There are no Quick Wins in Transformative Innovation

“I’m really excited about how this program sets us up for the future. I just really need some short-term results as well!” 

I want impact today and tomorrow. I want business model transformation and quick wins. I’ll have my cake and eat it too. For years, innovation sponsors and procurement leads have been dreaming an impossible dream, trying to achieve both incremental improvements and massive change at the same time. Let’s put this one to bed - when you confuse these objectives, you set your organization up for failure on both fronts. 

There are no quick wins in transformative innovation programs, and asking form them sabotages the opportunity to drive real change. 

• Short and long term programs have different goals. For an innovation team to be successful, a team requires a clear understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, and accompanying measures of success. Most long-term innovation programs have a learning objective and use metrics focused on IP development (e.g. number of patents), opportunity development (ideas to market / killed), or (rarely in my experience) risk adjusted NPV. In contrast, pure quick-wins programs usually have a central business problem that they are focused on (eg. improve NPS, efficiency, etc.). Achieving both requires a splitting of attention, meaning neither goal is fully delivered against. 
• They need different tools and experts. You wouldn’t ask your ambulance driver to put out a four alarm fire. Innovation meant to drive business transformation requires broad exploratory methods conducted by people with training in behavioural science or foresight. Short-term incremental improvements require experts in specific processes, channel expertise, and identification of best practices. Each type of discovery uses different methods and different experts. 
• Each objective requires a different mindset. Understanding market transformation problems versus product or experience optimization problems requires a mindset shift. Trying to understand each of these sets of problems and provide potential recommendations requires a completely different fact base and set of interpretive lenses, making it unproductive and inefficient to try and accomplish both at once. 
• Innovation implies change, and change requires planning (and time). Change management is the skill that is most required and most absent from innovation teams. Change management requires a thoughtful assessment of the scope of change, organizational readiness, and the development of plans. While I’m a big fan of agile change management, this still requires considerable time to be done right to allow for the change to take hold. The planning takes time, and most organizations aren’t nimble enough to roll out changes quickly unless they are seen well in advance, impacting the ability to deliver against a 3 month time horizon. 
• Ownership of quick-wins is challenging. While I don’t agree with it, most organizations use a 12 month planning cycle. In this cycle, 6 months are spent constructing a plan (setting strategy, budgeting, managing resources, etc.), and 6 months are spent executing against it. Time and time again, I see separate innovation teams try and insert a set of recommendations into a running plan, only to realize there is no one to take ownership of ideas, misalignment of the measures of success vs. the team’s strategic plan, and no budget or resources to implement. 

So you’ve been asked for business model innovation and quick wins, what do you do? 

• Educate that these are two different programs. Let your stakeholders know that each goal requires a different set of objectives and tools to be done effectively. Have them decide on which one’s more important - long term business sustainability or short term results (and don’t pass judgement if you don’t agree on their choice…).
• Make the short term someone else’s responsibility. If you’ve been asked to help transform the business, and I think we safely say that you have an important mandate and a split focus won’t benefit you. This is the frame through which you’ll interpret all of your discovery work, and you should not be distracted from this task. Recommend that someone else take on accountability for the short term goal, and take ownership over the frame of short-term impact. Let them interpret the findings through field notes and undertake complementary methods as needed. 
• Set up separate streams. While there may be points where findings are relevant to both streams of work, understand that these are two completely separate projects. If it’s possible, run two separate teams based on each set of objectives. If not, ensure that each stream carries its own charter, governance structure, and that the streams never cross in meetings and presentations. 
• Involve implementation teams on day one. The only way results can be achieved within a quick wins window is if implementation teams are directly involved in setting the program objectives, aligning program KPIs to their strategic plan KPIs, and rapidly applying findings to what they’re already doing. 

Transformation takes time. If you tell people success can be achieved in the short term, you'll create an impatient set of stakeholders. Know what you’re trying to accomplish. I have no issues with programs designed to impact businesses in the short term, but to try and achieve both short impact and long term transformation at the same time results in neither being done well. 

How would you handle it?