
In this lecture you draw the five steps an idea takes in your organisation, add the hours of work and the days of waiting to each step, and see which handover kills most of your ideas.
This course is built from five disciplines: the people practices of a company that made innovation part of its machinery, structured problem solving, process optimisation, gamification and knowledge management.
The map of the course
A dictionary for reading lectures from other fields as innovation work
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Idea Path Map and fill in one line after each lecture.
The specifics of how Google recruits
Which qualities they actually look for
Why academic record turned out not to predict anything
Using algorithms and data in selection, and the structured interview
The candidate rating system
Reaching consensus in assessment
The role of the hiring committee
Errors of the first and second kind in hiring, and the idea of Googleyness
Orientation week and how a first week is structured
A culture of learning and development
The role of mentoring
Feedback systems, and why cultural fit is treated as measurable
How performance is measured
How objectives and key results actually work in practice
Individual against team performance
Autonomy versus control, and the manager's role in improving output
Reviews and career conversations
The development opportunities available
Rotation and an internal marketplace for roles
Promotion, moving into new roles, and internal training
What Googleyness means concretely
The principles of the organisational culture
The role of openness and transparency
Working with motivation, and designing the physical environment
Stimulating creativity as a designed condition rather than a hope
Twenty percent time for personal projects, and what it actually produced
How innovation is supported structurally
Managing change, and turning mistakes into learning rather than into blame
The role of data and metrics in people decisions
Using machine learning and AI
Forecasting departures
Evaluating whether an initiative worked, and where the discipline is heading
What a troubleshooter is and how the role differs from crisis management
Problem versus trouble, and when this method is the right response
The four steps: localise, find the cause, propose, implement
Balancing speed with systems thinking, and the error of treating symptoms
Moving from symptoms to substance with the 5W1H template
SCQA for packaging a problem into a clear request
Logic trees and MECE so nothing is missed
Cause and goal trees, and checking what is genuinely in scope
Five Whys as the simplest root extractor
The Ishikawa diagram and its categories of cause
Confirming a cause is real rather than a tidy story
Hypotheses versus facts, and the danger of stopping too early
The eighty-twenty rule applied to finding the vital few factors
The Pareto chart: seeing where most of the damage sits
Process mapping and bottlenecks through Theory of Constraints
Check sheets, data stratification, and prioritising by impact against cost
Brainstorming done properly, with its rules and its anti-rules
SCAMPER and Six Thinking Hats for getting past the obvious
Mind mapping for fast idea branching
The barriers to creativity, and screening ideas quickly against criteria
The Ideal Final Result and the search for hidden resources
Formulating and resolving contradictions without compromising
Altshuller's forty principles with business examples
Simplified ARIZ, and when TRIZ beats brainstorming and when it does not
Stratagems and paradoxical questions for apparently hopeless tasks
Recognising psychological inertia and breaking the pattern
Morphological analysis: combining parameters into new solutions
The focal object method, and when to reach for advanced techniques at all
The role of moderator, staying neutral and goal-focused
The script for a collective session: analysis, ideas, choice, plan
Handling domination, conflict and idle discussion
Nominal group technique, Delphi and online whiteboards, plus the ethics of it
Profitability problems: decomposing revenue and cost to find the dip
Business situation analysis, SWOT and the 5P for strategy questions
Lean and Six Sigma for process speed and defect reduction
McKinsey 7S for organisational diagnosis, and ADKAR and Kotter for implementation
The full map of methods from root cause analysis to TRIZ and Lean
Why no single method covers everything, and how to combine them
A personal development plan across analytics, creativity and stress management
Learning from each case, and the responsibility the role carries
What a process is, and the characteristics it has
The different types of process
What process improvement actually means
What it buys you, stated concretely
The core values behind process improvement
What causes a process to need improving
What waste is, and what standardisation is
Process maturity, the five phases of improvement, and where to start
What process mapping is and how it differs from modelling
Stakeholder maps and relationship maps
Flow maps and cross-functional maps
The value stream map, what maps consist of, and the stages of building one
The process improvement framework
How improvement connects to strategy rather than running beside it
The phases from planning through to implementation
What process architecture is and what it gives you
Process-oriented architecture
What process modelling involves and how to manage it
Where to start when nothing is documented
What structured problem solving is
5S, Five Whys and 8D
Activity network and affinity diagrams
Benchmarking, checklists, cause-and-effect and flow diagrams
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Companies do not lack ideas. They lack a way of turning an idea into a changed process, and a way of remembering what they already tried.
So the same suggestion is made every eighteen months, by someone new, and dies at the same point every time.
Where innovation actually breaks
Ideas are generated in workshops and then handed to a process that was designed for something else, so the idea is what gets modified. Nobody framed the problem before solving it, which means several people are solving different problems in the same room. The tools available are brainstorming and enthusiasm, which fail on any contradiction that has no obvious compromise.
And when a team disbands, everything they learned leaves with them, because it was never captured anywhere a future team would look.
A company that built it in, and a method for hard problems
Thirty-eight lessons. Eight on how Google institutionalised this: structured selection, hiring committees and the two kinds of error, orientation and learning culture, OKR and the autonomy question, internal mobility, transparency, twenty percent time, treating mistakes as data, and people analytics. Their innovation output is the result of that machinery rather than of hiring unusually creative people.
Then ten on structured problem solving. Framing with 5W1H, SCQA and MECE trees. Root cause analysis with Five Whys and Ishikawa, including how to confirm a cause is real. Pareto and Theory of Constraints. SCAMPER, Six Thinking Hats, morphological analysis and the focal object method. TRIZ with the Ideal Final Result and Altshuller's forty principles, for contradictions that appear to have no compromise. Group facilitation with nominal group technique and Delphi. And the standard frameworks with guidance on which fits which problem.
Process, participation and memory
Then eight on process optimisation, because an idea meets the old process long before it meets the market: waste, standardisation, maturity, five types of process map, improvement frameworks, process architecture, and the full tool set from 5S and 8D through SIPOC, DRIVE and ICOR to prioritisation matrices — plus how a culture of improvement is actually built.
Then six on gamification, which is the practical answer to voluntary participation: mechanics for attraction, onboarding, recognition, culture and learning, including the options that need no platform and no budget.
And six on knowledge management, which is what stops the organisation relearning the same lesson: capture methods, wikis and ontologies, communities of practice, retrospectives, effectiveness indices, and a strategy that survives staff turnover.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — a games company among them, where the difference between a mechanic that produces participation and one that produces resentment is not theoretical.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Start with the memory problem
Ask whether anyone in your organisation has tried the thing you are about to try. Then ask where you would look to find out. In most companies there is no answer to the second question, and that alone explains a large part of why progress feels circular. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.