Get Your Organization to Behave Like a Startup - Part 1

In this first of a 4-part series, I will introduce a process that has been successfully used to ignite entrepreneurial behavior inside of large, established organizations.  The Actionable Creativity and Collaboration Team (AC²T) model is a framework that has been the catalyst for a wide range of applications and is something you can apply across industries and with organizations of varying size.  In this first part, I will describe what AC²T is and its benefits.

The Actionable Creativity and Collaboration Team (AC²T) model is a framework that can be used to accelerate development of innovative solutions where organizations become stuck in traditional thinking, can’t break out of old practices, or face difficulty surfacing new ideas within their culture and processes.  AC²T is designed for highly intractable problems requiring a degree of innovation beyond the established norms of a team or where groupthink has brought a team to a standstill.  The model is equipped to foster ‘intrepreneurship’ (entrepreneurship within a large organization) and can be adapted for groups of any size.  The basic concept is to charter a small team to act as a new business start-up to solve a specific problem without the constraints of the parent organization.  In this 4-part series, the AC²T model, implementation steps, and guidelines will be provided so you can charter and implement the process in your own organization.

Benefits of the AC²T Approach

The AC²T framework has consistently resulted in disruptive ideas that have game-changing potential for the company.  By emulating the conditions of a start-up within the organization and isolating them so that team members are unencumbered by traditional thinking, ideation begins to bloom and creativity is dramatically increased.  Once ideas have been generated and one or more potential solutions are briefed to the executive team, the application or adaptation of those ideas can be put into action.

Aside from the direct benefits of the AC²T approach, there are a number of other important advantages that should not be overlooked.

First, AC²T team members are given opportunity to develop new leadership skills during the process.  When the group is chartered, it is given the flexibility to determine how it will function as a team.  A team leader is not pre-determined when selected and the team members may decide to select a leader or to function without one.  Teams are left to journey through the forming-storming-norming-performing cycle and to work out mechanisms for decision-making and team management.  This gives each team member the opportunity to explore and discover the strengths and weaknesses of each other and themselves as well as seek ways to manage through them.

Project management skills are also a key benefit of the AC²T approach.  AC²T team members should be selected from early career professionals.  Therefore, it is unlikely that most if not all members would have had leadership and project management experience prior to the AC²T project.  Further, the tight constraints of time and budget used in an AC²T project forces team members to structure their effort and manage their time and money in a way that will enable them to meet their objectives.  This kind of pressure forces the team to function in creative ways, increases focus on project objectives, and structures their work in a way that is highly efficient.

The requirement to develop and deliver a compelling executive brief at the end of the AC²T project helps to develop and tune communication skills.  The team must create a briefing that is convincing at an executive level taking into account not just technical characteristics, but business and other factors as well.  This helps develop business case development skills and broadens the experience of team members.  From an executive perspective, a well-executed AC²T project enables leaders to test early career employees, identify employees with untapped potential, and select individuals for additional challenges and stretch assignments.

Stay tuned for the next article which will describe the conditions that may benefit from an AC²T approach.

Duane Grove is founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.