Author Archives: Jeffrey Phillips

About Jeffrey Phillips

Jeffrey Phillips thrives at the intersection of strategy, sales, marketing and innovation, and enjoy helping companies grow and find new opportunities or create new products. Jeffrey also teaches part-time at SKEMA US, leading graduate level classes on strategy, new product development and digital marketing and is the author of “Make us more Innovative”, and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

Innovation Exhaustion

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

After almost ten years of innovation consulting, I’ve come to learn some things about innovation, of course, but more importantly corporate cultures, hierarchies and power structures. After years of wondering why sustained innovation is so difficult, I’ve come to the conclusion that for many firms, innovation is viewed as an occasional variation from the status quo.

That doesn’t mean that innovation isn’t important. In that moment, during that project, innovation is very important. But while it is important, it is also obtrusive, works outside the regular working conditions, demands resources that are normally deployed in other work and introduces new tools and methods. Like a rubber band that snaps back to its original size and configuration, many organizations “snap back” to a historical norm once an innovation project is complete. And, often, what I’ll call innovation exhaustion sets in.

Innovation exhaustion is the culmination of the effort involved in introducing new tools, stretching perspectives and the breadth of thinking, pulling people from their regular jobs to perform innovation activities that they aren’t convinced management will support, and asking them to work in ambiguous, uncertain environments with little preparation or training. Conducting innovation as a periodic, poorly defined and poorly prepared activity is literally exhausting to an organization. While the results may be very positive, it is often very difficult to get people to agree to do another innovation activity soon after the initial one is complete. But that’s exactly what they should do.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat

Just like the famous advice on the side of your shampoo bottle, the most important step (after documenting what worked and what didn’t in the initial innovation activity) is to quickly define another important innovation need, and perform another round of innovation. Not necessarily in the same product area or business function, and not necessarily with the same scope, of course, but as quickly as possible develop another innovation activity that fills an important product or service gap. Why?

There are more reasons than I’d care to count here, but let’s list three:  continuity, to demonstrate the importance of consistent, sustained innovation; learning, to demonstrate that innovation is a learned skill that people gain by repeating the activity, momentum, to demonstrate that the rubber band, now stretched in new ways, isn’t going to return to the old shape and structure. You see, conducting one innovation project is difficult and costly because it must overcome all the inertia and resistance built up over time, and what little training or tools are introduced is quickly frittered away unless the activity is repeated. The only way to gain skills rapidly and resist the natural urge to return to status quo is to sustain momentum, repeat the process and gain new learning, and hopefully new outcomes. Otherwise innovation exhaustion sets in. The organization will argue for time to “Catch its breath”, to digest what it has created, to fully implement and document new methods and new procedures. This is simply a stalling exercise for the old methods and culture to creep back in and shackle the organization with the same lethargy as before.

Innovation Reluctance

These facts, in fact, are why many people avoid or resist innovation or are reluctant to participate in an innovation activity. They understand how much energy and commitment it will take to bring an innovation team up to speed, and how much resistance the team will face and how little time and investment the team will receive, and further, how quickly the organization will revert to its old, consistent ways of doing things. However, if it is clear that a number of innovation projects are aligned and your executive team expects repeated, sustained innovation over time, the old methods and culture can’t snap back into place. Yes, this approach places greater strain on the organization – demanding that innovation exist side by side with continuous achievement of efficiency and quarterly results – but that’s the only way to build continuity, sustain momentum and force change in the corporate culture. Otherwise, innovation exhaustion will set in, the organization will revert to its normal practices and every innovation attempt is a major leap of faith to overcome the barriers and resistors inherent in the existing culture. Don’t allow the organization a minute of breathing time:  the rubber band snaps back very quickly, and is very hard to stretch again.

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What Goldfish Teach Us About Innovation

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I wanted to write today about “context” and the importance context plays when teams attempt to innovate. You’ll be familiar with the phrase “like a fish out of water” – implying that the fish is in a new and unfamiliar context, and unlikely to succeed.

Not only is the fish in a new and unfamiliar context, it also faces risks, in that it can’t obtain oxygen from the air in the same manner that it can from the water. Not only is the context unusual and unfamiliar, for the fish it can be deadly. I want to describe why this experience is exactly the same as what many innovation teams face, without the fear of physical death.

Getting out of the box

I’ve written previously about the phrase “thinking outside the box“, so let’s imagine that we are the proverbial fish for just a moment. Goldfish to be exact. Goldfish spend their days in small bowls with the fake seaweed, treasure chests and divers, always looking out at the world around them. As long as they stay safely ensconced in their bowl of water, they are comfortable and content. Since the bowls are transparent, goldfish even have the chance to observe the world around them. That is, they witness people existing out of the context of water, and even have a few close encounters with people or cats who occasionally try to snatch the fish from the water. But when push comes to shove, and the fish ends up on the countertop, instead of in the bowl, weeks, months or years of observation aren’t helpful when there’s no water to help the fish breathe. In other words, you can watch others perform at a high skill level in a context they are familiar with, but that does not imply that you’ll operate with a high degree of success when you are placed in that context, regardless of the amount of time you’ve watched or the books you’ve read.

