Accelerated Innovation

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Identifying Potential Risks & Blockers

Description

Identifying and mitigating GenAI-related risks and blockers is essential to maintaining momentum and confidence as your efforts scale. This includes uncovering hidden technical, strategic, or organizational hurdles that can slow progress or limit impact.

Why it's Important

As GenAI initiatives evolve, organizations often encounter unforeseen challenges that can derail timelines, inflate costs, or diminish impact. These risks may include issues with data quality, compliance gaps, internal misalignment, or inadequate change management. By proactively identifying and addressing these blockers, teams are better positioned to sustain velocity, avoid rework, and maintain executive confidence. This capability becomes especially critical as the number and complexity of GenAI use cases increase across the organization.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Lack of Visibility Across Teams: Risks often emerge in silos, making it difficult to detect cross-functional blockers early.
  • Reactive vs. Proactive Mindset: Many teams focus on solving issues after they occur instead of building upfront risk management practices.
  • Unclear Ownership: It’s not always obvious who is responsible for identifying and managing risks across GenAI initiatives.
  • Changing Risk Landscape: New technologies, regulations, and dependencies frequently reshape what constitutes a material risk.
  • Low Tolerance for Failure: Fear of reputational or financial consequences can discourage open identification of blockers.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires structured processes, executive alignment, and consistent cross-team engagement to proactively surface and resolve risks.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the Defining Your Strategy to Win with GenAI workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices.
  • Assessing Organizational Readiness for GenAI.
  • Designing the GenAI Strategy Framework.
  • Aligning GenAI Strategy with Enterprise Objectives.
  • Sequencing Strategic GenAI Initiatives.
  • Defining KPIs for GenAI Strategy Execution.
  • Define Your Action Plan: Set a clear, prioritized action plan to strengthen Defining Your GenAI Strategy – combining the standard launch-pad actions with the targeted activities below. 

Jumpstarting Your Plan 

  • Define your accountable lead(s), their roles, responsibilities, and committed capacity 
  • Deliver your first 90-day quick wins 
  • Configure your Delta 7/28 Plan module 
  • Define your measures of success and insights plan 
  • Build and kick off your change and comms plan 

Targeted Activities 

  • Establish your risks, issues, blockers system (RIBs) and weekly triage 
  • Implement your integrated risk, security, and responsible AI gates for the roadmap 
  • Complete your early risk and trust review for candidate ideas (RAI-lite) 
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Build a Common Risk Taxonomy: Establish shared terminology to align teams and reduce confusion.
  • Identify Low-Risk Pilots: Select initiatives with limited downside that still surface meaningful blockers.
  • Conduct Post-Mortems Early: Review past GenAI missteps or stalled projects to uncover hidden blockers.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale.
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Review current GenAI initiatives to identify friction points and unresolved risks.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Establish boundaries and approval criteria for how risks should be identified, flagged, and mitigated.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Ensure consistent tracking of issues, delays, or blockers across teams and use cases.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units.
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Sequence rollout in stages to allow for risk and blocker assessments at each phase.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Ensure relevant teams understand their roles in identifying and mitigating risks.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Establish ongoing communication loops to surface blockers early and share lessons learned.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases.
  • Define a Risk & Blocker Playbook: Capture repeatable methods for identifying and addressing common issues.
  • Standardize Risk Escalation Protocols: Ensure all teams know when and how to elevate critical blockers.
  • Track Risk Trends Over Time: Analyze patterns to preemptively manage recurring friction points.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers.
  • Integrate Risk Reviews into Governance Processes: Make risk checkpoints a routine part of decision-making.
  • Expand Cross-Functional Participation: Ensure that legal, compliance, and security teams are actively engaged.
  • Build Internal Risk Champions: Empower team leads to own and drive risk identification practices.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum.
  • Highlight Blocker Breakthroughs: Share stories of how critical risks were overcome.
  • Recognize Risk Ownership: Acknowledge individuals or teams that proactively managed high-impact issues.
  • Share Lessons Learned: Create a learning loop by communicating how identified blockers informed future strategies.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away”, on the other hand, suggests that the specific Capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine.
  • Embed Risk Monitoring into Delivery Pipelines: Ensure automated checks and alerts are part of day-to-day GenAI workflows.
  • Establish End-to-End Visibility Across Teams: Provide shared dashboards to track blockers across functions and projects.
  • Eliminate Manual Reporting Gaps: Automate blocker logging and escalation to avoid missed issues.
  • Leverage Automation: Use GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort.
  • Automate Blocker Identification in Communications: Use GenAI to scan project updates and flag early risk indicators.
  • Use Predictive Models to Forecast Risks: Leverage historical patterns to proactively identify high-risk efforts.
  • Integrate Automated Alerts for Critical Delays: Notify teams when blocker thresholds are triggered.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases.
  • Conduct Regular Risk Retrospectives: Identify improvement areas and update playbooks accordingly.
  • Expand to Emerging Use Cases: Apply risk frameworks to new GenAI applications with unknown variables.
  • Benchmark Risk Practices Against Industry Leaders: Continuously compare and upgrade based on peer insights.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Assuming Risks Are Obvious: Many blockers go unnoticed without structured identification methods.
  • Over-Relying on Postmortems: Waiting until after issues occur limits your ability to prevent them.
  • Ignoring Cross-Team Dependencies: Blockers often emerge at handoffs between teams or processes.
  • Failing to Assign Ownership: Without clear accountability, risk mitigation efforts stall.
  • Treating All Risks Equally: Not all risks have the same impact-prioritization is critical.

Targeted Benefits

While Identifying Potential Risks & Blockers can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • Faster Time-to-Impact: Unblocking GenAI initiatives early helps accelerate value delivery.
  • Improved Cross-Team Alignment: Shared understanding of risks fosters better collaboration.
  • Reduced Strategic Waste: Early identification prevents teams from investing in unsustainable efforts.
  • Greater Executive Confidence: Visibility into risk mitigation builds trust and momentum.
  • More Scalable GenAI Success: Systematic blocker removal clears the path to enterprise-wide adoption.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

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