Redesigning Your Organization for Innovation

This is your last article/video this month!

Please log in or sign up to unlock 3 more articles/videos this month and explore our expert resources.

Automatic Summary

Why Products Fail and the Role of Organizational Systems

Hello! I'm Candace O'Brien, co-founder of the Six A design and innovation consultancy. Today, I will discuss an all-too-familiar problem in the field of new product development - product failure. Depending on your sources, a staggering 40%-90% of new products won't achieve a positive return. Why does this happen and, more importantly, how can innovation teams improve their odds? Let's delve in.

The Problem Isn't with Products or People, It's the System

Effective customer research, choosing the right technology stack, defining a compelling value proposition, hiring the right people - all essential steps in product design. Yet, they don't guarantee success. The bulk of product problems do not stem from the products themselves or the people behind them. Instead, they spring from the organizational systems containing these elements. No matter how talented your team is, they can't perform without a system that supports them.

The Relevance of Conway's Law in Product Failure

Conway's Law holds a mirror to organizations, asserting that organizational structures greatly influence the designs of their products and services.

The law suggests that products often reflect a company's broken organizational charts more than its users' needs, hence the failure. To design truly innovative products, you need to start by designing truly innovative product organizations.

Rethinking Your Systems of Work

Clear-cut organizational design starts with making conscious decisions about your systems of work. It's about intentionally shaping and aligning your people, processes, and structure to fulfill your purpose and strategic objectives. An innovative organization isn't only about designing great products and services; it's equally about designing the internal norms, culture, and tools needed to get work done.

Flexing Your Organizational Design Levers

Only by fine-tuning your organizational design can you create an innovation-friendly, high-performance organization. Jake Gilbert's Star Model provides five key areas to consider: strategy, structure, process, people, and rewards.

Your Organizational Strategy:

  • Set the strategic context for your team: why are you here, what's your purpose, why is your innovation domain important?
  • Clearly define your strategic goals and focus on delivering them.

Your Organizational Structure:

  • Most organizational restructuring efforts are based on shuffling people around, which usually does little to improve team performance.
  • There is no single perfect structure for all organizations. What is universally true is that people crave clarity about their roles, responsibilities, and span of control.

Your Organizational Process:

  • Just like software, processes shouldn't be overdesigned. They need to be reflected upon often, removing extraneous steps, automating manual ones, and eliminating unused reports.
  • Processes should aim to unleash greater empathy, collaboration, and a culture of experimentation and learning.

Your Organizational People:

  • People turn great ideas into innovative products and into sustainable businesses, and they should be the heart of your focus.
  • From recruitment to onboarding, optimize the employee life cycle to create an environment where people want to work.

Your Organizational Rewards:

  • Rewards aren't just about money. In fact, positive attention and recognition can significantly boost engagement, motivation, and performance more than financial incentives.

In conclusion, intentionally optimizing your organizational design for innovation requires an integrated approach that balance these five key levers.

Redesigning for the 'Next Normal' Future

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unparalleled opportunity to redesign our systems of work for the hybrid future. It's crucial to engage with your team to understand their experiences working remotely and their aspirations for upgrading to the next normal.

Remember, a successful organization values the importance of fostering strong relationships - learning flows from relationships, change flows from relationships, and most importantly, innovation flows from relationships.

Thank you for your time. Let's keep the conversation going. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and share your stories about how you're designing your organization for innovation as we move into the next normal.


Video Transcription

Read More