Activity 3 – Define Success: Outcomes and Indicators
After laying the groundwork by identifying challenges and establishing success criteria, the next pivotal step is generating actionable and innovative ideas to tackle these challenges. This ideation phase is crucial and should leverage insights from as broad an audience as possible to ensure a rich diversity of perspectives and solutions. Here’s how to effectively engage a wide audience in the idea-generation process and explore new avenues for overcoming obstacles.
Annual strategy often leads to annual roadmaps. If you are going to tell your teams what they are doing for the next 12 months, why bother hiring smart people? Many people, especially those working closest with your current systems, know limitations and opportunities that aren’t widely known. Passing down a roadmap from leadership or product management sometimes creates a suboptimal set of ideas, both from a feasibility and an innovation perspective.
Leverage Internal Expertise
Incorporate External Perspectives
Generating actionable ideas to overcome strategic challenges requires an inclusive approach, leveraging internal expertise and external perspectives. By fostering a culture of innovation and maintaining an open mind, companies can discover new ways to advance toward their long-term vision, ensuring they remain competitive and responsive to the changing needs of their customers and the market.
Rather than once a year, the goal is continuous ideation for challenge-solving. If there is a significant and high-urgency challenge with no current ideas, then no progress will be possible for that challenge, and success is no closer tomorrow, next month, or next year. Leadership must create urgency for major challenges that currently have no ideas, and setting a timeframe to encourage solutions helps.
The goal of setting a time limit on initial idea generation is not to cut off discussion; it’s to help focus thinking on a particular challenge that is currently lacking actionable ideas.
Sometimes, ideas help people see alternatives. Consider including a “less ideal” idea in the discussion to spur deeper thinking. As people critique a bad idea, they describe the traits of a better one.
Annual strategy planning is often very time consuming and detail oriented. More ideas to analyze means more effort. This often mutes the ideas chosen to analyze prematurely to reduce the effort and load on teams who analyze and provide the necessary details for planning. CASE avoids this trap. By spreading the load over the entire year, more ideas can be explored to solve each challenge.
CASE encourages progressive elaboration of the idea content. It starts by asking for just a few sentence description of an idea, just enough to prioritize and triage. Once it’s selected, a little more information is needed about size and what teams are needed, but this will be for just a few ideas not the entire company brainstorming.
It’s crucial to keep the flow of new ideas uninterrupted at any stage of the CASE process. Adaptability is key to ongoing strategic evolution, and the implementation of ideas is vital for generating the feedback needed to foster further innovation and improvement.
Activity 3 – Define Success: Outcomes and Indicators
Activity 5: Idea Triage and Selection
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