Why can a skilled management consultant without in-depth industry experience give valuable advice to senior executives who have worked in a business for decades?
One reason for this remarkable feat is that most information needed for solving an organization's problem can usually be found inside its boundaries! Excellent consultants work like an air crash investigator, who knows what to look for and where to find it. Together with client team members, they gather crucial bits and pieces, which are often widely dispersed throughout the organization, to cut the Gordian knot. After aggregating the information, recognizing patterns and drawing logical conclusions, the engagement team can propose fact-based and actionable solutions to the decision-makers of the client company.
Alas, many executives are not as receptive and productive as consultants of premier rank. They fail to recognize and use the gems that organizational novices uncover or produce during their "innovation honeymoon". This is the special period when newcomers are exceptionally insightful and creative. The incumbent leader should use various methods to collect, codify and spread their produce. During this stage of innovation honeymoon management, all organizational gatekeepers and internal opinion-leaders must keep their minds open and refrain from censorship. They should constantly encourage others to enrich the emerging ideas of the recruits.
Newsletters
A "New Arrivals Newsletters" is one means of giving innovation honeymooners pride of place and broadcasting their views. Among other things, it can feature portraits of novices and interviews with them. An "innovation honeymoon questionnaire" can be used to elicit penetrating insights from them (see illustration). After open-ended questions, the interviewer should drill deeper to obtain more detailed explanations and useful examples.
Prompted by intriguing questions, innovation honeymooners may make valuable proposals as to how to reengineer processes. For example, one government organization in Singapore had a long-standing policy that required employees to apply for "official leave" before traveling for business purposes. Prior approval was even required when the trip had been requested by the superior. A newcomer would be quick to spot such bureaucratic excess. In contrast, incumbents often find a customary procedure normal. Even those who dislike a rule may not challenge it, because they are tired of fighting micro-managers.
In the newsletter interview, the innovation honeymooner can also pinpoint the company's true strengths and identify key obstacles impeding progress. Besides, he can help surface the company's real values and beliefs, as well as evaluate whether any one of them is dysfunctional. His candid assessment of the current organizational climate may be more accurate than the self-reports of veterans, who may be locked into rigid cognitive frames and have vested interests that bias their views.
Magazines and working paper series
There are many other ways of accessing and publishing the innovation honeymooner's insights. For example, newcomers can be entrusted with establishing and editing a full-blown magazine on various topics related to innovation. This compels them to harvest and organize the productive insights of other honeymooners and the incumbents, too.
To leverage the collective intelligence and facilitate concerted error-pruning at an early stage, it is crucial not only to publish finished intellectual products, but also to disseminate work in progress quickly after the inception of ideas. One possible outlet for germinal thoughts is a working paper series. Its editor should constantly request intellectual rejoinders to the published articles, too.
Booklets and databases
The insights of initiates may also be published in staff booklets and entered into a central "innovation honeymoon database" that must be accessible to the entire workforce. A concordance can be compiled to index the revelations of newcomers. Together with a directory of innovation honeymooners, which classifies them by their expertise and ideas, it helps others navigate and access the new intellectual capital. Both information sources can be published in hard copy format, and, as soft copies, be included in the innovation honeymoon database. To avoid overspecialization and silo formation, the expertise and knowledge of innovation honeymooners must not be defined too narrowly; interdisciplinary linkages should be highlighted whenever possible.
Special gatherings
Organizations can hold dedicated "honeymoon gatherings" to communicate and, through a process of cross-fertilization, enrich the insights of newcomers. A valuable byproduct is the development of personal networks, which helps breathe life into idea depositories. A large multinational company can benefit particularly from such special events, since their potential impact grows with the diversity of countries, cultures and businesses. During global honeymoon idea fairs and road shows, novices can set up idea booths, mount poster exhibitions and give talks on their finds. In the course of these events, colleagues might place recruits on a "newcomer hot seat", grilling them with questions about their creative insights.
Additional gatherings include formal conferences and "brown-bag seminars". The latter format, which is less structured, is particularly useful for the discussion of nascent ideas, which sometimes are only scribbled on a notepad. The informal setting and relaxed atmosphere can be conducive to the free exchange of opinions. Besides, study groups can explore the honeymooner's emerging views or final intellectual products. Participants with longer tenure should explore them in depth but prevent a turkey shooting contest by abstaining from captious inquiries. Further, CEOs can deliver periodical "State of Innovation" addresses to the entire organization, discussing breakthrough thinking from the innovation honeymooners, among other things. The Board of Directors and entire top management should also be frequently exposed to innovation honeymoon ideas, for example, through presentations given by novices. The high and mighty should consider the insights of newcomers to be at least as valuable as customer feedback and jointly explore them as thoroughly as market data.
According to an old saying, prophets have no honor in their own house. The innovation honeymooner has a greater chance of bringing home his revelations to the residents of his new organizational dwelling than other vaticinators. At least, he is not yet sufficiently well-known to be despised just because of familiarity. But the voices of the newly arrived messengers are faint. Without sensitive microphones, strong amplifiers and powerful loudspeakers, their prophecies thus are likely to remain unnoticed. It is the task of a leader to put in place a set of effective structures, systems and processes for channeling the valuable insights of novices to the rest of the organization. As a result, those who open their ears can actually hear the innovation honeymooners and join the chorus of improvement-seekers!
(Part 5 of the "Innovation Honeymoon" series. To be continued)
Strategic Leadership Column Number 22 by Kai-Alexander Schlevogt (D.Phil. Oxford). He is a professor of strategy and leadership at the National University of Singapore Business School. Email: schlevogt@schlevogt.com; website: www.schlevogt.com
