I believe the value of working the seven domains of this framework, named the Leadership Alignment Workmat has significant value within and across any organization. It brings innovation together, a unifying point for the activity and momentum of innovation to become central to the core of the business in its future investment and value impact.
The Leadership Alignment Workmat provides a unique examination of the executive’s role in innovation; it offers a framework that the organisation’s leadership can adopt to ensure linkages and synergies between strategy and innovation, innovation and capabilities, innovation and culture.
They often lack the communicating medium to help clarify and shape the innovation story to provide the guidance necessary for achieving that essential engagement and encouragement they would like to align organizational efforts required from innovation to the strategies envisioned.
Benefits of applying the Leadership Alignment Work Mat
From an investment in an executive work mat exercise, you receive four significant benefits.
First, as an executive team, you will create cohesion and a consistent innovation framework that reduces barriers or uncertainties for innovators.
Second, you demonstrate your engagement, which increases visibility and lowers risk, which encourages more and better ideas.
Third, you create work-flows and encourage innovation skills and capabilities, which accelerate ideas through your internal processes that increase the opportunity to be more self-organized under this framework.
Fourth, you influence compensation, provide motivations and promote the culture and climate to innovate, which progressively reduces barriers and creates incentives for innovation to thrive.
These benefits add up to more speed, more agility, clearer flexibility resulting in new, relevant products and services that can increase organic growth and provide solutions that differentiate you.
We believe C.E.O’s and senior executives play a vital role in the success or failure of innovation. Unfortunately, those roles have often not been well-defined, and sometimes they are rarely well executed. We call this the engagement- alignment gap. Only an engaged, a committed senior executive can create the means for building a sustained innovation capability or disciplined approach through defining innovation’s role.
The Leadership Alignment Work Mat resolves the litmus test. It provides a compelling structured approach for senior executives to build, extend and sustain an innovation capability. Starting with the most strategic goals of your business, it links and aligns innovation to strategy; it explores the critical aspects of any senior innovation strategic framework. It addresses the critical aspects to provide a holistic approach to innovation, reducing uncertainty, reducing risk and increasing your chance to help your company innovate consistently.
The end outcome of this Leadership Alignment Work Mat approach provides the innovation leadership and guidance to your organization to ‘frame’ the innovation activity to your strategic goals. This allows you to articulate and communicate the alignment through the innovation work mat throughout the organization. It will provide the necessary understanding needed to perform the innovation tasks more effectively under this framework umbrella.
It offers the strategic ‘frame’ your innovation future requires; it forms the emerging common language and communication necessary across the organization that provides guidance, inspiration and clarity to your innovation vision and goals. It allows innovation to ‘cascade’ throughout the organization; to achieve that close alignment, innovation requires the strategy to achieve a meaningful and sustaining set of results.
To find out more or request a detailed White Paper on this, please contact paul@agilityinnovation.com or explore more here by clicking on the tab “insights and resources” or on the re-launched site of www.agilityinnovation.com under the tab “toolbox.”