Are you a Box Ticking Organization?

The concept of innovation theatre was brought to the public eye by Steve Blank in his 2019 HBR article (Blank is a Stanford Professor and considered by many to the father of the lean movement).

Essentially, organizations that engage in innovation theatre engage in initiatives to signal that change is happening but in actuality have little impact on a firm’s go to market capability and value proposition. It is characterized by incoherent, superficial, top down, and numerous so called changes that do little to enhance employee motivation and company performance (in fact they have the opposite effect).

Whilst innovation theatre is predominantly applied to innovation processes within a firm, all change is some type of innovation. I will expand a little here and call the concept box ticking. What characterizes a box ticking firm?:

• Creates new layers or positions without redesigning work or addressing culture
• Launches workshops, seminars, training etc (such as culture workshops) without any linkage to the way the organization works or with no follow through
• Creates the same endless PPTs and reports with no action
• Adopts the flavour of the month driven by senior leaders
• Functional silos reign supreme despite talks of the need for teamwork
• Focuses only on lag indicators with little thought to lead indicators
• Lots of meetings and ideation with little follow up and integration
• Pretends to get employee input when the decisions have already been made
• Has no formal process for talent development and management but emphasizes its importance
• Loves a good mission statement etc but does not live by those values

Overcoming box ticking is conceptually quite straight forward yet challenging in execution. It requires an honest assessment of where the organization is, getting broad stakeholder involvement. It will then require real change addressing the underlying issues the organization faces. Anything else is basically band aid management. Processes must be embedded that create customer value (it must mean something to the customer). This is the essence of strategy, which is:

“A strategy is the how. A coherent, integrated set of initiatives and concepts that will move the organisation forward in a unified manner to achieve transient advantage. It is fluid in movement but set in direction”.