Tick Tock

And, like the fish, once you are out of the familiar context, the clock starts. A fish out of water can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes before death sets in. No matter how many times a goldfish witnessed a human standing just outside the bowl, nothing prepared the fish to exist outside the bowl. Similarly, a new innovation team has little time before the rarified air of an innovation activity begins to make breathing and thinking difficult. Not because the air lacks oxygen, but for two compelling reasons:

1. Teams recognize their lack of preparation and the absence of familiar context and become anxious

2. Executives compound the anxiousness by demanding quick results

When anyone is placed in an uncertain, unfamiliar environment and asked to perform at a high level, the level of anxiety increases. As anxiety increases, team members quit working and attempt to return to a safe, comfortable environment. When we apply this to innovation we see that many teams simply pick the path of least resistance – choosing ideas that are very similar to existing products or services that can be quickly and easily deployed. This selection allows them to return as quickly as possible to their preferred context, even if innovation goals aren’t quite achieved. Executives often don’t help in this regard, demanding rapid results as quickly as possible.

Emergency stations

To add insult to injury, fish don’t leave the water and innovation teams aren’t in demand until an emergency arises. If the lack of context isn’t enough, much innovation happens only when the stakes are the highest. Fish don’t leave the water unless they have to or are forced to. Innovation teams face the added pressure of finding a solution to an emergency, while working under time constraints and in an uncertain and unfamiliar context. Research shows that most people under extreme stress focus only on the immediate solutions at hand and ignore other data or evidence. People under extreme stress make the wrong decisions when all the data is reviewed in hindsight. Just as a fish flops from one side to another, trying desperately to return to water, people rush back and forth to find a fast solution to emergency situations, rarely giving the issue the consideration it needs.

Innovation in many firms is a story of people who are unprepared to leave a comfortable context who are asked to design and create unusual and valuable concepts under significant time and resource constraints while under high anxiety and questionable reward structures.

Innovation Business As Usual

I wrote in Relentless Innovation that we need to move from operating models focused solely on efficiency to operating models that incorporate both efficiency and innovation – creating an innovation business as usual operating model, where innovation is part of the “context” of everyday work. Teams won’t be good innovators by watching others, or reading books about innovation, but must become accustomed to the different environments presented by innovation. They must acclimate themselves, just as the first fish that slowly began to breathe air did over time. They must gain skills in the new roles and tasks assigned to them, or they will revert to their old tools and methods, which are comfortable and familiar. And they must be able to work in a fashion that indicates that success is measured by outcomes not timeframes.

The good news is that unlike the fish that evolved to breathe air, our innovation teams can evolve and become comfortable in different contexts far more quickly, but only if they are allowed the time to adjust and acclimate, only if their rewards and compensation encourage them to do so, and only if they are provided with the tools necessary to succeed in the new context.

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These Aren't The Ideas You Are Looking For

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

As a guy of a certain age, who grew up with the Star Wars franchise, and who is happily passing it along to his son, I think many aspects of life can be related with a Star Wars reference. Of course I’m going to skip over some of the franchise’s less than stellar characters (I’m looking at you, Ewoks, and you, Jar-Jar). What were they thinking?

But I digress. As everyone knows, a masterful Jedi controls his emotions and his situation. He or she has such control that Jedi Masters can influence the thinking of others whose “weak” minds are susceptible to influence. Thus it was in Mos Eisley that Obi-Wan Kenobi was able to convince the Storm Troopers that “these aren’t the droids you are looking for”, even though they most certainly were the droids they were looking for. It’s the old trope – who are you going to believe, me, or your lying eyes?

Obi-Wan’s capability with the force allows him to influence and blind a group of Storm Troopers to the obvious truth, telling them that the androids in his possession aren’t the robots that the troopers have been sent to find. With a simple mind trick he diverts the troopers’ attention, and goes blithely on his way. What’s not so well known is that many executives have similar powers. Their power of suggestion is at least as powerful as the Jedis, when it comes to innovation.

These aren’t the ideas you are looking for

While any executive may ask for new ideas to create a new product or service, the honest truth is that ANY executive can derail the search for interesting ideas by suggesting the ideas are too small or too large, products rather than services, too early or too late. A simple recommendation, a question out of context or a signal with negative body language can throw an entire innovation team into suspended animation, as they attempt to read the tea leaves and please not only the individual who started the activity, but also respond to every executive request, question and whim.

Most innovation teams are cross-functional, structured that way to introduce more experience and perspectives and to ensure many of the business functions are represented. While one executive may need a new product or service, all of the team members report to a wide array of managers and executives who may, or may not, be all that enthralled with the innovation need and the kinds of ideas being generated. It’s a simple act to place a question in the ear of an innovation team member, or to remind the team of a failure from years ago, or to illuminate a potentially competing product, and quickly have the entire team questioning the wisdom of pursuing a particular path.

