For those of you new to the crystal ball, you might wonder who it’s for? Anyone with the desire to untangle the paradoxes of corporate innovation.
We feature reflections, of and from our innovation team, situated within a global pension and investment platform. We share perspectives and projects to our colleagues within OMERS, with the broader global innovation ecosystem.
We get common feedback and requests for upcoming topics. One of the popular requests was about prioritizing innovation.
How do you direct limited resources to promising concepts, balancing objective data with unknowable instincts? (Or, how do you fulfill governance requirements while still fostering free thinking?)
This week, we asked our Danielle from our world class innovation operations chapter to share our process for prioritizing innovation in our pension business. This is a tactical and practical look under the hood. Innovation thrives most in unlikely places!
Danielle, over to you!
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Innovation, like life, is about having a goals, setting priorities, navigating trade-offs and making decisions.
Hundreds of decisions, both big and small. Every day.
Some decisions are easy to make, and feel almost intuitive, if not like “obvious” choices. These choices take minimal time, energy, or focus to go with - like always going for the middle brick in the center of a Jenga tower.
Other decisions may not feel as obvious to make: they require us to think a bit more deeply. Midway through a Jenga game, is that left brick loose, or just crooked? If I restack the brick too slowly or too quickly, will the tower fall? Which brick will I move on my next turn?
We are faced with hundreds of decisions every day. Yes, hundreds – when to wake up, what to do when awake, when to get ready, what to eat, etc. But with only 24h in a day, how could we ever make every decision, yet alone find time to action our choices – when do we restack the Jenga bricks, if we’re spending all our time deciding on which brick to move next?
Prioritizing before deciding
The secret is a bit of a meta brain twister – when faced with hundreds of decisions, we must start by choosing which decisions are necessary.
Yes, we prioritize our decisions. We choose which of the innovation Jenga bricks requires our time, energy and focus for that play, so we can prioritize the restack correctly and win the game.
This is easier said than done – there are many factors to consider when making any choice, yet alone prioritizing hundreds of choices and actioning several choices at the same time. When the number of decisions feels overwhelming, we could throw it to chance – if I go for any brick in the tower, something will happen anyways, right?
Also, what about the other decisions that need to be made? For some, we could automate, systematize, or turn them into habit. We prioritize by focusing on what we need to do, and built a process for the rest to take care of themselves.
Prioritized innovative decision-making
When it’s not our Jenga reputation on the line but the value and service we bring to our members, stakeholders, partners, and teams, we can’t leave that to chance.
Thankfully, we’ve designed and operationalized a process over the past year to help guide our project prioritization and decision-making, to grow our innovation platform to scale: we call it the Star Gate model.
Star Gate helps us structure the robust innovation portfolio management we need to prioritize our investments (of time, people, money, political capital), while also keeping pulse on the progress needed to effectively turn a promising idea into a solution. It doesn’t mean we say “no” to any choice, but by doubling down and focusing on ideas that have the highest potential value for OMERS, we create a repeatable, scalable process that actions on unique solutions that make sense.
We receive new ideas constantly and work on initiatives every day, but every quarter we pause, re-assess, and prioritize our tower. The quarter cadence gives our team, partners and stakeholders a regular opportunity to see where we are, and discuss what decisions we need to prioritize making in order to take us to where we want to go.
Again, easier said than done, right? Well here’s how we’re doing it – Jenga style:
The Decision-Making Algorithm [“DMA”] – quantifying the value potential of each brick.
New brick placements are endless, exciting opportunities. We open our idea intake to anyone in OMERS as the brightest sparks really come from anywhere. But to ensure we optimize an idea’s true value, we needed to determine which ideas make the most sense at the right time, with the right resources.
We created the DMA to help measure an idea’s potential, by using metrics and weighted scores to compare ideas each quarter. The algorithm has inputs across business strategies to ensure we’re always aligned to our North Star and OMERS Vision:The Pension Innovation Committee Pre-Gate Meeting – consulting our team and Jenga experts on our next play.
The tower is as strong as its bricks and its movements. Even with each change, the tower gets taller and has the potential double its height in only a few moves. Better yet, each brick is resilient and has importance in its purpose for every play – it could be the adapter and take on a new configuration, or the foundation that keeps the tower stable so we can continue stacking.
We democratize the decisions needed to grow our innovation tower: a multi-disciplinary Pensions Innovation Committee [PIC] helps us determine what we should start, pause, or continue working on. Leaders, strategists, project sponsors and colleagues across Pensions give us the feedback and business updates we need to prioritize working on the initiatives that will help us reach our goals for the quarter.The Innovation Playbook – building the tower together, one brick at a time.
We have our bricks, we know our plays, now let’s restack and build.
Our team of designers, strategists, operators, and data wizards collaborate with PIC project teams across OMERS to shape and scale the innovation tower together. Guided by the innovative design thinking model, we action on our priorities in repeatable phases and keep regular gate check-ins with business sponsors throughout the process.Each priority and project is different, and may require flexibility, re-assessments and more research. We follow the model in unison with the business to ensure we’re making the necessary decisions for OMERS at each phase, and to continue moving the innovation dial forward.
There are many towers, and hundreds of bricks we are called to make decisions on. Prioritizing our innovative bricks today helps us design for the tower of tomorrow - eventually all bricks will be stacked, we just decide when and why they will be played so we can strategize on the scalable how.
Together, with our partners, shared vision & goals, we prioritize the business decisions we need to make that will bring us another step closer to building the best innovation tower ever created.
Because as we all know, strategy is choices, innovation is prioritization and life has some trade-offs. It’s not about making the most decisions; rather, making the best decisions.
Onward.
What we’re reading (watching, and listening to)
How to answer the age-old question: Could this meeting have been an email? – General rule: the more unrelated work you’re able to do while in a meeting is inversely correlated to the necessity of that meeting.
Death by a 30-slide deck? It’s time to kill PowerPoint presentations, say experts – Mangled communication via PowerPoint may have resulted in the death of seven astronauts in 2003.
[Watch] Will the world be better? Hear from these kid futurists – “In the olden days, my mom said people used to go outside and play, but now…”
System thinking for designers – Better questions, better answers.
How to be a good ancestor – “Don’t get trapped in the now. You can help future generations survive risks like climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence.”
Last word
“At the end of all exploring we will arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time”
– TS Eliot