DEV Community: Saugaat Allabadi

I created Wordle, but for Blockchain!

Saugaat Allabadi — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 05:33:48 +0000

If your insatiable appetite for the simple puzzle game needs a niche, I bring to you a Wordle twist: Wordle for Blockchain terms!

Obsessed with playing Wordle? Also happen to be interested in Blockchain? Then 0xWordle came just in time.

Play the game: 0xwordle.saugaatallabadi.com/

🤌 What is it?

The waning days of 2021 introduced us to a new genre of tweets: Green, yellow, and grey boxes arranged in a 5-wide grid with as many as six rows. You’ve likely seen people posting screenshots of these cheery little grid boxes.

🟩🟨⬛🟨⬛

🟨🟨⬛⬛⬛

⬛🟩⬛🟩⬛

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Yep, that’s Wordle.

And once you’ve caught the Wordle bug, it’s hard to keep yourself from coming back for more.

The phenomenon was created by software engineer Josh Wardle.

Wordle is an addictive puzzle that involves six tries at guessing a secret five-letter word, with clues coming in the form of the color your letters turn after you’ve entered your guess.

Yellow means a correct letter in the wrong place, green a correct letter in the right place, and grey a letter that’s not in the word at all.

Now, if your insatiable appetite for the simple puzzle game needs a niche, I bring to you a Wordle twist: Wordle for Blockchain terms!

0xWordle (0x is a prefix to every crypto wallet address [coz, hexadecimal]) uses five-letter words only relevant to the Blockchain space. Eligible words can be anything from MONEY to FRAUD, CHAIN to STOCK. The focus may seem narrow until you remember the extensive range of terms, using up a sizable chunk of the dictionary, making it a fair game for 0xWordle.

Apart from the Blockchain angle, 0xWordle’s rules are the same as Wordle’s. You have six chances to guess the mystery five-letter word of the day. You can share your results like you would your Wordle results. Just click on your statistics and press “share” to share your grid with your friends and colleagues.

🏗 How It’s Made

Tech used: HTML, CSS, React, Typescript, and Tailwind

Credit where it’s due, I noticed the Github project ‘react-wordle’ by Chase Wackerfuss, and it acted as a good starting point for me from a design perspective. So I decided to fork his repository and get started from there.

I also felt this might be a good opportunity for me to build off of an open-source project and apply it to a narrow space in an Emerging Technology — Blockchain.

To make sure all the solutions are 5 letter words in the Blockchain glossary, I combined the text from Bitcoin whitepaper, Ethereum whitepaper, and “Blockchain for Dummies” textbook, extracted all 5-letter words from it, cleaned it by removing common words like ‘those’, ‘where’, etc., and marked the rest as my ‘solution wordlist’.

That’s when I decided to rebrand it to “0xWordle”.

📖 Lessons Learned

This web application acted as one of my early projects in front-end technologies, especially in ReactJS.

This project taught me about:

Dark/Light Mode
Local Storage in browsers
Sharing results with contacts
Deploying with Netlify
Google Analytics
Real-time performance monitoring

📸 Screenshots

Take a look at a few of the screenshots from the app (mocked) -

📶 What’s Next?

No project is perfect. There’s always some optimization, some refactoring to do, and that certainly is the case with this project as well. Even though this application works as expected, we can certainly make it better, faster, prettier.

If you feel the need to make it better, be my guest. Feel free to fork the repository and add your own flavor to it. After all, that’s what the open-source community is all about.

🏁 Getting Started

Codebase — https://github.com/saugaatallabadi/0xWordle

After you clone/fork the above repository from Github-

Install all node dependencies:

npm install

Then, run the development server:

npm run start

Use the .env.example as a template to enter the environment variables.

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the app

and viola! 🪄

Originally published at https://www.saugaatallabadi.com on March 4, 2022.

How Reverse Mentorship can help create better leaders

Saugaat Allabadi — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 14:57:12 +0000

The workforce has never been as varied as it is today, with full-time and part-time employees, contingent, freelance, and gig workers all working in a variety of settings. It’s becoming even more diverse across all spectrums of underrepresented groups. But that change is not arriving nearly as fast in boardrooms, which means there’s a growing gap between leaders and their people in regards to their perspectives and experiences.