Clarity, Consistency, Continuity

The executive mind trick is sometimes intentional, when competing priorities mean that executives want to derail projects or simply regain resources allocated in other places. In many cases the executive mind trick is accidental, an executive simply asking questions or making statements that cause the team to rethink its position. Innovation is difficult enough for an untrained, undermanned team with limited time and resources. No idea is perfect, and any doubt or uncertainty introduced about the team or its ideas is likely to distract or even derail the team.

What defeats the intentional or unintentional innovation mind trick are three factors:  clarity, consistency and continuity. Clarity defines the strategies, goals, and commitments. Innovation activities are often started with little clarity about means and goals. The more clarity the sponsor provides, the more difficult it is for another executive to distract the team. Consistency describes sticking to the path in the face of adversity. Every project faces unexpected hiccups, and innovation projects even more so. Executive sponsors must understand the deviations that are possible but remain steadfastly focused on the end goal, and encourage the innovation team to do the same. Finally, continuity is important. The more every executive gets in line and says the same things to the team, encouraging and supporting rather than questioning and dividing, the more likely the team is to find a valuable outcome.

What ideas are we looking for?

The most challenging issue that many innovation teams face is that they know how the ideas they are generating must be evaluated, but don’t know how to reach that desired end state. In other words they know that the ideas must generate more revenue or more profits, attract more customers or disrupt the competition, but those are end goals that can be delivered through many different means. What type of ideas are we looking for?  Incremental or disruptive? Products or Services? Internal or External? With definition comes the ability to defend the idea, but without definition or defined scope any executive can reasonably question any idea the team presents.

Many executives know that their people and teams hate uncertainty and ambiguity more than any other feedback. Asking questions or making statements to an innovation team that introduces uncertainty or suggests different priorities or knowledge ramps up the anxiety and slows the team’s progress. With a simple question or statement that isn’t aligned to the team’s understanding or goals, any executive can send a ripple through even a strong innovation team or activity. This is the executive innovation mind trick, and it derails innovation more frequently than you’d imagine. Sometimes it is accidental, sometimes on purpose, but in either case the innovation team must be hardened to identify and respond to questions or signals that seem to cast doubt on their work. Only an engaged executive with a clear definition and consistent feedback and oversight of the innovation team can do that.

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The Innovation Box

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

If you stick around innovation practice and theory long enough, you’ll hear the “box” mentioned many times. Clients want their teams to think “outside the box”. People are criticized for any ideas that are “inside the box”. Consultants and industry thinkers will talk about the value of the box and whether the team needs to be “in the box” or “out of the box” in order to succeed.

The challenge with this discussion of the box is that it confuses means and outcomes. The “box”, as we’ve come to define it, represents the context, framework, perspectives and timeframes within which people are comfortable. When an executive wants his or her team to “think outside the box” he or she wants new ideas, which requires the team to put aside their existing culture, context, resource and time constraints, and adopt, at least for a moment, a new context that has less constraints. In other words, get out of the box of their current culture, thinking, perspectives and attitudes, and take on new attitudes, risk tolerances and expectations, at least for a short time.

There are a least three problems with this demand:

  1. The effervescent, short term nature of the expectation
  2. No preparation or training is provided to help the team achieve that new state
  3. The executive and the rest of the organization remains in the “old” box

Let’s look at each of these issues quickly.

Short term-ism

For the last thirty years, our businesses have built efficient performance engines based on reducing variability, risk and uncertainty. Training and skill development has focused on doing things according to defined methods. Reward structures are based on achieving short term milestones, avoiding risk and achieving forecasts. Suddenly, out of the blue, an executive asks his team to put all of that aside and think very differently. Even more to the point, the team should put aside their old thinking, their old perspectives only momentarily, to get “out of the box” to create some new ideas.

How does an individual steeped in corporate expectations and cultures “get out of the box” for just a moment? The short timeframes don’t allow for significant change, and most teams know that as soon as they have finished what they’ve been asked to do they’ll slip right back into the old perspectives. It takes a lot of energy to shift from one perspective to another. It’s often easier just to pretend to put on a new perspective, rather than to fully embrace a new perspective, so many teams never leave the old “box”.

Further, the teams attempting to “think outside the box” are constantly confronted by their “old box”. Most of these teams work in their same offices, meet in the same conference rooms and hold the same full time jobs. When, exactly, are they supposed to get out of the box when they are constantly confronted with the “box” of short term demands. How can a team be creative in its same space? Einstein defined insanity as doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. Corporate innovation teams are often the definition of insanity.

Preparation

To “get out of the box” teams need to reinvigorate skills that have gone dormant, or perhaps learn new skills that aren’t valued in the regular day to day work. It’s not easy taking off the old ways of thinking that govern the ideas people generate. These teams need time, motivation and especially preparation. They need more tools, more techniques and more creativity. One does not simply levitate from the box, one must work mightily to get out of the box, at the risk of discovering a completely new set of perspectives. Will you be able to keep them in Peoria once they’ve seen the big city? If teams come fully “out of the box” can they ever really return? Isn’t that a risk as well?

