Credit Union Blog 1.0: What does Innovation mean to Meridian?

While I don’t pretend to speak for the entire company, I can speak as Meridian’s VP of emerging markets and innovation on what innovation means to me. Innovation is more than an end result – it’s a process of reinvention, a journey without end, a business philosophy.  What I love about innovation is that it is empowering, engaging and collaborative by its very nature.

When discussing the mandate for my current role with my CEO, Sean Jackson, we came up with three broad areas of focus. They are:

·         Support the development of sustaining innovations to keep the core business competitive and growing.

·         Lead the development of disruptive financial services offers to create new markets and new business lines.

·         Support the credit union system through sharing innovative ideas and learning from others.

Sustaining Innovation: Building an innovative culture at Meridian

I have played the role of change agent numerous times in my career. What I love about cultural initiatives is the engaging of employees to co-create the end state and eventually own and sustain the desired culture. Creating culture is as much about listening as it is about communicating.  To be successful, employees must voluntarily contribute and cooperate. I can’t think of one successful change initiative that started with “this is the way we will do things from now on”.

So how do I propose to change a process and project driven culture into a more innovative and nimble let’s try and see culture?

Well, for starters I’ll begin with myself. You see, I’ve grown up in various run rate businesses managing and leading large corporate “best practice” change initiatives. I’ve made a career out of being a heads down and just get it done damn the torpedoes kind of guy. While I might be able to come up with innovative ways of cutting through bureaucracy and a few other good ideas, this type of cowboy approach does little to drive a culture of innovation across a wide geography of decentralized staff.  Over the last few years I’ve come more and more to appreciate the value of collaboration and open source development. The biggest benefit comes from getting people engaged up front in the development of the programs. But what if you don’t know what the change initiative is? What if the initiative is to create initiatives?

This is precisely where I think I can change my leadership style by taking advantage of modern collaborative tools. I have to get out of the box of corporate project teams and frontline focus sessions and into the world of open source online collaboration. This is the only practical way to engage the hearts and minds of the 1000 or so employees that we have spread across large geographies. It also cuts through artificial hierarchical barriers that exist in typical corporate offices.

We recently piloted some collaboration forums and blogs in our HR department at Meridian. I was amazed at the quality of ideas that came forth in the first few days. In a group of about 20 people, virtually all visited and read most of the site and topics. About 30% actively contributed by providing feedback and comments. Finally, about 15% voluntarily created their own content through the forums and blogs. That may not sound like much, but on an employee base of 1000, an actively engaged project team of 300 is larger than our entire corporate office and 150 content creators are almost twice as big as our leadership team.  The benefit in using this approach for projects or cultural shifts is that by the time a given initiative is developed, it’s practically already implemented.

Social media is not just a fad. Global giants like IBM use open source development to manage their international business on a daily basis. It’s just a matter of time before email and shared network folders are replaced by internal Facebooks, Twitters, blogs and forums.

Disruptive Innovation: Upsetting the apple cart

How does an ING swoop into a new market and build one of the top internet banks in Canada out of seemingly thin air? How can Manulife grow its lending book at 25% a year when most portfolios are flat and stagnating? Answer: do the job that no one else wants to do.

What’s the science to come up with the sure winner without losing focus of your core business? I can tell you from personal experience it is not by soliciting unanimous support for your ideas with the entire executive and leadership teams. Someone, somewhere in the organization has to sponsor the weird and whacky stuff. Michael Raynor, co-author with Clayten Christensen of the best selling business book “The Innovator’s Solution” describes the challenge thus:

“First, they must pre-empt those parent organization processes that threaten to weed out or otherwise undermine the pursuit of a disruptive strategy. Creating seemingly “inferior” products that appeal to apparently “unprofitable” customers that don’t fit into any defined “segments” is not something that most planning systems can cope with … It requires leadership of the first order … to overcome the kinds of organizational antibodies that would otherwise quash the growth opportunities created by disruption.”

Meridian is committed to investigating the possibility of disruptive financial services. The ultimate process to resource and incubate those ideas is something we are working through now. I spend a great deal of my time advocating the value of innovation and I’m confident that we will find a way to be weirder and whackier in the future. Which brings me to my final mandate: how can I engage and leverage the rest of the credit union system to help find innovative solutions to today’s business challenges?

System Innovation: Together, We’re Better

When piloting social media within Meridian and personally through my own blog, I was so intrigued by the feedback, perspective and fresh new thinking I could solicit through the use of social media, I just had to see if we could expand that forum to the credit union system as a whole. Luckily, innovation is a hot topic in these times and it wasn’t too long before I found some like minded credit union people who were willing to start up this forum – Shawna Miller from Affinity and Ed Brett from Westminster Savings. With a geography like Canada to contend with and limited start up budget of 50 bucks (at least in my department), having a kick off conference or setting up a one time webinar without an agenda seemed a little well, hopeless. Not to say that the success of this online community couldn’t one day morf into a national institute of financial innovation, we just have to start somewhere.  I am hoping that through this blog, these forums and the value provided through the resource section, we will find other credit union employees that are interested in creating content for this site. (That’s a plea to help get this started by the way.)

I hope that you have enjoyed reading a little about Meridian’s plans to support innovation and that if you have any suggestions on how we could proceed either at Meridian or with this online community please sign up and comment!

Best regards,

 

Robert Leaker

VP Emerging Markets and Innovation

Meridian Credit Union

www.meridiancu.ca

Email: Robert.leaker@meridiancu.ca

Web: www.justbankme.ca/blog