Live from FEI EMEA: Organisational Breathing: embedding an innovation rhythm

In his presentation about "Organisational
Breathing: embedding an innovation rhythm" David Thomas, Global Innovation
Leader and Program Manager at Mars Inc. described his experience about setting
up innovation routines for organizations that are naturally repeated like
breathing in and out.

ORGAN.ization as a living system

His challenge at Mars Inc.
was how to create a common approach for a business is very much driven by the
segments. His objective is to foster innovation by working across the segments with
joint solutions. In addition Mars University is used to train employees from
different businesses in common methodologies and tools. Historically, there was
a lot of freedom for each business with the consequence that there were no
commonalities between the generated approaches- every business had its own
approach.

Creativity and Discipline
seems to be a contradiction. It's a matter about processes and frameworks to be
used as a guiding structure. This is the first step, but it doesn't provide
outcomes. Performance improves can be only realized through repetition. It's important to develop a collectice consciousness about

Why are we doing it? What
are we doing? How are we doing it?

David Thomas emphasized that for
him using story telling is a really powerful way to discuss what works and what
doesn't. He presented a
chart which showed a linear dependency between the degree of collaboration and
innovation. You really need to repeat to learn and improve.

He closed the session by
sharing the following lessons learnt:

Commitment to a direction
Start breathing
Build capacity through the
network
Leverage story telling to
drive collective conscious
Encourage circulation
Recognise that it's a
tribal network.

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Z'rich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.