Thoughts

Boom Trust

As organisations strive and strain through the current economic storm, the survival driven response might well be to batten down the hatches, then steer straight ahead, steady-as-she-goes. Those rocking the boat are most likely to end up walking the plank. But Natalie Turner believes that now is the very time when captains of industry, and indeed skippers of L&D, ought to be trying something new.

“In our ever-changing world,” says Turner, “organisations also need to constantly change to maintain competitive advantage. That’s just as true, indeed more so, during troubled times. The best chance any organisation has of surviving in the short-term, and thriving in the longer, is to continuously innovate and differentiate itself, pre-empting both consumers and competitors, and leveraging what makes it truly distinctive: its people”.

Today, innovation doesn’t just distinguish the leaders from the followers, as Apple’s Steve Jobs once said, but the survivors from the fallen. Such thoughts aren’t new – many years ago, the management guru Michael Porter described innovation as “the central issue in economic prosperity” – but for Natalie Turner, ‘founder creator’ of innovation and change consultancy entheo, the main driver in the modern business world is the growth in services.

“Since the Industrial Revolution, the pace of change has increased exponentially and so, therefore, has Boom and trust Daniel Wain unlocks the ‘energy within’ entheo’s Natalie Turner the need for companies to stay ahead,” she told me. “The rise of the service sector means companies now need to innovate not just via new product development but through people. Sadly, though, most businesses still operate within paradigms of management thinking that were designed for an earlier age. Over the last century, there’s been unparalleled growth in innovative products, services and technologies, but innovation in management and leadership has been scarce.”

So why is such innovation a challenge? “The status quo is based on established models and structures, on conventional wisdom, on a factory mindset, in which people are treated as machinery,” believes Turner. With an L&D audience, she ought at least to be preaching to the converted, if not the naturally subversive: in a knowledge economy, people equal innovation, which, in turn, equals survival and growth.QED.

But, with Google throwing up 112 million lines of enquiry for the word, what does Turner mean by ‘innovation’? She points to work conducted by one of entheo’s partner organisations, the Centre for Research in Innovation Management at the University of Brighton: “CENTRIM has identified six core organisational capabilities shared by successfully innovative organisations: focusing leadership; intelligent decision making; deep competence; facilitative culture; active learning, and enabling structures and processes. HR, and particularly L&D, has a key role in delivering all of these.”

Entheo recently conducted its own study of HR professionals across the UK and continental Europe, and found, not surprisingly a consensus that innovation remains important during a downturn. Yet this very research also found 80 per cent of respondent organisations spending less than 10 per cent of total corporate budget on innovation, with 26 per cent spending the grand sum of zero. Despite 90 per cent of HR respondents believing innovation is a “strategic priority”, 80 per cent don’t have an innovation management system, 66 per cent lack systematic measurement of their innovation activities and 47 per cent don’t even define employee competencies for innovation.

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