IntrapreneurBlog

I use the following example process in my Intrapreneuring 101 presentation:

1. Seek out the pain,
2. Look at things with an open mind (reframe, edgecraft, brainstorm),
3. Seek corporate champions, supporters, and a team,
4. Run the intrapreneuring project as a project,
5. Manage the critics, and
6. Deliver something useful.
7. Then… Wash, rinse, repeat.

Please note that this is A Process, not The Process. It is also necessarily high level - each of the following steps could easily be a book in and of itself. Each of them relies on some fairly basic people skills - easy diplomacy, convincing rhetoric, being trustworthy, showing leadership. Disclaimers aside, let’s run through the steps.

Seek out the pain
The first step is to identify the pain. Every organisation has some pain somewhere. Usually, there are several large pain-points that are intimately obvious on a daily basis - processes that don’t work, information silos that get in the way of the effective delivery of customer service, competitive rather than cooperative relationships with suppliers and clients.

Look at things with an open mind (reframe, edgecraft, brainstorm)
Solutions can sometimes be obvious but not viable owing to organisational politics - and bit of lateral thinking can lead to an alternative that works for everyone. There are some standard “brainstorming” techniques that can be helpful:

• Reframing is about looking at the issue with a fresh set of eyes - going one semantic step beyond the obvious and looking at analogue (similar) situations (and how they are solved).
• Edgecraft involves going more than one step beyond - taking the issue and looking at solutions that go beyond the edge of what is reasonable and possible, then reining them in a step at a time until they become doable.
• Brainstorming techniques abound - depending on who you read and in what context, they are either a waste of time or a good way of helping everyone feel included (rather than directly contributing to the solution itself).

For all of the above, mindmapping can help to keep the ideas in order and assist in communicating them.

Seek corporate champions, supporters, and a team
The beauty of intrapreneuring is that it gives you an opportunity to work with a lot of people and, if successful, become well known as a “doer” - someone who gets things done.

It is good to seek out the following people:

• Corporate champions: Most organisations are hierarchical - they have a power structure that looks a bit like a pyramid. No good idea was ever universally accepted - you will need the support of people at the top of your organisation to see an idea birthed and grow to useful adulthood. If you can convince one key person that the idea is worthy, then it has a chance.
• Supporters: Supporters can be champions or they can simply be people who are spread throughout the organisation that are aware of the pain and sympathetic to your proposed solution. Any time you can spend marketing your idea to different areas of the organisation will pay dividends.
• Project team: Few truly remarkable things were achieved in total isolation - you will need a team to bounce ideas off, get the legwork done, spread the word, and deliver on the project. Like minded souls may be in short supply - but chances are you are not the only one that sees the pain and the necessity for change.

Run the intrapreneuring project as a project
The only way to impress some of your critics (and you will get them) is to use industrial-strength project management. It may be that you have to run the project in your own time (and you have to decide if this is worth the afterwork) - or you may get some in-work hours to get it done. Either way, being prudent and responsible with project resources has a number of advantages:

• less wasted time,
• a heightened sense of shared purpose amongst members of the team,
• a familiar set of project deliverables (to satisfy the process fans), and
• a repeatable process (with a little luck and a lot of hard work, a process that you will get to use again).

Manage the critics
Unless you own the company, you will get critics. How you manage them will determine their acceptance of your ideas now and into the future. The highest art, according to Sun Tzu, is to win the battle by never fighting it in the first place (in other words, a little circumspection and diplomacy goes a long way). Here are some hints for turning critics into allies (accepting that there may be some people that you will never convince):

• Accept criticism in a spirit of generosity - you want things to improve, and chances are the people who are criticising your idea genuinely want things to improve also (but may not see things as you do).
• Engage with critics and discuss their concerns - what is it that they are specifically worried about? What are their main problems? Can you adress some of their concerns while maintaining the integrity of your solution?
• Look at the barriers raised by the critics - are there any objections that can be reframed and incorporated into the solution?
• If any critics remain that cannot be turned into allies, are there ways of sidestepping them?

Deliver something useful
Unless you deliver something useful, you will not find it as easy to get support a second time within the same organisation. The best successes are:

• Regular: The successes happen often enough to be anticipated.
• Obvious: While it sounds obvious - it is easier to remember something that makes a marked improvement in the daily life of the organisation.
• Shared: Not everyone likes superstars - sharing the credit goes a long way to ensuring that you will get continued support.

Then… Wash, rinse, repeat
Admiral Grace Hopper was a genuine computer science pioneer. Apart from anything else, she is credited with the following saying (and if there is ever a codified set of intrapreneuring laws, this will be in the top 10):

“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission”

Anecdotally, she used an example to illustrate the frailty of everyday human logic: she is said to have read an instruction (”Wash, rinse, repeat”) on a shampoo bottle and followed it - washing her hair with the shampoo, rinsing it out, then repeating the process - until the shampoo was gone. The obvious computer science application of the anecdote is in loop control - the use of IF/FOR/WHILE/etc statements to ensure that the loop is not endless (that is, that the shampoo lasts more than just one wash).

Should intrapreneuring ever stop? There is no reason why it need ever stop (so long as you want it to last and are able to keep up with it).

So this is the trick: once you get it right the first time, get up and do it again. Build on your successes.

The disclaimer (again)
It needs to be said again that the above is a high level oversimplification of one way to do it rather than the way. Each of the steps above is worthy of a lot more discussion than that shown - and may not be sensitive to the needs or the culture of your current organisation.

That said, if it makes any kind of sense, it could be worthy of further thought.

Watch this space.