By Yasmin Glanville (originally published March 15, 2023)
A financial company invested in a game-changing new productivity platform – but couldn't get its employees to use it.
A cleantech company was revolutionizing portable, emission-free power – but was challenged getting clients and investors.
A start-up company conceived an innovative online lending platform – but needed help to launch the business, build a compelling brand, and attract clients.
Business leaders and entrepreneurs are faced with a make-or-break question: how do you transform today’s businesses for sustainable growth and relevancy? Organizations that recognize and embrace change, explore possibilities and innovate swiftly will reap the best rewards from evolving markets and new opportunities.
It Starts with Innovation and Change
Over the past three decades, as an entrepreneur and executive and in collaboration with others, I have been solving business problems like these for small and global organizations in Canada and abroad. With a background in successful product and business innovation, marketing and strategic foresight, I work with leaders and organizations to shape their future and make it happen.
To support your organization in creating its brightest future, this article captures several of my favourite strategies and solutions, with client examples and real results.
Five Ways to Future Proof Your Business
1. Success = TEAM
Once upon a time, when things were relatively stable and business phones had cords, executives were paid to come up with the ideas – and employees did what they were told. Now, changes come at us from all directions: increasing competition, environmental disruptions, economic changes, new technologies, shifting demographics, and ever-evolving customer needs. Who can possibly keep up?
Great ideas for innovation can be found by harnessing the creativity and experience of all your teams. Your employees, of course, but also your customers, your top users, and even your suppliers. When was the last time you brought your suppliers together for a discovery session? When did you last watch a customer try your product for the first time? How much could you learn from following a front-line employee for a day?
“How do you transform today’s businesses for sustainable growth and relevancy? ”
As every Silicon Valley start-up learns, the answers you're looking for are not in your office!
All these people are on your side. They want you to succeed, so you can continue to employ them, buy from them, or improve their lives with better products. Most companies know this deep down, but need to learn how to tap into that goodwill. Before organizations can become innovators, they must become better partners. That means understanding who their partners are, and creating more trusting, mutually beneficial relationships.
Identify your best potential collaborators; some might even be competitors! Diverse teams deliver better results. Create formal networks for information-sharing (e.g., supplier relationships, customer focus groups, employee events). Make sure everyone gets a chance to speak. Don't make this a passive, box-checking exercise: actively listen! Some of your best solutions are just one degree of separation away.
The work often begins with identifying key stakeholders in and out of the organization, reaching out, and forming teams to share information and brainstorm. My clients and I have achieved incredible breakthroughs with this process and generated insights we could never have dreamed up ourselves. This process can take weeks but always results in improved relationships, new ideas and innovation-driven results. It is not a spectator sport – C-level participation is needed from the beginning to accelerate engagement and build trust.
“As every Silicon Valley start-up learns, the answers you’re looking for are not in your office!”
Be ambitious and creative when selecting people to partner with. In a recent government-funded project to help solve problems in aging urban high-rise communities, we didn’t work just with local politicians, landlords and tenants. We called in experts of all kinds: engineers, climate and building scientists, urban planners, architects, ecologists, economists and creative designers from across Canada, the USA and Europe. This in-depth collaboration helped us identify a wider range of potential problems, and the best world-class solutions, which were published in an action-centred playbook and shared with other multi-residential urban communities. As one of our key sponsors said, we “cracked the code” for sustainable action.
2. Develop a Rallying Point that Gets People Excited
People and teams work best when they are excited by an explicit challenge. Once you've done some active listening and thinking, develop a specific theme, cause or point of view that your innovation teams can rally around. The right theme can focus participants’ attention, build alignment, and create a stronger sense of mission.
Themes should be specific, focused, and easy to understand. If this theme doesn't address every problem you're trying to solve, don't worry. Once you've built an innovation machine, you can focus it on different challenges over time.
At one mining company, the client and I focused our initial innovation challenge, not on the mining operations, but on the company’s worldwide energy use. Energy is one of the mining industry’s biggest costs, and it affects mine efficiency and safety. Increasingly, it’s also a reputational issue, which is a major concern for the board of directors.