This way, the organizations can fall right through that gap into the trap of stale thinking, and blind spots that could alienate the workforce, not only in regards to age, race, or gender but all different kinds of viewpoints. Reverse mentoring could be an antidote to that tunnel vision.

What is Reverse Mentoring? 🤌

Reverse mentoring is defined by junior employees acting as a mentor to senior leaders or executives.

For many organizations, reverse mentorship’s purpose is to give leaders a fresh perspective on rising trends in areas of technology or the future of work. For others, it’s a great way to increase the visibility of minority employees for future leadership opportunities.

This concept was born out of the belief that the youngest people joining the company are far more knowledgeable about new technologies than their managers. So, the top executives should seek out mentors from among these new joiners. Reverse mentoring recognizes that there are skills gaps on both sides and that each person can address their weaknesses with the help of the other’s strengths.

Why is Reverse Mentoring important? 🤷

Reverse mentoring has many personal and business benefits and can create a real lasting impact within a business. The likes of PwC, KPMG, P&G, and General Electric have all found success across different business areas from running reverse mentoring programmes — from supporting diversity initiatives to engaging and developing their graduate employees.

Reverse mentoring is a powerful way to build human connections and community within a business.‍

🤩 Benefits of reverse mentoring include:

Supporting inclusivity By pairing mentors from under-represented groups with mentees in senior management, they can effectively share perspectives, learn from each other, and work towards a more inclusive company culture.
Overcoming generational gaps Reverse mentoring is an effective way of breaking down these silos between generations, exposing those who have worked in the business for a long time to a fresh perspective on the way things are run, and the industry as a whole. New employees can also bring fresh ideas and approach things in a different way, which can inspire innovation in those who may be more stuck in their ways.
Digital skills development The graduates now entering the workforce are from Gen Z — the first digitally native generation — meaning that they grew up with advanced digital technology. Rather than putting senior colleagues on to training programmes that generally get very low engagement, reverse mentoring is a common and effective approach to increasing digital skills in older employees.
Developing leadership skills in younger employees By giving graduates and new joiners the additional responsibility of being a mentor, they have a platform to increase their communication skills, practice empathy, learn the art of asking good questions, and generally become more self-aware — all of which are vital skills of a good leader.
Increasing millennial retention Research by the Harvard Business Review found that reverse mentoring fulfills millennials’ desires for recognition in the workplace, which in turn leads to stronger retention numbers.

How to set up a reverse mentoring programme 🌱

Reverse mentorship programs involve a lot of strategic match-makings. Not only between a mentor and mentee but between the company and their goals.

Now that we’ve decided reverse mentoring would be a good initiative for your organization, let us look at some steps to set up the programme:

Step 1: Outline the objective ⭕️

Before anything, be very clear about the purpose of the program. Identify which benefit is most critical to your business. This might be sharing skills around technology, data, information, insight, or even changing the mindset about privilege.

Example: Objective of the programme — Digital skills

Method: The reverse mentoring programme will pair junior employees with advanced digital skills with more senior employees with weak digital skills. The mentors will offer training and support in digital areas the mentees want to develop.

Success: The mentees would have a greater understanding of digital areas by the end of the programme, and increased confidence in discussing technology.

Measure: Surveys and digital literacy tests before and after the programme.‍

Step 2: Fill in the details ✍️

Once you’ve got the basics mapped out, it’s time for all the other details. Here you need to outline:

Who will be on the programme?
Are you selecting participants?
Is it a formal or informal programme?
Will it be a set length or ongoing?
How do people sign up?
What is the expected commitment?
How will you monitor progress?

The answers to these questions will vary from business to business and depend on the objective of the programme. It’s important to be as detailed as possible at this stage of planning to help your reverse mentoring programme run as smoothly as possible.

Step 3: Pairing Mentors and Mentees 👥

An important part of setting up a reverse mentoring programme is deciding how you will match the mentors and mentees. This again may vary depending on how many participants there are on the programme, and how they have been selected.

An important pointer that shouldn’t go unnoticed — Make sure that your mentor isn’t a direct report or part of your team, because it will be really difficult to elicit honest feedback from someone who you also have to review at the end of the year. If you’re in finance, find someone creative in marketing, or if you’re in engineering, find someone in customer service. This will ensure that you develop perspectives from outside of your immediate team. Different perspectives make better leaders.

