Hi, everyone. I'm Candace o'brien, co-founder of the six A design and innovation consultancy that helps enterprise clients and pioneering start-ups achieve faster innovation cycles, create better products and services and improve their processes and organizational cultures. Using design and vision sprints.

When we work with innovation teams on new product development. One of the quandaries we often confront is why do so many products fail depending on how you source in your innovation statistics, between 40% and 90% of new products launched won't achieve a positive return. But why does that happen? And what recommendations would you give teams to improve their odds? How would you design the world's most innovative product? We often hear responses like more effective customer research and validation, choosing the right technology stack, defining a compelling value proposition or hiring the right people. These are all correct. These steps are foundational but they're not enough. Generally, in our experience, product problems are not about the products themselves or even about the people creating them. They are about the organizational systems in which those people operate. Even if you hire the very best and the very brightest people, if you can't help them coalesce into a high performance team that is aligned for execution and is supported by systems that allow them to learn quickly and respond rapidly to dynamic conditions. The likelihood is that your product will fail. Generally, we find that companies can't truly fixed product problems till they tackle the organizational problem. Conway's law holds true to paraphrase the way a company is organized, its lines of communications, its silos its hierarchies.

Its bottleneck is the way everything the company produces will be organized. Too often. Products become more of a reflection of a company's broken orgs org chart than of its users' needs. So in our experience to design truly innovative products, you need to start by designing truly innovative product organizations, innovative organizations are interconnected, dynamic, constantly evolving human systems, whether it's at the level of a global enterprise, a business unit, a scale agile team or a pizza buy team.

The goal of the organization is to harness the unique capabilities of a set of humans to understand the needs of other humans and then to create solutions for them in a way that delivers collective value. Peter Drucker, the management guru said the purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things in high performance product organizations, our systems allow us to translate raw inputs that is customer problems that we identified through continuous discovery into predictable, reliable, high quality outputs, viable products and services that allow us to achieve strategic outcomes which result in changes in customer behavior that drive success for them, for our business and for society.

So how do you design such a system that unlocks the very best of human potential for innovation? It really starts with making very conscious decisions about your systems of work. Organizational design is an ongoing and iterative process of intentionally shaping and aligning the way an entity is structured, its people, its processes in order to deliver on its purpose and strategic objectives, it requires that you really are as thoughtful about the way you design the systems, the internal norms or what we would call culture and the processes and tools you use to get work done as you are about how you design your products and services themselves.

So as product design or technology leaders or future leaders, you are by default organizational designers. And there are some important levers that you can flex to create your optimal innovation organization. Jake Gilbert's star model gives us a good place to start by identifying five key areas of organizational design strategy structure, process people and rewards. Now, the first level strategy, if you're a leader trying to drive innovation at any level, it's critical to help your team focus by setting the strategic context. Why, why are we here? What's our purpose? Why is what we're doing important? Why have we made the choices to focus on these innovation domains and opportunities rather than others? And as importantly, where are we going, what outcomes are we trying to achieve? Simon Sack says giving direction is not the same thing as giving directions, directions are instructions on how direction is the reason why. So as a product leader aligning teams and keeping them on the line and inspired is job number one, when teams lack strategic context, the why they falter focusing on outputs, how many features we ship, for example or did we ship on time rather than the outcomes is what we're doing actually helping us to achieve our strategic goals and our objectives.

When we work with product and innovation, teams that need to get back on track, we typically conduct a vision sprint to help them realign around their core for their purpose, their vision, their mission and their values. Next, we want to focus on the success metrics and the tangible outcomes. They need to measure as well as what are their guiding principles and their boundaries for making more effective decisions and prioritizing their work without a doubt. One of the guiding principles we recommend for any organization is to have a big vision that's essential, but really to start small to to scale your work, figure out what is the smallest fastest, simplest thing you can do to test a solution of assumption and to bring the product vision alive with an end to end use case successfully executing even a sliver of functionality that has a measurable value to end users.

Even if it's a single feature, even if it's about creating a single report, can reenergize a team that's stuck and can become a game changer in itself. The second level when you're thinking about developing innovative organizations is around the organization structure and many companies obsess about what's the right or structure? Should we be a hierarchy? Should we be matrix? Do we need to be flat or hollo, how do we get rid of management layers?

Should we create squads or tribes? Is this right for us? Should we be more like Amazon and have two pizza teams? What is the right model? And when projects are failing, the most common response is to shuffle people around but messing with the org chart, moving lines and boxes usually has very little effect on improving the performance of teams that are trying to innovate. We regularly work with enterprises that have recently been restructured.

A typical trigger is something like a new leader has been brought in and then teams are consolidated or split apart in arbitrary ways and then no one's happy, which isn't surprising at all based on Harvard Business Review studies, 80% of reorganizations or restructurings in a company fail to deliver the value promised.

And the fact is there is no single one right, organizational structure. That's right for every organization that's trying to innovate what we see consistently. However, is that whatever the structure of the organization in which they operate, people crave clarity around their roles and responsibilities and their span of control, ambiguity around rules and responsibilities can kill team performance and accountability and really contribute to a toxic culture of blame and finger pointing.

