This national IT organization had a challenge. Years of cost-cutting, tight deadlines, changes to IT infrastructure, architecture and their service delivery model left staff and their directors entrenched in silos, feeling overworked and doing their best to avoid raising the ire of another group in the organization. Client satisfaction with IT was low, burnout trends were rising in the IT group and directors were grumbling about the impact on people and productivity given all the changes. With more change on the horizon, the VP Human Resources and the VP IT Strategy knew they needed to do something to help IT teams cope with the changes and get everyone working better together. The objective: lead a change in how IT Directors led themselves, worked with each other and with their people, so it became easier to lead the next wave of change and build relationships with clients.

Our ThinkUP Innovation Framework solution was uniquely designed to integrate with a broader leadership competency development program. Our solution specifically worked to build competencies for innovation, collaboration and communication by introducing the FourSight Thinking System™  and asking leaders to integrate it in how they delegated work and engaged their teams, clients and other functions in meetings. One of the biggest challenges these leaders faced was the fact that many had risen through the ranks in the organization. They’d been on the side of “doing” for many years before they became leaders. They had technical expertise and longevity in the organization. They were respected problem solvers who took on more problem-solving than they should. As a result, first-line managers and staff were overly dependent on directors and weren’t being given opportunities to develop problem solving and technical expertise.

We wrote about this client in our blog.  We worked in the organization for three years, taking a new cohort through our ThinkUP Innovation Framework program each year.  Our solution produced results. It met the objectives of the leadership development program. It significantly improved collaboration, communication and innovation, and it had a residual impact on employee engagement, staff development and client relationships.

Perhaps more importantly, in an organization that had been focused for many years on cost-cutting, they learned a big lesson about the value of collaboration. Two directors realized each of their teams were independently and unilaterally attempting to solve the same recurring incident from a different perspectives; neither of the approaches was producing needed results in incident management. In IT organizations, when client-facing systems are down, it costs money. In this case, customers couldn’t make purchases and every hour of downtime represented lost revenue that likely wouldn’t be recovered. By bringing their two teams together to look at the problem using the FourSight Thinking System™, these directors were able to lead their teams to explore the challenge from a number of perspectives and through the eyes of stakeholders. With a shared and deeper understanding of the challenge, the teams were able to generate more promising ideas and develop an extraordinary solution—one that was expected to address this recurring incident once and for all. Time to solution for these teams wasn’t more than a couple of hours; the bottom-line impact was calculated as high, not only in cost savings and expense avoidance for resolution but in the ability to capture sales revenue and keep clients happy in a competitive market.

Time to result: 6 months

A financial services organization runs an annual leadership development program. Getting selected to participate in this program is a privilege. Once in the program, in addition to some specialized skills training, participants work to tackle challenges assigned by the CEO. Each quarter the cohort is asked to resolve a complex problem—the answer to which is unknown or unproven and could take the organization in a new direction.

In this particular cohort, all of the leaders were in the age group defined as Millennials. In the first quarter, the cohort was given this challenge to resolve: How do we become a culture of innovation?

Throughout the first quarter, the HR Director leading the program observed this cohort had difficulty working through their challenge. Faced with ambiguity and uncertainty, this cohort struggled to organize and focus their thinking; and they didn’t work well together; personalities got in the way of productive collaboration. When they couldn’t get answers from the HR Director and CEO to resolve the uncertainty and ambiguity in the challenge, participants turned to Google to find answers. While they each demonstrated great skill in gathering information, collectively they had difficulty sense-making and building new knowledge that was appropriate to the context - everyone was solving the problem from a different perspective. As a result, the solution they offered didn’t address the problem. In fact, it ran counter to what is needed to foster a culture of innovation because it suggested a select team of individuals, siloed and split off from others in the organization should be responsible for delivering on any innovation needs.

