Teamovate approach
Teamovate is an approach to innovation within a small team around a shared theme. The approach consists of the Teamovate Innovation Generator for conceptual development and the Teamovate Breakroom for relationship development within the team. The team spends most of its time within the Teamovate Innovation Generator, and enters the Teamovate Breakroom only when the team needs to blend divergent viewpoints into a savory viewpoint stew. Over time, multiple teams can choreograph a number of Innovation Generators to achieve sustained innovations across multiple themes and timeframes.
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Teamovate Innovation Generator
The Teamovate Innovation Generator creates a repeatable trajectory for concepts that a team considers. A concept trajectory starts from an initial idea and proceeds through various waypoints until the team absorbs the concept, where it can mingle with other concepts to achieve a flash of inspiration that leads to an innovative capability.
The Teamovate Innovation Generator starts by forming a team around a ‘theme’, which is a general reason to get together. The team puts concepts into the ‘hopper’, in a raw ‘come as you are’ form. The team takes each concept and ‘turns the crank’ to clarify the concept such that team members share the same understanding. These clarified concepts turn into brush strokes and options. Brush strokes mingle to reveal an emergent ‘big picture’ that defines the purpose, constraints and outcomes relative to the theme. Options accumulate in the ‘assembly area’, where they are assessed with pros, cons and concerns, but not discarded. Options may be combined to create capabilities. Those capabilities convert the emergent big picture into a reality. Big picture purposes, outcomes and constraints, as well as assembly area option combinations may inspire even more concepts, which the team subsequently adds into the hopper.
At some point, the big picture stabilizes with sufficient feasible options such that the team experiences a ‘flash of inspiration’. The team ‘packages‘ that inspiration into capability development projects along multiple time scales: immediate, mid term, and strategic. These projects can mesh together over multiple teams, as if they were choreographed from the start.
Sometimes, a capability gap emerges with no feasible options to fill that gap. However, the team should be able to define that gap with enough information about what is needed to spin off a Teamovate Unobtainium Innovation Generator as a ‘side quest’. If supplied, unobtainium provides necessary capabilities that enable a simple solution to a challenging problem. Even though unobtainium may be infeasible for the current team to develop, another team with different skills or knowledge might be able to provide or develop the unobtainium, if the original team were to describe the necessary information succinctly.
(Fun fact: Unobtainium is a term coined by Kelly Johnson in the Lockheed Skunk Works aircraft development team for a hypothetical material that has all the necessary properties needed to make an airplane fly in a challenging environment, but either does not exist or is too expensive to consider. It was famously used to define the material for the Mach 3.5 SR-71 spy plane to overfly the USSR, which turned out to be titanium that ultimately was supplied by the USSR via a number of front companies.)
Teamovate Breakroom
The Teamovate Breakroom creates a repeatable trajectory for a team to work through divergent viewpoints, enhancing the team’s cohesiveness into a savory ‘viewpoint stew’.
The Teamovate Breakroom is a place where the team pauses conceptual development within the Teamovate Innovation Generator, when divergent viewpoints become distracting to the conceptual development. While in the breakroom, the team looks at ways to legitimize the various divergent viewpoints, and arrives at a ‘viewpoint stew’. In a stew, there are initially many distinct ingredients cooked together. As the stew simmers, each distinct ingredient absorbs flavor from other ingredients, softens around the edges, and contributes to the stew’s savory flavor. Even when the stew is ready, each ingredient retains most of its original identity. In a similar way, team members may not agree with all divergent viewpoints, but each member begins to understand how seemingly divergent viewpoints may actually be opposite yet legitimate ends of some blendable continuum. Given this understanding, the team blends together into a ‘viewpoint stew’. Even when blended in this manner, each team member retains their initial identity. Having achieved a ‘viewpoint stew’, the team resumes its conceptual development in the Teamovate Innovation Generator with fresh perspectives.
Catalytic Practices
Within both the Teamovate Innovation Generator and the Teamovate Breakroom, teams apply a number of catalytic practices that amplify the team’s effectiveness. A catalytic practice is an activity consisting of some disarmingly simple steps that hone in on essential characteristics of the issue at hand.