How to promote and enable innovative thinking in your team members

You can’t just throw a bunch of smart people into a room full of sticky notes, whiteboards and Nerf guns and expect that three hours later, your next big product will emerge.

Finding that next big thing is about as hard as capturing lightning in a bottle. That’s the bad news. The good news is, all you need are two things: more lightning and better bottles.

Lighting represents the spark of innovation. They are the ideas that emerge from your employees. It’s how you think. It’s part of the culture of your organisation. Great ideas are everywhere and can be inspired by anything. The trick is having the mindset and environment that can recognise them, and then evolve them into something special. This usually takes a process and cultural transformation to achieve.

Bottles represent your ability as an organisation to turn an idea into a product. How many times has someone in your company said, “Geez have I got a great idea!” to which someone else said, “Yeah, but we don’t have that data available” or “Great, but, it will take too long to develop” or even “We don’t have the skills to build that”. When that idea comes and your business is not in a position to take advantage of it, then it doesn’t matter how many ideas you have as you’ll never get anything done.

Don’t despair. I’ll share some things you can do to start this journey.

Let’s start with the lightning.

Requirement specifications. Big documents where you specify up front everything you want another team to build is the number one killer of ideas and innovation in any IT organisation. Don’t get me wrong - you absolutely need to plan and absolutely need to set your vision, and absolutely should be setting strong deadlines.

However, everyone on the team needs to be involved in the planning, thinking and reasoning so they have context, and they must be able to adapt as you learn along the way. The best ideas will come from the people in the trenches who actually try things out. The best ideas will 99% of the time be an evolution of something else. If you can’t adapt, you can’t evolve.

People. Don’t forget you’ve hired the best people and are paying them good money to work with you. If you ask them not to think and only follow orders, then their value potential is going to waste. The best ideas will come from the most unexpected places.

So get rid of those old-school mega specifications tombs, specify everything in little chunks of value you can build in about a day and plan it as you go in 2- to 4-week iterations.

Boiling the ocean. Often in meetings, as soon as the excitement starts to build someone will pipe up with “Hang on … let’s not boil the ocean here” and kill the conversation. Wrong! When you are ‘talking’ that’s absolutely the time to think big and audaciously and get everyone excited. It’s exactly that kind of thinking that will lead you a new magical idea. Trust me, you are in no danger of going off and spending years building the wrong thing just because of one meeting.

Here’s what you can do to embrace it - I call it the ‘diamond model’. Break every meeting into two halves. The first half is the ideas half where you just go big and wide (like moving from the bottom of a diamond to the middle). Anything and everything related is on the table.

Then, once the new ideas have petered out, you switch to narrowing the best ideas down to the pointy end of the diamond and focus on what is actually possible given the constraints. When you name the two halves it gives everyone the licence to think outside the box without anyone putting down the conversation.

Ok, let’s switch our focus to the bottles.

Tools. Many companies heavily lock down the set of tools their employees can use to get their jobs done. Don’t. Open it up. Tools guide how people think and define the scope of what is possible, so limiting them just doesn’t make sense. Sure it will be harder to manage. You’ll lose some control and the cost might be a little more, but that’s a very small price to pay for such an amazing enabler. You don’t have to go open slather, but allowing a set of two or three tools in each category will make a big difference to the process and also to employee engagement.

The cloud. If you haven’t already, adopt the cloud and put your infrastructure there. If someone has an idea and it’s going to take three months to source the hardware for it to run on, the idea is dead on arrival. With cloud infrastructure you can be up and going in about two minutes. That kind of turnaround time allows a high degree of experimentation, which is the key to evolving ideas.

Automation. Automate everything. If a real person has to get involved every time someone needs to provision a system, test a product and move data around etc - where it could be automated - this is a crime against humanity. Every second you spend upfront automating everything you do, as you do it, can save hours and hours for the rest of the time. Bite the bullet early.

APIs. Finally, for everything you build, do so on an API. Having your data and your business logic available via programmatic interfaces is actually an innovation accelerator, because it opens up the richness of your internal ecosystem. And this is exponential: the more that is open, the more possibilities there are to combine things from different parts of the organisation. Adopt an API-first policy.

There you have it. Put these seven easy concepts in place and I guarantee your organisation will generate more ideas and be able to put more of them into practice.

*Simon Raik-Allen is CTO at MYOB. An IT professional with more than 15 years of experience in the industry, Raik-Allen is well accustomed to working within innovating industries. With a background in software engineering, he cut his teeth in Silicon Valley working in a variety of companies in areas such as trading exchanges, e-commerce, business intelligence, communications, banking, and media and entertainment.