Step 4: Launch and monitor 🚀

Once your participants are matched, you can officially launch the programme!

In order to get off to a good start, provide support and resources to the mentors and mentees to help them navigate and build their new professional relationships.

Track how frequently the mentors and mentees are meeting, and develop a good system for receiving feedback from the participants to know if the programme is working towards your desired business objective. Tweak it accordingly.

With these guidelines in hand, you’re ready to launch a reverse mentoring program and reap the benefits. Don’t be surprised if it shakes up your company a bit — but in a good way.

Conclusion 🌘

Start small. Developing safe and positive reverse mentoring relationships can be tricky. It is best to start with small pilot programs and then use pilot participants as a steering committee for a rollout of the program on a wider scale.

Reverse mentoring challenges all employees to step outside the box, and look at how they think, work, and learn. Increasingly, companies are using this strategy to bridge the generation gap and fuel business innovation and growth.

By creating a well-constructed reverse mentoring program, you’re bridging the gap while building a more connected, informed, and cohesive work environment for all.

Take the first step towards it today!

Originally published at https://www.saugaatallabadi.com on February 8, 2022.

How to Sell Your Ideas Internally

Saugaat Allabadi — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 18:00:01 +0000

Anyone who has experienced the frustration of others just "not getting it!" knows how critical team buy-in is for the success of an idea.

Most leaders say they want innovation. And yet, when you pitch them new ideas, their default answer is “no,” claiming that either resources and staff are stretched, or now is simply not the best time. In effect, this means, “I love change, but don’t change anything I decided”

So, how can the intrapreneurs, the innovative types drive change that’s successful for the company and their careers?

What does “selling” an idea mean?

When we talk about “selling” an idea, we simply refer to winning over support from decision-makers, colleagues, or even from those reporting to us or other stakeholders.

To put things into perspective, selling an idea can be done in three directions:

Up: to managers, leaders, executives
Down: to those who report to you
Laterally: to coworkers or other stakeholders like experts on a topic, thought leaders within the organization, and so on.

If you want to sell your idea, you should exercise influence by inviting participation. This yields better results and encourages collaboration.

Persuasion is about getting someone to do things your way while influence is about working together with someone towards something new.

Your prerequisites in the firm 🎟️

So, first thing first, be patient and learn your way around the company, and more importantly, the people within. Different people have different motivations in their work. Pay attention to what these motivators are.

Whether you have a bold idea for a new line of products or a less obvious suggestion for incremental improvements, you often still need to have the foundation and plan your tactic. Here’s what you would need:

Expertise 🧓

Fundamentally, you need to be very good at your core job. You have to have expertise in something, whether it’s finance or IT, marketing or HR, sales or whatever.

You also need to understand the business and culture overall. Keep abreast of your industry trends, notice what your company funds (initiatives, campaigns, events they sponsor, staff additions, acquisitions). These speak volumes about what the company values.
Create a string of undeniable successes, including small wins that build trust. They earn you “permission” to try bolder strategies.

Credibility 📚

Your expertise and your “wins” — and the metrics that reflect them — will give you foundational credibility. You will need more. Taking on assignments outside your job description, including online courses out of your own curiosity adds to your portfolio and your credibility.

Relationships 🤝

It’s not always the brainstorming sessions or group activities that yield the best results. Get out there, meet people, build relationships, ask questions to understand the topic, and get inspired by their feedback. This will help you shape your idea better and gather support. By listening carefully to their answers, beneath the words, you hear what motivates and inspires your colleagues, so you can meet them where they are.

Strategies to selling your idea ♟

You now need to find a balance between a pragmatic, data-based approach and clever use of emotions that help your personality (along with your idea) shine through. Here are some steps you can take in introducing new ideas in your organization:

Frame the problem 🤌

Whether you know a way to automate a process, how to save money, or improve aspects of corporate culture, you should always explain the “why” behind your idea. Not all problems have a simple, straightforward solution. Sometimes, you need more brainpower to provide different perspectives on how to fix things. This will prevent poor decisions along the way.

That’s why the preparation work is so important. Involve others in the development of your idea, talk to stakeholders and coworkers in advance to get them on board. This takes us to our next point.

