Creative wins

There are two ways to win in the “innovation” game. The best, the creative win, is persuasive demonstration of potential value from an idea. The other, not failing, is to disprove potential value before having spent too much money seeking the creative win. An organization bent on not failing is probably starved for creative wins. Forward thinking – market leading – sustainability investment is a problem of creative wins.

Integrated Skills

In my view, sustainability projects need to draw from three sets of skills:

  • Innovation - A journey toward destination without out a map and without proof of existence.
  • Decision Analysis - Navigating a fraught journey supported by limited resource
  • Systems Analysis - Estimating where you are and predicting where this path might take you next

This metaphor suggests a “Hero’s Journey”, where the project team, collectively, is the hero. Heroes are admirable, but they are exceptional. Plus, someone is paying for that journey as an investment. What I am striving for is ordinary successes. These are successes that take passion, mission, ingenuity, grit, and resilience. But heroic sacrifice - never. Work itself should be sustainable.

So, to look at the problem in drier terms, the three skills, the three dimensions of knowhow, are:

  • Innovation - the processes of seeking out and incrementally realizing new value.
  • Decision Analysis - the craft of structured decision making - in particular under uncertainty, within groups, with meaningful risks and stakes, and with meaningful tradeoffs.
  • Analysis of Ecological, Engineering, & Economic Systems - Analysis starting with SME’s experience with how things actually work, and with looking at how new things might work from a model and simulation perspective. The typifying issue with sustainability is that problems are systems-scoped and coupled across all three “E” domains.

Integrated Skills for sustainability innovation

Project teams need to integrate these practices. Projects that lack competency in any one of the three areas are harder to start and more likely to fail.

People working in different roles need to communicate with each other about their work and their working assumptions. They need to understand the intentions behind and the limitations of each other’s work. They need to understand the problems that each other is solving inside the project and the problems that the project is solving for the sponsoring business.

That’s my belief. How do I substantiate that view? What’s my evidence? My argument here is a logical one based on a synthetic framework that you might recognize as credible or not. “Yeah, that make sense” – or not. To look beyond that - Is that belief consistent with those expressed by others? What might industry leaders, business school professors, or analysts might be saying? The most rigorous thing to do would be to look for patterns from relevant experience – to interview sustainability project sponsors and teams and unpack factors behind wins and losses.
What’s your experience?