Our ThinkUP Innovation Framework solution introduced the FourSight Thinking System™ and helped the team develop awareness, knowledge and skills to organize, focus and broaden their thinking when tackling complex challenges. Because FourSight models innovation process, the team developed insight into what it takes to be innovative and gained a process and tools that support collaboration. Friction on the team was reduced and collaboration improved when everyone understood how thinking preferences can derail collaboration and problem-solving, and what they needed to do to work better together.

Following the training, the team had to apply what they learned to resolve their Quarter 2 challenge. The complex problem was to translate what they learned from us about innovation into a half-day event that would help headquarters staff understand what it means to be innovative and how they could contribute to innovation. As the cohort worked through this challenge, we provided some process coaching to help them over some of the tougher aspects they needed to tease out and helped them understand the finer details of how to manage themselves and each other through the process.

The cohort rose to the challenge given in Quarter 2 and produced a logistically sound, well-attended and appreciated learning event for headquarters staff, despite the constraints of a tight budget and a short window. In the process, they emerged as a higher-functioning team with greater respect and trust in each other to deliver.

In the end, you could say the team learned that they could do better than Google: they had new knowledge, skills and awareness about themselves as problem-solvers, innovators, team players and leaders. In a final lessons-learned meeting with the cohort, they counted these as peak learning events: learning how to work outside their comfort zone and remain productive even when faced with ambiguity and uncertainty; understanding their thinking preferences and how these contribute to problem-solving; having a process to think more creatively and contribute to innovation;  knowing where they need to be flexible and develop skills to collaborate; learning the proper way to brainstorm and being able to lead their teams through more productive brainstorming sessions. More importantly, they recognized they had a tangible experience of what innovation looked like, and how everyone, given the opportunity and a creative thinking process and tools, could contribute. 

Time to result: 2 months

Imagine scoping and clarifying the opportunity to use new, leading-edge technologies in your business, only to be told your solutions aren’t wanted or to find you’ve worked hard to implement the wrong solution.

This IT Team in a highly regulated science field was responsible for delivering new value to their organization. They found they did a great job of clarifying applications for new technologies that could be used in the business, and yet they were having little success in delivering solutions that their business clients wanted or perceived as having value. This IT Team was pushing the boundaries on what was possible in their organization and bumping into implementation challenges every step of the way. It wasn’t very rewarding work; in fact, they said it was frustrating and demoralizing.

In charge of delivering on a large business transformation agenda to refresh legacy systems and deploy new technologies that would revolutionize how the business delivered services, the IT Team couldn’t seem to get any traction. They needed a way to lead change in the organization, and better engage and collaborate with their business clients in that process.

We were invited in to help the IT Director optimize his team’s performance and teach process and tools for engagement and collaboration.

The first step in our ThinkUP Innovation Framework solution for this client was to measure the capability of the team to grow, transform, and innovate by administering the Organizational Growth Indicator (OGI) assessment.

The OGI assessment uncovered that the team was most challenged when it came to aligning around strategy, collaborating with others internal and external to the organization to resolve challenges, and that they generally lacked the problem-solving skills necessary to drive innovation.  Our work with the team also brought to light that they perceived innovation solely as the implementation of new technology. Outside of their awareness was that innovation is a process of thinking meant to create value in the organization.

We then delivered a customized training program that used the FourSight Thinking System™ to deploy a shared language, process and tools for innovation. We were able to help individuals across five teams in this organization understand how they naturally engage in creative process and what this meant to how they work as a team to approach innovation. We taught collaborative tools and process to help navigate thinking on the team and showed them how to use these to collaborate more effectively with stakeholders, business clients and other functions in the organization.

As a result of our engagement, the team learned the value of meeting their clients where they were, first focusing on clarifying what’s not working or required improvement in how they deliver services. They also focused on how to collaborate with the client throughout the entire innovation process. We taught them how to bring clarity to roles and responsibilities in the innovation process so that engagement became easier. They shifted their thinking of their role from that of purveyors of new technologies trying to convince adoption, to that of collaborative problem-solvers searching for ways to create business value. In the process, they learned how to more effectively clarify challenges, and to generate, develop and implement ideas to solve them. By doing so, they were able to build relationships and trust with their clients, and feel better about what they were achieving. 

