At the other end of the scale (from the Gadgeteer), you have consultant-innovators. They don’t focus on the answer to the business situation (an answer that will, hopefully, be something innovative), and instead concentrate of defining the problem to be solved.

Now, of course it is necessary to have a pretty good definition of a problem before it can addressed in any reasonable way, but the consultant-innovator will write reports and requirements documents till the cows come home.

A key sign you have a consultant-innovator on your hands is that they will try to run ‘workshops’ to get a group understanding of a problem. They’ll attempt to produce facts and figures that describe it. They’ll always seek more data to clarify things. And then, when it comes right down to it, they won’t propose either a solution or a pathway to getting one.

The consultant-innovator’s hallmark is such a narrow focus on the business problem that they don’t ever get to using influence to push the next innovative thing. They’d much rather study the issues and create Powerpoint.

But the Consultant-Innovator is a deceptive creature, and that’s because (at the start at least), their workshops and problem definition work have actual value to stakeholders. Senior leaders call in consultants all the time in order to get independent views of their issues. Having an innovator do the same thing competently (probably for free) has an intuitive appeal.

Stakeholders, however, are unlikely to be thrilled with fact-finding that never terminates. That’s the danger of the Consultant-Innovator, and influence burning is the eventual result, as it was with the Gadgeteer.

I’ll post the remaining 3 archetypes over December.

Previous terrible innovators:

•  The Gadgeteer
• The Talker

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Now we come to the Talker, one of the most destructive of all innovators. The talker is a superlative communicator, and when you put one on a stage in front of an audience, you get inspirational words that create excitement for the innovation experience.

The Talker is also great at networking, and is able to get to practically anyone in an organisation. Usually only once, mind you, because the great failing of the Talker is they never do anything.

If only innovation was about giving speeches and taking meetings, Talkers would be the most successful innovators in the world. But unfortunately, it isn’t. There’s a lot of hard work involved, and a great idea may as well remain unthought-of if no one is going to work through the Key Questions to take things forwards.

Talkers, because they are great communicators and know how to open doors through their personal networks, will often have a greatly inflated view of their worth.  They imagine that because people are enthusiastic about their ideas they are successful. That, obviously, is not the case if an innovation team is being measured on actual changes they create.

Another thing to watch out for with the Talker is the regular status meeting with the innovation leader to whom they report. Because they are such great communicators, it is likely the case that the innovation leader will be lulled into a sense of security just because doors are opening that were unavailable before. The Talker will be excellent at doing smoke and mirror performances that make it look like progress is being made, even when it isn’t.

The key signal of a talker is that you get the same status updates all the time, with promises they are ‘close’ to closing new innovations. Or that they have ‘just one more meeting’ to get agreement. A real innovator would drown the puppy, and forget the ‘one more meeting’. Talkers, though, have nothing to back them up but the meetings they’ve been able to get.

As you’d expect, the Talker is also someone who burns influence. They do it at a great rate, because stakeholders, having met with them once or twice, realise that nothing is going to come of further interactions and stop letting innovators in. The Talker, who needs to get meetings to justify him or herself then moves on to the next stakeholder, where the same thing is repeated.

I’ll post the remaining 4 archetypes over December.

You can read about “The Gadgeteer” in this post.

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

When you have an innovator who focuses most of their time on the latest and greatest technological thing, you are likely to have a gadgeteer. A gadget is a deceptively dangerous thing for an innovator. On the one hand, it seems the new thing (if only it could be sold correctly to stakeholders) would be a fantastic addition to the innovation portfolio. But on the other, there is practically no way to tie whatever-it-is back to any business problem.

This is the hallmark of the gadgeteer – a pursuit of new things without any conceptualisation of what business problem is being solved.

Gadgeteers are dangerous for innovation teams because they burn influence at a fast rate. It only takes one poor meeting with a stakeholder (who will likely ask ‘So what?’) to close that door to innovators thereafter. A door slammed in one’s face is one less avenue for the future to get predictability in the innovation portfolio.

But the worst thing about having a gadgeteer around is they reinforce a stereotype that an innovation programme must try to undo as quickly as possible: that innovation is about way-out things with little relevance to the business.

