Make Ideas Happen
By Kate DowlerOften, the biggest challenge when it comes to innovation isn’t coming up with a great idea, but influencing internally and progressing ideas through the organisation. The behavioural, human element of decision-making plays a key role in whether ideas succeed or fail.
When it comes to innovation, you might expect that coming up with great ideas is the biggest challenge for most organisations. However, there’s usually a large bank of existing ideas sitting around on servers, in presentation documents or in people’s heads, many of which have potential.
Instead, we’re hearing more and more often that the biggest challenge for innovators is how to progress ideas through the organisation - to choose the right ideas, influence decision makers and make change happen.
“We don’t need more ideas - as a team we’re good at coming up with new ideas. The problem we have is how to sell these ideas in internally - how to persuade other departments and senior stakeholders to back an idea and take it forward”
So, what makes this process hard, and, as an innovator, what can you do about it?
Fear of failure
As humans, we are naturally risk-avoidant, and this tendency is amplified in large organisation where the impact of a particular decision may have huge ramifications. In the world of behavioural economics, one of the key tenets of prospect theory (Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky), is that losses are twice as powerful, emotionally, as receiving the equivalent gains.
This can often lead to deferment, and a tendency to just “keep going as we always have”. Driving this “do nothing” behaviour is another cognitive bias, the omission bias. We are prone to underestimate the impact of not acting (an act of omission), compared to an equivalent act of doing (an act of commision).
So, how can you overcome these biases?
Play on the omission bias. Paint a picture, mock up a future scenario (maybe even a bit of fake news if you like) to show what could happen if the organisation doesn’t act now. Perhaps a press release of a competitor launching a similar idea/product, or a future world where the brand is no longer relevant.
Make the first step seem easy. When working with further-out ideas, it can be helpful to show a clear roadmap of how to get to the future. Be clear on the future vision, but then make the initial investment something that is easy to say yes to.
Use anchoring as a technique to get people thinking out of their usual frame of reference. Show an even more disruptive idea first to make the key idea seem less radical (a common design technique when presenting a range of concepts). For a real world example, restaurants are good at doing this with their menu pricing - particularly the wine list!
Lost in translation
Communication is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects to getting buy-in for a new idea. Many great ideas don’t progress through organisations because the vision or excitement is somehow lost or mis-interpreted at the point it is shared.
One of the key reasons this happens is structural. In large organisations, different departments and teams often have different objectives, different mindsets and goals. This is amplified further in global businesses where ways of working, expectations and the decision-making process may vary between geographic markets.
There are several key principles that can help here:
Build ownership for the idea amongst key decision-makers. The IKEA effect, another cognitive bias, shows that people value ideas more if they have been personally involved in their creation or if they have some existing ownership of the idea. It sounds obvious, but involving key stakeholders in the creative process at key touchpoints is one of the most effective things you can do to prepare your idea for its internal journey, as well as get some valuable feedback and wisdom.
Building empathy is also key throughout the process of working in cross-functional teams, particularly when priorities and mindsets are different. It’s worth taking the time to properly understand the people and teams that are critical to progressing and developing ideas through the business (for more on the science of empathy and why it's so useful, read The Three Stages of Empathy).
Timing is everything
As we’re seeing right now on a global scale, the world is constantly changing. An idea that didn’t resonate a few months ago might suddenly be super-relevant given changing internal priorities and the emergence of new opportunities driven by external forces and changes.
As the world changes, so do the messages and stories we hear on a daily basis. Right or wrong, we are all influenced by what we see and hear - from friends, the media, from customers and from our own organisations.
So, how can we adapt to this changing narrative?
Identify the hot topics, keywords and phrases that are being used in the media right now in fields that are relevant to your idea. These keywords, phrases and memes will be top of mind for internal decision-makers too, so incorporating these into the language and other storytelling devices you use to introduce or present the idea will make it intuitively more acceptable and feel more relevant.
Re-visit existing ideas regularly, in light of internal and external changes. How do these changes affect the potential of a particular idea. Are there elements of the idea that are particularly relevant right now? Is now the right time for this idea, or a new version of it? The answer to the changing world may already exist within your organisation.
In summary: a human decision
There are many different factors that affect the likelihood of any one idea being taken forward and progressed within an organisation. The three themes we’ve looked at: Fear of failure, Lost in translation and Timing is everything, all illustrate the human element of decision-making. This human angle is typically overlooked, but plays a key role in whether ideas succeed or fail internally - often for irrational or arbitrary reasons rather than rational ones.
For more on influencing with impact and how we help innovators in this space, please contact me at Kate@industryofus.com