Lead Strategic Innovation and Growth
Innovate Professionally.
Equip your intrapreneurial leaders for the status-quo conquering journey from now to next.
Welcome to a new paradigm where uncertainty and transient advantage are the new norms—and unpredictable, dramatic, sudden changes are expected. Changes that cannot be solved by business-as-usual nor met with incremental improvements.
To keep pace and execute the impact you need in the future—to thrive in this environment—you must transform existing executives, managers, and practitioners into intrapreneurial leaders who use what is to build what will be.
No matter where you are on the journey to next, there are crucial moments your intrapreneurial leaders will face and actions they will need to take. We offer a series of leadership development sprints to build the skills and discipline required at each of those moments as they encounter them throughout the entire Next Cycle.
The Leaders of Next Program guides your teams through role-specific sprints that equip your intrapreneurs with the language, frameworks, tools, and skills required to improve their strategic impact and innovation productivity.
Leaders of Next Program
Your innovation productivity depends on your intrapreneurial leaders working as one team.
Intrapreneurial Executives
Provide a unique and disproportionate influence in defining innovation objectives and strategy, ensuring alignment, providing guidance and governance, and achieving significant impact.
Intrapreneurial Managers
Ensure initiatives reach fruition by leading the process of innovation, aligning resources, and providing executives with the information they need to make portfolio management and investment decisions.
Intrapreneurial Practitioners
Execute strategies and do the work required to move solutions through the innovation development cycle in ways that support decision making and investment, achieve strategic goals, and produce option value and impact.
Executive Sprints
These sprints equip your intrapreneurial executives with the innovation processes, risk management, investment models, and techniques they need to lead innovation execution and productivity. Your executives will gain the knowledge and skills, and establish the governing bodies, operating principles, and strategic goals required to execute an Innovation Playbook across multiple opportunity horizons.
We recommend that your executive team create an Innovation Playbook to inoculate your organization from fragmented, undisciplined, unproductive innovation that fails to make meaningful contributions to your strategic goals.
Executive Sprint 1.
Intrapreneurial Baseline*
Two week sprint with group coaching.
The conditions for intrapreneurial success are often lacking or misunderstood, leading to missed goals, disillusionment with innovation, and reinforcement of the status quo.
During this sprint, your leadership team will take the Intrapreneurial Readiness Assessment to discover where your organization stands and where to start.
We will evaluate your results to establish your intrapreneurial baseline and work with your team in a series of online sessions to prioritize executive opportunities for innovation productivity improvement.
Week 1: Introduction to Intrapreneurial Readiness and Assessment
Week 2: Evaluation / Boosters / Prioritization / Coaching
Executive Sprint 2.
Leadership and Decision Making in Uncertainty
Three week sprint with group and individual coaching.
Leading next is different from leading now. In this sprint, we introduce the skills, language, frameworks, tools, and system needed to plan and meet goals in the Age of Uncertainty—and to join the 6% of organizations satisfied with their innovation performance.
This sprint will enable your intrapreneurial executives to avoid making costly gut instinct-, political-, emotional-, and inconsistent-decisions.
Your executives will be introduced to a rational and systematic approach to get to “Yes, because…” and “No, because…” and how to use unique frameworks and tools to realize strategic innovation goals and achieve maximum impact.
Week 1: Defining Opportunity Horizon Portfolios / Innovation Goal Setting / Strategic Alignment
Week 2: Innovation Criteria and Assessment
Week 3: Leadership and Decision Making Recap & Coaching
Executive Sprint 3.
Innovation Governance and Funding*
Four week sprint with group and individual coaching.
The certainty of now offers better short-term returns and lower risk—so why change? To ensure your organization’s longevity, you need to develop the structures, rules, and expectations for essential constituents to build what’s next.
In this sprint, your executives will learn to effectively manage the friction between now and next with Next Boards, Next Advocates, and frameworks for opportunity horizons, context-based rules, operating principles for intrapreneurs, funding options, evaluating real option value, and more.
