Happy Birthday, PF Lab! Mode 2.
How do you foster employee-driven innovation, when all your talents and resources are absorbed in huge and essential projects to secure the company’s future? Here’s PostFinance’s approach in “Mode 2” and the role of their PostFinance Innovation Lab (PF Lab).
Here’s their story.
Let’s celebrate PF Lab’s 1st birthday!
Team PF Lab in Mode 2: Fabienne Bürkli, Patricia Schmid, Monika Blaser, Nicolas Bärtschi
(c) PF Lab
PostFinance is one of Switzerland’s major domestic financial institutions. As part of the Swiss Post, PostFinance is head-quartered in Bern, has 3’600 employees, and provides banking and transaction services to consumers and corporates.
Since 2014 the whole organisation is putting all possible effort into the biggest transformation projects in the company’s history.
There was – and still is – serious concern that under these circumstances smaller and disruptive ideas might not get any attention at all, and hence the company might overlook promising, maybe smaller business opportunities.
Also, the carefully initialised process of fostering employee-driven ideas might falter.
Mode 1 and Mode 2.
PostFinance differentiates between:
“Mode 1” – the predictable way of working, doing projects: clear job descriptions and organisational setup, clear assignments, water fall projects, big bang launches.
“Mode 2” – the exploratory way of approaching challenges: agile, Design Thinking, mixed teams, backlog management, focus on delivering results in consecutive steps.
Both are value-generating ways of working – the challenge is to choose which mode fits best for a challenging project.
No Champion – No Project. Monika.
As an upcoming IT manager, Monika found her decisive innovation challenge in supporting a close colleague to steer his innovative business idea through the organisation.
She then grabbed the chance to take an official 6-month “suspension” from her regular job to develop the idea of the PostFinance Innovation Lab – a physical space that would support idea champions like her colleague (and herself), once they passed the initial milestone.
She quickly found an unused office space to turn straightforwardly into a lab. She was able to hire Nicolas, as the first intern, and they made a trip to IKEA to get a basic set of tables, chairs and a shelf – to put their “Hot Dog”-cooker on. While they arranged the space into a functional lab, Nicolas and Monika were supporting a business idea at the same time. The perfect occasion to learn what is really needed and helpful so they could constantly optimize the lab space and its offering.
1’000 visitors in 1 year. Congratulations!
Now, one year later, over 1’000 colleagues have come to visit her team for a tour, 25 idea champions have entered the PF Lab with their projects, the space interior has progressed into a compact innovation hub, including an “idea cemetery”, and the team is holding regular “Hot Dog”-events with speakers from in-/outside PostFinance.
Patricia giving a tour: Storytelling with Matt’s champion journey (sequence of drawings hanging from the ceiling)
(c) Lars Diener-Kimmich
The PF Lab Team at work.
I have been Monika’s and her team’s sparring partner and innovation coach since they had just come back from their first IKEA shopping trip.
It’s been an amazing project!
Here are some key insights into why this project has been so successful so far.
We’ve mapped all the stakeholders, and then decided to focus on the most important one (the idea champion), and built everything else around it.
We developed a fictitious Champion’s Journey: Matt’s story on how he exchanges his idea to a colleague, who then connects him to the coaches at the PF Lab. Matt then on-boards and iterates his idea to a successful go-to-market and then returns to his former job, with a whole set of Mode 2-work experience to share (and hence contributes to transforming the way PostFinance works).
We visualised Matt’s Champion Journey with the help of an art student – and hung it up the same day: the visuals allow everyone to introduce the PF Lab to visitors in a 15 minute-tour, without further preparations (see picture above).
We have defined a large set of supporting practices, methods, key players, etc. as a “tool box” and now develop it in an agile way: what the champions need comes first.
PostFinance has sponsored an appropriate amount of resources to keep the team hungry, ambitious and in shape – (neither starve nor over-feed the team).
The PF Lab team has done a great job developing a diverse network of fans, supporters, experts and management to join them in supporting the champions (and their teams) or with contributions to events.
Buzzer, Cemetery and Ratrac rides.
We’ve had great working and wild ideation sessions.
Here are 3 of my favourite practices that illustrate the chemistry and vibe of the PF Lab Team in Mode 2.
Buzzer. Champions are required to expose their progress with their idea at last every 2 weeks (compare with agile sprints).
They do this in what we call a “Watering Hole” – an invited set of 5-10 participants with specific profiles that give them green/red feedback. So, how do you find these participants? The red “buzzer” (in fact it is now an app) allows the champion to call up the more than 80 registered participants by requesting certain profiles to get feedback from, and of course defining the time and place where the pitch will take place.
It’s intriguing as a basic idea – and now starts to get traction among the PF Lab community.
Use the Buzzer: assemble colleagues to get feedback on your project
Cemetery. When progressing step-by-step in an innovation project, a champion asks “Love it, Change it, Leave it?” again, and again.
Culturally the hardest call is to “leave it”. We dug deeper to find a way to facilitate easier decision-making when it comes to stopping a project and introduced the “idea cemetery” – building on: respect for past champions and ideas, keeping the past present, allowing to learn from past projects and failures, and allowing younger ones to trace back in history.
It’s pragmatic – and it works.
Idea Cemetery: use the past (champions, projects, learnings)
(c) Fabienne Bürkli
Ratrac rides.
(A “Ratrac” is a specialised machine to prepare ski slopes. They operate when the lifts are closed, deep into the night. It’s very exclusive to be able to go along for a ride – and very fascinating.)
Monika’s sponsor from the top management had the idea to use the expert know-how from his management colleagues (Top70) for the mentoring/coaching of the champions. The challenges: Do these champions feel comfortable to be mentored by a top manager? Do these managers want to mentor? How do we match them?
We discussed how to define a concept, how to find a process for match-making, and then came across Ratrac-rides. Instead of writing a perfect concept, the team just started with the first rides. Fabienne (a first-year intern) pitched the idea to the sponsor, then set up the first pairings, where a mentor would come on site to get a 1:1 introduction to the project by the champion (so to speak in his/her Ratrac cabin).
And now, they take it from there. Step-by-step.
Ratrac rides: an exclusive 1:1 introduction to an innovation project
(c) Nicolas Bärtschi
What’s next?
The PF Lab just turned one.
The primary focus remains on the idea champions and their teams.
The first product that was accelerated by PF Lab is successfully launched in the market.
Meanwhile the PostFinance’s and Swiss Post’s Boards of directors visited PF Lab and were enthusiastic. Several supporting and enhancing activities were released for the future.
In the end it’s the results that justify the PF Lab and makes it well-established.
There are two kinds of outputs:
Successful projects.
A small, powerful number of champions and team members that have experienced an intensive way of working on their projects.
When they return to their “normal” working environment, they will have learned a lot and will have a transformative effect without being dogmatic: “Mode 2”.
Happy Birthday, PF Lab!
(Monika co-authored this blog post with me.)
