Does your team have the skills needed to drive innovation?

April 4, 2022 Steven Forth

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

Innovation is critical to organizational growth. It works across all levels of the organization, from granular business processes, to how people learn and contribute, to the products and services taken to market. Given its importance, why is innovation so difficult? Why do so many innovation programs get bogged down? Why does innovation make so many of us uncomfortable?

Please share how your organization is collecting and prioritizing skill data

Ibbaka is working on a role and competency model for innovation and we have been probing on this question with many experts in innovation, organizational design and team building. We have found three key reasons.

The purpose and approach to innovation changes across the adaptation cycle
Innovation teams need a different organization pattern and different skills
Integrating innovations into an existing organization is difficult with new ideas often being rejected by the host

The purpose and form of innovation changes across the adaptation cycle

Organizations go through a cycle of resilience, adaptation and efficiency or effectiveness. Innovation means different things at each stage. Lack of clarity on where an organization is in the adaptation cycle can be fatal to innovation programs. The skills needed at each phase of the cycle are also different.

Innovation in the efficiency phase of the adaptation cycle

During the Efficiency phase (and most organizations prefer to spend as much time as possible in this phase) most innovations are highly directed and are focussed on sustaining rather than disruptive innovation. The metrics of KPIs of the innovation are well understood. Teams are often from one business function. Only when the problem is clearly at the interface of two functions is a cross functional team used.

Innovation in the resilience phase of the adaptation cycle

Innovation is not generally associated with the resilience phase. Organizations in the resilience phase are focussed on survival and tend to believe they do not have the resources or time to devote to innovation.

A couple of contrarian views.

Smart companies will invest in the skills and connections needed for resilience in the efficiency phase. This goes against the grain of efficiency, so few organizations actually do it, but the ones that do are more likely to endure.

When organizations are bent out of shape, and resilience is about being able to flex and then return to the stable state, new opportunities can open up. The ability to recognize opportunity under stress is something we see with high performers.

Resilience relies on the connections that connect the people in a company across functions. Cross company (and not just cross functional) teams are needed.

Innovation in the adaptation phase of the adaptation cycle

Innovation and adaptation are closely connected. Innovation both drives adaptation and makes adaptation a requirement. It is here where one needs to build goal seeking teams (teams that are responsible for setting their own goals) and find people from different disciplines who can work together on cross functional teams.

Open, cross functional, goal seeking teams require special skills to put together, lead and to play on. These teams can fail when the necessary skills are not present, so let’s look into this more deeply.

For more on this theme see

Managing the tension between adaptation resilience and efficiency - how skill models evolve

Critical skills for the future of work - Managing trade offs

Goal seeking teams (management by discovery)

Innovation teams need a different organization pattern and different skills

Teams that can support disruptive innovation and drive adaptation are different from the teams needed for resilience or efficiency. Back in 2018, Harvard Business Review published an interesting article ‘If Your Innovation Effort Isn’t Working, Look at Who’s on the Team’ by Nathan Furr, Kyle Nel, and Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy.

Transformative projects require the organization to return to a more malleable state. This challenge requires teams that are formed through a re-matching of resources and employee capabilities.

In the article three key skill sets are identified.

Negative capability: being comfortable with uncertainty

At Ibbaka, we decompose this into two different skill sets. The ability to explore and make decisions under both uncertainty and ambiguity. Another HBR article explains the reason for this.

‘What VUCA means for you’ by Nathan Bennett and G. James Lemoine.

For more on this see ‘Managing ambiguity - an emergent skillset.’

Chaos pilots: leading and executing in unfamiliar territory

What are some of the skills that help a person succeed as a chaos pilot?

Sense making
Story telling
Pattern recognition
Way finding
Goal seeking

These skills are seldom assessed and are not always valued in organizations. Many people who have these skills do not know they have them. People are often not aware of their own skills when the people around them are. Any skill assessment program that is focussed on innovation needs to go beyond self assessment or manager assessment and bring in peers and communities.

Divergent thinking, convergent action, and influential communication

In many organizations a premium is placed on critical thinking and decision making. But before we can apply critical thinking we need ideas to critique. This is where divergent or generative thinking comes in. In 2021 Ibbaka interviewed design thinking leader GK VanPatter on the importance of generative thinking in design thinking.

The skills to lead teams through the process of opening, to allow space for new ideas and divergent solutions, and then focussing in on the ideas with the most potential and communicating them to the larger organization are rare and seldom found together in one person.

We can hope to succeed by finding these rare people, or we can find ways to combine people on teams so that it is not any one person who provides these skills but a combination of the people on the team.

Integrating innovations into an existing organization is difficult with new ideas often being rejected by the host

Even when innovation teams are successful and come up with compelling ideas that will have an impact the ideas are often not implemented or the execution is poor. This is one reason that so many innovations fail to get adopted. The widely cited number is that 75% of new product launches fail (see the HBR article cited below). There are many reasons for this. It is interesting to study the many cases described in these two articles.

35 Innovation failures by Jonathan Livescault

Why Most Product Launches Fail by Joan Schneider and Julie Hall (HBR)

There is another reason for failure though. Few organizations ask if they, or their customers, or the support network of consultants, suppliers, advisors and even competitors, have the skills needed for the innovation to take root and flourish.

Most innovations require new skills. Failing to understand the skills needed for the innovation to succeed is a contributing factor in many innovation failures.

Part of the work in bringing an innovation to life is to understand the skills required, see where those skills live, and helping people close any skill gaps.

Does your team have the skills needed for innovation? Ibbaka can help answer this question.