How to Rescue a Gate Meeting

I regularly facilitate multi-million-dollar innovation decision meetings. In fact, I have observed or facilitated hundreds of them over my 30-year career at Stage-Gate International. What distinguishes between a company exceeding its innovation profit goals or failing usually amounts to the effectiveness of its Go/Kill decisions (Gate Meetings).

Yet, business leaders and innovators alike describe their decision process and meetings as a painful, disappointing experience. Worse, bad meetings also tend to yield poor results. Let’s fix this.

Are your go/no-go decision meetings plagued with problems?

– hit or miss attendance, with key people missing,

– lack of clarity with roles,

– poor informational decision support,

– no agenda or meeting flow to build the decision,

– ineffective decision criteria,

– no decision goals,

– lack of transparency,

– lack of focus,

– lack of orientation (where you are in the bigger picture),

– too much emphasis on low impact, low value-creating activity,

– no code of conduct, resulting in people behaving badly:

• • • dominating airtime,

• • • interrupting speakers,

• • • off-point questions/discussions,

• • • ill-prepared or lack of real contribution,

• • • deferred/delayed decisions,

• • • lack of alignment and support for a decision,

• • • lack of clarity on resource commitments to advance,

• • • no prioritization relative to other competing initiatives,

• • • lack of clarity on the next steps,

• • • lack of integrity – failure to do what you agreed to do.

Demanding Decisions

By their very nature, innovation projects tackle challenges that are new to the company, ill-defined or described as fuzzy, carry uncertainty, complexity, and risk, take longer to complete, involve multiple internal and external stakeholders, and typically cost more in terms of person-hours, dollars, and capital investment. Indeed, innovation investment decision-making represents one of the most demanding decisions a business leader will make. This is intensified when the organization manages multiple, diverse innovation portfolio(s), effectively multiplying the volume of timely decisions required for success. Many studies indicate that the average innovation failure rate is nearing 75%! Our research also confirms this. However, our research also reveals that one group of companies gets it right more than 75% of the time1.

Getting Gates Right

If innovation decisions are inherently challenging, why bother? Well, innovation is one of the most effective growth tools in the business toolkit. Innovations create real value, top-line profitable growth, deliver higher rates of return on your investment, establish hard-to-copy competitive advantages, and satisfy customers – all while advancing your business strategy. Innovation is the only sustainable path to grow profitably. So, getting innovation right means reliable, profitable growth. But getting innovation right also means getting decisions right.

Gate Governance Framework

When Stage-Gate International Founder, Dr Robert Cooper, introduced the science-based Stage-Gate® Innovation Model, he presented a novel decision framework tailor-made to the uniqueness of innovations, called Gates. Gate Governance has since become the industry standard framework for project and portfolio decision-making within organizations prioritizing innovation investment. Based on the options trading model and integrated with the lifecycle stages of development, it introduces three key concepts:

1. Multiple decision points. Expecting even your most experienced business leaders to make just one successful investment decision at the inception of an innovative concept when information is limited, fluid & potentially inaccurate is flawed thinking. You increase your odds of commercial success when you introduce a few decision points throughout the life of the project. These decision points are called Gates. Yes, there is a method to determine the optimal number of Gates for each type of innovation.
2. Robust team-based decision analysis. Anticipating that every innovative project your organization imagines will develop into a commercial success is flawed thinking. Changing market conditions alone is enough to sour even the most initially promising idea. Therefore, at every Gate, decision-makers must have the right to proceed but without the obligation. We can increase success by introducing a mechanism to ‘spot & stop’ deteriorating projects and reallocate resources to projects with growth potential. Gates are dynamic, rigorous, cross-functional business assessments resulting in Go/Kill decisions that convert pipeline tunnels into funnels. Yes, there is a method to determine optimal decision criteria, team-based decision code of conduct, decision support, and integration to typically fixed Operating Plans.
3. Governance. Expecting that even your most skilled project team can successfully drive the development of a new product or innovation from inception to launch while navigating the organization – with speed –without the oversight and sponsorship of a decision team is flawed thinking. Organizations are purpose-built to execute repetitive, lean, predictable operations at volume. Inversely, innovating is a dynamic learning process that creates new value through change. It challenges norms as it experiments with new solutions that will ultimately pave the way for the organization to advance in new strategic ways. New product/innovation teams encounter numerous points of friction that create delays or, worse, coax compromises and substandard solutions that can lead to poor in-market results. We can increase team success while reducing friction by engaging the decision team beyond the discrete decision points – in what happens before and after each Gate – a bigger picture of the complete process from start to end. The decision team’s ‘process leadership’ accelerates speed to market while focusing on the ultimate performance goal of succeeding in the market. Process leadership accelerates organizational readiness by resolving potential organizational conflict (e.g. preserving the current operational status quo for leverage or optimizing/evolving operations to support the new product/innovation) at each Gate. This process leadership is called Gate Governance.