Show your homework 📑

Whether you’re proposing purchasing a new piece of technology or creating a new internal innovation team, chances are time and money investments will be necessary. If that’s the case, backing up your assumptions with facts and demonstrating the return on investment will go a long way.

When a new idea requires a new set of rules, it’s crucial to test your idea against multiple possible outcomes. For example, if you’re changing the way employees spend their time, what happens to the work that now must be neglected to focus on this new idea?

Who will be in charge of enforcing potential new policies and how might that change company dynamics? These are questions you’ll be asked, so be prepared.

Make it achievable 🏁

Any excitement your team may have over your fresh new idea will fall flat if executing that idea requires a tight timeline, longer hours, or convoluted success metrics. Start small with even the biggest ideas. Demonstrate what short-term success and victory milestones look like when you pitch your idea.

Breaking the idea up into small, achievable intervals and celebrating those wins won’t make the end goal feel so esoteric or daunting.

Momentum is key to getting projects off the ground. Do the simple things early to instill faith that your idea has legs.

Link it to the company vision 🔗

When a leader pitches an idea down the chain that’s tied to the organization’s vision, it reinforces the direction the company is going and strengthens trust. Similarly, employees who go to management with their ideas can speak the language of leadership and demonstrate their commitment to the company.

You want to begin the conversation by being able to say something like, “you know, the organization has the business goals of A, B, and C. I’ve got an idea that I think will fit perfectly.”

Common mistakes to avoid 🚩

We can learn a lot from our mistakes, but also from others’ mistakes. Communication and human interactions in the business context are very complex so identifying patterns that lead to failure is not so straightforward. Even so, there are still things you can pay attention to, to minimize risks and increase your odds of succeeding.

The idea conflicts with someone’s beliefs or interests 🤼

The steps you take and the research you do before presenting your idea will help you determine who is directly affected by the changes you suggest. If you risk upsetting or threatening someone’s position, try a different approach.

Not listening to feedback 🔇

You’ve had this idea for a long time, and you think you figured it all out. Sometimes our biases stand in the way and affect our judgment. Not listening to feedback is a common mistake. Don’t fall in love with your “perfect” idea and stay open to others contributing towards its development.

Making it “your” idea ✋

The point should be to improve something for the benefit of the organization. If it’s your idea and all about you and your benefit, you won’t get far.

Getting others on boards and giving them credit for their contribution will enhance their motivation and commitment. After all, this is what it means to be a good team player.

Conclusion 🌘

The more you try to improve your idea and the delivery process, and the more ideas you try to sell, the higher the chances are you will succeed. Look at your own process like you’re developing a product. Apply the same steps: build your hypothesis, validate your assumptions in the preparation work, test it within your circle, department, or business unit and learn from feedback.

Expect the unexpected. It will likely take longer and end up looking different than your initial idea, tweaked (improved!) by your colleagues, and with lots of twists and turns along the way.

By continuously working on this you will soon realize that not all ideas are worth pursuing and it’s very important to choose your battles.

That’s the journey of an intrapreneur. It’s complicated, risky, fun — and rewarding.

Originally published at https://www.saugaatallabadi.com on February 1, 2022.

Why Middle Management is the Hardest Job in Innovation

Saugaat Allabadi — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 10:47:57 +0000

“Most things break in the middle!”

To simplify what is in question, let’s first understand it right -

I am using the term ‘middle management’ to describe the crossing point between the frontline employees and leadership; the members of the workforce who have authority to make decisions to a certain extent, whilst still having legitimate insight from the employees.

Their job is to make sure that the right things happen in the organization. Middle management often works as an innovational bottleneck, controlling which ideas get passed along in each direction. Let’s take a look at some of the challenges middle-management has to face, ending with some tips on how one might resolve them.

A Manager’s Role in Innovation 📥

Does Middle Management suffocate Innovation? Employees from all levels have valuable insights and ideas on their respective fields and even on a broader company-wide scale. The problem is that these ideas get nipped in the bud too often than not since there’s no one to truly heed to them. Managers are crucial to this dynamic, as they need to be proficient in seeing the potential hidden in raw ideas.

Sometimes it is simply not the right time to go forward with an idea if, for example, the organization as a whole is focusing on a different strategic agenda. It is, however, important that all ideas that employees come up with are stored for later use.