By creating a rallying point around this important challenge, the teams could get to work on discovering and implementing tangible, impactful solution strategies and deliverables. Before long, we had developed an internal energy innovation training and resource hub, a binder full of energy conservation pilot projects, and an Energy Innovation Fund to finance and accelerate innovative energy solutions. A measurable impact of this collaborative results-driven work is the success experienced in one of its Canadian operations: an annualized savings of $15 million!
3. Create an Ongoing Culture of Innovation
Before you go searching for answers, recognize that ’one-stop, one-size solutions’ do not work in today’s world of constant change and disruption.
Your company won't secure the future by executing a few cool projects. It will succeed by becoming a perpetual innovation engine that can regularly create, develop, and test new ideas, year in and year out.
Future-proofing your business requires building an innovation mindset. It starts with convincing your team that the future lies in their hands. Whirling change disrupts everyone. A positive, motivated team supported by management, backed by aligned partners, and given a safe space to share innovative ideas and be recognized positively has the best chance of surviving and thriving.
Other elements of a culture of innovation include:
Creative Curiosity: Curious people ask smart questions that explore and uncover new possibilities. “How can we make it better?” “What else might we do?” “What if…?” Curious minds inspire creativity and collaboration.
Empathy: The best innovations come from user-centric perspectives. You must understand what customers and users are trying to do, and everything they go through in order to appreciate their experience and improve it.
Experimentation: Encourage small pilot projects to test theories and develop successive prototypes. In this safe zone, everyone learns by failing together. After every project, do a retrospective to learn from mistakes and identify success patterns.
Agility: “Move fast and break things” was the mantra of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. I'm not a big fan of breaking things, but speed is essential to innovation. Many companies suffer because they don't respond fast enough to market changes. Extend the urgency of innovation to other processes in your organization that might delay new products, whether manufacturing, marketing or management.
Commitment: Innovation must be embedded throughout your organization. Practice ideation, planning, testing, tweaking and trying again, to build the culture and process muscles that will carry your whole organization into the future.
Inclusion: Include board directors and other key influencers in the innovation process to demonstrate alignment with overall strategy. Directors should not wait for a crisis before they focus on company culture.
Innovation is hard work, and maintaining this mindset is harder. Some clients foster this culture by retaining me or one of my associates as ongoing mentors after the official project finishes. They know we’ll ask the tough questions that will inspire managers to keep the flywheel spinning. And they know we’ll make it easy and fun.
4. Strategic Foresight
Other than the certainty of increasing competition, every business faces different opportunities and challenges when confronting its future. Beyond innovation, your organization’s success will depend on how well you understand these changes, and on the strategy created to accentuate strengths and minimize gaps.
The era of disruption has generated a new approach to discovering “best fit” solutions: Strategic Foresight – or as I prefer to call it, Future Thinking. It’s the process of creating a competitive analysis of your organization’s place in the world and using tools such as alternative futures and horizon scanning to identify significant factors and threats. It involves understanding the new world that’s taking shape – and ensuring your company is ready for the changing culture and values of tomorrow. As a certified executive coach and practitioner of Strategic Foresight and Innovation, I have done this by exploring such questions as:
What are the most powerful issues and converging disruption trends affecting your business now and in the near future? What positive trends can you capitalize on?
How does your business or product line compare with the best-in-class competition?
What are the key unmet needs of your customers, partners and employees?
What practices and values at your organization best fit with the flatter, more collaborative future of business? How can you double down on them to boost this competitive advantage?
Which organizational practices are out of step with plausible futures, and what needs to change first?
“Innovation keeps you in the game; Future Thinking lets you win it. ”
In keeping with the interconnected world of tomorrow, these investigations would ideally involve both internal and external stakeholders to understand their unique views of the future of your organization. This work may quickly lead to new positioning, next-generation product ideas, clear strategies and action plans that help organizations understand what they need to do to prosper and set measurable targets so they can gauge progress and track real-time market shifts.
In my experience, innovation combined with Future Thinking can be a powerful process for uncovering new opportunities, driving down costs, increasing employee motivation, and becoming a profitable market leader.
Future Thinking helps organizations cut through the blur of complexity to lead change in a strategic, human-centric way. Innovation keeps you in the game; Future Thinking lets you win it.
