Don't Ask if you Can't Act

In a recent Harvard Business Review article titled “Don’t Ask for New Ideas If You’re Not Ready to Act on Them”, Ron Ashkenas provides an example of a company wanting to do the ‘right’ thing but not having the processes or systems in place to pull it off.

The example provided by Ashkenas is one that I’ve heard and experienced many times myself.  One of his clients implemented a ‘crowdsourcing’ approach to gathering innovation ideas from people throughout their business. This company received so many responses that it took nearly a month for all of the responses to be analyzed, categorized and reviewed.  It then took a few more weeks for executives to respond to everyone and announce that they were planning on following up on specific ideas to pursue.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve seen this type of thing happen at other organizations I’ve worked at. The urge to identify and implement innovative ideas is a strong driving force for any organization and crowdsourcing these ideas makes a great deal of sense. That said, taking the step of asking for new ideas is pointless if your organization can’t quickly act upon those ideas.

This is why every organization needs to reimagine (or reinvent) itself as an agile organization. To truly be able to act upon innovative ideas, an organization needs to be able to marshal the necessary resources (e.g., people, systems, data, etc) to be able to analyze and act upon these new ideas.

Organizations need to be able to pivot and turn quickly to address their clients needs and their competitors offerings. This agility requires the utmost agility in all aspects of the business, including the IT group.  The IT group must provide systems and capabilities to allow the business to gather data, analyze that data and act upon that data quickly and easily.

In the example given by Ashkenas, an agile organization with an agile IT group should be able to put the right tools together capture, track, analyze and report on ideas from around the business.  If your IT group can’t put together the right tools at the right time to deliver the right services, you probably need to spend some time rethinking your IT group and its leadership. Additionally, if your IT group can deliver the right tools at the right time but it still takes you weeks or months to analyze and react…you have larger problems than just a non-agile IT group.