Driving human centric innovation within large organisations: A personal checklist.

When trying to implement human centric innovation within large organisations, it’s very likely that you will face many, many barriers along the journey. Organisations that decide they need to “innovate” can often be the slow moving, monolithic type of structures that have their own traditional ways of working. Many of them will not be prepared or set up for the types of disruption they will need to go through in order to successfully innovate. Many of them will completely underestimate the time, resources and steps needed to innovate. Many of them will simply misunderstand the true meaning of innovation.

For example, It’s rare that a company successfully innovates without taking into consideration the end user. As Eric Ries points out in the excellent “Lean Startup”, Innovation is about learning what your customers really want, testing your “visions” continuously and adapting and adjusting before it’s too late. Organisations who don’t know their customers and ignore their needs and wishes, will likely develop products and services that fail to inspire any enthusiasm or set themselves apart from the competition.

To be successful, it’s necessary to create and nurture an environment of human centric innovation. Employees at all levels will need to learn to use “change” to their advantage. They will need to embrace new a human centric approach to work. They will need to embrace technology and fully understand its potential. They will need to understand the bigger picture, both from an industry and global perspective. They will need to be prepared to downsize or reengineer their operations and potentially reduce the number of employees while accomplishing the same amount of work, if not more. The following checklist is a set of examples or steps you could take in order to maximise your success when trying to embed innovation within your organisation:

1. Build personal relationships across multiple internal networks, in order to nurture a collaborative and open environment between departments. When working in an organisation that’s siloed and lacks a collaborative culture, it’s vital to search for people who have similar interests and needs. These people exist and they are probably looking for someone like you too. By building these close personal relationships, you can slowly begin to work around the bureaucratic decision-making processes together, speed up collaboration and reduce the decision-making cycles that are blocking your progress. Find the right people, invite them for a coffee, share your experiences. Many will begin to treat these initial meetings as a venting session, which is a good sign. It shows you that they feel they are in a safe space when they are around you. From here you can begin to find ways of collaborating and begin to move faster than the rest.
2. Speak to the users and make the findings as visible as possible across the organisation. It shouldn’t be surprising that many people within the organisation won’t know what the users of the service or product actually think, feel or need from them. It’s rare that this sort of information trickles down to all aspects of the company, but when it does, it can become very powerful. So, make sure you do your user research, gather as much information as possible. Once you have synthesised the data, start finding ways of making it accessible to others in the organisation. You could hold show and tell events, invite stakeholders to a talk that where you demonstrate some of the findings. You can also create tangible artefacts that help tell the story, for example a set of customer journeys or a service blueprint. Then make sure these are placed somewhere very visible, like the canteen, entrance hall etc. These items will spark curiosity and conversations, conversations you need to have in order to spread human centricity across the organisation.
3. Educate stakeholders to the value of qualitative research. Many large organisations will have a strong focus on technology, IT and data. Sadly, qualitative, human centric approaches still struggle to get the full appreciation they deserve in many traditional companies. In order to drive true innovation, your organisation needs to understand its customers’ needs and wants. It will take time and patience from you, so start small. For example, as well as utilising some of the ideas from the previous point, you could also try inviting willing stakeholders (maybe start with the close personal relationships you build from point 1) with you during fieldwork, so they see and hear first-hand from the end user. You could involve those same stakeholders in some rounds of user testing that you might be running. You could offer to run small co-creation sessions and workshops on their behalf. You could even run Q&A sessions on topics like Design Thinking within communal spaces during key times of the day. There’s a great number of things you can try, the key is becoming creative in your approaches. If things get blocked, find another way around.
4. Look to develop quick wins, quick wins that don’t rely on technology to become a success. If you rely on too many stakeholders, departments, etc. you will find yourself becoming frustrated. While working towards the big picture, it can be incredible useful to find some quick wins. Quick wins are great as you don’t need to rely on too many other people, other departments like I.T, and they help to boost your own positive state. They also help to sell the big picture to other stakeholders. With every successful quick win, the bigger picture becomes easier to imagine and in turn, more appealing to others.
5. Gorilla marketing is your friend, utilise and grow your own networks to spread the word of the great work you and your team is doing. If you are struggling to get internal buy-in or support from Marketing departments, then utilise your own networks. LinkedIn and Twitter are your friends, make an effort to publish the great work you are doing (without breaking any company policies in terms of what you can and cannot discuss publicly), tag your colleagues to spread the coverage, get your colleagues to do the same. This is a great way to help promote the amazing, innovative products or services you are developing. It also has a second, less obvious benefit. By tagging the organisation you work for in the posts you publish, you will begin to reach other parts of the organisation you maybe previously struggling to reach. Colleagues you have never met will start to notice the work you are doing, and hopefully they will slowly begin to reach out to you to learn more.
6. Test your products, speak to users as much as possible to understand the true needs in order to develop products and service experiences that delight. This might sound obvious, but you might be surprised at how many companies still fail to properly test their products and services with end users. If this sounds familiar, don’t want for others to do this. Make a start, get out there and start talking to people. Get the products and services in front of them and begin to ask the right questions. You don’t need things like dedicated user testing labs to make a start, do some gorilla testing instead. Take prototypes into the field and get some initial feedback. At this point, any research is better than no research.
7. Develop external collaborations with universities, startups etc. There is a wealth of untapped knowledge, expertise and curiosity out there that simply won’t exist in many organisations. Firstly, these people can not only help develop new products and services, reducing the need to rely on other slow-moving parts of the organisational structure, they might even already have existing products that you could utilise. Why reinvent the wheel when you can simply partner with someone else to help fix existing problems or meet new needs? They also help to promote the work you do across their networks. Secondly, these people can become your ambassadors, helping to spread the word about the amazing work your innovation teams are doing. Thirdly, it’s a great way to find new talent that you may want to include in your team going forward.
8. Take a bottom up approach to the work you do, working with lower level stakeholders to help them personally. Too often the day-to-day business takes priority and innovation remains a lip service, something to be used as a public facing message, but ignored internally. Innovation is a low priority for many as it rarely earns you money for today. Therefore, its often the case that top down buy-in for innovation is none-existent. If it appears to be a low priority, then start from the bottom. If you begin to help solve the problems of people at the lower levels, working with them, imparting knowledge and empowering them at the same time, then your following will inevitably grow. This then has positive ripples that spread vertically up the chain or seniority. Find your ambassadors that not only help you solve complex problems that they know more about, but who will help your following grow internally.

It’s important to note that these are just some personal examples based on past experiences. There are many other factors that could lead to varying success rates. For example, cultural differences (both country and organisational environment) could make a big difference to the success factors. However, hopefully using this as a loose guide will help you be a little more successful when it comes to driving human centric innovation within your workspace.