If that is a challenge in your organization, bring your team together, visualize your end to end operating model, which is the current flow of work, how information gets passed along your organization and what governance or decision making structures you have across your organization, identify gaps and opportunities for optimization, define the rules and capabilities necessary to support a new operating model.

Then as a team define the activities, deliverables and metrics for those roles. This kind of clarity, especially when it's visualized can be reinvigorating for any team that needs to start execution. The third level level of organizational design is really around process. We like to think about process as a recipe, a set of ingredients and tools and capabilities and steps for how to get things done most efficiently to deliver value. So one way to optimize your organization for innovation is to conduct a small virtual white boarding session with your team and consider what would your organization look like if you use the smallest amount of energy possible to accomplish your most important task? Think about mapping out your processes today and then figuring out what extraneous steps could you remove what manual steps could be automated? What unused reports could be eliminated or unproductive meetings permanently canceled? Where is the most friction in your processes today and do your processes drive your strategic outcomes. Like software process shouldn't be over designed or over engineered and it should be reflected often as you consider your processes shift your thinking from what you want to control in your organization to what energies and capabilities you want to unleash whether it's greater empathy, greater collaboration, a culture of experimentation and learning, then prototype and test those new processes to support the behavior change and the ways of working that you actually want.

The fourth level of organizational design is people. People are what turned great ideas into innovative products and into sustainable businesses. It's important to think holistically about the entire employee life cycle as you collaboratively iterate and ideate on creating an environment where people actually want to work, where they feel empowered, where they have a sense of autonomy, where the work they do is matched with their skills.

So they also feel a sense of mastery and where they have the psychological safety to share, to fail fast, to learn and to iterate. But if there's one phase in the life cycle, we recommend companies obsess about especially in a world of remote work. It's the onboarding experience.

How do you set up new employees for success and acclimate them to their position, their team and the organization. So they are aligned from day one around your strategic contacts and understand their purpose. How do you help them find moments of connection across the organizations that contribute to a sense of belonging, whether it's through things like buddy and mentoring systems, periodic, one on 11 on ones with employees or meaningful interactions with leadership where employees see leaders embodying the values of the organization.

Often we find that when companies think about focusing on creating an optimized experience for new employees, they get armed with tools and ideas for creating more optimized experiences for all their employees. The fifth and last I I'll talk to about today is rewards and rewards are not just about money. In fact, if people are being paid market rates, generally giving them additional money, giving them additional incentives is not going to be a major motivator. If you want to boost engagement in your team in less than five minutes, probably the easiest way is by getting into the conscious habit of acknowledging your team members in real time for what they're doing. Well, a series of Gallup surveys on employee engagement concluded that positive attention is 30 times more powerful than negative attention or critical feedback in creating high performance on a team and 1200 times more effective than just ignoring your employees. But I assume that no one is actively employing their organ, uh their employees as part of a management strategy. So don't wait for an annual review or a quarterly one on one or uh once every three years, 360 degree feedback session. Give employees and coworkers praise in real time and watch people blossom. So today I talked a little bit about intentionally optimizing the design of your organization for innovation and five level levers that you can flex.

And I want to leave you with this idea as we emerge from the pandemic organizations and teams have an unparalleled opportunity to take a step back and redesign their systems of work for our next normal hybrid future. During the lockdown, organizations that needed to pivot their business models often pivoted some of their internal processes. However, most companies simply transplanted existing processes to the remote work contacts, putting the onus and employees to adapt to an endless life and cycle of zoom meetings.

Furthermore, the the reality of returning to the office is sparking conflict in many organizations. There was a study in Newsweek a few months ago that noted that while 83% of CEO S want employees to return in person, only 10% of employees want to come back full time. So to potentially navigate this tricky period, whether you're a leader in innovation, whether you're a worker in innovation, take time to talk with your team and understand their experiences with and challenges with remote working and their aspirations for the next normal then core policies and processes that allow them to do their best work regardless of their location.

So things like ensuring employees have equitable access to resources like high speed internet and secure networks consider whether your organization can provide child childcare credits for impacted employees. As you guys probably know, almost 3 million women left the workforce in the last year because they were unable to balance work and childcare. What an incredible brain drain we're experiencing. We want to get those women back into the workforce so we can maximize their contribution.

And then also think about how you can proactively brainstorm ideas to address the power imbalances and the lack of visibility issues that can emerge when one segment of workers is on site and the other is remote uh employees as well as leaders need to be sensitive to the fact that logistics will require more thought and planning as we move into more of this hybrid way of working who will be in the office and when should be mandatory colo location.

Uh And what types of activities do we need the team to be physically present? Are we going to have some people working um at different days of the week or is everybody going to come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do people only need to come in for high stake things like high stakes meetings or immersive training. All of these things are areas that need to be figured out and discussed upfront. And finally, if you're an employer, ensure that you're creating opportunities for movements of connection, for cultural rituals and for celebrations, to cement the bonds and relationships in your organization in a human system. It's the relationships that matter. Most learning flows from relationship change flows from relationships, innovation flows from relationships. So, thank you so much for your time today. I'd love to hear any questions that you might have or feel free to connect with me on linkedin and share your stories about how you're designing your organization for innovation as we enter the next normal.