The Executive Perspective

Innovation and execution excellence is a big subject. As an operating executive for over 30 years, I have studied and applied best practices to improve my own organizational performance and the performance of other organizations.  I think it is misleading to talk about organizations in terms of this organization executes or innovates better than that organization, because it obscures a fundamental fact.  Organizations do not innovate or execute, people innovate and execute.  So, when you say this organization innovates and executes well, what does this really mean.  It means the people in that organization have installed effective processes and have developed the capability to work effectively together.  What emerges is innovation and execution excellence. 

Ultimately, all results are achieved by people following a process or processes. This is a very simple, but powerful concept. When you think about it, it cannot be any other way.  Everything we do in life is done by a process driven by a capability. This can be represented by the Process Cycle Model below. I was first introduced to this model in 1991, in a somewhat different form, by Brian Yost of Yost and Associates.

Before I explore the Process Cycle Model and its relationship to innovation and execution excellence, I want to articulate a number of axioms that provide additional context for this discussion.  I’ve learned these axioms over the years.  I call them axioms because, like in geometry, an axiom is a truth that does not have to be proved, but is used to prove other truths.

Here are the axioms which I am using to support this discussion on the practices used by high-performance organizations/teams to produce innovation and execution excellence. 

1. An organization is a system, of people and processes, perfectly designed to produce the results it is producing. The term organization can be applied at the enterprise, department and individual team level.
2. If you want to change the results, you have to change the design.
3. Results are produced by the individual and collective capabilities of the people driving a process or processes.
4. Language is generative not just descriptive. Our conversations produce results through the language-action relationship.
5. Everything that happens between people happens in the spoken and unspoken conversations people have or do not have with one another. In this context, we take a broad view of conversations.  To us, conversations are anything that provokes interpretation.  This includes anything we pick up with our senses as an active or passive participant in the conversation. This means conversations are never innocent.
6. Since everything that happens between people in an organization happens in conversations, the system design is held in place by the spoken and unspoken conversations.  However, it is the unspoken conversations that have the most gravitational pull creating the status quo.
7. To change the results you have to change the conversations.  This means having the courage to start new conversations, stop some conversations and change other conversations.

We have used the Process Cycle above for years as a lens and actionable framework to lead organizations to produce the results they actually want to produce, rather than continuing to produce the results they do not want.  High-Performance organizations/teams are able to see the relationship between their capabilities, processes and the results they are producing. Without this lens, it is difficult to make design changes.  You cannot intervene in a world you cannot see.

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