To get teams out of the box requires more than a simple request. Teams are confronting years of training, tools, methodologies and experiences. They need new tools and ways of thinking. They need new creativity sparkers. They need new facilitation and leadership. Thinking out of the box doesn’t happen overnight. It requires investments.

Two tracks

But perhaps the biggest issue with “thinking out of the box” is that now there are two parallel tracks in your business – the team that has managed to achieve the thinking you’ve requested, and the rest of the organization stuck in the old ways of thinking. These are like two trains on parallel tracks, never destined to meet. If a team actually achieves the thinking you hope for, the ideas they create will be so different, so disruptive and divisive that the rest of the organization, comfortable and safe in the old box, will reject them out of hand. There’s simply no way to connect and accept these new ideas into the old organization, the old “box”.  Either the box changes or the ideas change. It’s that simple.

Teams that attempt to get out of the box recognize this. They have three options: create truly interesting ideas that the old teams in the old box must reject, or recognize the gap issue and create incremental ideas that fail the executive’s request but which can be accepted into the old box, or find completely new ways to commercialize interesting new ideas. Since everyone is rewarded on success, no matter how miniscule, we always settle for incremental ideas that can be implemented, rather than risky ideas the old organization can reject.

Thinking outside of the box

What does it take to get a team to think outside the box? More transition time, to help the team make the transition from the old box to the new box. More training, new tools and new facilitation to help the team become proficient at the new work. More time and commitment to taking on new perspectives. A commitment to shift not only a small team, but the rest of the organization, to new perspectives and a new “box”, or a new method to commercialize the ideas the old organization will simply reject. Until and unless executives are willing to countenance these investments, asking for ideas “outside the box” is a cynical exercise at best.

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Imperfect Innovation

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I’ve been thinking a lot about the juxtaposition of innovation in our expectations for perfection. Modern business has high expectations of its people and its processes.

Process improvement and Six Sigma have led us to expect exceptionally low rates of imperfection, variance or failure. When managers talk about their teams they refer to “flawless” execution of day to day tasks. The concept of perfection is an interesting one, especially in the rough and tumble world of business. Let’s look briefly at some of the definitions of the word “perfect”:

a: being entirely without fault or defect flawless diamond

b: satisfying all requirements : accurate

c : corresponding to an ideal standard or abstract concept perfect gentleman

When our business processes work as designed, and when our products meet or exceed customer expectation, we may describe the results as “perfect”. But if we are honest with ourselves, everything in business is simply a striving for perfection. There are too many constraints, limits and tradeoffs in any process or product to create a “perfect” solution, yet that doesn’t stop many from trying. We even have a saying attributed to Voltaire to reflect this thinking:  don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Yet executives and cultures set high expectations of execution and result, expecting if not perfection, then something awfully close.  After all, true Six Sigma is 3.4 errors in 1 million products or operations. This is a standard difficult to achieve and difficult to sustain, in processes and products that are well-understood, in which the firm is deeply experienced. So what does this striving for perfection do to innovation?

The Imperfect Science

Innovation is frequently the opposite of perfection. If we are honest, innovation is risky, variable, full of errors and “failures” that may ultimately lead to new successes. Innovation fails the first definition of perfect, because innovation will frequently create errors or defects. If you have a flawless innovation process, then your focus is too incremental, too same, too constrained. As they say about skiing, if you aren’t falling occasionally, you aren’t trying hard enough. Innovation clearly fails the third definition as well, in that most organizations don’t have a “standard” for innovation processes or outcomes. Without a standard, how can innovation be measured? How can we claim success?

Not only is innovation an imperfect science, it is more effective and returns greater value in its imperfection. Exploration, experimentation, cross-fertilization, learning from mistakes and incorporating new learning is critical to innovation success, and seems far less than perfect to an organization trained in Six Sigma near perfection. Perfection is about constantly honing deep and well-practiced skills. Innovation is usually about discovering new tools, new methods and unexpected or unarticulated needs. There’s little perfection in innovation, other than the realization that innovation is messy, imperfect but vital for growth and differentiation.

The Ultimate Conundrum

Here resides the ultimate conundrum: in organizations that strive for flawless execution, that hope for perfection in processes and products, that measure failure and error several decimal places to the right of the dot, what place does an intentionally imperfect, highly variable, messy and uncertain process take? Don’t the anti-bodies of the “perfect” organization work to reject the imperfect processes, or worse, attach themselves to the imperfect work and seek to adjust their operations to become more like the perfect operations and outcomes?

On the whole, you’ll be better off if the anti-bodies actively reject innovation and its messy, imperfect ways, because that rejection will be obvious. When the perfect anti-bodies co-opt the innovation activities, that’s when the real trouble starts, because what appears to be innovation simply becomes a perfected, rigid process structured to deliver near perfect results, which may please internal processes and expectations but will fail to deliver value. While internal metrics and measures value perfection, customers, consumers and channels value solutions that address unmet needs. Those solutions require new discovery, changes to processes, trial and error, learning from mistakes. Truly new products and services don’t emerge from perfect processes, but from discovery, experimentation, failure and new insights.

