A Unique Approach to Innovation

My perspective is that innovation for us is anchored around being responsive to ever-evolving customer needs, which are in turn responding to our customers’ ever-evolving external operating environment. The current operating context is the increasing cost of living — fuel, rent/mortgages, electricity, food. However, in the last few years, we have had a wide range of material shifts in our operating contexts — think fires and floods … I’m sure the locusts and the famine are next.

If that is indeed a relevant and appropriate definition of innovation, then I’d say that clubs in NSW are first-class innovators.  Clubs are incredibly connected to their customers, more so than in any other organisation or industry I’ve ever worked in. 

Large corporates and listed public companies seem to hire consultants to run “customer centricity operating design workshops” to ensure they have “continuous customer centric operating processes improvement pipelines of work” — I mean … yawn … basically just millions of dollars being spent on external consultants to produce PowerPoint presentations, which essentially just say: “go and talk to your customers and find out what they want/need/value and then deliver it efficiently”.

Yet in every club I go into (and in week 14 for me I’m still pounding the pavement meeting club managers and their teams!), all I see around me is club employees talking, engaging, serving or assisting their members. And not because they are getting “paid” to do it, but because they are simply wired that way. They actually care and have an intrinsic personal purpose that is oriented around doing good, and they work at the club because the know that the club does too. They are innovative (and are excellent at being innovative) because they have to be. Often they have minimal resources, so they intuitively ensure that their business is optimised to guarantee that the benefits the club delivers to its community can reach as many people as possible. Because that aligns with its purpose, and our industry’s purpose, and we don’t need a PowerPoint deck to tell us how to do it.

And you can’t buy that kind of human spirit, you grow it — with great culture, great people, through LISTENING to your customers and through caring and developing your employees. When you get that right, you innovate without even thinking about it. It is not about “failing fast”, it is about not actually having the luxury of failing because you are being relied upon by so many. Maybe that is what drives true innovation? 

“Clubs are incredibly connected to their customers, more so than in any other organisation or industry I’ve ever worked in.” — Rebecca Riant, ClubsNSW CEO