Time to result: 3 months

The product engineering and R&D teams of an aerospace firm were being asked to be more innovative. Their organization hadn’t fully developed its innovation strategy and still, the teams were motivated to contribute to new growth objectives. These teams knew they couldn’t innovate in a vacuum and were concerned about overcoming a history of working in silos. Managers were concerned they weren’t seeing significant results from the adoption of Team Agile processes.

In our ThinkUP Innovation Framework solution, we used the Organizational Growth Indicator to help the Senior Leadership Team (which included the Directors of Product Engineering and R&D) understand where to focus the innovation strategy and innovation skills training for the teams.

As part of our solution, we introduced the FourSight Thinking System™ to these teams. Individuals completed the FourSight Thinking Profile Assessment and received feedback in the training on how their thinking preferences for engaging in creative process influenced how they solved problems and contributed to innovation. After gaining personal and team awareness of these thinking preferences, the primary focus of the training was to teach these teams how to organize and focus their thinking and show them how the FourSight tools and process could be used to support cross-functional collaboration. In turn, they were able to conceptualize, develop and successfully implement a practice for cross-functional collaboration.

In a follow-up coaching session, we helped these teams understand how to get more from their Agile practices by integrating them with the FourSight Thinking System™. Using what they’ve learned, these teams are running more productive cross-functional meetings, leading changes in work processes through staff engagement, and they’ve been able to assess the needs and influence the development of a broader culture of innovation in the organization.

Time to result: 2 months

It’s typical for Human Resources teams to be asked to help improve employee engagement in an organization, but what if you’re the source of the engagement issue?

The Senior Leadership Team of a Human Resources group in a large government department was tired of hearing what a crappy job they were doing in delivering value to departmental managers. Despite innovating their service delivery model, they heard the same complaints over and over again: “Why can’t you deliver the human resources services we need better, faster and more simply?” A contributing factor was that human resource advisors weren’t trained to lead creative collaboration; they were trained to compartmentalize departmental managers’ human resources needs into established processes. Advisors weren’t looking for creative solutions to challenging situations; they felt bound to a history of rules and weren’t happy with many of the changes to the recently implemented Human Resources service delivery model.

We used the ThinkUP Innovation Framework to help the Senior Leadership Team develop a change management approach to “Change the Face of HR” and improve customer experience. The approach involved training the Senior Leadership Team and then training middle managers and supervisors on how to use the FourSight Thinking System™. This gave the entire extended leadership team a common language and process for tackling the challenges associated with Changing the Face of HR and a flexible yet structured approach to engage staff to resolve these challenges more collaboratively. Middle managers, with their supervisors, were then tasked with applying their newly learned skills to engage their staff in the change process and lead their teams through creative dialogue to surface and resolve lingering issues about the new business model.

From there we trained HR Advisors on the FourSight Thinking System™ and coached managers as they led staff to apply what they had learned to engage with clients to better understand their needs, and to fast track and find creative solutions in rule-bound processes.

With their new skills, managers were able to develop winning and strategic responses to the need to develop a Talent Management Framework and engage staff more collaboratively in matters that impacted them. Employee satisfaction with how they engaged with managers and in how change was introduced to the branch showed consistent increases over time.  Client satisfaction with HR services showed increases over time as well.

In a final deliverable to this client, we worked to capture the best practices in collaborative engagement they had learned across the branch, and developed an Engagement Framework and Job Aids for ongoing use. In effect, the branch learned to make the creative collaborative engagement of clients and staff part of the fabric of their work and as a result, was able to Change the Face of HR and deliver greater value to clients in the process.

Time to result: 6 months