Week 1: Uncertainty Map / Now & Next Operating Principles / Next Rules
Week 2: Next Boards / Next Advocates / Strategic Fit / Portfolio Fit / Option Value / Funding Options
Week 3: Opportunity Portfolio Mapping and Rebalancing
Week 4: Governance and Funding Recap & Coaching
*These steps are also included in the Playbook Sprint.
Manager Sprints
These sprints equip your intrapreneurial managers with the skills to navigate uncertainty with discipline and rigor. They will learn how to recognize key moments in the Next Cycle, align resources, and lead teams to produce the answers to key questions that manage risk, optimize innovation performance, and drive innovation productivity.
Manager Sprint 1.
Intrapreneurial Baseline
Two week sprint with group coaching.
The conditions for intrapreneurial success are often lacking or misunderstood, leading to missed goals, disillusionment with innovation, and reinforcement of the status quo.
During this sprint, your team-leads will take the Intrapreneurial Readiness Assessment to discover where they stand and where to start.
We will evaluate your results to establish your management baseline and prioritize opportunities for innovation productivity improvement.
Week 1: Introduction to Intrapreneurial Readiness and Assessment
Week 2: Evaluation / Boosters / Prioritization / Coaching
Manager Sprint 2.
Leadership and Decision Making in Uncertainty
Three week sprint with group and individual coaching.
Managing and leading next is different from managing and leading now, In this sprint we introduce the skills, language, frameworks, and tools and system needed to plan and meet goals in a disciplined and rigorous way.
This sprint will equip you to help your teams avoid making costly gut instinct, political, emotional, and inconsistent decisions.
You will be introduced to a rational and systematic approach to lead your team in activities that produce the data your executives need to answer key questions and make tough decisions with confidence.
Week 1: Defining Opportunity Horizon Portfolios / Innovation Goal Setting / Strategic Alignment
Week 2: Innovation Criteria and Assessment
Week 3: Leadership and Decision Making Recap & Coaching
Manager Sprint 3.
Strategic Painstorming
Four week sprint with group and individual coaching.
People are conditioned to give the right answer, not ask the right question. This sprint gives you the tools and skills to make sure you don’t invest capital (human, economic, political, intellectual, reputational, etc.) in the wrong “it.”
During these sprints, participants will learn how to lead their teams in the application of a simple question-driven approach to quickly discover real pains/ needs/ opportunities/ challenges that can lead to strategically-aligned innovations that:
Optimize operational performance;
Grow your markets and revenue;
Renew your organization for the future;
Maximize the value realized from operations and practices you might exit.
Week 1: Pain Hypothesis Development
Week 2: Pain Mapping & Prioritization
Week 3: Challenge Framing
Week 4: Strategic Painstorming Recap & Coaching
Manager Sprint 4.
Discovery-Driven Development
Four week sprint with group and individual coaching.
Too often, capital gets invested in projects based on untested assumptions and best guesses that lead to low impact, project failures, overruns, increased costs, and missed deliverables.
In this sprint, intrapreneurial managers learn the discovery-driven development process, a radically different approach to manage the risk of uncertainty that comes with the execution of innovation projects.
Week 1: Introduction to Discovery-Driven Development / Set-Up Assumptions Canvases
Week 2: Validate Assumptions
Week 3: Small Bet Design
Week 4: Discovery-Driven Planning Recap and Coaching
Practitioner Sprints
These sprints forge a team of professional intrapreneurs equipped to execute strategically aligned innovation initiatives in a systematic way that uncovers the greatest opportunities and rigorously manages risk across your opportunity horizons.
Practitioner Sprint 1.
Intrapreneurial Baseline
Two week sprint with group coaching.
The conditions for intrapreneurial success are often lacking or misunderstood, leading to missed goals, disillusionment with innovation, and reinforcement of the status quo.
During this sprint, your practitioners will take our Intrapreneurial Readiness Assessment to discover where they stand and where to start.
We will evaluate your results to establish your practitioner baseline and prioritize opportunities for innovation productivity improvement.
Week 1: Introduction to Intrapreneurial Readiness and Assessment
Week 2: Evaluation / Boosters / Prioritization / Coaching
Practitioner Sprint 2.
