When all goes slow

I'm blessed to work with a broad range of innovation professionals, from executives to front-line teams. Some of the businesses I help are of cyclical nature, meaning their customers are more active in certain periods, and less active in others.

Recently I worked with several innovation teams that found themselves exactly in such situation. They had burning questions to work on, insight gaps to close, and plenty of energy to spend. But being in the business-to-business space, most of their customers were away and unavailable.

What then? Here is what they spend their energy on instead:

• They revisited all their insights, decisions, and experiments. This allowed them to update their understanding of customer, business, and broader environment. It is easy to miss some of the finer details when you are in the thick of it. With the benefit of time one can assess data more calmly and objectively.
• They refined and polished their insights for broader dissemination. Any successful corporate innovation project or venture will eventually need more funding, more resources, and more manpower. That will, nor should it, be freely given. Being able to demonstrate desirability, feasibility, and viability with numbers, facts, and emotion is critical for ensuring internal funding and commitment.
• They spent more time onboarding and aligning new team members. Innovation teams move at neck-breaking speed, so there is usually little time for new folk. They are thrown into the thick of it, sink-or-swim style, and they do their best to pick-up as they go. The teams used the slow-down to talk about the way they innovate, what are their intermediate and long-term goals, and how do they fit in the organisation's broader picture.

Doing the above positioned the teams to maximise learning and speed when the customers return and become more available. For example, one team was able to conduct three experiments the moment their customers became available again. Another was able to secure a meeting with vital internal decision maker, and were immediately granted additional resources they needed.

Innovation indeed never sleeps.