Treasure 85 – Innovation & Organization

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How do I prepare the ground for innovation? Is innovation only for R&D? How do you keep your organization fit to deal with surprises? The video treasure provides answers. You can consume it faster than an episode of your favorite series.

We start with Astro Teller, head of Alphabet’s Moonshot factory X. He tells how he prepares the ground for innovation. This is not possible by cleverly combining different methods. He is particularly challenging the mantra “Fail fast”. Even if you tell people that failure is not bad and has no consequences, they will still avoid it for the time being. His suggestion is very surprising. Celebrate people for killing a project. Also a project that is good. “If you can’t afford crazy, you can’t afford brilliant.”
The explanations are irritating at first, but if you think about it for a while it makes perfect sense. His final word is the transition to the second video. Everyone can innovate, because all children are hyper-creative. We have only forgotten this over time.
Thanks by the way to Judith Braun for sharing this nugget on Twitter. (18 min, video, English)

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Video-Link: https://youtu.be/3SsnY2BvzeA

Less known as Astro Teller is Dominque Pfeiffer. He has founded an Innovator’s Club at Philipps and thus followed a similar path as I did about two years ago. Everyone on deck is the motto, because innovation is not just for Research & Development teams. I consider the number of 10% participants as be realistic. With 50-100 people in a medium-sized company or location, you can make a difference. How are the innovation enthusiasts networked in your company? I would be happy to exchange ideas.
PS: By the way, I’ve been on stage at 12min.me before. You can find my talk on the page with the lectures.
(12 min, video, German)

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Video-Link: https://youtu.be/kTkFRNHDVLs

And how do I manage my organization accordingly? Mark Poppenborg explains in seven episodes Future Leadership to Go. One episode per principle. In episode 7 he explains why, in an environment with many surprises, planning and efficiency are less important than fitness. Since I love sports analogies, I would like to illustrate this with the example of a basketball team. Let’s assume they would approach a season like a traditional company. The goal is championship. The plan is to score an average of 75 points per game, because “market research” has shown that you this made a champion in recent years. Five players are enough. Putting someone on the bench would be a waste. At the beginning of the season you’d be teaching basics like shooting, dribbling and defending. Otherwise you learn the skills in the game. But now surprises come into play. Someone gets hurt, an opposing team defends your offensive system better than expected, a series of referee decisions gets you out of concept, your opponent fouls much more than usual. If you don’t have redundancy in the form of substitutes, don’t have a new offensive system, have some mental stability and trained free throws, chances on championship are bad. I think you understand this analogy. The remaining 6 videos are also worth watching and similar analogies can be made. (8 min, video, German)

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Video-Link: https://youtu.be/4iPMrAVYQoo

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