We innovators need to help organizations embrace imperfect innovation processes which will yield better, more interesting ideas, and help executives balance two almost mutually exclusive concepts – the near perfect day to day operations, flawless and held to a high standard, and the necessarily imperfect innovation operations, filled with variability, risk and uncertainty, but vital for growth and differentiation.

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Too Busy to Innovate

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I’ve begun to wonder if the concept of innovation in large corporation is an exercise in pointless navel gazing. And no, this isn’t another bashing of brainstorming, or a recent conversion based on my experiences with faulty innovation logic. No, the challenge to innovation is based on the recent development of a core strength: focus, efficiency, time management. As businesses become more streamlined, more efficient, more time bound, there’s ever less time for contemplation, exploration, and, God help us, simply thinking about concepts, needs and alternatives. They are too busy to innovate.

I write this after visiting the office of a client recently. I needed from her one fact, that only she seemed to possess. But regardless of when I visited her office, early in the morning, mid-day or late in the afternoon, she was in a meeting. In fact she ordered lunch to one meeting so she wouldn’t waste time eating lunch. I finally interrupted one of her meetings to simply ask for the data, which she gave me after apologizing for not being available. When I left for the day she was still in meetings. While she may seem extreme, she is not an isolated case.

We’ve been taught to manage our time, focus on what is important, stay occupied and stay in demand. People who are constantly busy are hard to remove, while people who don’t seem as engaged in day to day activities or whose capabilities or energies aren’t focused on tomorrow’s successes are often considered to be less useful or not contributing. Once we are all fully booked every working hour in meetings, discussions and debates we’ll finally be fully efficient, and almost as assuredly innovation will wither and die.

To many of these busy executives, innovation activities appear pointless in the short term. Gathering customer needs, thinking about how the future will unfold, contemplating new competitive threats and emerging needs, generating ideas, these actions don’t drive revenue tomorrow, and take up the time of people who could be gainfully employed doing other things. I’ve written before that most organizations value firefighting over planning and avoiding problems. Everyone will excuse a manager who must rush off to address a problem that in most instances probably could have been identified and avoided with some simple forethought. Few firms award status to people who actively predict issues and work to avoid them in advance. Everything about how we think about our organizations, their structures, their processes, their attitudes, their reward systems, focuses on the very near term, or worse, on a backward looking set of metrics. There is far too little time and effort given to considering what comes next.

Einstein was a great physicist but also a great philosopher and innovation thinker. Perhaps my favorite quote of his was about problem solving. When asked how he would spend his time if he was given an hour to solve a thorny problem, he said he’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and alternatives and 5 minutes solving it. Which is exactly opposite of what the vast majority of executives today would do. Most of them would simply define a solution, implement it and have 15 minutes to spare for checking email.  In many organizations we undervalue exploration, thinking, empathy for customer and needs, contemplation, stillness. We often need a “beginner’s mind” but that requires leaving behind the expert’s perspective.

Good innovation almost always starts with noticing a problem or opportunity, contemplating a range of solutions, experimenting and interacting with those that have the challenge or problem, iterating a solution and then commercializing. Most of us want to skip from noticing to commercializing, to speed a solution to market, without the contemplation, the thinking, the understanding necessary to develop a really interesting, compelling solution. Our organizations and the corresponding corporate cultures have taught us to be busy, focused on deliverables, always engaged. But this busyness leaves little time for the true drivers of innovation thinking. We are simply too busy to innovate, and what’s worse, we seem to enjoy the busyness over the contemplation necessary for innovation. Like a man who starves to death in a bountiful land because he is too busy to plant, many businesses will wither because they were too busy to innovate.

With this speed and busyness comes a foreshortening of time. Since we are so busy, we focus on the next activity, the next day, the next fire, postponing issues that are longer term, or require deeper concentration or contemplation. The faster and more efficient a business becomes, the less it is able to think about innovation, and the more attuned it becomes to split second decision making, eventually making all decisions with no thinking whatsoever. This model works as long as the markets and competitors agree to participate in the same race to the bottom. As soon as one competitor stakes out a different business model that offers compelling services to customers, the jig is up. Dell and HP found that out. And their cultures and operating models simply cannot adjust fast enough because all they know is speed and efficiency. Thinking and contemplation, understanding customers, doing things in a different way are simply not in their DNA.

Notice too that there is a happy medium. Apple isn’t exactly a slouch at good practices and efficiency, but has managed to marry good, efficient business practices with good thinking, contemplation and empathy for the customer. We’ll see if they can sustain both, as the pressures for ever more profit and ever more efficiency will weigh down on the profit models. Recently, Yahoo has called in its remote workers, arguing that they need to be in the office to spawn more creativity and interaction. I’m doubtful that’s going to work, unless Yahoo sets aside time for people to think and contemplate. Having more faces at meetings simply increases the number of people who think they need to speak, and will increase the number of meetings, which creates the need for more followup and more meetings until… well, you get the picture. We need to break the cycle of efficiency, not to return to sloth and inefficiency, but to return to good management. An executive who is constantly fighting fires and in meetings can’t build the skills of his or her team or give adequate praise or feedback. An engineer who is constantly engaged in designs or discussions can’t think creatively about new products or desired features. Everything gets watered down, reduced, compacted to the least common denominator when customers want the opposite – something interesting, new, different and relevant.

