10 Lessons from Building an Innovation Lab
What I learnt last year at the crossroads of innovation and project management.
Happy new year!
In 2023 we built an innovation hub. A lab, a working space, a collaborative environment - call it what you will. I personally don’t like the word lab because of the image it conveys, but it’s probably semantics. In short, we built a 9000 sq ft space, on the 44th floor of a Bishopsgate building, which all our clients would access and be inspired by.
While many aspects of the lab were from a template, by its very nature we were always looking to push the boat out and do a bunch of new things that hadn't been attempted before. And so this was a classic melting pot of innovation and project management.
I have learnt about myself over the years, that large scale project management is not my forte. And yet, as you can imagine, we had a lot riding on it. Consequently I found myself subsumed by the responsibility and the minutiae of the planning and execution. Towards the second half of 2023, I found my hours getting increasingly swallowed up in trying to get this flagship Innovation space launched by the end of the year. We started this journey 18 months ago, so it's been quite a journey. After all, it wasn't just the project management, but many aspects of the design and operating model we were responsible for. And when we delivered our first workshops in the end of last year, the overwhelming feeling was relief - that the thing worked! (I have to admit that there was also a little bit of surprise - you always expect something to go wrong!).
This is also my excuse for not having the mindspace to write for much of the last quarter. Now, having taken a bit of time to reflect on the experience, I thought I'd kick off the new year by sharing my experiences from having design and built our innovation lab.
Dealing with the Physical
Unless you've worked or trained in architecture or interior design, or have a natural inclination for it, you might also appreciate my first big challenge - dealing with the physical. When we first went into the space, a massive empty floor, looking over the magnificent landscape of London, it was bewildering to work out spaces in my head. Our design agency Maris translated our brief in exciting and thought provoking ways. But it was one thing to look at designs, plans, measurements, or even mock ups. It was another thing entirely to translate it in my head as to what the actual spaces would feel like or look like. Right through the process, I was surprised at the actual spaces, sizes, and flows - and how often they were different from how imagined they would be. Some days I was overwhelmed by the inability to look at a scale plan on a screen and bring it to life in my head. I dealt with this by consciously trying not to over think what that actual space experience would be, as I recognized it wasn't my forte. The agency clearly knew what they were talking about so it was easier in the end to discover how they had translated our brief rather than second guess it.
Flexibilty Is Everything
We went in with quite a bit of specificity about what needed to be in the innovation lab, but early in the process, it struck us that being overly deterministic about how our clients would work with us in the space was dangerous. Every client came from a different industry, context, and level of innovation maturity, so retaining flexibility was far more important than 'getting it right'. This would also allow us to evolve effectively. This is arguably the principle that served us best. Whenever faced with options A or B in terms of design, layout, technology, hardware, tools, etc. we opted for the option that gave us more flexibility. As opposed to a factory, which is designed for repeatable efficiency, an innovation lab is the opposite - you want unique experiences for every participating organisation. Flexibility comes at a cost. You have to work harder for each client experience. But it's worth the trade off! This was also true for the operating model and technology - and it needed us to build a whole second layer in the cloud for the operating model!
Building a Playground Model
Consequently the metaphor that started to take shape in my head is the playground model. We want the toys, the tools, and a set of stackable experiences, but the environment should promote diversity of ideas and thought, rather than be a constraint. The space should encourage freedom of expression and activity. This is especially true for our own team who are stewards of the space and the creators of the experiences. The playground model means that we have the environment to enable rather than constrain our creativity. In fact the capabilities of the lab should challenge us to do new and interesting things rather than opt for the safe and repeatable options. Once I understood this clearly and was able to articulate this, it also created the space and the launch pad for many of the later design ideas for the spaces and the tech.
Collaboration is a Design Challenge
I remember when Steve Jobs was asked for his input for the new Apple office, he is reported to have asked for all the toilets to be located at one end of the building. The logic was that this would ensure employees serendipitously 'met' each other more regularly as they went for their pit stops and had to walk across the building. While not planning anything that extreme, we did realise that collaboration is a design challenge. You can intentionally or unintentionally design for or against collaboration. When I joined the company in another building in London, my team and I took up residence in an unwanted open desk area, while everybody preferred cubicles or dedicated desks. Consequently while everybody sat with their backs to the world, we sat facing each other in our team and also anybody that passed by often stopped to have a chat. While it proved sometimes to be a trade off in terms of focus and interruptions, in an innovation function such as ours, this was a huge, though unplanned asset. So this time, we designed for collaboration - all spaces are as open as possible. Or rather, open is the default design, spaces are only closed if they really need to be. It's already paying dividends in a month and a half of working.
Things Don't Turn Out the Way You Planned but are Better for Your Planning
This is a straight hat tip to Eisenhower's well known quote - plans are useless, planning is everything. Large (and long) projects with multiple streams will always have twists and turns, interlocking pieces when they have to change will impact other parts. Circumstance, budgets, shifting priorities, new ideas, and emergent constraints will all force your plan and design off its original path. However, the very act of planning, if done with enough intensity and rigour will act as a bulwark on which a new plan or design can be constructed. For one, a thorough planning process implies that you've already looked at alternatives, what-ifs and are better prepared for those changes, but also emergent solutions are always stronger because you can keep the good and robust parts of your original plan. In innovation projects, where you are going to evolve by design, sometimes the role of planning is underplayed, but putting aside hours for planning and replanning is a high ROI investment of time.
