What Goes Up Must Come Down

Quite often during the process of innovation, we devote the vast majority of our creative efforts to building projects, initiatives and strategies and virtually no time planning for the eventual (admittedly) non-creative disassembling of them. What, you say, a process for not just starting a project but ending it? Exactly!

This reality is usually ignored in the planning stages and sometimes made manifest only in a little line item called “Project Documentation” at the end of the outline. The truth is that despite the significant effort required, there is often un-mined value to the effective ramp-down of a project. When a program is concluding, leadership needs to recognize that this is one of the most critical phases of a process life – one that can present serious benefits.

History is full of examples of great results that were followed by less-than-stellar ramp-downs. I think among the most triumphant yet tragic is the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

President Thomas Jefferson had the vision to map the new Western frontier, and he commissioned the right team to accomplish it. Lewis and Clark were wildly successful; they achieved their objective flawlessly and with only one casualty. Upon their return to the East, they were greeted almost as moon-conquering astronauts. Their discoveries were unprecedented. Yet they never formally documented their journey. In fact, other than Lewis’s journal, very little was recorded.

It gets worse. After their return, both men suffered lackluster careers that ended in tragedy.

What Jefferson failed to consider was how the Lewis and Clark project should conclude. To achieve truly successful innovation and for the good of the enterprise going forward, leadership must plan how to redeploy talent and document the real project findings. Sound familiar?

Here are some simple tips on what to include in innovation planning. This list can apply to any kind of innovation development, big or small.

1. Make sure that project findings are not only documented but communicated.
2. Develop a drawer-pulling process to revisit ideas that may not have been right for the time but could be freshly relevant. We often experience A.D.D. when it concerns some of our best ideas.
3. Try to invite fresh eyes to critiques and presentations. On our own we become organizationally bored and lose interest, often leaving innovation orphans in our wake. Minus a new perspective, we are doomed to repeat exploration when not attentive to our initial results.
4. Build active web-based archives. Document the project in such a way that anyone individually can review it.
5. Design a redeployment strategy for each person on your innovation team. If Jefferson had already identified another task for Lewis and Clark, they would have become reenergized and remained engaged.
6. Create a plan for the capture and redeployment of the team’s intellectual assets. Has the team’s IP potential been captured? What did they learn in process development? Was it documented and shared with those who design your company’s innovation process? How could the project have been better?
7. Recognize the company’s cultural contribution to projects. If I were a CEO, I would ask my team to come talk to me AFTER all of the presentations were complete. I would want to know what it was like to navigate the company’s resources. Who gave them support? Where were the barriers? Was the collective culture a help or hindrance?

Although it’s true that what goes up must come down, planning when and how to go up again can help make your innovation process successes repeatable and robust.