How to Rescue a Gate Meeting

If you experience decision problems regularly or you are not achieving desired return on innovation investment, you are likely missing key aspects of a robust Gate Governance Framework. Examine and focus on your improvements here. Consider collaborating with us to learn more about our proprietary designs for Gates, Gatekeeping, Gatekeepers and decision support tools.

If you have a robust Gate Governance Framework in place, but you experience the odd decision meeting that spirals out of control, your Gatekeepers are yet to find their rhythm as a cross-functional decision team, or they are not leveraging the decision supports available to guide tough decisions. You can rescue a wayward Gate Meeting using this approach:

1. Pause the Gate Meeting.
2. Summarize the discussion thus far.
   Ask a Gatekeeper (decision-maker) to summarize the key points/themes discussed thus far (from their point of view).
   Confirm if all agree.
3. Recall the purpose of the Gate decision.
   The spirit & purpose of each Gate should define the decision challenge in a way that makes it easier to know when you have achieved the goal of the meeting. Does the spirit & purpose of the Gate align with the themes raised during the meeting? Has the decision team mistakenly jumped ahead of itself? This can happen when we become excited by the potential of an opportunity. We ask questions that need information that are yet to be obtained by the team. Remind the Gatekeepers that a GO decision equates to a decision to purchase the next Stage so the team can obtain the information they are looking for. Confirm if they are indeed signaling a GO decision.
4. Recall the agenda.
   Have we mistakenly veered off course? Perhaps we dove into unusual technical detail? Are we jumping around, or are we maintaining discipline to the flow that will build a decision? Perhaps we wrapped up too soon – after we made a GO/KILL decision, but before we clarified prioritization or resource commitments for the next Stage? This can happen when we forget the agenda format or when Gatekeepers are not prepared. A visual process check can help Gatekeepers orientate and contribute accordingly. Or it may lead to a discussion on how to improve the flow of information and/or agenda discussion to better serve the decision maker’s needs.
5. Recall the criteria that guide the decision.
   Are we making good use of available decision support? Or are we resorting to gut feel and intuition which can impede alignment? One of the most under-utilized yet most effective decision support tools is the Likelihood of Commercial Success Scorecard with six proven criteria. This tool saves time because it immediately reveals the weak links in a project: areas where all believe the project is lacking strength, and where there is high disagreement among the subject matter experts. The scorecard equips each Gatekeeper the opportunity to articulate their unique point of view/lens, increasing the likelihood that all bases will be covered. Gatekeepers can focus their discussion here, if there is disagreement. Or, on the forced rank prioritization (how the project fits/compares with other competing initiatives) if there is disagreement on resource allocation.

Every Gate Meeting is a tough Go/Kill decision. When you support your decision-makers with a best-in-class decision framework, you find you rarely have to ‘rescue’ a gate meeting.

As go the gates, so goes the process

Dr Robert G. Cooper, the Father of Stage-Gate^®

Pioneers in Innovation Governance

Our company and its Founders, Dr Robert G. Cooper and Dr Scott J. Edgett, are the pioneers of Innovation Governance. Our solutions – the Gate Governance Framework for individual projects, and the Portfolio Governance Framework for multiple projects, have become industry standard. It started with a first-of-its-kind innovation benchmarking study and eventually became a continuous, 45-year fact-finding mission, to surface the most important practices and drivers of in-market business success. Over the years, many of these practices and drivers have remained central to success and have stood the test of time. Today, we continue this mission to stay on top of innovation management for you so you can focus on what matters most to your organization and your customers – delivering high-impact innovation.