Modern business culture reads like a Jonathan Swift satire – managers too busy to eat, too busy to think, too busy to lead or manage. Like a Modest Proposal, one day maybe manager and executives will exist only to meet and work in a never ending cycle of efficiency – no families, no hobbies, no homes, but constantly efficient and never innovative.

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Who Are My BEST Innovators?

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

As we work with a lot of companies, in the US and overseas, we are constantly confronted with one of the most important questions: who are the best innovators in my firm?

Any organization wants to optimize its resources, and increasingly good people with deep skills and commitments are hard to find. Placing the right people in the right jobs, and giving them the skills and freedom they need to succeed is paramount. What every firm wants to do is find their best innovators, place them in conditions that are conducive for innovation, and support them in every way possible. But first, how do they find their best innovators? It’s not like strong innovators walk around with a large “I” on their chests, ready to suit up for any innovation emergency. And, to make matters more complex, many good innovators aren’t “mainstream” corporate types.

Many innovators in your organization may occupy positions that aren’t exciting, or may be people who are interested in change and uncertainty, while the rest of the organization is fixated on efficiency. In other words, some of your best innovators may be shunted to secondary positions because their insights and feedback seem like complaining about the status quo.

Misconceptions

Before we discuss how to find the best innovators, let’s deal with a few common misconceptions. Good innovators aren’t necessarily:

1. The “Experts” – too often organizations assign innovation activities to the people who know the issue or problem exceptionally well. But these individuals often rule out ideas and narrow the scope too quickly based on past experience. The “curse of knowledge” blinds many experts to opportunities, or the fact that knowledge of the past or expertise today doesn’t guarantee success tomorrow.

2. Prominent leaders. Many good leaders achieved their roles through excellent financial prowess and are good at asking tough questions about profitability and cost.  Frequently these individuals struggle in innovation activities because the ROI is so uncertain, and they reduce the scope and possibilities to conform to their own financial models or expectations.

3. “Idea People”. In any organization there are people who have ideas or who are very creative, but they may not be your best innovators. Like Michael Keaton’s character in Night Shift they may record ideas (“feed the tuna fish mayonnaise”) but those ideas may not be valuable or practical or solve customer needs.

Finding the right folks

Who then are the right folks – the best innovators? Good innovators combine a number of skills and attributes:

  • Deeply curious about how and why things work and how they can be better
  • Experimentive, willing to try things, make small tests
  • Comfortable with risk and ambiguity
  • Eager for change
  • Very empathetic to customer needs and market conditions
  • Not locked into the “way we do things”
  • Can look at problems from a new perspective or a “naive” viewpoint

As you can see from this list, people who exhibit these characteristics are less likely to be prominent leaders and more likely to be solo practitioners or leading small projects because the way they think and act conflicts with a highly efficient “business as usual” operating model.

Assessments

There are a range of innovation assessments you can use to identify good innovators in your organization. The first we use is The Innovator’s DNA, an excellent book that calls out five characteristics of successful innovation leaders: associating, questioning, experimenting, observing and networking.

Next we use assessments like Foursight, which suggests that individuals have specific skills that are applicable at different phases in an innovation activity, from clarifying to ideating to developing and implementing.  This helps place the right people in the right task at the right time.

Next we assess the individual and their tolerance for risk, change and ambiguity. Good innovators are comfortable with extending scope, doing new things, cannibalizing existing products, entering new markets. They are comfortable with ambiguity – not everything has to be perfectly understood or “black and white”. They are often entrepreneurial, interested in new products or opportunities as opposed to supporting and sustaining the existing processes or products.

Birds of a Feather

While it seems unlikely, identifying and consolidating individuals who share these characteristics often creates a very innovative team, while assembling the best and brightest, the “idea people” and those with deep technological skill – the obvious choices – can lead to frustrated teams and incremental innovation at best. More than likely you have good innovators, but because they think and act so differently from the rest of the organization which is so focused on efficiency and effectiveness they’ve been shunted aside or left in high authority but low responsibility positions. However, with the right leadership they can make a dynamic innovation team, since they share common perspectives, a desire for growth and change and are open to risk. Your innovation teams may look less like your corporate “all stars” and more like “the Dirty Dozen“, but its results you need, not beauty or perfection.

Not a beauty contest

Building a good innovation team isn’t a beauty contest. Good innovation teams will often be populated by people who didn’t necessarily fit well into the existing corporate structures, people who aren’t focused on efficiency and effectiveness, people open to change and risk and uncertainty. They may not be your top performers or your “experts” – in fact there are many reasons to leave the experts off the team. Using the Innovator’s DNA, Foursight assessment and other criteria to determine who your best innovators are, and give them the tools, processes and skills to be successful.

