I’m thrilled to share that our research has made its way into HBR. Congratulations to Linda and the Paradox team, Michael and the Pfizer CGS organization, and all those who helped bring the Collective Genius model to life. And, while this seems the lamest sentence ever to honor your heroic work, thank you for the COVID vaccine.
Article Summary
As ever, the editors at HBR have written an elegant summary of the article. You’ll see I’ve highlighted my favorite sentence in bold.
“Despite their embrace of agile methods, many firms striving to innovate are struggling to produce breakthrough ideas. A key culprit, according to the authors, is an outdated, inefficient approach to decision-making. Today’s discovery-driven innovation processes involve an unprecedented number of choices, from which ideas to pursue to countless decisions about how to conduct experiments, what data to collect, and so on. But these choices are often made too slowly and informed by obsolete information and narrow perspectives.
To align their decision-making processes with agile approaches, businesses need to include diverse (customer, local, data-informed, and outside) points of view; clarify decision rights; match the cadence of decisions to the pace of learning; and encourage candid conflict in service of a better experience for the end customer. Only then will all that rapid experimentation pay off.
The article suggests best practices for these interventions, drawing on the story of the transformation at Pfizer’s Global Clinical Supply, which would go on to play a critical role supporting the rapid development of the pharma giant’s Covid vaccine.”
20 Years of Research in one infographic
Check out how the HBR art wizards tell our data story in this gorgeous infographic. (Yes, I am a data nerd.)
Source: Harvard Business Review
Lastly, I also loved this sentence:
“When we looked closely at 65 of the companies that were on the journey to becoming more nimble, we found that the more successful ones were applying many agile and lean principles to decision-making itself. ”