Your innovation team is a factory. Hopefully not just a factory of meetings and emails. Hopefully not just a software factory. Your collaborative team is an expectation factory.

Approachability is an advantage. Making coaching easy is an advantage. This tool minimizes the effort to manage expectations, manage perceptions, and share helpful feedback across three communication channels.

An innovation team that emulates the arts has a competitive advantage. These culture traits include balance, vigilance, rejection, failure, and resilience.

An innovation team that emulates the arts has a collaborative advantage. These culture traits include safety, authenticity, welcoming beginners, trust, listening, practicing, and rehearsing together.

Innovation should take inspiration from an expanded view of the Performing Arts - the Empathetic Arts. The world of innovation has much to learn, benefit, and profit from audience-centric collaboration that has a great employee experience.

Change is disruptive, so evangelize to stakeholders why your change is desirable, stylish, and cool. Formalize the “D” in ADKAR. Craft an Elevator Pitch to convey the benefits of the upcoming innovation.

At the start of every project, to accomplish the first “A” in ADKAR, notify your stakeholders. An Awareness Blast is a low-maintenance way to let stakeholders know they need to contribute, and they need to help to identify other stakeholders who need to contribute.

Meetings are great opportunities for team members to build upon each others’ ideas. Meetings are critical for alignment. Know every trait of a good meeting in order to maximize them.

Legacy methodologies emphasize software. That’s not what makes innovation difficult. Elegance is a methodology that shapes how people interact, collaborate, and govern. Elegance is a combination of discipline and empathy - ruthlessness and grace.

Your innovation team is a factory. Hopefully not just a factory of meetings and emails. Hopefully not just a software factory. Your collaborative team is an agreement factory.

Although your innovation team is not literally a theater company, you should manage it like one because you want all the same things: a great environment, a great story for your customers, a great experience for your actors, auditions for the right roles, a sense of belonging, low re-invention of the wheel, and the integration of numerous moving parts. Memories, Moments That Matter, and a Standing Ovation.

Three metaphors give structure to the book. The metaphor of a factory shapes the Why. The metaphor of an Asset Portfolio - a documentation inventory forms the What. The metaphor of the Performing Arts shapes the How of the Innovation Factory.