Whenever you spot an innovator continuously wasting influence pushing something that has no direct bearing on a business problem, its time to call it a day.

I’ll post the remaining 5 archetypes over December.

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Go to www.futureproofbank.com if you’re interested.

That is an interesting result, and one that I’ve wondered about for big system processes myself. Almost two years ago I wrote on this subject, suggesting that for some big systems, paper could be a good alternative to large systems development.

This study is evidence that computerisation isn’t always the best answer.

This, of course, leads to questions about the characteristics of systems that should not be computerised. It is an important question, because technologists, left to their own devices, will always build systems, whether it makes sense or not to do so.

Here are the times I think it doesn’t make sense to build a big system:

1. When the prospective process is very low scale, in terms of throughput. The economics of big system development don’t work very well when you don’t have volume. Upfront costs are massive, and you rarely get payback in short time periods. Sometimes, the process has changed or ended before the system even arrives. End user computing has a chance of changing that, but don’t let big IT anywhere near something little if you want an economic result.

2. When the prospective process is at scale, but is extremely complicated. The economics of big IT don’t work for very complicated. You have to have too many people trying understand the system, then too many coders trying to make it work, then too many users trying to change things because the analysts didn’t understand the system correctly in the first place. The costs mount up, and sooner or later your business case that authorised the development in the first place collapses.

This latter case is the one that I think is exemplified by the healthcare study. The more complicated a system, the more expensive it is to build, maintain and operate. That’s if you can get it to work at all, of course. For healthcare, most systems are more expensive than the paper they replace.

So big IT can do simple processes if they are at volume, but not extremely complex systems regardless of scale.

There is an answer of course, and that is that you have to simplify complex processes before you start doing the computer bit. Its obvious, really. But I do wonder how many project failures could have been avoided if some Lean practices were applied to things before the technologists were let in.

We’re lucky that here at the Department that we have a big Lean initiative that does just this. We had a  Lean initiative at Lloyds Banking Group as well, though it was on a much smaller scale.

The trick is making sure that the Lean Machine gets to something before the IT Machine has a go at it. That’s a feat that’s way more complicated that spooling up a Lean or IT project on its own.

You can imagine the response if a technologist were to suggest it. “What? You want to change my business before you’ll computerise it for me? You think you know enough about it to change it? Not hardly”.

Unfortunately, in most organisation, IT hasn’t gained the right to tell business people that they might actually know something about their businesses. The irony is that after you’ve built a few systems that computerise a particular process, you almost certainly do know more about it than the business owners.

I see this changing rapidly, by the way, but will leave my thoughts on the evaporation of the business/IT divide for another post.

This, as far as I am concerned, is about as stupid as you get. Since I have gone to such lengths to put my thoughts on line and expose what I care about to everyone, surely you would want to have that advantage when you come to meet me? Is it so difficult to type “James Gardner DWP” into Google before you show up?

So I had the standard discussion about our strategy and goals, which is so generic as to be almost completely useless to anyone, and sent him on his way. He will not be meeting me again.

Of course, this goes to something I’ve been saying for a while, and that is that there’s this huge – and widening – gulf between those who are connected and those who aren’t. There is a visible performance gap between the two groups.

Apparently, though, there are all these people who are “too busy” to read blogs, keep up with Twitter, and participate online. I find, increasingly, they are missing the action.

Actually, as a side note, there are some people in my own teams who don’t bother to read this blog. I don’t even feel remotely worried that I’ll offend them by disclosing that, by the way, since they aren’t paying attention.

Anyway, so the sales guy didn’t get anything he wanted from me, which is a further opportunity to engage. Considering he’s a system integrator and wanting to sell services, what would I have expected him to know if he really wanted to talk?

1. He should have known that I think architecture should be firmly grounded in the business we’re trying to make go, and therefore, that' I’d care more about real things happening than models and theories.

2. He should have known that I care deeply about security, but I like a nice risk based assessment of things that lets us move forward rather than a process of shutting things down randomly the moment any potential threat comes up.

3. He should have known that I like strategies to have flexibility, and I hate ivory tower-ism. Strategists that won’t flex are as bad as security people who shut things for down for kicks or architects who are custodians of “the one true way”.

