futurethink

Through years of experience with Fortune 500 companies, futurethink has accessed the inner workings of the world's most powerful organizations. We've observed that large-scale change initiatives in the workplace are not just costly—they're frequently ineffective. This is the inspiration behind Little BIGS: the idea that small changes create the biggest ripples. Little BIGS are behavior tactics that individuals can model to encourage and enable the same behaviors in others. Instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all initiative upon employees, minor adjustments are made to everyday aspects of the workplace.

Among the many scenarios to which Little BIGS are relevant, the humble "team meeting" offers an immediate and dynamic platform to shake up the status quo. When scheduling your next meeting, consider these action-oriented Little BIGS:

1. Provide cell phone day care and minimize the temptation to multi-task. Just before the meeting starts, ask participants to set their phones to silent mode. Pass around a basket or box to store cell phones for the meeting's duration.

2. Chair-free meetings keep participants alert and focused, which translate to shorter, more efficient sessions.

3. Unexpected venues prompt fresh thinking. Surprise the group by scheduling meetings outdoors, in a coffee shop, or over pedicures.

4. Meeting-Free Fridays offer uninterrupted time for large-scale projects—or the chance to complete all the assignments employees received in this week's meetings.

5. Bring the sandbox into the boardroom. Inspire creativity by introducing objects, such as LEGOs, crayons, de-stresser squeeze toys, etc., during meetings.

Which of these Little BIGS resonate with you? Do you have a gem or two of your own? Share it with us here.

In much the same way you track the performance of your financial portfolio, it’s important to regularly look at and evaluate your innovation portfolio.

Take a look at all the new offerings you’ve launched in the past 12 months – both big launches and small improvements – and tag each one as one of four things:

• Business as Usual: Projects and innovations you had to do in order to remain competitive or satisfy customer demands.
• Incremental: Projects and innovations that are small (low risk, low investment) improvements over your previously existing offerings.
• New to Us: Projects and innovations that were completely new to your organization and allowed you to better meet the needs of your customers. These projects brought you into new competitive territory.
• Breakthrough: Projects and innovations that were new to your company, and new to the market – those things that have never been done before that have the potential to change your industry.

Once you’ve tagged each of the projects you’ve launched, count up the innovations you had in each of these four categories. To manage risk effectively, make sure you are making both big risks and safe bets. A good innovation portfolio has a mixture of breakthroughs and incremental improvements.  Are you balanced?

Innovative organizations have developed the capabilities to assess the potential of new ideas and identify the very best opportunities to pursue. Many of the world’s skilled innovators follow definitive processes to guide them in bringing breakthrough ideas to fruition.

Two organizations that do this well are Kraft and BMW. To move ideas forward, Kraft applies a set of rigid evaluation criteria, which is widely accepted and serves to align the company around common goals.

Kraft's criteria for vetting ideas include: 
     • Does it rewire the organization for growth?
     • Does it reframe categories?
     • Does it leverage sales capabilities?
     • Does it down cost without compromising quality?

BMW uses a phased idea-management process that works like a funnel as ideas move through research, innovation management (evaluation), and innovation transfer (development and launch). Throughout the process, ideas are reprioritized or reshaped depending on market conditions, and many concepts don’t make it all the way through—this allows BMW to focus resources on projects that are most likely to succeed. Learn more about BMW’s process in our in-depth case study.