'Solutioning Council'....an internal start-up

For any organization to survive, irrespective of size and scale of operation, it has to balance both – manage earnings against budget and invest carefully into next growth trajectory.

While the well-oiled machinery of sales, delivery and support functions carry out the first one, month after month, assessing variances against budget and taking corrective actions; an independent team or function is normally setup to oversee the second one in a different way to ensure the right direction towards tomorrow’s growth.

Some set up this independent team in a formal manner and some in an informal manner and many names are coined for this internal team as ‘Innovation Council’, ‘Research & Development’, ‘Solutioning Council’, so on and so forth. Irrespective of name, structure and size, three important factors are to be kept in mind while setting up such internal team(s).

- Organization should foster a culture of ideation, conceptual thinking, innovation, and solutioning across the floor; rather than confining it as the sole responsibility of the internal team. It should be treated as a habit where employees can exchange ideas and thoughts freely and fearlessly, cutting across the hierarchical structure; where employees adopt a childlike inquisitiveness and behave as risk-takers and do not feel afraid of failure.

-  The identified team or group or council should have a mindset to oversee the above. Organizations should be careful in selecting the leaders of this internal team, as they are required to be mature, committed, hands-on leaders and moreover avid readers, who not only read, but apply and teach. They are required to be heavily networked both internally and externally keeping eyes and ears open on the trends in the market, discussion topics, and make sure that new ideas and thoughts are being exchanged.   

-  Organization should have a structured process to gather, document, review the funnel of concepts, thoughts, ideas, solutions and select the ones to invest based on the organization’s capability, capacity and market need. However, such investments should be treated as internal projects with set milestones so that the progress is tracked against investment. At the same time, organizations should have a big heart to accept the fact that all investments will not result in desired outcomes and hence should be able to decide winding up a project midway and move on.

Such internal teams or councils are required to operate as internal start-ups, and to be nurtured carefully pursuing tomorrow’s growth.