There are common challenges in the quest for delivering great experiences and developing a world class innovation capability.
After experiencing the creative industry in many different types of organisations, roles and decision making levels, I have found common opportunities for the innovation teams.
One of these opportunities is the ability to maintain a healthy balance between seniors and less developed creative professionals in order to satisfy a high level of internal talent demand.
Unbalanced talent and internal demand
Let’s imagine a large organisation with 50 multifunctional products or delivery teams. All of those teams will eventually need different specialisations within the creative teams skills.
If we want to embed a creative champion into each team, we would need 50 unicorn designers that can navigate between all different design specialisations.
In reality, for large organisation of 50 multidisciplinary teams, there will be an average of 10 to 30 creatives and designers distributed in 3 to 5 crafts.
A healthy distribution of expertise and specialisations, suggest that there will be more junior people than seniors, with limited access to a mentor to support them in their day-to-day challenges.
As a result, we see teams that are weak in certain areas either because the professional is not a specialist in the required skills, or due to their work experience.
Tips to maintain the balance between Innovation talent and demand
Most of your “internal clients” will ask you to support them with talent that is familiar with the project or expert in the craft. This is the moment to challenge the status quo and ask yourself how might we get the best outcome for people and the organisation.
The right person to the right challenge
Good innovative and creative people want to be exposed to something new, something they haven’t solved yet, and to explore solutions.
The next time you allocate a person to a challenge, ask yourself first “Has this person solved this problem before?”.
If the answer is yes, it might be a good moment for a change.
The right person with the right mentor
Regardless of whether the person has solved a problem or not, they should always be in close contact with someone to soundboard ideas, get feedback and guidance.
As leader, one of your key responsibilities is to identify opportunities to pair learning in both directions and to enable them.
External expertise as a policy
A good practice is to reserve between 10% to 30% of your internal demand to be covered by external partners consultants or contractors.
The main reason is to bring expertise from people that have been exposed to different industries problem spaces.
Your internal capability will be exposed to a wider skillset and mentoring options.
Your strategy will play out differently, depending on the value proposition of your organisation and the way of working.
The key to overcoming these challenges lays in understanding the organisation’s way of working, and defining a specific way to operate as an innovation team.
It is ultimately in the best interest of the organisation to develop their creative talent by exposing them to new challenges and mentoring. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Do you need help balancing your capability and internal demand?
Let’s brood together a solution that will help your team to succeed in satisfying your internal demand and developing a world class capability.
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