Prototyping to Innovation
Throughout our continued digital transformation, we learned that we need to create an area where digital experimentation and learning is encouraged, a place where we could foster the innovation mindset. An investment that we chose to make at Cargill was in the form of Cargill Digital Labs (CDL); essentially you can think of CDL as a digital laboratory in which we can test ideas, technologies and incubate thoughts of internal customers. The initial investment in CDL was in our Immersive Learning Center (ILC) which is a team which provides internal coaching and Rapid Prototyping services.
What is Rapid Prototyping?
The Rapid Prototyping service is a place to safely experiment on ideas, largely focused on the perspective of the user experience. We solicit ideas throughout the organization and ask them to bring us an idea and invest their time with us; in turn we bring the engineering talent to rapidly learn together.
The outcome of each engagement is a unique prototype, delivered in six weeks, where our primary focus is to inform an investment decision for the idea. The investment may come in the form of dollars to build out a product, identifying the talent needed for success, or no longer pursuing the idea.
Renaming Failure
We are embracing failure through prototyping - which is a culture changing moment for us. Failure can manifest itself in many ways, from determining that a product idea will not create the value we thought it would, to seeing value in a product but determining certain feature sets are not needed.
The key is to capture the learnings which ensure value in every failure. We subscribe to a core value of “knowing your blast radius” – fail under conditions where everyone is safe and learning rapidly in small iterations. Through this, we avoid costly large failures because we have achieved learning, made an informed decision from the learning, and caused no damage.
The Prototyping Journey
We are now several prototypes into the service offering and have observed an interesting growth in the types of ideas that are coming our way. This reinforces the benefit of prototyping.
The first ideas that came into our backlog were simple and straightforward, and in some cases proven capabilities in the market. As opposed to turning them away, we embraced the engagements and applied a lens of experimentation to them. For example, if a business partner asked for a customer portal, we didn’t point them to the multitude of robust options in the market. Instead, we worked with our partners to identify the hypothesis they have on how their customers will engage this portal, and how to think differently about testing that hypothesis. Then, we started building: developing ever changing ideas and fostering continued experimentation.
The prototype process has achieved some wins at an individual level along the way. One example is where a business partner, challenging himself to think outside of the box, brought us an idea during a prototype to add a layer of gamification to it.
The big wins, though, come in the form of new ideas coming into the service. These include ideas that may just be crazy enough to work … or not. We aren’t sure yet, and that’s the whole point. This is the land where transformational innovation exists. I firmly believe that to see these transformational ideas land in our backlog, we first had to work on the simpler ones – gaining the trust of our partners and leadership - and we will continue to do so. As teams begin to envision the art of the possible, they will have a means to experiment available to them.
What is next
Living the spirit of experimentation, we have always treated our service as an experiment to be measured and refined. We are on the precipice of some large decisions. Currently we time-box ideas to 6 weeks and rapidly help our business partners learn whether they need to further invest or not. We believe it’s now time to consider the next phase of our service evolution. In order for experimentation to be sustainable throughout the organization, the act should be something everyone is empowered to do and not just a service that someone engages. We do not currently have the answers to how our future will evolve, but the experiment will continue … rapidly!