How do you balance innovation and risk management as a thought leader in business transformation and change?

Innovation thrives in a safe space that encourages experimentation and learning from failures, but without clear goals and purpose, it can become aimless and impractical. Balancing risk and innovation requires clear guidelines and practices to ensure stability and sustainability, allowing them to work together for transformational success.

It depends on the type of innovation that you are trying to accomplish it may be just a small step, or it may be disruptive; either view has its merits; careful consideration is vital to its outcome.

We must consider buy-in from stakeholders as a major step in the initial planning phase. A projects cannot succeed unless all stakeholders have buy-in and have input. This is best done by establishing routines to give the appropriate venues to receive buy-in.

Since Innovation projects require some degree of change, setting a vision that gives participants a picture of what that change could look like becomes critical. One way I’ve approached this is to be intentional about chatting one on one with stakeholders to get a sense of their vision for the project. What are their hopes and fears? This helps get on a path to a unified vision that is influenced by diverse points of view that open up new possibilities for problem solving.

One of the greatest pieces of advice I was given by a coach years ago reminded me that a Vision is something that is always to be strived for, worked toward, reached for...and almost never fully achieved. In today's ever-changing, digital-first, AI-infused world, this is important to remember when defining your vision and purpose. Vision helps us focus on where we want to go, as a waypoint to where we will then want to go once we get there. In our "always-on" workplace, and our increasing number of data-capture assets feeding us signals, innovation becomes a 24x7x365 job. And that can be exhausting at times. That is why, in addition to setting a vision, you must call upon your values, as an individual, and as a collective body or company.

Assessing one’s context can be an exercise in looking outwards and there are many paths to gathering what’s in the external context. What I’ve found is that assessing capabilities as a company can be difficult as “fish don’t see water,” meaning sometimes we can as companies have and inflated or diminished view of our capabilities which can impact crafting a true path forward. A key question is how can we be honest about where we are and what we need to learn?

Adapting and responding to changes and challenges requires first granting oneself permission to slow down, breathe and assess what is true, versus what is hype, toothless trend, or even hyperbole. Thought leaders often feel the pressure of the game - always playing catch up on reading the next Analyst report or FastCompany or HBR article. Sometimes, clarity of mind and the ability to ponder, wonder and reflect are the most important investments for a thought leader. Find your trusted sources, and learn to titrate the remaining pipelines of information overflow. What helps you stand apart may just be the forethought, the calm you bring to others when conveying complex topics and disparate sets of data. Then, you'll find others adapt to you.

Why do we learn? To grow and to feel less lonely while making our way through the world. Why do we experiment? To explore our sense of wonderment and test our roots of wisdom. As a thought leader it is imperative to place yourself in environments and ecosystems that allow you to safely seek feedback, test for learning & more importantly break the mold of "group think" & listening to your own echo chamber. Curiosity is your friend here. Data are your friends always. Data don't lie. Remember that our brains are pattern seeking devices, and it is instinctual to want to find patterns to make sense of the world. Beware the urgency to shut down your learning capacity to seek out comfort. That's not where the best learning occurs. Model growth.

The key here is mitigating risk with informed judgment vs perfect data. Because we don’t want to be wrong, I’ve seen organizations delay decision making or even miss opportunities to learn about new markets or uses for product trying to nail down degrees of certainty that simply don’t exist at an early stage in an Innovation process. Like entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs must take some degree of risk to get to the new, understanding what’s at stake and how they will navigate twists and turns in experimentation.

Play is the word that comes to mind here: create a no-blame, relatively low risk, real-world ‘lab’ where your team can carry out active experiments to exercise the muscle of strategic innovative problem solving. Get clear on the mindsets and behaviors that are critical to building this muscle. And incentivize adoption by recognizing growth and tying it directly to business outcomes. Your team needs to know that thoughtful, courageous curiosity is critical to lasting success and that setbacks will be treated as learning opportunities for the collective good. It’s amazing how these intentional efforts can inspire and transform those around you.

It’s so important to know what you are both able and willing to do as an organization to mitigate risks. I’ve made some mistakes miscalculating willingness when I’ve seen green lights in ability and it caused major stalls in projects after several months of investment.

Documentation is key here. The old adage, "Name it to tame it." We think we can manage all the risks in our mind, because we are complex beings and success has come to us over the years because we can deal in ambiguity and uncertainty. But remember, no human mind is perfect, nor is our memory and analytical ability ever as flawless as we think. So, let tools, templates and teammates be your allies in managing risk. Diverse sets of perspective help a great deal, because often times we cannot see around the bend, or from where we are standing. Transparency is also paramount in growing trust and care when managing risk. Use cloud-based dashboards that give people a single, seamless view to make decisions & more importantly, appropriate pivots.

Scaling Innovation takes time and can feel antithetical to the cultures of urgency in many large organizations. Having the focus and discipline to set realistic timelines, checkpoints and celebrating milestones and even pivots along the way can keep engagement up while teams are hitting the murky middle of bringing a product to life or running into barriers while scaling.

The power of an invitation to collaborate is somewhat intoxicating for humans. Everyone wants to be asked to share their thoughts, opinions and ideas. So, gleefully invite those you trust to do just that. Hackathons are a great way to scale innovation, after all why settle for just a few minds working on a future innovation when you can reach thousands with diverse perspectives? Make sure to invest in a platform that allows the easy capture and correspondence for communities built to innovate and scale ideas. IBM's InnovationJams and Microsoft's Hackathons remain some of the most powerful examples of this crowdsourcing for scale, while sustaining interest and investment for long term success. It is also a great way to attract talent.

One part of the calculus of suggesting change and risk internally is to take into consideration the current state of mind of your stakeholders. The most persuasive risk matrices and cost-benefit analyses in the world won't matter one bit if you're pushing against a wall of risk aversion. You have to read the current zeitgeist at your organization to determine the current emotional appetite for risk - to fly in the face of that can actually be risky for your employment. Talk to stakeholders. Look for examples of successful change happening now. Gauge the group's emotional appetite before starting your run. Doing so will increase your chances of success - and that of your organization.

The other thing here is to consider the messenger. Some organizations have an unwritten narrative of who they find credible, and if a person doesn’t embody that narrative they have a harder time gaining traction. This means that the project will struggle no matter what research, data and case studies they present. The messenger needs to have some degree of social currency in an organization, or find themselves a lone wolf trying to influence people who are open to ideas but not ideas from them.

Storytelling matters here. When attempting to inspire others to take on behavior change, we have to remember at our core we are human beings. And human beings make sense of the world through storytelling. And with all that is changing in the world around us, by the minute, the need for compelling, charismatic, concise storytelling is in high demand. Don't tell me your credentials, tell me a story that leaves me curious about how you became the person you are today. Don't showcase your accolades, rather tell me the challenges you overcame to see the world the way you do today. Don't paper cut me with stats about followers and listeners and downloads, but leave me with a desire to want to have a cup of coffee or share a meal with you.

How innovation is incentivized is another concept worth considering here. Many an innovation possibility has died on the vine of competing metrics and insufficient motivation for team members to proceed. Reminding oneself that ideas must pass through the crucible of human motivation helps balance my pioneering enthusiasm, knowing perseverance is necessary to stay the course.