Retail is Detail They Say

Let’s assume the role pays $100,000, that’s about $8,000 of time to produce the paperwork. Add in a few more people and you are probably up towards $20,000 of effort. This culture doesn’t support innovation, it prevents it.

You don’t see Amazon or Google doing this?

Now I am not saying, let everything happen, as the focus on the business can shift and resources can be wasted, but there any many great examples of innovation support. A business needs governance and good cost control, but governance can go too far. At Amazon, they have pioneered a Lean Canvas approach, no PowerPoint, but simply write down your idea, almost on a napkin, but in the style of the marketing pitch. What this does is, it stops you spending too much time on format and makes you reflect upon business value, what it really means to the customer. Writing a marketing pitch, forces you to step in the customers shoes.

What’s in it for them?

The other approach that I like is 20 percent time, the Google initiative of allowing you work on “Anything you want that will most benefit Google”. Now this could be seen as risky, a little outside of the norm, but the reality it’s where Google Apps (now G Suite) and Google cloud came from

So, how do you stop your company methods and culture strangling innovation?

Some, have separated parts off. Woolies X (part of Woolworth’s Australia) for example have done just this, bringing to together, key online, technology, marketing and data businesses to solve these problems. Wesfarmers followed a similar path, by separating out the analytics and data science from its flybuys business into the Wesfarmers Analytical Centre.

These are great at driving innovation, but the question is, “How do you bring this back into the broader business, to change the culture?"

Ultimately it requires structural change, to set teams out in the right way. It requires effort to embed empowerment and a testing mentality. It often gets called failing fast, but it’s really about experimentation, trying ideas out, adjusting and trying again. Finally, it requires training on tools, techniques and mind-set. Agile fosters a short-term focus on value being delivered quickly, encouraging teams to learn, test and pivot, but the issue is, this can be a big shift for some. The Agile mind-set can be learnt, but it takes time. There are ways to encourage the change and I have seen this happen during a partnership with GlassRock Consulting and Peak teams.

A process called “adventure-based training”, encourages the team to take, fast, calculated risks, by putting them in fictitious life or death scenarios. A bit far-fetched you may say, but what it does, is, it provides the team with limited data and limited time to decide a way forward.

Move forward or fail

They have to make a choice. Do you fly to base camp at a financial cost with reduced time and energy, or walk, consuming energy, more time, but less of your financial resources?

You have 90 seconds to decide. This pressure drives clarity of decision making, focusing on the goal:

Getting to the summit

After Cloud training and agile training, this was my final formal training element. The team was left to self-organise, with the support of an agile coach.

The result

After sprint 0 (Building the DC on AWS) the team moved 18 applications to the cloud, including Active Directory. So it can be done, you can get out of your own way. All really makes for common sense, but they say “it’s not that common".

I see this is an issue with business’s not adapting and taking a leaner approach. It’s an absolute must in today’s climate, with digital players, built on a simpler system, from nothing, taking a somewhat scrappy approach, jostling approach.