Introduction to Think Wrong and the Next Cycle
Five week sprint with group and individual coaching.
One of the biggest barriers to establishing a system of innovation is the lack of shared and unifying language, frameworks, processes, and policies.
This sprint introduces your team of intrapreneurial practitioners to a practical, lightweight, and agile system that equips them to conceive of and execute your organization’s vision for what’s next.
Week 1: Introduction to Deflection Point / Certainty Map / Opportunity Horizons
Week 2: Introduction to Next Cycle / Next System
Week 3: Introduction to Pain Finding / Decision Making Criteria
Week 4: Introduction to Think Wrong Practices / Think Wrong Lab
Week 5: Next Frameworks and Practices Recap and Coaching
Practitioner Sprint 3.
Strategic Painstorming
Four week sprint with group and individual coaching.
People are conditioned to give the right answer, not ask the right question. This sprint gives you the tools and skills to make sure you don’t invest capital (human, economic, political, intellectual, reputational, etc.) in the wrong “it.”
During these sprints, participants will learn how to lead their teams in the application of a simple question-driven approach to quickly discover real pains/ needs/ opportunities/ challenges that can lead to strategically-aligned innovations that:
Optimize operational performance;
Grow your markets and revenue;
Renew your organization for the future;
Maximize the value realized from operations and practices you might exit.
Week 1: Pain Hypothesis Development
Week 2: Pain Mapping & Prioritization
Week 3: Challenge Framing
Week 4: Strategic Painstorming Recap & Coaching
Practitioner Sprint 4.
Think Wrong Facilitator Training and Solution Seeking
Five week sprint with group and individual coaching.
Our signature facilitator training will resume live and in person after the health crisis passes.
To increase your organization’s ability to think wrong about it’s now and next, we develop your corps of Think Wrong Facilitators who can facilitate and execute a radical problem-solving-system to conceive of, build, and operate unexpected, yet practical, solutions that conquer intractable biological and cultural forces that interfere with people's desire and ability to produce bold solutions.
Week 1: Introduction to Think Wrong Practices / Think Wrong Lab
Week 2: Face-to-Face and Virtual Facilitation
Week 3: Sprint and Blitz Design
Week 4: Sprint and Blitz Production
Week 5: Documentation and Report Building
Practitioner Sprint 5.
Discovery Driven Development
Five week sprint with group and individual coaching.
Too often, capital gets invested in projects based upon untested assumptions and best guesses that lead to low impact, project failures, overruns, increased costs, and missed deliverables.
In this sprint, you will learn a radically different discovery-driven development process to execute innovation projects. Discovery-driven development manages the risk of uncertainty by uncovering and addressing the assumptions that are most crucial to your success or failure.
Week 1: Introduction to Disovery-Driven Development / Set Up Assumptions Canvases
Week 2: Validate Assumptions
Week 3: Small Bet Design
Week 4: Discovery Driven Planning Recap and Coaching
Some of our Leaders of Next clients.
Future leaders are everywhere—in operational, customer-facing, and development roles. We equip these executives, managers, and practitioners nwith the skills, processes, and platforms they need to maximize the value of their mature offerings, improve the performance of what they do today, grow what’s next for their organizations, and invent what will come after that.
Our goal is for our clients is to help them build a scalable and sustainable army of professional intrapreneurs. Through the repeated use of a common language, process, frameworks, and tools, a shared understanding develops and propagates. Over time this understanding imbues the fabric of their organizations and outlasts any one person, team, or project. Through their leaders and a systematic approach, intrapreneurialism becomes an enduring part of their culture.
We work with each of our clients to develop a Leaders of Next Program that addresses their unique circumstances. We equip their people to be hands-on and master our proven intrapreneurial system, so they become independent of us.
When our clients invest in their Leaders of Next, they create opportunities and career paths for intrapreneurial executives, managers, and practitioners. Leaders who manage the risk and complexity of high-velocity change, possess the practical skills, processes, and tools to imagine, build, and launch what’s next. Leaders who act in a disciplined, systematic, prioritized, and rational way to help their entire organization achieve their strategic goals executing a portfolio of growth initiatives.