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Making Innovation Second Nature

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

Athletes understand the concept of muscle memory. That is, the experience your body has performing specific activities that are consistently practiced until they become second nature. Baseball players take hundreds of swings of the bat every day. Basketball players shoot hundreds of shots. Some are successful, others aren’t, but over time the repetition builds muscle memory, which leads to more consistent performance and the ability to execute complex activities without even thinking about it. What we see as effortless performance by athletes in many sports is a combination of good genes and consistent practice. Some athletes are able, for a short amount of time, to get by on good genes alone, but that inevitably catches up to them. As the mantra at cross-country goes: hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work very hard.

Why does something that seems so evident on its face in one activity, athletics, seem so unusual in other aspects of our lives, such as business? We expect, no demand consistent performance and near perfection from our professional stars in many sports, and we pay to see these men and women perform. Yet in other aspects of our lives, just as important and just as demanding, we give short shrift to building muscle memory and deep skills. Since this is a blog about innovation, you’ve probably guessed where I am heading. We’ll use a baseball analogy: where is spring training for innovators? Where is the constant practice of innovation tools and methods? How does one progress to build skills, or do we simply believe that innovation is an innate skill that doesn’t need development? If you believe that, take a look around at the many failed innovation experiments in any business. Innovation, even more than other business skills and functions, needs to be practiced and the capabilities need to be developed.

We have muscle memory about efficiency and effectiveness. The existing business processes have been ingrained into our very being – to the point where anything that contradicts existing business process or practice is shunned. Innovation, on the other hand, is rarely engaged, and often in a highly visible, high stress environment, with people who have had little experience and no “spring training” to build skills and capabilities. Is it any wonder that many innovation teams seem uncertain and uncomfortable? This is like asking a novice to walk a tight rope over a flaming pit, with no practice and only an occasional hired guide to shout instructions from afar.

When a second baseman turns a nice double play, we applaud and think of a job well done. What we don’t see in the baseball ballet is that the shortstop and second baseman have practiced turning thousands of double plays, from many angles and from many different ground balls. Their poetry in motion is the result of a lot of failed attempts, repeated under less pressure at spring training and constant practice. When an innovation team is confronted with big goals and a lot of executive pressure to succeed, they are thrust immediately into Yankee Stadium with no spring training, no muscle memory and very little practice, so why are we surprised when the activities look like something from Double A?

While it may be difficult to constantly practice innovation skills, it will become vital to become far more fluid with those skills, since the pressure to innovate isn’t going to be reduced any time soon. Rather, what we need to do is invest in building skills and then using those skills consistently so that innovation becomes more like a second nature activity, with good muscle memory, rather than a forced activity that the participants would rather avoid or forget. This means defining an innovation process or capability in your business, training people in the tools and techniques that support the process and then engaging those teams consistently to build more innovative concepts and bring them to market as new products and services. The only way to gain deep and capable skills for innovation is to practice and develop the expertise and muscle memory to make innovation seem more innate. Sometimes when we are asked why innovation seems so natural an activity to us as consultants, we can easily answer:  because we do it so regularly it becomes almost second nature.

With training and with practice, innovation can become second nature to you and your colleagues. And increasingly, innovation must become second nature to organizations that hope to be around for a long time.

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Innovation: Lost in Translation

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

I was thinking today, between flights, about the kabuki dance that innovation often becomes. What I mean is that many CEOs and executives talk about innovation and the benefits of innovation. They describe how innovation will help their firms grow and become more profitable, and create differentiated products or enter new markets. All of these suppositions are true. Innovation can help a firm accomplish these goals. But only if the people tasked with innovation have the skills, capabilities, resources and political cover to do innovation.

So, in an era when CEOs and senior executives consistently extol innovation, yet fail to adequately follow up or invest in innovation, what are we to believe? Are executives guilty of “innowashing”, talking about innovation without committing resources to drive up the stock price? Or are they guilty of cynicism, simply trying to appear innovative without investments? Or, do they believe that every utterance is immediately implemented within the organization? Or, perhaps, do they lack understanding about what it takes to convert innovation demands into productive outcomes?

First, the basics. Executives don’t need more innovation, any more than the rest of the company does. What the executives and their companies need are more growth, more differentiation, more profits, new products and entry into new markets. Innovation is simply a set of tools and capabilities that can help achieve those goals. But innovation is only a set of tools and capabilities, it is not a sentient capability residing in your organization simply waiting for the executive direction.

So, what’s the problem in translation?

Executives want innovation, but they need near term profitability, so their most consistent emphasis is on efficiency and near term profits. But, once that fact is acknowledged, we have to ask they next question – why is the demand for innovation lost in translation throughout the organization?

I for one don’t believe many executives are cynical or innowashing their companies. I believe many executives are deeply (and rightly) concerned about their innovation capabilities. So if we eliminate the few executives who are talking up innovation merely for marketing’s sake, that means that executives are either detached from the reality of translating demands into corporate actions, or don’t understand how woefully unprepared their organizations are when attempting innovation.  Or, perhaps both.

