the lens of time. The Power of Ten is a perceptual forecasting and innovative technique that can help you can perspective on a situation, a product, or service by looking at the effects in layers, each offering a new possibility.

How to do it

The Power of Ten technique is simple. Take the current situation, topic, product, or service and forecast what might happen in ten minutes from now, ten hours, ten days, ten weeks, ten months, and ten years.

In some cases, you’ll find little effect or difference between the two and in others the differences are dramatic.

Consider waiting times for a service call. In that case, ten minutes might be a long time and ten hours is insufferable. If you are on a waitlist for an elective surgery, ten days might be incredibly fast, ten weeks reasonable, and ten months is anxiety producing.

What about a particular situation? Consider the dynamic situation that unfolded with the COVID-19 pandemic and policies that affected how and where we work. Time perception changed, value changed (e.g., Internet access), and certain things like parks, groceries, restaurants and bars, and video conference tools all changed their value in a matter of days, weeks, and months in different ways.

The Power of Ten activity is designed for you to forecast and spend some time thinking about what will something look like, feel like, interact with, and impact the world at each of these different scales.

This simple exercise will allow you to see constraints, opportunities, effects, and interactions that are either not present or imperceptible at one scale at other scales. This allows you to see connections between things that were not perceived before.

This is best done as a group and can be performed in a short time as a facilitated activity or at a distance.

If you want to see possible futures using this approach and want help, contact us. We can help you multiply your perspective by a power of ten.

Note: This exercise draws inspiration for a video first produced in the 1970s by the legendary design partnership of Charles and Rey Eames for IBM.

7 Questions to Evaluate Design Thinking

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Design thinking is much more than sticky notes, whiteboards and creative exploration. It’s impact can be felt in the outputs and outcomes tied to actual product or service and much further if we allow ourselves to focus on that.

Here are 7 questions that we ask of design thinking that focus on the learning outcomes and uncover the true impact of creation, design, and execution, which is a big part of what design thinking is all about.

By asking these we can better tap into the true return on investment of design thinking as a transformative approach to learning, not just product or service design.

  1. What do people learn in the process of engaging in design thinking?
  2. What new skills to people acquire, develop, or refine through design thinking?
  3. How are the lessons from engaging in design thinking applied to other subsequent products?
  4. What is the effect of design thinking on the mindset of those involved in a design-oriented project?
  5. How does the co-design process influence team development, cohesion, creativity, and innovation performance?
  6. What role does design thinking play in shaping the innovation culture (e.g., creation, execution, delivery, and evaluation) with an organization?
  7. How does design thinking contribute to the implementation of innovations?

Evaluating the impact of your products or services is always important, but if you focus only on that you will miss some of the biggest benefits that design thinking offers your organization when done well.

If you need or want help in learning how your team learns and amplifying the effects of design thinking, contact us and we’ll help you out.

Note: This article was inspired by a recent post on our sister blog, Censemaking, which focuses on ideas, commentary and issues tied to innovation.

Innovation Talent Inventories

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Faced with a situation or opportunity that demands you try something new or change what your organization does, the type of knowledge, skills, and experience required is often different than what is used to maintain the status quo. One of the most overlooked places to look for this talent is right under our noses — or beaks — and that your birds of a feather might be closer together than you knew.

An innovation talent inventory is an exercise that organizations are advised to undertake every 6-12 months (depending on the level of dynamism within the organization and industry) to assess the talent within your organization.

Why an Inventory?

Talent acquisition and retention is a costly part of organizational development. Hiring staff often means looking at a variety of skills, yet may only enlist a few of them for a specific job. Over time it becomes easy to lose track of or forget that your team may have skills and experiences that can be brought to bear on your current project.

The process of undertaking an inventory is also a means of recognizing and reminding your team of who is on it. By looking at your staff through the lens of innovation, it’s also possible to identify attributes that were not germane at hiring or recruitment but have evolved into a need at the present day. Whether its a certification course, extra-mural activities like coaching sports, or experience working in a particular sector, these previously non-recognized experiences can now serve to support your team’s innovation project.

Undertaking an Inventory

There is no prescriptive means of undertaking an inventory and we recommend the following:

Informal interviews. Simple coffee-time conversations can make a big difference and have the added benefit of allowing your team to build trust and commitment to the innovation project in the process. Toronto-based software firm Freshbooks encourages their team to go on ‘blind dates’ (not real ones) over coffee with staff in other departments so that they can learn from each other. Informality allows for conversations to wander to different parts of a persons’ career that might have been previously unexplored.

Resume reviews. Whether it is looking over your team’s personnel files or LinkedIn pages (all with permission and consent of your team, of course), a review of the current set of listed skills, experiences and certifications can jog your memory about what talent your team already has. Being transparent about why you’re doing this and ensuring that any exploration is done solely for the purpose of the innovation talent inventory is essential. This can be a powerful means for team and trust-building if done right and harmful if done poorly.

Surveys. A simple exploratory survey asking individuals to identify skills and abilities (less about knowledge) can catalogue your teams’ ideas and suggestions. The one risk with this approach is that many staff might still see themselves in their current role and frame their responses according to that. Like with the interviews, focusing on a person’s journey rather than their current destination is key.

Visual Mapping. Another fun and informative strategy is to use visual maps where individuals either self-plot or are plotted on a map of the situation. Plotting out the needs, wants, and opportunities on a simple large-sheet of paper and then having individuals place themselves closest to where they fit related to those needs, wants, and opportunities can be highly participatory. This works by having the page posted on a wall in a common area for a few days (e.g., coffee room) or using an electronic tool such as Miro or Mural.

Together, you will find yourself and your team learning much from what you already have and putting underused or unknown talents to work to help take your idea forward. You’ll know so much more about what you already know (and didn’t realize).

Need help putting this together? Contact us and we can show you how to engage your team and learn more, together, to set yourself for innovation, by design.

Innovation Implementation Index

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What does it truly mean to say that you are an innovative organization? One of the simplest, most powerful measures is implementation. How many innovative initiatives have you launched and put into the world?

There are arguments why the QWERTY keyboard is inferior to other designs, but there’s no argument that its the best innovation we’ve ever had when it comes to typing. Why? It’s the one that was implemented into practice.

Success Marks

Checkmarks on a list usually imply some kind of rote behaviour that isn’t suitable for innovation, although checklists themselves are useful for quality control. We prefer the idea of ‘success marks’ which indicate that an idea has been successfully taken from concept and put into practice — whether or not it yields desired outcomes.

As an index, we propose the following six metrics:

  1. The number of new initiatives that have been implemented into practice
  2. The number of projects that have developed prototypes that have been tested
  3. The prototype ‘death rate’: divide the number of terminated prototypes by the total number of prototypes developed
  4. The number of prototypes moved into implementation (* which is a similar, but not necessarily the same number as #1)
  5. The number of new initiatives started:
  6. The initiative death rate: divide the number of ‘new’ projects started by the number of projects implemented

Number 1 is the most important of all of these.

The reason we count all six as part of an index is that each of these represents some form of concerted action and effort toward moving ideas out of concept into action with the lowest number (Number 1) representing the highest value to the organization.

While having ideas is a precursor to prototypes we don’t we count this because it is easy to game this metric.

We also don’t believe in coming up with metrics about innovation or even prototype quality because the success of implementation and the quality of the prototype don’t always match. You can implement an idea that is still in development, yet still has value that can be realized right away.

Want to show how innovative you are? Consider scoring yourself on these metrics to see how much of what your organization does is talk and how much of it is action.

Want to move ideas into action? We can help. And we can develop the metrics to show what kind of impact your innovation has in the world. Let us show you how.