Somany of us have gone through this. Though I don’t have exact statistics for this but I believe creating elaborate business cases for new projects or initiatives has to be one of the biggest energy suckers in large organizations. Think of the cycle time from creating it, to aligning with a bunch of other people, adjusting it multiple times and then going through tons of reviews to finally get it approved. Or worse, to have it rejected! And this exercise can take six to nine months or more. At the end of it all that is there is a bunch of Word docs and powerpoints.
Business case is of course the first document that is used in the investment seeking process inside organizations. The expectation is that it must articulate the story in the most compelling manner about why the proposed project or product or a change must be made. Then follow that with a solid strategy and outlines of an execution plan. The entire process takes 100’s of hours of brain time with as much as 70–80% going in wrestling with the documents (Powerpoints, Word docs) to make them look sleek.
This situation often creates what I call a “word trap”. The problem is often compounded if the final decision maker is far removed from the subject area and has a vague idea. There are far too many assumptions hidden in this exercise. Firms can spend way too much time strategizing and circling around a “Word document” without actually diving head long into the opportunity. In today’s fast moving environment, opportunities come and go in months. We all know what happened to Nokia even after building working models of touch screens seven years before Apple took this concept to market.
Smart firms are creating models inside their organization that promote low cost experimentation. They know it is impossible to assess from “words and excel graphs” whether an idea can break into the market. There is a growing emphasis on rapid prototyping of innovations and testing in a controlled way in the real world. Internet companies have perfected the art of prototyping. Don’t make the mistake that all this is for software products only.
My belief is traditional companies would find avenues to come out of this “word trap”. They would force their people to build small scale experiences of their ideas to test in the real world. Maybe VR technologies would one day be used for all this. The way to fuel all this would be to create the right incentives along the full continuum of idea generation to designing to prototyping to market testing to validating the results and plans to scale. There will be no more free lunches.
This last 12 months have been all about how firms are throwing away their performance appraisal system in this new age. Waiting to see a flurry of news in coming years how large organizations finally discarded lengthy processes of business case approval and just jumped to prototyping their ideas and testing in real life before committing to any investments.
Leave a comment below how your organization generates ideas and ensures they come to life.