UCIF - Unified Collaboration and Innovation Framework

Introduction

When you are searching for surprising strategic insights you don’t know what you will find or where you will find them. If you did, they wouldn’t be surprising.

This means that traditional approaches to action-planning and project management can be problematic to apply. Early commitments of resources (money, time, attention, and expectations) make it difficult to react to and build on new insights gained. The more we learn the more constraining the initial commitments become.

When the majority of activities in a project  focus on learning - as they do in innovative projects - early commitments should be made with care. They often create path-dependencies that are difficult to escape.

Agile approaches to planning are more likely to be productive. Instead of directly contributing towards a global goal of the project - which per definition is unknown in explorative projects - tasks should focus on building knowledge in smaller steps, each step followed by a decision-point on where to go next.

The resulting insights will thus emerge from the research actions of the team rather than being planned in advance. Each task produces a stepping stone which helps the team venture farther into the unknown. By focusing on iterations of small research tasks surprising insights are more likely to emerge than by working in larger chunks.

The overall process focuses on iterative planning methods that help teams keep up productivity while being responsive to new insights.

Teams work systematically with managing iterations and change in open-ended projects, with quick feedback loops, and with facilitating disciplined innovation meetings, all accelerating the emergence of surprising strategic insights.

The iterations are represented as routines (in grey boxes) in the above diagram. Most of the action happens at the level of the team or the innovators. 

Some of the routines however are themselves part of higher level iterations involving a broader selection of stakeholders operating at higher levels in the organisation. The different levels of action are described in the next section.