Three characteristics of a good challenge book

Step-2 of our “8-steps to innovation” book is “Create a challenge book”. When I visit any organization, one of the first things I look for is a challenge book. Unfortunately, very few places that I have visited were able to articulate top few challenges clearly. Some of them discover in a leadership meeting that they don’t know what the top challenges are or at least there is no consensus on what the top challenges are. Without this clarity, it is difficult to focus innovation efforts. What are the characteristics of a good challenge book? Here are three:

    1.      Current-ness: What’s the point in making a list of challenges in an off-site and not updating it until the next one? In fact, a challenge book should be current like an airline arrival/departure list. OK, perhaps not that current. But it should be current within at least a few weeks. It is possible that the few top challenges may not change within weeks. It also helps to retire challenges which are not relevant any more.

     2.      Prioritization: Earlier this week, I got an opportunity to meet the manager of a new product development team of one of the largest e-commerce companies in India. The product manager was candid enough to articulate some of the tough challenges he and his team is focusing on. However, his team is relatively small – ten people. I asked him how he prioritizes his challenges. He said that he is still learning. The team used to change the priorities every day a few years back. Then they learnt to hold the priorities for at least a month. Now, the team is learning to set priorities for a quarter. Without prioritization or with rapidly changing prioritizing the team can be lost. Besides the toughest challenges don't vanish in a day or two, perhaps even in a quarter or two.

3.      Championing: This characteristic marks the difference between action and inaction on the challenge. A challenge either finds a champion or gets buried. A challenge is unaddressed doesn’t mean it dies. If a restaurant doesn’t respond to “home delivery through mobile app” trend, it may suffer its consequences eventually. But every tough challenge would need a person in a leadership position to champion it. This means she would put her weight behind the challenge, put a few resources together to study the issues and experimentation on the topic. A challenge book should indicate who the challenge is championed by in case it indeed has a champion. Number of challenges championed by people with senior positions is one of the important health indicators of its innovation initiative.

In short, current-ness, prioritization and championing are the three characteristics of a good challenge book. Hope this helps you to improve your challenge book.