After all, ideas should be treated as living and breathing beings. They can grow, take shape, and flourish with the right exposure.

Hence, managers aren’t the “bad guys that always suffocate innovation”. It is, however, necessary to filter information since although it is important for leadership to invest time in listening to ideas, it would be in no way efficient for leadership to cram in endless hours to their busy schedules to go through every single one of them. Delegating responsibility is necessary for optimizing time and maximizing productivity from upper management. Unfortunately, it renders the system vulnerable to the formation of bottlenecks. To get around the challenge, information shouldn’t flow through just a few individuals. There should be additional communication channels to help get the job done.

Delegating responsibility is necessary for optimizing effectiveness and freeing up capacity from upper management.

Obstacles with Innovation 🛑

A common issue regarding innovation is how to properly handle the ideas coming your way. To assure that valuable ideas don’t get lost, there should be a way to manage these ideas in a way that promotes growth, both of the idea and the employee giving it. A way to systematically collect and develop ideas is to make nurturing and prioritizing them easier. This would alleviate the time pressure associated with handling the flow of ideas, thus freeing up more time to scope it out properly, as well as be able to make the right people responsible for each idea.

Even with a process to properly manage the flow of ideas, it’s up to the managers to facilitate the process that makes all this possible. For that to work properly, they need to not only motivate employees to participate and contribute, which is hard to accomplish without insight into what makes each of the employees click but also be able to give constructive feedback on the ideas. This is where having good relationships with employees comes in handy. Knowing everyone on an individual level helps make an informed decision on what the best course of action will be.

Every organization has ideational potential. The only question is, is it utilized?

Broadening the Bottleneck 📶

There are indeed multiple reasons why middle management might be a bottleneck for innovation in your organization. It might be due to their inability to motivate the employees to contribute their insights or it might simply be because they, usually inadvertently, work as a two-sided barrier for information flow. For managers to have time to go through all ideas coming from their employees, and for the employees to hear what their ideas accomplished in the end, there must be proper communication channels. Facilitating these channels, along with upholding a positive culture, is mainly on the shoulders of middle management, as long as the correct resources are allocated from above.

Motivating employees to act on issues they face is the key to assuring that you’re getting all the ideas out there. For this to happen, it’s important to promote transparency and participation on all fronts. The more active and engaged your employees are, the more they’re willing to contribute intellectually and the more productive and committed they’ll be. Refrain from shooting down seemingly irrelevant ideas or ignoring input. Instead, ask questions that will help the employees figure out the current weaknesses of their ideas so that they can improve both the idea and their skills on critical thinking.

Motivating employees to act on issues they face is the key in assuring that you’re getting all the ideas out there.

If managers appear to be informational barriers in an organization, the focus must be on broadening the initial bottleneck, not by increasing the number of managers, but by finding ways to manage their workload.

There is one major aspect that managers, who are solely in charge of the ideational input of their employees, can improve — They need to make sure the flow of ideas and information is transparent and asynchronous so that it isn’t dependent entirely on their input.

From Bottleneck to Facilitator ⚡️

The goal: The goal is to be able to gather, categorize, develop and then utilize or represent forward ideas coming from your employees.

Also, the method should be easy, effortless, and self-sustaining, since nobody has the time to constantly manage it.

Now, how can middle-management improve their situation?

Make sure that an effective pipeline is in place to ensure that the right ideas really get implemented. New and existing processes should naturally complement each other.

To find the best flow of ideas in an organization, we should define a pipeline — a process I’ve covered in a previous article: https://www.saugaatallabadi.com/defining-a-pipeline-for-bringing-ideas-to-life-at-scale/

Thanks to the good relationships you have with your employees, you should know which ropes to pull in order to get people on board and get everyone to use the pipeline properly. As an incentive, you promise recognition and a chance to be responsible for the implementation of your own idea, should the leadership approve it.

Refrain from being a bottleneck, but rather aim for being a facilitator. Make it easy to submit ideas to make sure no idea is left unheard. In the end, it is in the hands of the manager to make sure that their employees have a way to express themselves. Don’t overwork yourself, but rather find a smarter way to deal with the issues at hand.