5. It’s All About Mindset
An innovation mindset helps your organization grow stronger, more confident and more resilient. As your teams learn to embrace change, they become more engaged with the organization and more invested in its future. After doing this work, your organization will be ready to grow in new ways. You will confidently tackle ambitious new projects to produce that growth.
Did you know that nearly half of all corporate transformation projects fail? The odds for successful innovation projects are only about 40% to 60%. My experience is different: because of my commitment to change management, collaboration and trust-building, I have headed-up collaborative business transformation projects that have exceeded client expectations.
One national financial institution had huge difficulty getting employees to use its new sales productivity platform. They hired me to boost the participation rate, which hovered around 5%. Exploring the problem with select groups of end users, I found they resented the time it took to learn and use the system. After getting to know the bank’s culture, we gamified the productivity tool as an online platform for a national competition, modelled on the Tour de France. It made learning the system a fun, sophisticated challenge and offered rewards at various stages for those who used the platform the most. Within five months, usage hit 87%. Later, the company calculated that use of the system increased its revenue by over $1 billion – and reduced operational costs by another $100 million.
By engaging your people in change, you can turn the whole organization into a learning and transformation platform with unlimited potential for innovation-driven results.
“Unleashing innovation-driven results starts with mindset. It doesn’t have to be hard – when you know how. ”
Another example: a company was challenged with attracting new customers and investors, as it lacked a proven track record of success. To overcome that barrier, we collaborated with the startup team to shape a culture of innovation and leadership mindset. Using Futures Thinking, we also uncovered evidence-based insights that informed and substantiated the unique value of their innovative solution and how it met unmet and underserved needs of ‘right fit’ customers, strategic partners/investors – other innovators and forward-thinking organizations.
Unleashing innovation-driven results starts with mindset. It doesn't have to be hard – when you know how.
What Makes This Approach Different?
Over the course of delivering professional services, clients describe me as a “pragmatic, purpose-driven visionary and innovator who delivers” time after time.
The value proposition draws on three decades of leading change on both the client and consulting sides of business. My clear point of difference encompasses six key industries in which I have excelled: 1) technology; 2) manufacturing; 3) financial services; 4) energy; 5) e-commerce; and 6) professional services.
I am a certified practitioner of Strategic Foresight and Design Thinking to drive Innovation. My background includes Executive/Leadership Coach and Advisor. I’m also the founder of several successful organizations, including Rethink Sustainability Initiatives (RSI). This vast experience is rounded out by being a co-development and launch strategist of several client organizations (e.g., Lendified, PC Financial and Portable Electric); and an Executive In Residence at Foresight Canada Cleantech.
Driven by me, delivery will involve a bespoke team of proven professionals who match the specific business challenge. As a team, we take pride in unlocking the passion and talent within your organization.
Here’s How To Do It
The job of every business is to secure its own future. That means understanding new social, economic and industry trends, identifying your customers’ changing needs, embracing new technologies, and building a more resilient, proactive, future-ready workforce.
Not only do you have to be open to change – you have to be ready to change NOW. The organizations that innovate first and fastest will reap the most benefit from evolving markets and new opportunities. Being future-forward is not just a mindset. It’s a platform for scaling up capabilities for creating sustainable competitive advantage.
To seize the future, we help business leaders innovate by becoming more strategic about understanding their organizations’ future, and its unique risks and opportunities. This process accelerates the transformation of existing companies and the design and launch of new business and product solutions.
Business Clients
We work with organizations who are open to innovation, who understand their mission and purpose and want to remain market leaders decades from now. Companies who understand the need for ongoing reinvention, adaptation, employee engagement, and laser-like customer focus. Organizations who choose to disrupt rather than be disrupted.
Satisfied clients include major financial institutions, a global mining giant, forward-thinking manufacturers and service firms, and ambitious start-ups serious about building traction.
If you like what you read, I’d be happy to meet with you to discuss referenced examples and how we might work together to secure the future of your business.
Discovery Session – Limited Offer
To discover your priority needs and how best to support you, I am offering a limited number of gratis 20-minute consultations during March and April 2023.