Innovation Emergencies Happen

Emergent See Innovation from GFi Available February, 2019

I advise pro-active, and continuous, innovation. It’s always easier to work with a challenge when you have time and the leisure to incubate, think, and in general work the clay of research insights, trends, prototypes, paper-based concepts, or a business model canvas. When you are always doing innovation, you have time to fail, time to create small wins, time to learn.

Time is what you don’t have in an emergency. And Innovation Emergencies Happen. You’re caught off guard by a market shift, a new competitor, or a technical advancement.

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t have a formal innovation program, and so, they wait until the proverbial poop hits the fan. It’s a tough wake-up call to realize that unless you do something, and right now, you’re in big trouble. The clock is ticking and that is a frightening sound.

The good news: An Emergency is motivating. I’m not being ironical or funny — that sense of urgency is powerful and important. It’s not a trivial thing. Once you’re motivated to do something, you’ve got a chance.

The bad news: In the frenzy to do something fast you might make big mistakes or take risks that could be avoided. Especially in an emergency, it’s not time to do something thoughtless, or grasp at the first straw. Creative thinking can rescue you, but it better be focused, and that’s going to be hard to do when you’re in panic mode, and, without assistance.

For a situation where innovation is required now, Gregg Fraley Innovation (GFi) offers a packaged facilitation service to assist called Emergent See Innovation.

The key benefit: Taking positive, immediate, creative, and thoughtful action to address your challenge.

The Emergent See Innovation service settles you into the eye of the storm, where you:

• Explore your situation quickly — but as thoroughly as possible
• Do some emergency research — to check assumptions and needs
• Frame up the challenge — and not just accept the obvious, early, running scared, thinking. This is about focusing your thinking.
• Generate insightful and on-point ideas to solve your focused challenge
• Get prototypes and tests underway
• Implement a solution

Professional facilitation is what you need to get through tough times.

Emergent See includes:

• A one day culture assessment and pre-consult session
• A quick turn-around Emergent See project plan
• Research and Homework thinking assignments for team
• Challenge Focusing facilitation workshop
• A Half-Day Ideation session — to come up with solution ideas
• A Half-Day Solution Development and Planning workshop to kick off your project
• On-Going check-ins with your innovation project team
• All done by experienced innovation facilitators

Emergent See is a negotiated flat fee service. The goal of GFi  is to provide you with a steady hand, neutral thinking, masterful facilitation, and an expedited process. Our goal is not to generate thousands of consulting hours, it’s to get you on track with an innovation project, and fast.

Call or write if this is of interest.

Most GFi projects are done by Gregg Fraley, a master innovation facilitator, trainer, entrepreneur, and author. In some cases, Gregg works with industry specialists, or other master facilitators to complete projects.

Gregg is a Visiting Innovation Scholar at the University of Notre Dame.