4. He should have known that I think you can build big and important results from innovation groups when you focus on many little things. And that doing a few very big things is the way to failure, since most innovations fail no matter what their size.

Anyway, a little research was apparently a bit too hard. Perhaps he “doesn’t have time” to read blogs and keep up with Twitter and participate in the conversation himself.

But never mind. That’s a sales guy that’s going to get fired, because there are any number of people who do their research before showing up.

As you’d expect, the conversation moves a lot faster once you get beyond “tell me about your role, your issues, and your goals”.

The first thing about “clout” – especially the kind needed for innovators – is that you either have it by virtue of your position (i.e. you are senior in your own right), or you have it because you are associated with someone who has clout.

This is, by the way, why so many studies suggest that successful innovators almost always have the ear of the CEO, or someone directly reporting to him or her.

Let us assume, therefore, that you don’t have clout because you aren’t senior yourself.  And whilst innovation is important, noone at the top really cares enough to prioritise it over other things. This means the question really boils down to one thing: how can you prove to someone with clout that you should be closely associated with him or her?

I cover this in detail in Futureproofing, in which I outline a five step model that innovators have to go through before they’re going to be able to do much that is really impactful.

Firstly, innovators have to prove they can do anything. It doesn’t matter what, even the smallest of deliverables that can be talked about make a difference. Avoid the temptation to take on big programmes! Without clout, they will go nowhere. Instead, take on a few, small, but talk-about-able things. Make them work, and you can move to the next stage.

The second stage for innovators is building a network of interested people that care about doing things differently. Taking the small things that were achieved previously, talk to everyone, anyone that will listen, in fact, about how innovation can make a difference. Find the people that will help in the mission to do things differently. Offer them opportunities to participate. Recognise that one person – even a small number of people – is never going to scale. You need to recruit believers.

Why doesn’t an innovation programme scale when you just add employees? The answer is simple. The cost of an innovation programme has to be less than the returns it generates. When you add people, your costs increase. On the other hand, most things that are genuinely new never give you any decent returns in the same year as you’re paying your wage bill. By the time they are giving you decent returns, someone else in the business will be taking the credit. Trust me on this: you need to keep your innovation team costs as low as possible. Recruiting believers is the only way to get avoid this trap.

The third stage, once you have all these people helping with the innovation problem is making sure that you can get predictable. You need to make sure you can make a return routinely on the money your enterprise gives you for investment. It needs to be predictable, so that senior people can trust that if they make a bet on you they won’t look stupid. And, of course, if you’re generating real returns, they’ll be interested in holding you close, simply because you’re something that has the potential to make them look good.

Guess what, you’ve just managed to get some clout.

The next stage is using the tools of innovation to start influencing strategy by helping senior leaders rehearse important future decisions. You’d be amazed at how powerful that can be, especially when they find they’re ready to deal with something unexpected in advance. Do that often enough, and you’ll be invited into top table discussions to help future planning.

The final stage is one where you have enough clout that in your own right you can disrupt major business lines and get away with it. Bare in mind that this is the ultimate point of being an innovator in the first place: the job is saving organisations from themselves. Any operation will be disrupted by someone given enough time: the real role of innovators, therefore, is to ensure that such disruptions come firmly from within, where they can be controlled and managed.

Of course, it is this kind of disruption that causes the worst innovation backlash in the first place. That’s why clout is important.

Now, on average, you have only 18 months to get from the first stage to third before you will either get cancelled, or you will be personally tarnished as not effective.  I hate to say this, but if you’re in role for longer and you still haven’t got the clout you need, you’ll probably not be able to turn things around. You’ll need to consider carefully your options.

There are some, but I won’t go into them here. The point is, there is an urgency about doing all this stuff which many people don’t recognise. You are in a constant race to prove the value of what you do against the value of everything that the organisation ordinarily does. Since business as usual has an overwhelming advantage most of the time, it is a race that very few people win without help.

Now, one last piece of advice if you don’t have clout: get a meeting with the most senior person you can. When you have the meeting, indicate you can’t be effective because you have no clout. Offer to shut down innovation altogether, since “our organisation is clearly not ready for it”. Since no-one senior will ever allow themselves to be seen as “not innovative” this is practically certain to at least give you a chance to do something.