Ask yourself: Are you a bottleneck or a turbocharger for your team?

Originally published at https://www.saugaatallabadi.com on January 25, 2022.

How I built a Web Application in 2 days.

Saugaat Allabadi — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:24:39 +0000

This is my first attempt at building a real-life Frontend focused project named “Know Your Borders”.

Visit the demo site —

https://saugaatallabadi-know-your-borders.vercel.app

🤌 What is it?

Know Your Borders is a web application built using NextJS, which gives you a list of all countries in the world with some fields like -

Population
Area
Gini coefficient
Languages
Currencies
Neighboring countries

and much more…

🏗 How it’s made?

Tech used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, NextJS Framework, REST APIs

Credit where it’s due, I noticed the project ‘world-ranks’ by @nghiemthu, and I knew this was a good starting point for me learning NextJS. So I decided to fork his repository and get started from there.

However, since that project was built a year ago, the APIs were outdated and some other issues had come up and I felt this might be a good opportunity for me to build off of an open-source project and enhance it.

That’s when I decided to rebrand it to “Know Your Borders”.

Know Your Borders is a two-page web application (responsive) with a list view of all countries and simple navigation to the detail page of each country.

📖 Lessons Learned

This project acted as my introduction to front-end technologies, especially in NextJS.

This project taught me about:

Data sorting, filtering
Responsive Layout without any CSS framework
Dark/Light Mode
Server-side rendering
Deploying with Vercel

📸 Screenshots

Take a look at these couple screenshots from the app (mocked) -

📶 What’s Next?

If you feel the need to make it better, be my guest. Feel free to fork the repository and add your own flavor to it. After all, that’s what the open-source community is all about.

🏁 Getting Started

https://github.com/saugaatallabadi/know-your-borders

After you clone/fork the above repository from Github-

Install all node dependencies:

npm install

Then, run the development server:

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the homepage

and viola! 🪄

Originally published at https://www.saugaatallabadi.com on January 23, 2022.

The Importance of Leadership involvement for Innovation.

Saugaat Allabadi — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 17:29:52 +0000

Innovation is one of the areas where people are often looking for senior leadership involvement. Yet, it tends to be lacking at times.

Through this article, let’s look at the role of senior leadership and their involvement in Innovation management, why it’s important, and how should it be done.

In the words of Simon Sinek, let’s start with -

The “Why” — Why should Leadership contribute towards Innovation 🤷

Based on the research by McKinsey, 80% of executives consider their current business models to be at risk. Every year, a number of S&P 500 is replaced by other firms. This indicates that for most organizations, change is inevitable, and to remain competitive especially in these unpredictable and turbulent times, Innovation is key.

However, for the publicly listed companies, the constant pressure is to boost short-term results — the next quarter’s earnings, and that tends to affect management priorities.

Luckily, most executives understand this and already rate innovation pretty much at the top of their list of priorities, in which case they should also allocate their time and efforts accordingly.

According to Strategy+Business, top innovators are able to significantly outperform the rest of the Global Innovation 1000 (1000 largest corporate R&D spenders) across a variety of financial metrics such as revenue, operating income, and market cap growth.

According to their findings,

They closely align innovation strategy with business strategy
They create company-wide cultural support for innovation
Their top leadership is highly involved with the innovation program

Let’s explore these factors to see how they play a big role in innovation performance.

1. Closely aligned innovation strategy with business strategy 🤏

The execution of innovation strategy should always be aligned with the overall business strategy across all levels of the organization.

No good executive wants a marketing strategy poorly suited for addressing the larger goals of the organization. The same holds true for innovation. The innovation strategy should be designed to help an organization reach its overall goals. If it isn’t aligned, the executives are simply gambling on the innovation program coming up with a miraculous disruptive innovation out-of-the-blue, which will then hopefully lead the organization to a new direction.

Innovation is simply about creating the future of the organization and as such, it just makes sense for top management to ensure that this work is closely aligned with the overall goals of the organization, whatever they may be.

2. Creating Cultural Support for Innovation 🤝

There are certain cultural characteristics that are generally considered to be universally beneficial for innovation, such as collaboration, work ethic, and a willingness to experiment.

However, the right culture is also dependent on the strategic goals of the organization. Cost-driven companies likely have a different culture from more value-driven companies.

