Everyone is crying out for innovation. But, to be honest, so what? Or, better yet, why?
The answer on an abstract level (for systems theorists): The system environment is changing ever more rapidly, so we need innovations to enable the system to constantly adapt to the ever-changing conditions. This is maybe the case - or not. In any case, this statement will not be compelling enough to drive change longer than some 3 seconds if at all.
In our case it all began even before the start of the Innoclusion project with a set of problems and some severe pains induced by them.
Here I have at least to mention a very German peculiarity. As Germans we love problems. We cannot live without them. We even adore them. This a bit dysfunctional aspect of our mentality quite often prevents us from tackling them. They are just too beautiful.
So, there is the first prerequisite for leading any innovation project to a successful end: Stop that. Stop marvelling at the problems and encouraging each other as to why they cannot be solved.
When we came into the game our German colleagues form St. Georgen and Kork either already stopped that marvelling or - quite probable - never did. These two organisations have both been inherently innovative at least partly. Let's put it that way: They were very innovative at the top and the organisations as a whole had learned to cope with that. Therefore, a lot of problems social care providers in Germany are struggling with (up to and including insolvency) had already been solved or were on a good way to be.
The leadership team's perspective was already focused on the future and problem-solving. This means that you automatically focus on the problems, the negative aspects and the pain. When it came to integrating technical and procedural innovations into the organisation and its daily routines, the focus was on the pain and the problems that caused it - and therefore on pain relief.
When a real, broad, and deep transformation is at stake, this is not enough. This is simply because transformation needs change. And the only human being that loves change is a wet baby. So maybe the whole organisation starts to change when the pain is hard enough. But once the pain is relieved just to a barely tolerable level, transformation stops. Now the pain of change feels harder than the pain arising from some yet unsolved problems.
This is why transformation in Germany is so necessary and although not happening yet. The (imagined) pain from change is still much higher than the actual pain from the overwhelming bunch of problems we avoid facing.
Transformation needs more than pain, which may or may not activate change. Transformation that will last and lead to a good (at least desired) end, needs a vison of what we want to achieve - a positive vision.
Therefore, we started the process with strategic visioning as a prerequisite of the Innoclusion project: developing a clear, long-term, aspirational, and inspiring idea of what we are heading for: The future of care and support for people with disabilities.
Now we were not only talking about problems, and pains, and working on pain relievers only. We were and we still are (the future is always yet to come) working towards realising a common vision of a better state of care and care work than we were (and partly still are) in.
The reason that the Living Labs turned out to become nucleus of change of the whole organisation is that we have developed this shared vison before. This vision is the fundament of a persistent change process, it provides the positive energy for people going a lot of extra miles even when working already hard enough to get ready with their standard daily business, to get over setbacks and cope with the necessary (and sometimes unnecessary) hardships of the common endeavour.
One of the key learnings that result from our experience here is that the method of value proposition design that is more or less common in the start-up sphere has to be complemented, indeed completed by strategic visioning when it comes to the necessary change process to implement real innovations. Creating a value proposition without a context in (future) real life is not really compelling. Or at least only the beginning. At the end it is about creating a clear, concise, and positive common vision of the future if you aim to compete successfully against the status quo - the toughest competitor you will ever have to deal with as innovator.
Guidance and alignment
Without the vision that we jointly created it is very difficult to decide which kind of innovations you really need and how to prioritise them.
With designing the vison of good care in the future (including regard to the conditions that make the provision of good care even harder each year from where we started) we developed a very concrete understanding not only how good care would look like but how it could be provided for and what tools, proceedings, social interactions etc. were needed to make the vision become reality.
When comparing the status quo and all the resources and instruments available today for care with the future state of good care (including its methods and instruments), it quickly became clear which gaps needed to be closed or bridged through innovation and, in many cases, still need to be. This was the necessary input for the roadmap that could lead us from the status quo to the future desired state.
Needless to say, that this roadmap is subject to persistent change because the more we move forward with the transition the more we learn. More and more items emerge from the fog of uncertainty and emanate on our topography of the future. Vision and roadmap not only give us inspiration and endurance, but also very practical guidance and alignment.
