Every year I make a series of presentations on enterprise alignment in which I advocate a number of ways that corporate real estate (CRE) executives can best link their efforts with core business strategies and outcomes developed by C-Suite leadership. Many discussions at regional and national CoreNet Global functions come back to the fundamental issue of gaining timely access and proving our value to the C-Suite — or what I often refer to as trying to get a seat at the adult table for Thanksgiving dinner.
Opportunities to do so range from demonstrating ways that portfolios can maximize flexibility for organic and acquisition growth and change; physical and virtual workplaces that enable new ways of working; change management processes that help achieve buy-in and ownership to concepts and solutions; to benchmarking that goes beyond typical quantitative, generic real estate indices, focusing instead on best practice research specific to organizational objectives and business processes. A theme common to much of the dialog is application of the CoreNet framework of people, the processes they employ, technology and place in enabling core business strategy. I often refer to this as the people-technology-place (P-T-P) interface.
Refocusing the People-Technology-Place Interface
Sven Govaars, in an Industry Tracker piece in December 2010, reinforced the importance of the people-technology-place interface in his discussion of five forces that are shaping corporate real estate. The additional point he made is that the issues related to people are far and away the most important elements of the P-T-P relationship. For me, the implication is that if you’re only addressing place, or only offering solutions that result in changes to place, there’s a strong likelihood that you’re not truly enabling core business in a meaningful, measurable way — certainly not one that’s going to be easily sold to the C-Suite.
Transformation of a Practice
In fact, that is precisely my experience, and in the paragraphs that follow, I will use the evolution of my consulting practice over the last 10 years as an example. Quite simply, my work has transitioned from trying to sell “upstream” to the C-Suite about the value of place in enabling business to one in which my team and I perform business strategy services, and in the course of doing so, subtly introduce the value of place as just one element in a broader model.
The focus of our approach is a form of business process mapping (BPM) applied specifically to teams focused on innovation. BPM is a process of understanding exactly what a business does, breaking it into its individual elements and putting it back together to determine how information flows, who’s responsible, key internal and external collaboration networks, and identifying opportunities and constraints across an innovation value chain.
Our efforts aren’t just focused on top-of-funnel innovation or ideation that resides in the R&D department. By definition innovation is the introduction of something new or different; a change in the way of doing things. Innovation happens across organizations, often involving multidisciplinary teams comprised of people from numerous backgrounds and levels, who, especially in Fortune 1000 companies, reside in several different locations.
Across multiple industries, we’ve found that innovation can be broken in to as many as 10 different categories, namely disruptive, customer, marketing, application, product (and service), brand, structural, business model, organizational, and process. The people who have defined these categories for us typically are our client leads, including Directors of Strategy or Innovation, the CEO or COO, business unit heads, organizational development and HR experts — all typically supported by senior IT and CRE/FM representatives.
Our efforts are focused on connecting and aligning, distributed, often global innovation teams in ways that drive superior, measurable innovation performance. So, we’re not working with businesses to establish or refine their innovation strategy, but instead to enable the ways teams work in creating innovative ideas, products and services. For those of you who are old enough, it’s the BASF TV commercial in which the selling point is “we don’t make your products, we make them better”.
The Innovation Connectivity Performance Path
Innovation tends to drive focused processes that require significant, often multidisciplinary, collaboration to enable those processes. The term “connectivity”— or to join together, a demonstrable union — serves as the framework for exploring how people, technology and place can be employed to maximize the possibility that innovation teams work effectively to drive innovation. Figure 1 depicts how these elements come together in what we’ve coined the Innovation Connectivity Performance Path.
During the course of specific assignments, C-Suite leaders define the types of innovation they seek to drive, and we work with them and their teams to map processes and describe how elements of people-technology-place help or hinder those processes. The 10 types of innovation mentioned earlier are depicted in Figure 2, along with sixteen elements of P-T-P that we use to evaluate and then develop strategies for connecting teams and individuals along the performance path. As shown, there are nine elements of people, three associated with technology, and four for place.
I’d like to write more extensively about the details of the model, definitions, performance outcomes and best practices benchmarking related to it — and will do so in upcoming articles — but my space here is limited, so I’d strongly encourage readers to search the vast array of articles in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan and countless books by leading business authors about innovation, collaboration, organizational development, connectivity and related topics.
Power of the Path and the Importance of People in the P-T-P Interface
As an alternative, I’ll take a few paragraphs to discuss a couple overall results and to highlight a recent case study, specifically:
- Innovation teams that score highly on all 16 elements of P-TP, meaning their people are highly connected and processes are very effective, have strong team and overall business performance outcomes. By contrast, teams with low P-T-P connectivity are associated with lower levels of team and innovation performance.
- The four elements most closely associated with team and innovation success are people issues (see the numbers in parentheses in Figure 2), and in general, all nine of these elements must be addressed first to ensure that technology and place issues are positioned for maximum effectiveness. In the few situations in which technology and place solutions have been implemented — alone or together — but without addressing people issues first or at all, the team or innovation outcomes have been moderately to strongly negative (i.e., you can’t impose tech and place concepts on teams that aren’t ready for them). Sound familiar?
Recently my colleagues and I completed an assignment in which our client’s company had spent much of the last five years acquiring several new businesses that resulted in many of their key innovation teams being spread throughout the world. Our client’s fundamental hypotheses were that there was extensive duplication in capabilities and that most, if not all, teams needed to be consolidated in one or two locations. After mapping all processes and evaluating the connectivity of the teams (16 elements of P-T-P) our evaluation indicated that there was little in the way of duplication, and co-location — at least as an isolated single solution — was not the answer. The real concerns were related to teams with unclear missions; changing leadership and inconsistent decision making; excessive multitasking, with key people on way too many innovation projects having concurrent time lines, and incredibly outdated communication technology. In fact, many of the key participants were on so many projects, with parts of their collaboration networks located in so many different places (many outside the company!), that co-location with one would only create problems for others. On top of that, the focus and composition of each team often changed throughout the year, so assuming that most could or needed to be brought together in one or two places simply wasn’t feasible.
As a result, we spent weeks working on a variety of peopleand process-related issues, and then addressed technology enhancements that created a much stronger sense of virtual presence. It was only after addressing people issues and concurrent with addressing technology that we began to focus on place responses in great detail — and in only a few locations deemed essential to innovation processes. Had we entered the process at a point when a traditional “occupancy and workplace study” was requested, we would have waited months and had little context with which to understand the extent of the business issues that needed to be solved. In addition, our value, and connection to the C-Suite, would have been severely limited.
The organization in this case study has saved millions of dollars avoiding excessive changes to facility infrastructure and paying for numerous employee relocations. Perhaps more importantly, focusing on the heart of the problem first — people issues (and to a lesser degree tech concerns) — and then creating a variety of ways to connect and align its teams, has resulted in sharply improved team and innovation performance that is contributing to bottom line revenue growth.
If You Can’t Beat ’em (so to speak) Join ’em
The changes in my practice represent just one way to gain better access to the C-Suite. I certainly recognize that there are numerous other ways to do so, and I always look forward to new approaches offered by fellow CoreNet Global colleagues.
For me, being able to work with C-Suite leaders focused on innovation, and subtly show how place, in the context of people and technology issues, plays an important role in enabling their work processes, has proven successful and intellectually rewarding. I spend less time selling or trying to “prove” the relevance of place and more time demonstrating its value as a business tool. Perhaps most importantly, it’s allowed me to reach back to skills that I developed in college many years ago and apply them in new, and hopefully innovative, ways.
