Importance of Trust and Transparency to Innovation

by Geoff Carss

There is lots written about how hard/challenging/difficult transformation/change/innovation are in companies - the bigger the more difficult - but there are two key issues which don't get raised enough (in my view).


Hard decisions and transparency

First - hard decisions. A couple of years ago I attended a Financial Times Innovate conference in London. The speaker that stood out was Syl Saller - the Innovation Director at Diageo (it owns Guiness, Baileys, Smirnoff etc) and her honest insights into innovation and change in global companies. Syl described a series of key meetings about what they were going to invest in to support the growth of new global brands and what they needed to stop in certain countries where investments were being made in local brands. The (relatively) easy bit was where to invest - the (really) hard bit was agreeing on what to stop.

Being a big company metrics drive behaviour so country managers, who ran the local P&L made local decisions to meet their revenue/profit targets. This was counter to growing global brands which, by implication, meant focussed investment in some geographies and lowering investment in others.

The hard decision was working with a country manager to free up local marketing spending for bigger projects - but that meant a country manager may miss their targets - which could impact their careers etc - so 'deals' had to be done - based on trust - such is the reality of big companies - and having worked in IBM for 6 years, these issues are a function of size and reach and really hard to mitigate.

Second - transparency is a killer. An organisation kicks off a transformation or change program - gets consultants in to design and initiate. Consultants leave after the first phase when all kinds of projects have been initiated - and the whole thing stalls as most people go back to their day job and the rate progress is no longer as apparent. In many cases this may be due to lack of visibility rather than actual progress as people are spread across different countries and business units and are trying to manage via conference calls, spreadsheets and monthly powerpoint slide packs.

This lack of transparency can cause confusion, reduced alignment and additional work which in turn makes decision making slower, harder and interventions less effective.

The above is one story, but every CXO and middle manager I know can tell similar ones, regardless of the sector, geography, company culture, etc. Having ways to surface these debilitating and often invisible organizational dynamics is incredibl important for management.

So what are you doing to drive transparency, trust, and hard decisions in your organization?


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Geoff Carss is VP Sales & Marketing at element8 software. I was previously with Ernst & Young Consulting and IBM Consulting, but I now enjoy working with clients and partners explaining the new ways we can help their organizations transform.