The good thing is that, once the business and innovation strategies are aligned, it’s also much easier to create a singular culture that supports both of them simultaneously.

A transition to a pro-innovation culture isn’t easy and it always takes time. It typically requires some positive pressure from the top, clear communication, as well as the willingness and ability to change the day-to-day practices. Suffice to say, to have the best chance of success, cultural change too should be led from the top.

3. High involvement of Leadership with the Innovation Program 🛠️

The Leadership should never underestimate the impact their interest might have on employees’ perceptions and motivation.

If leadership shows interest in an employee’s work, they typically see it as being more important for the organization, which in turn makes the work more meaningful for the employee, and also signals to them that succeeding in it would be a great opportunity for them to shine.

In addition, by being more involved, top management can better communicate the importance of these factors and prove that the aforementioned cultural alignment is in fact in place.

The “How” — How should it be done? 🤔

Occasionally, executives withhold from taking part in innovation due to their inexperience in innovation work, or bad experiences or failures in their previous attempts at innovation.

Considering that typically CEOs come from more risk-averse and operations-focused backgrounds, such as finance, operations, and legal, they consider innovation to be one of the weakest areas of their expertise. This is quite a natural challenge to have. (One of the best solutions to deal with this is to introduce the concept of “Reverse Mentoring” in the firm — a topic I plan to cover in the future)

While top management having little experience in innovation is without a doubt a challenge, it doesn’t have to be a blocker.

As they have plenty of other priorities as well, they shouldn’t necessarily be in the trenches innovating.

Senior management simply needs to show others the way forward and then take ownership in helping their team achieve the desired results.

As ex-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt puts it -

The executives of the most innovative organizations often simply “manage chaos”.

To get there, senior managers should find a way to make sure that anyone in the organization is able to answer the following questions:

Why is innovation important for us now and in the long term?
What is the organization looking to achieve with it?

In addition, they need to show that they’re serious about innovation and achieving the desired results.

So, what’s next? 🚪

If you are not in a leadership position, you might be wondering about where to go from here.

If you believe that your management team should be more involved in innovation work than they currently are, you should take ownership of the situation and lead up the chain of command.

Share your concerns with the management and ask:

Is Innovation important for the organization?
How is it aligned with the overall strategy?
Why isn’t senior management spending more time on it?

The conversation will serve as a starting point that you can hopefully use to start to work together to improve innovation performance.

On the other hand, if you are in a leadership position, you too need to take ownership and ask both yourself, as well as your team the following questions:

Is Innovation important for our strategy?
Am I spending enough/too much time on it considering what its priority is?
Have I been able to communicate why innovation is/isn’t important for us?
Do we have a pro-innovation culture and an aligned innovation strategy?
Are the people in charge of innovation able to lead us to the results we want?

As mentioned above, innovation is no less than about creating the future of the organization and as such, the leadership should always be involved in it.

The extent and nature of this involvement can vary tremendously, but it most certainly needs to be there.

Here’s to finding the right approach for our organization! 🥂

Originally published at https://www.saugaatallabadi.com on January 18, 2022.

Defining a pipeline for bringing ideas to life, at scale.

Saugaat Allabadi — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 08:15:57 +0000

The successful exploitation of new ideas is crucial to a business being able to improve its processes, bring new and improved products and services to market, increase its efficiency and, most importantly, improve its profitability.

However, ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. To reap the rewards of your thinking, you need to act and further develop your idea. By defining a pipeline for managing the ideas, you’ll introduce clear responsibilities that will hold people accountable for progress, as well as create a set of common rules that make the process transparent and understandable for everyone.

Let’s look at different idea management models and talk a little bit about the suitability for different types of companies.

The ‘Not-so-ideal’ Pipelines 👎

Every company has ideas and every company makes decisions on how to proceed with these ideas, one way or the other.

When there’s no defined process in place, the culture and operations of your company will define how ideas will be managed. There are also some models that are less than ideal, even if they were formal.

The two most common ones are:

1. The Wild West 👾

If you have no idea what to do with new ideas in your company, you can probably be classified under this model. Typically people have an idea, they tell their colleagues or immediate manager about it. The manager has tons to do, and he/she might forget all about it later. This oftentimes frustrates the employee even with their daily work, and they start to turn more and more demotivated, resentful and pessimistic.

