Making Elephants Dance -- How corporates can lean into the future with Lean Startup

How corporates can lean in to the future with Lean Startup

Making Elephants Dance

Janice Fraser Director, Innovation Practice

November 2015

Keep in touch!

@clevergirl

3 Pivotal points in time…and a fourth

Let’s take a moment to remember 1987.

“To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.”

–Tom Peters, 1987

Now let’s take a moment to consider today.

Software is disrupting entire industries

$6B Valuation Financial Services

$19B Valuation Transportation

$3.2B Acquisition by Google Home Automation

$3.3B Valuation Travel & Hospitality

$20B Valuation Entertainment

S&P 500 churn since 2002ADDED TO the index LEFT the index

The greatest risk for any business today is the pace of change.

Our management theories are 100 years old, defining “management” as creating efficiency through:

Source: Management Theory and Practice, G. A. Cole, 2004

Planning



Planning Organizing



Planning OrganizingMotivating



Planning OrganizingMotivatingControlling



For 100 years, the business world has emphasized planning and control as a means of ensuring predictable outcomes.

When change is your greatest threat,

When change is your greatest threat, plans and predictions are (literally)

When change is your greatest threat, plans and predictions are (literally) unbelievable.

Tom Peters saw the problem coming in 1987, but nobody really figured out what to do about it, until now.

Entrepreneurship is the solution, creating a steady stream of innovation that leads and responds to change.

Lean Startup is a management approach that mitigates the risk of change, turning it into an asset that can be leveraged, by supporting entrepreneurship throughout any company.

Lean Startup is not religion. These are not rigid rules set in stone. I don’t care if you use the jargon.

It’s the thought behind your action that counts.

JUNE & PETE’S Wedding Cake

A STORY

JunePete

April

May

June

July

August

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thekitchn.com

Zoe Clark, The Cake Parlour

Lean Startup

Lean Startup methodology reconceives all our efforts as experiments with a simple goal: To test our strategies to see which parts are working and which are not.

—Eric Ries, The Leader’s Guide

1. Begin with a clear hypothesis.

2. Test predictions empirically by giving customers a chance to take some action.

3. Measure customer behavior.

4. Make a decision to act based on what you’ve learned.

How do you retool for entrepreneurship when your management structure is optimized for planning and accountability processes that look like this?

Analyze

Plan

Stakeholders

Feedback

Revise

Budget (staged-gate system)

Approve

Execute

Measure

Level 1: Project processes Start prioritizing assumptions, running experiments, measuring outcomes, and making learnings-based decisions.

Level 2: Broad company culture Share the experience and value with leadership. Share the know-how with teams. Emphasize experiential learning and corporate storytelling.

Level 3: Deep operating systems Yes, You Can. Retool incentive, budget allocations, and other management mechanisms.

To change your company, target three levels:

How The Process Level Works

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Plot the difference

Lots of little wiggles

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Each wiggle is a learning cycle

Build

Measure

Learn

It’s a blow to our egos when we discover that a lot of our beliefs about the future are wrong.

But when we get over that, it’s quite liberating. We realize that we don’t need to know everything.

We can put our ideas to the test and change course based on what we learn.

—Eric Ries, The Leader’s Guide

• Teams shift questioning from “can this be done” to “should this be done?”

• Seeing predictions falsified inspires exploration and fosters informed humility.

• Seeing customers actions creates confidence.

• Confidence creates a drive for definitive action.

• Experimentation discourages vagueness and ambiguity.

Impact of working at the Project Process level

Fostering the Entrepreneurial Culture


Leadership Your vision is your destination, and anything (or anyone) that gets in the way needs to be open to change. People are the engine. Do your beliefs and values support or hinder entrepreneurial innovation?



StorytellingTell stories at all levels of the organization, in large and small ways, all the time. How do we talk about success and failure? What values are our stories reinforcing?



StorytellingTell stories at all levels of the organization, in large and small ways, all the time. How do we talk about success and failure? What values are our stories reinforcing?

Team Structure Entrepreneurial teams are cross-functional, collaborative, and fully dedicated. Recognize the systems that are creating drag on your startup teams and begin devising strategies to change them.

Change the Deep Operating Systems LAST

Project Finance Establish startup boards that function like investors. Startups don’t fail, the just run out of money.

Accountability Re-evaluate how the Corporation monitors progress, manages risk, and measures effectiveness. Implement an innovation accounting system that monitors value creation.

Performance ManagementRewarding people in both monetary and non-monetary ways for outcomes and value creation, rather than mere output. It’s about the value of what you do not the quantity of what you do.

Thank you!

@clevergirl

Making Elephants Dance -- How corporates can lean into the future with Lean Startup

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