Immediate Execution

When executives request innovation from their organizations, they are sending signals that innovation should be prioritized – but at the cost of what other activities or capabilities? Every organization today runs on the bitter edge of capabilities and available resources. When a firm focuses on innovation, what work should it put aside?What happens if it “takes its eye” off the ball, and misses its revenue or profitability numbers in a quarter? Unless executives detail specific actions and resources for innovation outcomes, little innovation work will occur, because senior and mid-level managers are overly focused on meeting short term goals. No new objective that the executives demand, without constant follow-up and clear decisions about investments, will get off the ground.

Lack of skills

Most organizations today have deep skills and exceptionally capable people who have been consistently trained in the existing processes and methods. The organization to some degree is at the peak of its capability and knowledge – about existing processes. This means that the executives take for granted that the knowledge and capability for innovation is as strong in the organization as the capabilities and skills for business as usual. It’s often shocking to discover how little capability there is in an organization for innovation, since many people have never attempted it in a corporate setting. Yes, there are a range of tools scattered here and there, and a handful of people who have been to facilitation or brainstorming classes, but that doesn’t make a consistent, coherent capability. Executives are always surprised by how much skill building and capability development is necessary to innovate effectively.

Translation and Skill Development

These two factors indicate that innovation is tightly tied to capability development, communication, change management and culture. Until the concept of innovation is firmly established and constantly communicated and resourced, it will be hard for firms to innovate consistently. And, until the skills and capabilities are developed, and the culture is shifted to be more accomodating to innovation, little innovation will get done. Innovation is not a project, but a corporate capability that spans factors like communication, culture, process and governance. Until organizations understand that, the kabuki dance will continue, and the innovation demand will be lost in translation.

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Three Innovation Clockspeeds

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GUEST POST from Jeffrey Phillips

The pervasive lack of enthusiasm or even awareness of time in regards to innovation is a constant source of amazement for me. In organizations transfixed by time, speed and efficiency, innovation and product development are often the slowest out of the gate, the longest efforts to accomplish and seem completely unrelated to the real world.

In any organization, people are constantly asking – can we do this faster? Can we respond to customers more quickly, can we collect cash more quickly. The only things most businesses want to do more slowly these days is pay bills. Yet innovation seems to be in a time warp, slower by far than other important activities and processes. There are, of course, reasons why innovation is slow:

1. Innovation is uncertain and risky, so organizations try to move slowly to reduce risk
2. Innovation (if done well) is often ahead of the market, so organizations try to time innovation to market needs and demands
3. Innovation requires tools and techniques that are unfamiliar, which slows the process
4. Innovation and subsequent product development processes are sclerotic, like blood vessels full of plaque, stuffed with unimportant but time consuming activities.

My stipulation is that you should do innovation as fast as humanly possible, even at the risk of skipping steps or bypassing checkpoints, because your internal clockspeed is almost certainly out of synch with the market’s clockspeed.

Your internal clockspeed

Your clockspeed – how fast your organization works – was set by management dictum that likely governs efficiency and effectiveness in familiar and known processes. This means that your clockspeed is relatively high when working on familiar products and services, and very slow otherwise, as the prevailing business as usual operating model rejects new innovative products and services. What’s fascinating is that your operating models slow innovation down at exactly the time that they should be speeding up. Because you don’t have to worry about your internal clockspeed only, but the external market and innovation clockspeed as well.

The strange thing about internal clockspeed is that it is similar to the weather – everyone complains about it but few do much about it. Now’s the time to stop complaining and start doing something.

External market clockspeed

Your markets are likely moving faster than your internal processes, since the markets are subject to competition, new entrants, substitutions and other factors that Porter and others made famous. Further, as businesses grow and age, they shift from an offensive posture to a defensive posture, suggesting that reacting to incidents in the marketplace becomes preferable to creating disruptions in the marketplace. More than likely, your best, top clockspeed is equivalent to the market’s, for existing products and services, and far behind the market’s changing expectations for new products and services. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is innovation clockspeed.

Innovation clockspeed

Innovation is happening everywhere, all the time, in your industry and outside your industry. If you compete in a lucrative market, there are a host of firms innovating right now, seeking to disrupt your market, create substitutes for your product or to simply replace the need for your product or potentially your market. Innovation happens far more quickly outside your business than inside your business, for reasons we’ve discussed above, but also because there are many ways to skin a cat – you’ve perfected one, but thousands of individuals and firms are working new ways to skin a cat, and many are working on developing reasons to do away with cat skin all together. Innovation clockspeed isn’t simply about bringing a new product to market faster, but about making the product or market obsolete or unnecessary. The speed of change in the marketplace itself won’t tell you this – this clockspeed is completely unexpected and totally disruptive, so it constantly surprises many in the market or industry.

Getting obsolete faster

Fact is, nobody cares about how efficient or fast your existing process are to provide existing products and services. Those are table stakes my friend. What will differentiate firms in the future is an accelerated ability to innovate, at least as a fast follower if not an innovation leader, carefully tracking the external market clockspeed and anticipating innovation clockspeed. If you aren’t tracking these two, more accelerated speeds and their impact on your business, the sand is quickly running out of your hourglass. The time to address uncertain innovation processes and sclerotic product development processes is now.

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