How to Stop Worrying and Share Work Product: 15 Easy Techniques That Will Help Your Team Innovate

If you like reading our blog posts as much as we do writing them, then you know we like to help companies plan for and realize their more connected futures – futures where products adopt platform business models, deliver value to their users at scale and enable flourishing ecosystems. Truthfully, that’s a long and ambitious path. Execution of growth strategy requires conviction on behalf of your leadership and ops teams.

In an effort to aid with your quest, I’ve assembled some techniques. They’re derived from fundamental, organizational patterns we see every day at Applico. They’re behavioral. Everyone involved with innovation needs to have a pioneering spirit before there can be a cultural fabric of contribution. As my first official post on the blog, I figured I’d start here, with 15 of my top tips for pioneers to implement today, in any work environment, to get your team in fighting form.

Embrace a Value System- Make motivating forces consistent, and let your team aspire to creative excellence. In times of uncertainty, values represent the true north. It’s my personal opinion that these must be crafted by the founders or another visionary. Committees can’t be responsible for attracting employees to dedicate a significant portion of their lives working toward shared and, sometimes, uncertain or intangible goals. Dalio’s Principles are our gold standard.
Keep a Visual Workspace– When I was at the Stanford d.School, we were required to leave all our post-its and whiteboard notes in viewable areas after hours. I’m not suggesting your team open a bottle of wine at 11PM and review all the stimuli from other teams, but that’s really how it happens at the d.School. Maybe there’s an in-between that works for you. In the quest for transparency, consider removing any symbolic barriers to conversation.
Structure and Rigor- In order to ideate toward eventual delivery of something, it helps to first frame the context. If you can assign some form of timeframe for the exercise, even better. The next time you see totally uncontained creativity in a workspace, take a harder look at how much of it gets translated into execution. Remember that the original intent of ideation is to find ways to get to the bottom of a challenge, then to work toward resolving it efficiently. Professionalism is the ultimate, “unfair advantage”.
Use the Right Tools- Contemporary software makes life so much simpler. Some of our favorite time and stress savers include Mindjet for mind maps, Jenkins for continuous integration and PNG Express for screen slicing. Please comment below if you’d like a full list of winners.
Capture Inspiration- People can get busy. Schedule time for white-space discussion, and document it on a Wiki or Google Drive for everyone to revisit and revise. At Applico, we have a weekly “Connected Revolution” brainstorm open to anyone interested in discussing trends in business-model formation and a separate, weekly “New Business-Oriented Brainstorm” to discuss applying growth strategies to current and prospective clients’ businesses.
Champion the Individual– Creators can be introverted. One of our favorite R&D lab managers has a trick here: pick one-off projects to share with each team member. These responsibilities should be assigned outside of official tasks or job descriptions, with the goal of highlighting individual strengths. This technique also helps build a war chest of prototypes that can be shared as appropriate.
Asking “Why” of “What If…” People– Always be both curious and constructive. If you’re interested in learning to be an even better friend to others in your life, check out D’Andrea and Salovey’s guide to peer counseling. You’ll see that approaching traumas as heavy as rape and suicidal thoughts involves asking the counsellee to first describe feelings, relate them to past experiences and suggest past and other possible options to resolve the underlying concerns. Using that framework, you can arrive at an evidence-based response. When you ask “why” something was or is a particular way, you put the other person on the defensive.
Temperament is Everything- Building sustainable innovation is constant, long-term work. Warren Buffett’s words still apply, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation, and five minutes to lose it.” Adopt a strict no-rudeness policy. No passive aggressive emails, no criticism without evidence. These moments of impropriety tend to present themselves when people are tired. People get tired when they don’t sleep, eat healthily and exercise regularly.
Relieve Real Pain Points- The basic tenets of User-Centered Design call for empathizing with people and understanding what motivates patterns of behavior. Understand their pains and opportunities. Deliver a better solution. Monitor it, and enhance it over time. Utility is the single biggest driver of both successful user experience and organic user acquisition. Without fail, this has been how every big platform business scales – just see Square, Uber and YouTube. Once you have the users, you can add features, build loyalty and present value for other user groups.
Network Internally- If your company uses an email convention other than firstname@, chances are you might not know every team member in every other department. In huge companies like GE, there are official positions for internal evangelists. Join some clubs, make an effort to meet friends of friends and refer job candidates to other departments. Someday it’ll pay back. Maybe when seeding a new initiative or calling in a finish-line favor – or it might simply result in having more people stick up for you.
Socialize Iterative Builds- In the sexiest software startups, waterfall development fell out of favor some time ago. In addition to the ownership team’s internal feedback loops between incrementally developed versions of work product, there’s the additional opportunity to shop things around the water cooler. Unless you’re working on hardcore IP, harness that opportunity to encourage an eager interest in your work before it’s released to the rest of your company or the world at large.
Smile When You Share It- Start the cycle of storytelling by displaying sincere excitement for your work and outlook. Smiling is a universally accepted gesture of positive energy.
Demonstration and Abstraction- Hacker culture dictates “fix it; ship it” craftiness. It’s equally important to let yourself step back from the immediate objectives, so you can explore implications, higher-order consequences and outcomes. Plan and execute with a sense of purpose. Most products and platforms will function as ecosystems that “live and breathe.”
Put It on the Roadmap- I have an internal rule that I’m happy to work through anything with anyone, as long as I’m first sent a calendar invite. Conversely, if it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t exist. Most of the same time-management concepts apply to roadmaps. A roadmap forces prioritization, bandwidth tracking, adherence to vision and values, project burndown, deliverables, performance indicators and standardization of objectives across teams. Here are some best practices.
Celebrate: Industry experts are saying that SEO 2.0 more closely resembles PR than it does keyword manipulation. Every success deserves some recognition. Give credit where it’s due, and document those special milestones. The voice captured and shared will endure beyond the initially measurable returns.