In the meantime, if you’re still trying to get those first few things happening, and you can’t, I’d suggest you try something smaller, commensurate with the amount of clout you have right now. I promise you, clout will build over time and comes automatically with success.

That is rather a lot for a single post, and in fact, I’ve written a 350 page book on the subject for any one who wants to have the exhaustive details of how to do corporate innovation at scale.

But it is possible to summarise, I think, because everything you need to know about doing innovation happens in four stages.

The first is futurecasting. This is the process of working out what is likely to happen in the future so you can guide subsequent iterations of your innovation process. In the book, for example, I explain a specific futurecasting process based loosely on a scenario planning methodology, but anything that gets structured consideration of the future on the table is a good thing. Why is this important? Well, firstly, you can never ask a senior person for support on something new, especially if that new thing impacts current business or revenue, without rehearsal. They need time to think over consequences, and making them think about the future helps them do that. The second reason is that random innovation without a guide won’t always result in new things that solve the strategic problems of the firm. Out of the box thinking is all very well, but if you are not only out of the box, but out of the ballpark, it is usually not helpful.

So futurecasting is the first stage. The second stage is ideation.

Ideation is the process of collecting ideas and deciding how good they are relative to all the other ideas that you might have. The thing is, if you’re running a programme, you’ll likely have far more ideas than resources to execute them. So you have to have a way of deciding what you’re going to work on. Of course, if you’re still thinking that the answer to your innovation challenge is getting the good ideas, then you have some work to do. Ideas are everywhere, and usually all you need to do is find a good way of collecting them. Anyway, you’ll have more ideas than you know what to do with, so one of the main tools of innovation is a decent way to prioritise. Usually, people create various scoring systems to do this, but crowd based methods, such as voting and prediction markets work just as well.

The third stage is what I call the “innovate” stage, which is really all about the tools and processes you use to work out – in detail – the stuff that has to happen before an idea is actually fundable. Just because an idea sounds like a good thing and fits in with the priorities of an organisation, it isn’t necessarily something you can actually do. I was banging on about quantum computing and its use in financial markets for months before I worked out how far away usable hardware was, for example. Anyway, to get to the crux of the matter here, you need to answer three questions. “Can we do this?”, which is technically, operationally, and environmentally, is the idea actually possible. “Should we do this?”, which is primarily economic, i.e. can we afford it, and if we can, will anyone want it?. And, finally, “When?”, which is mainly about the response of competitors or internal players. Answering all that means you have a case which is a candidate for funding and delivery. As you’d expect, there are lots of things you do for each of those questions to get to decent answers for as little investment as possible.

Once you have money, the final stage is execution, which is all about building the thing and getting it out in the market. Key tools here include all the things you need to do to win over users, prove you know what you’re doing from an operational perspective (remember, its innovation, so its new, so noone will have made it work before), and a ton of other things. But I think the most important thing is you don’t even get to the Execute stage until you’ve done a substantial amount of ground work first.

Actually failure to all four stages is why I often make the observation that innovation programmes with their own large budgets usually fail. They don’t have to go through the rigour before they get to spend money, so invariably they spend money on the wrong things. Consequently, they also fail to get predictable in their returns quickly enough. Usually, at least in banking, you have 18 months to do that before your programme is killed off.

So, that’s my lightning summary of innovation tools in a corporate innovation programme.

In the meantime, some of you will likely be interested to know that I’m well into writing my next book, which I’m tentatively titling “One Big Thing”. Its all about how to use the tools of innovation to de-risk the situation people like founders and project managers have – one idea which just has to work. These are people who don’t get to spread their risk across a portfolio. They are laser focussed on their “one big thing”, rather than a corporate innovation portfolio. The consequences of failure are usually quite significant.

I’m also writing it in a much less academic style, with more interesting stories and far less focus on theory, than i used with FutureProofing. It is also not just about banking.

No idea on a date yet, but will keep you posted. I expect the manuscript to be done in about 4 months.

Update: Stupidly, I forgot to note that the whole of the first chapter of my book is online here, and it contains many more details about this stuff than I've written here.

