The focused execution

The importance of focus in execution cannot be overstated. Contrary to what some might say about innovation, it too is about execution—bringing ideas to life, making them real, and yes, benefiting from them. The trick is to maintain the big picture overview with aligned, micro-focused, hyper-intensive, pushes. Let's take each in order.

Due to uncertainty that is inherent to innovation, we ought to always be aware of our guiding principles. Those are usually a mix of organisations' broader goals (e.g. what are the role and expectations from innovation in the organisation) with business unit's goals (e.g. growth in specific market segment or industry) and customers' goals (e.g. a specific desired outcome or problem to solve). These paint a loose frame around our own "acceptable" innovation space. We can safely assume that any solutions within it are worthwhile testing.

Because of the above, we can now zoom in to the lowest possible level—a single task or activity. For example, it is common to generate multiple ideas that we believe are fit for purpose. Next thing is to eliminate them as rapidly as possible. We select one idea and micro-focus on it, identifying the most vital aspect of it to work on. Again, in the innovation space that is most easily discovered by asking "what must be true for this idea to work as described?" This in turn allows us to drill down even further.

Once we have found the most important thing to focus on, e.g. a question that would enable us to decide if we eliminate or continue developing the idea, we put all our effort into it. Testing ideas is usually about running business experiments. There is very rarely a good reason to delay or postpone testing an idea. Since we know that answering the vital question will immediately inform our next step, we can safely assume that putting all effort and time into is a sound next step.

This combination of alignment, micro-focusing, and hyper-intensity is what allows us to move much faster than expected. Forget about months—we are talking about weeks, if not days, depending on the question or activity. Remember, speed of innovation is vital for business outcomes.