Building a Global Sensing Network

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist, the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016 release).

  Change Management   Innovation   Leadership   Resource Management  

When I first wrote about Building a Global Sensing Network, I wrote in the specific context of the war for innovation and the need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization--not inside. I looked at how most organizations hire the most clever, educated, experienced and motivated people they could afford and then directed them to come up with the best customer solutions possible, organize and execute their production and marketing predictably and efficiently, and do their best to outmaneuver the competition.

In short, most organizations pursue success by building a fortress from which the organization can defend its intellectual property and its market position, utilizing the human resources it can assemble within the castle walls. At the same time, most organizations focus on achieving organizational success by achieving the greatest overlap possible between the skills, abilities and talents of each job applicant and the job description for each role.

But most organizations (referred to as “typical organizations” in the graphic below) fail to harness all of the skills, abilities and talents of the individuals they have in their organization to achieve greater performance as a collective. In my mind, this is painful, wasted human capital--painful for the organization (lost potential revenue and profitability) and painful for the individual …

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