Bundling a group of highly-paid employees into a group labeled a Steering Committee fosters a culture of ambiguity, ego, exclusivity, and high cost. Assign those individuals to maximize speed, quality, inclusivity, and durability.

Innovation professionals spend a lot of time in meetings. Rethink the relationship between meetings and “real work.” Have a firm grasp of the numerous ingredients of effective meetings.

Manage your team like a factory because you want discipline, predictability, rhythm. Manage like a factory because you care about speed, quality, and waste.

Approximately weekly, every innovation workstream should produce status reports. It demonstrates momentum, transparency, and alignment.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your waste? Consider whiplash, noise, inauthenticity, idle work, idle worker, Reply All’s, Backlog, last-minute cancellations, too many cooks, unused talent, and mismatched collaboration and competition. Fix your culture. Fix your Waste.

No asset exists in isolation. Within every asset, no specification exists in isolation. A Traceability Matrix minimizes orphans.

Whether you build, buy, or rent, your technology - your systems - are instrumental to innovation decisions. Have your inventory ready for those decisions!

Transparency for your Current State is instrumental to know what is most valuable and urgent to innovate next.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your elasticity and resilience? Consider idle work, idle workers, a balanced innovation pipeline, spontaneous alternatives for stakeholders, and if you blame a hiring decision. Fix your methodology. Fix your elasticity.