Interviewee: F9, Novum
Role: facilitator
Date: —
Interviewer: —
Interview Summary
Personas
Multiple roles are involved in an innovation project. The client is always internal to SVB, holds ownership of the issue, and must be sufficiently senior in the organisation to be able to make decisions. The Innovation Designer (such as Jeroen) guides the process in terms of content, designs the working methods, and facilitates collaboration between parties. The business employees are the subject-matter experts who do as much of the work as possible themselves — conducting interviews, co-designing — so that they become owners of the solution. The portfolio manager oversees the whole from the outside. In addition, there are sometimes external chain partners (UWV, Tax Authority, municipalities) who join as stakeholders or collaboration partners. For larger decisions, the strategic innovation manager also plays a role, setting the overall direction and making the final calls. What stands out is that the team deliberately tries to keep the number of roles filled by Novum itself as small as possible — the business must lead, Novum facilitates. A project team always includes someone or a team from the business (SVB) who should hold ownership and, after the innovation project, can continue with implementation within the business itself — at which point Novum’s involvement ends.
Facilitator role
Process guide and selects tools from toolbox: he follows the agreed innovation methodology as a framework, but within those boundaries decides for himself which working methods and approaches best suit the specific project. He is the discussion leader in sessions, designs the programme in consultation with the client, and ensures that all those involved come to see the issue in the same way — the “elephant” principle, where everyone sees a different part but collectively works towards the same whole. A core principle is that he lets the business do as much as possible and builds as little as possible himself — you only build in order to learn and validate, not to deliver. He also has a signalling role towards the PM: he spots trends, recognises new issues, and actively brings these forward. His role is therefore directive on process, facilitative on content.
Facilitator s relation to decision makers project leaders
The Innovation Designer holds process ownership, while the client remains the owner of the content and the decisions. The PM acts as an intermediary layer: he qualifies the client at the front end and remains the point of contact throughout the project for escalations and steering at management level, allowing the Innovation Designer to focus on process facilitation.
First phase start
At the start of a new project, the Innovation Designer establishes working agreements, role definitions, and a shared understanding of the challenge — he explicitly acknowledges that not everyone sees the problem in the same way, and that bringing those perspectives together is one of the first steps. He does this by designing a programme, always in consultation with the client. The scale and format of that start-up phase varies per project: a session with twenty people requires more preparation than one with four. Furthermore, the start-up phase is already prepared from a portfolio perspective by the PM, who has verified the right people, ownership, and preconditions at the front end before the project actually gets underway.
Second phase understand
After the start-up phase, the Innovation Designer guides the team through the successive phases of the innovation methodology (based on design thinking + lean startup): understand, experiment, transfer, and close. Within that framework, he has his own authority over which working methods and approaches he deploys — he determines, for example, whether more research is needed or whether a different route should be followed. A core principle here is that the business carries out as much of the work as possible itself: in customer interviews, for example, business employees are trained in advance and conduct the interviews themselves, while the Innovation Designer provides guidance. An important requirement within a project is that they want to speak with the people who actually experience the problem. Always work from the perspective of the people you are doing it for, the end users.
Fourth phase experiment cocreate
No response recorded.
Fifth phase transfer
No response recorded.
Sixth phase finish
No response recorded.
Tools used
no specific tools mentioned that support the facilitator
Monitoring progress
No response recorded.
Collaboration
At the start, working agreements are established and roles are divided. Collaboration is always bespoke — every project has a different composition and calls for a different approach. What also emerges is that ownership is a prerequisite for good collaboration: past experience has shown that if people do not feel they have been genuinely involved, they do not regard the outcome as their own solution. Tensions or bottlenecks within the team reach the PM either through the Innovation Designer or through informal channels, whereupon the PM acts as the first point of contact. It also becomes implicitly clear that collaboration can be vulnerable if the right people have not been brought on board from the start.
Specific painpoints
First, there is the risk of working with the wrong people or at the wrong organizational level — experience has shown that when people cannot move forward elsewhere, they sometimes seek out new entry points, which can lead the team to take on a challenge that has already failed multiple times without being aware of this. Second, knowledge retention is a recurring challenge: when team members leave or lessons are not properly documented, valuable experience is lost. Third, building solutions with the wrong team — where Novum itself builds rather than the people who will eventually own and maintain the solution — has historically led to low adoption, reinforcing their principle of building as little as possible themselves.
Room for improvement
The Innovation Designer explicitly mentions one area for improvement: better retention and accessibility of lessons learned from previous projects. He describes how valuable knowledge is currently lost when experienced team members leave, and how it is difficult to find and understand what has been done before.
Platform requirements
No response recorded.