Remote Innovation: Here and Now

Off the back of the pandemic, I am reminded of one of my least favorite fallacies and frequently debated topics about remote innovation:

You need to be physically in the same place to drive process improvement. 

In other words, you simply cannot innovate in a remote environment. Now that the corona-virus has pushed many businesses to this model, I guess that means no more process improvement, right?

Of course not. Firstly, I’d like to share a few thoughts as to why teams may feel this way. And then I will run through a few of my favorite ways to execute on remote innovation in a newly remote world. 

Co-Location or Bust

Let’s start by listing some of the common concerns I’ve heard over the years. Things like “we can’t innovate remotely because:”

I won’t know what my team is doing or vice versa. 
We can’t whiteboard ideas or brainstorm together. 
Our team culture will be diminished to where we can only support normal processes.
Who will I eat lunch with?

I’ve taken enough Agile training courses to realize that “co-location” is often put in the critical path for project success. The intent is to optimize communication and synchronize team activities to ensure high levels of productivity. 

This is akin to the old “war room” concept where, in times of crisis, you get everyone together literally in one room. Supposedly everyone yelling at each other in a tiny box helps increase the speed at which a resolution is reached. Just ask Uber.

Okay, I am only joking about the yelling (sort of). And yes I admit these concepts can help a team work together in an efficient way. But this strategy is far too rigid, especially now when many remote requirements dominate our post-pandemic world. 

Furthermore, co-location is often a band-aid to cover up some serious deficiencies in how your team normally operates. If the only way your team speaks to each other is by physically confining everyone together, there are some deeper issues to investigate. 

You Were Already Remote

To further remove perceived boundaries, I’d like to also point out that this concept of remote work has already been implemented throughout the corporate world. You and your team just haven’t been using the remote innovation label.  

For example, a global company that has a small team spread across satellite cities most certainly operates in a remote manner (even if they do go to an office everyday). Furthermore, have you ever called someone that works just a few floors below you in the same building? I know you have. You might as well be working remotely in that case. 

Screen-sharing. Virtual Conferences. JIRA. These are all tools we use because we are not always working with folks in the same floor, let alone region. It’s a global world and again, co-location is just too rigid of a requirement to be feasible in most business models. 

So be confident! This is not a massive change. We should expect our teams to continue to support remote innovation in a highly productive way. Only our lonely lunches should suffer. 

Remote Process Improvement 

Tip #1 – Download Zoom

Just kidding. Let’s assume everyone is savvy enough with technology to know that we can see each other’s faces whenever we’d like. I’d like to instead propose some more nuanced actions to embracing remote work. 

One tip on this subject though – invest in a wide screen! If you’re process mapping regularly (and I hope you are), you’ll thank me. 

1. Define roles and responsibilities

No I don’t mean making sure Johnny sends out that report on time. Help your team solidify process improvement with formal roles and real expectations. Carve out time in each regular meeting to have innovation leads update the team on goals and progress. This may have been taken for granted when everyone was together, but will now be necessary to help keep efforts going while we are all at home. 

2. Digitize your huddle board 

Take the medium where your team previously communicated their innovation activity and make sure it is available anywhere in the world. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A nicely formatted excel sheet can give you everything your team had in a physical huddle-board. 

Don’t have a huddle-board or have one but don’t track improvements on it? Stay tuned for a future article on why this is awesome and how you can start one. 

3. Don’t be afraid of manual data collection

Don’t have a machine learning, AI based algorithm to collect client feedback? Who cares! Spend some extra time collecting data from the processes you support. Summarize insights and share it with the team. This is still valuable data despite the manual method of capture, and even more so as your team wont be witnessing what you observe on a daily basis. 

4. Start a book club

I am stealing Thomas’ patented community building technique, but I think this is a really nice way to ensure “ad-hoc” conversations in a remote innovation model. Choose a few innovation topics, pick a book and organize the team once a month to talk about any learnings. It’s a great way to keep the juices flowing outside of normal production activities. 

Final Thoughts 

I must admit that this list of actionable tips was a bit difficult to define. Not because there isn’t much to propose, but that most of these tips are relevant for really any business model (remote or otherwise). Therefore, it’s hard to say that these tips are specific to remote innovation when in reality, you should be trying these whether you sit next to your team or have never even met them in person. 

In that same vein, most of our other articles will help with your remote process improvement efforts. Check out how to create a backlog for ideas, or optimizing how your team arrives at a solution. 

Happy (remote) innovating!