There are lots of people who are at airports in work time and clearly do their work mobile, whilst keeping in touch with everyone else.

They are lots who are arguing about Enterprise Architecture, or other professional stuff, in real-time.

There are lots who, in time-zones opposite mine, are working out whether they should, or should not, go out for Friday night cocktails with colleagues, or go home to families.

There are none at all who are process workers, or, the new term of today, task workers.

This makes me wonder: am I particularly discriminatory in who is in my list of people I follow? Or is something else at play here?

I then log into my newsreader, latch onto a presentation of technology trends, and come across the quote “In the next 10 years, everyone except task workers will be equipped with a notebook, which they will probably provide for themselves. Task workers will have fixed location PCs, stripped down to be optimised for the task at hand”.

It makes me realise something: practically everything we do today in tech is optimised for the knowledge worker. Task workers are getting shut out.

In the Department, we worry about Digital Inclusion a lot. There are many people who don’t have access to computers and the internet, so providing services to them online is difficult. The Digital Divide can be very real.

But what about the new divide? On the one hand, the whole tech industry is occupying itself in making knowledge workers more productive, more able to promote themselves, and more able to access the information and data that will make them successful. The best of them are self publishing constantly. They’re on twitter, and they have personal brands. Their future is their network.

On the other, though, there are the task workers. For task workers the normal approach is to take radical steps to make sure they can’t participate in the conversation by turning off their tools at work. Monitor their working patterns to get the maximum number of work units out of them in a given time, making sure the cost to serve are as low as possible! Deny them every opportunity to be digitally engaged, to build their own brands during the working week.

If they want to do that, they can do it on their own time, managers reason. Of course, that’s all very well when most of the influentials they might choose to connect with are at home or in bed.

Here is the problem I see. By making sure that task workers don’t have the same access to resources as knowledge workers, we ensure that they will stay task workers forever. It is a new class system that is only marginally more acceptable than the one we already worry about with the Digital Divide.

I mean, everyone knows that the best jobs go to those that know how to network into them, or have sufficient profiles they get noticed independently of their network.

The thing is, I’m not even sure how you would go about fixing this. Its not enough to say that our task workers need better training, when they aren’t allowed the the liberty to grow and flourish because of the press of work. And, on the other hand, I can’t see a solution which lets the cost of service rise all that dramatically either because of “declining productivity”.

I think there is indeed a new digital divide, and it is not one of the have-technology versus the have-nots. Its worse than that. Its the divide about those who are allowed to use it and those who aren’t.

A couple of people contacted me to tell me the days of the “chip” were long gone.

Apparently that’s not the case, however. And here is the evidence.

Profile Microsoft evangelist Don Dodge was laid off, recently, in the latest round of cuts. As he says on his blog:

Microsoft announced more layoffs today, and I was one of them. This was a total surprise to me, and management offered no explanation. This is pretty standard procedure, mostly for legal reasons, but none the less left me with a cold feeling...but only for a minute or two.

Nice of him to be so level headed about the fact that he was just fired. Obviously, the chip is still inserted tight at this point.

A few days later, he is hired to work as an evangelist for Google. Seconds later, the chip has fallen out, and you get these remarks on his blog:"

Last week started a new personal journey for me. One without Microsoft. So, why not move forward without Microsoft technology, and try the new alternatives? Old habits die hard, but these were actually pretty easy to break…

I made the switch to Gmail last week and it has been awesome! Outlook has been an old familiar friend for years, but it was getting kind of tired…

Hey, isn’t this November of 2009? Why Word 2007? One of the nice things about Google Docs, and all web based products, is that they can be updated continuously with no interruption to you…

OK, now that I am no longer with Microsoft, I can admit I had iPhone envy. My Windows Mobile “Smartphone” didn’t measure up….

Thanks Microsoft Internet Explorer, but I’m moving to Google Chrome. Chrome starts faster, loads pages faster, and is easier to use…

Fake Steve Jobs, one of my favourite blogs on the internet, summarised the whole thing very nicely I thought, in a post where he calls Don a Borgocrat (Fake Steve refers to everything Microsoft as the Borg), and compares previous posts Don has made with his new position on products for the company.

If this isn’t evidence that the “chip” still exists, I don’t know what is.