Dynamic Agendas Are a Go
In fact, one of the areas where the previous point is brought to life is our workshops. A lot of thought was put into how we might want to design our workshops. And as it turns out the workshops we are delivering aren't quite the workshops we envisaged. But the fact that we had a framework in mind, and we evolved from that framework keeping some modules and structures, while adding and modifying others, has helped greatly. This way we've only had to think through the parts that have changed. One such area is the creation of dymanic agendas. In an ideal workshop we have learnt to craft an agenda which has accounted for 120% of the time available and content we want to deliver. This acts both as a buffer in the case of last minute changes or enforced challenges, but also allows us to shift and morph the agenda as the day progresses. It even allows us to tweak the agenda collaboratively as we go through the day with no loss of quality or experience.
Stamina: The Juice is Worth the Squeeze
18 months is a long time if you're not used to projects of this scale - which I'm clearly not. In the space I typically work in, we get in and get out within 6 months, having either proven or disproven an innovation hypothesis. Our stock in trade is speed, not stamina. This is the equivalent of a floor gymnast who does 3 minute routines attempting their first marathon. (I should add here that I'm quite rubbish at both so this is really an abstract analogy). But the stark lesson for me was about stamina and staying at it. To embrace the conflict, and confusion that accompanies large projects. The often circuitous stakeholder management that can sometimes feel like swimming in sand. The challenges of any large organisation where everybody is doing their job, but you can only see them getting in the way of your acceleration. The urban dictionary asks the question of whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Whether the hours spent chasing procurement, legal, or internal approvals ultimately feel worthwhile. Short answer, yes. It was worth it. Just like running a marathon or climbing a mountain. There are times when all you feel is pain. But in the end it’s good pain.
The Outcome Leads the Way
And the reason we could stick with it, is that we were always fundamentally clear on the outcome we were seeking to deliver. And the outcome wasn't the construction of a lab, it was the delivering of a whole new experience for our clients and partners. An opportunity to change the conversation and change the game. It would have been straightforward to deliver a like for like lab, given that we have already built a few excellent innovation labs across the world. But for good or bad, we pushed the boat out and that meant we had set a clear path into some unknowns. But it also meant that we could envision the prize as the outcome, where it would have been more prosaic to just think of delivering a lab with defined features. When working with a complex project or even product, I absolutely think you need to think of the outcome for the user. As Hans Wegner said, a chair is only finished when someone sits in it. So your product, or tool, or platform, or new business model is only complete when it is being used and delivering the experience you envisaged. You might have to make a few changes to your original concept by then, and that might be where you learn and grow the most.
Dealing With Detail: The Scuba Diving Principle
Alongside the space, we had to furnish the space and then add an entire layer of audiovisual hardware and software - all of this was critical to the playground concept. This meant getting to insane amounts of detail in a number of areas - none of which I (or anyone in our team) was an expert in. But as you know, both god and the devil hide in the details. To make an idea work, even a simple one, you often have to get into the tiniest of details. What specific colour and fabric for the cushions on the sofa? How many different configurations of the screen might be required for a specific workshop? What features of CMS applications would we use while comparing half a dozen? What's the best way of clearing up breakfast dishes whilst keeping the clatter to a minimum? And hundreds of other such problems. This is something we've known through all the work we've done. But it was an order of magnitude more complicated for a project like this. Anybody who has delivered large complex project knows this, and will smile reading this. But what I learnt through this experience was how to get into detail without being bogged down by it. Of course, having an exceptional team around me, and delegating to people more capable than I, was a big part of it, but I found personally that while looking at specific areas, and contexts, my coping mechanism was to scuba dive into detail at those specific points but not retaining much of it. I did it for the quality of the decision, not to remember it. So if you asked me about many of the more detailed aspects, I would probably be blank, or rely on somebody in the team who lives and breathes it. But I know I was there and in that moment I understood the detail. Our partners Engage Works did some amazing work to make the space come to life with clever A/v technologies and our Internal IT team regularly burnt the midnight oil to ensure everything was up to scratch.
As a minor aside on the point of detail, even operationally, delivering a great experience is down to the little things. And so bringing along all our teams from Admin, to internal tech, to legal, have all been critical. In fact I’d say the role of the admin function is probably the most under rated, and incredibly critical to delivering great experiences.
Evolution is a Fundamental Truth
When we started this project, the word Generative AI was probably understood by a few hundred people working in a handful of early stage businesses. ChatGPT was 6 months away from launch. Sam Altman was relatively unknown to most people. Web 3.0 and Metaverse was front and centre for most businesses. Sam Bankman-Fried and Changpeng Zhao were high-flying rockstars, and twitter was still called twitter and run by Parag Agrawal. I list these examples to highlight the difference in what the loading of the word 'innovation' was then, versus what it is now. Generative AI and AI strategies are now almost synonymous with innovation. So our north star has also evolved - what we want to deliver, how we want to do it, what our skill set should include and how we want to go about delivering innovation. This is what I've previously called the Evolving Operating Model. And it's an even more tricky idea when you're actually investing in building the underlying asset to deliver that changing model. But here's the bottom line - there is no option. The world will change. Rapidly. And whatever you were building will need to evolve even as you're building it or face obsolescence by the time it's ready. And while this is something I've always preached, it was a particularly interesting experience to go through it in a complex project and understand how to be nimble enough for the product itself to be evolution-friendly.
Thanks for reading and happy 2024!
Reading List
The amazing success of Bluey the Fish - Australia’s top export (FT)
Your data lives in the cloud but travels on the sea floor. Big Tech is the new plumbing. (Economist)
Death is not an event (MIT Technology Review)
The Era of AI Nationalism (Economist)
AI and the Last Lions of Hollywood (Economist)
Neuromorphic Computing: Synaptic Transmitters (Neuroscience News)
Are we ready for Humanoid Robots in our work spaces? (IEEE Spectrum)
Taylor Swift, innovator extraordinaire, is Time’s person of the year. (Time)
ICYMI: NYT sued Microsoft & Open AI for copyright infringement (NYT)
Why menopause and the ovaries provide a great basis for understanding the ageing process overall (Business Week)