There are really just two ways to get something to happen in this model:

Just DIY (do it yourself)
Shout around loud enough until someone is forced to take action

If you identify yourself with this “process”, you could introduce a rudimentary process that requires managers to collect suggestions from their employees and report to their superiors once a month. This could be your start towards positive development and a hallmark of a quick win.

2. Suggestion box 📮

A suggestion box can have many forms:

A physical suggestion box
A dedication email inbox
An online form on the company’s intranet

It is then monitored typically by a single person and is “unboxed” once a quarter.

Even if the intention is well, the execution of this process is oftentimes terrible. Furthermore, people leaving the suggestion will typically never hear of what happened to their idea, especially if it’s a no-go decision.

This has some fundamental flaws due to its non-transparent nature:

The slowness of the project leads to frustrated employees.
Since the first idea is almost always not ready to be implemented and requires further refinement. This leads to fewer ideas in the box worth taking forward.
Difficulty in avoiding bias in decision making, as the ideas are typically evaluated by a single party.

Clearly, there are some serious downsides going forward with either of those models. Now let’s look at some pipelines I believe can actually get the ball rolling.

The Recommended Pipelines 👍

Typically, you would see two different kinds of models in companies that are successful in this area.

1. For SME (<500 employees) 🚀

The first one is for Small and Medium Enterprises. The idea is simple. The employees come up with new ideas and add them to an Ideation tool, which then notifies people who are responsible for the domain of the idea, called DomainLeads, after which the idea is then collaboratively developed further.

Decisions are then made in a group meeting or similar, which gathers in regular intervals, on whether the ideas are to be implemented or not. If not, the no-go decision is communicated back to the employees automatically via the system after its status is changed.

If the idea is given green light, the idea might be implemented by the same business unit, or a project team can be formed to implement the idea.

The project manager is always responsible for communicating the status of the idea back to interested stakeholders (employees interested, domain leads, decision-making group) via the system, which can be as quick as a couple of clicks or a one-sentence status update.

If the implementation is a large project, further go/no-go decisions need to be made by the decision-making group.

2. For Large Enterprises (>500 employees) 🏢

This model is a necessity if you have a large portfolio of projects and would like to manage ideation separately for each large project (as you probably should).

There might be a need for a “product-related ideation” or/and general “company-wide process development”. These are very different by nature so it just makes sense to have different processes for each of these use cases. Let’s call them “tracks”. For now, consider a track to be an instance of the SME model above.

However, when you have several separate ideation tracks in place, you should have some kind of a dedicated process owner/ group in place to oversee the different tracks. This can be just one person, but ideally a recurring meeting of either executives and/or the representatives of the different tracks.

The role of this group is to support the decision-makers of the different tracks to monitor their performance and improve their processes. However, this party can also help in cases where an idea is overlapping with other tracks.

Unsure if this model is for your company? Start the implementation small with the SME Model above. Then once you start expanding to other use cases, you’ll soon realize if you need to implement those use cases as their own tracks.

The Dream 🌈

To be completely honest, none of these models is ideal. They all have one thing in common: you basically need to wait for a decision to be made about an idea before anything happens. This has two major downsides:

It takes time and adds overhead
Many good ideas will inevitably be rejected

In business, time is of the essence, and no matter how efficient you’ll make the process, waiting for a decision still always prolongs things and adds overhead costs.

The dream is to have a company where every employee understands their own job and the business as a whole well and is capable of proactively improving every facet of the way they work. And occasionally they’d even come up with really big ideas and build the first versions of those themselves, really taking the company to new heights.

The dream is to have every employee understand the business as a whole and proactively enhance and optimize every facet of the way they work.

Conclusion 🌗

Change takes time and is inevitably gradual. There are obviously many ways you can build the capabilities for innovation and having an efficient idea management process is just one of them.

However, the models introduced above are practical ways of getting started on that path. They’ll help you build an engaged culture that appreciates participation and empowers people to innovate.

The good thing is that you don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t if you haven’t done anything like this before) make the process company-wide right away. Start with just a single business unit as an experiment — see how the process works and how people respond. Learn and adjust your approach, and after expanding gradually, you’ll see positive results! ✌️