Author Archives: Pete Foley

About Pete Foley

Pete Foley is a consultant who applies Behavioral Science to catalyze innovation for Retail, Hospitality, Product Design, Branding and Marketing Design. He applies insights derived from consumer and shopper psychology, behavioral economics, perceptual science, and behavioral design to create practical solutions to difficult business challenges. He brings 25 years experience as a serial innovator at P&G. He has over 100 published or granted patents, has published papers in behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and visual science, is an exhibited artist and photographer, and an accomplished musician.

Cognitive Bandwidth – Staying Innovative in ‘Interesting’ Times

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Cognitive Bandwidth - Staying Innovative in ‘Interesting’ Times

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

‘May you live in interesting times’ is the English translation of an ancient Chinese curse. Superficially presented as a blessing, its true meaning is of course far from positive. As memes go, it has lasted quite a while, perhaps because from a cognitive perspective, that little twist, and the little puzzle it forces us to solve makes it more subtle, but also more impactful than a more direct insult. But the ‘blessing and a curse’ dichotomy that it embodies is also a fundamental insight. Opportunity usually brings potential for trouble, and trouble usually bring potential for opportunity, largely because both involve change. So many are going through an awful time on many fronts at the moment, but if that has a silver lining, it is that with it comes change. And ultimately that creates an opportunity for innovation, and hopefully better times.

Big Issues Create Big Opportunity: I’ve written before about the opportunity that Covid-19 presented for innovation. The shattering of habits and established behaviors, combined with dramatic shifts in personal and work situations opened the door to trial of new products and services to a degree not seen in a generation. But as we (hopefully) continue to emerge from Covid, we’ve been sucker punched by numerous other things. The horror of war in Europe being the most shocking, but we are also facing enormous economic challenges in the form of energy shortages, inflation, supply chain issues, the great resignation and rapidly changing socio-political landscapes. And of course, we still have numerous other pressing ‘pre-Covid’ issues such as climate change, pollution and economic inequality that also require urgent attention.

That is a lot of problems that need solving. And as awful as Covid was for everyone, the current issues around supply chain, global economic instability, inflation and increased cost of debt likely create at least as immediate operational issues for many organizations, and hence an equally urgent need for innovation.

Another Innovators Dilemma. Unfortunately, the time when we need most innovation is often when it is hardest to deliver it. Innovation doesn’t happen overnight, and usually needs clear strategy, resources, funding, creativity and knowledge. And all of these are currently in short supply. An uncertain and rapidly changing world makes setting long-term strategy challenging. Supply chain challenges can have huge short-term operational impact, and suck up resources and expertise normally allocated to longer-term innovation. The great resignation and early retirements reduce available expertise. And on top of all of this, inflation, increasing interest rates, raw material prices and labor costs are squeezing finances. None of this is terribly new news, or insightful, but it does provide context for another, sometimes less obvious barrier to innovation that I want to talk about: One that operates more on the individual level – the squeeze of cognitive bandwidth.

Cognitive Bandwidth: The innovation journey needs creativity everywhere from the nascent front end through to launching into market. Ultimately that creativity comes from individuals. That in turn requires those individuals to be allowed the cognitive bandwidth, or ‘quality thinking time’ to ideate. We can only effectively think deeply about one thing at a time. This is our ‘cognitive bandwidth’, and it is a finite resource. There are only so many hours in a day, and most of us can only allocate a small fraction of those to think deeply about problems or process information. And of course the more problems we are facing, the less bandwidth we usually have. The more difficult the situation, the more of our time is spent distracted, jumping from one issue to another, or attempting to ‘multi-task’. Even when we carve out time, the current climate means all too often we are stressed, or in an elevated emotional state. This reduces the quality as well as quantity of our thinking, and so further narrows our individual cognitive bandwidth.

The Covid Squeeze: Covid-19 of course sucked up a lot of cognitive bandwidth. We had to find new ways to work, learn new tools, and new ways to manage personal lives and work-life balance as many found themselves taking on new roles as educators, care givers, chefs, simply learning how to share an office with a spouse for the first time. There were some compensating effects, such as reduced travel, but even that likely had some less obvious and hard to measure impacts on the creative process that I’ll discuss later. But perhaps the biggest, albeit largely intangible impact on cognitive bandwidth was the impact Covid had on our collective emotional state. Covid, and the changes it brought was hard on everybody. Everyone has there own stories, and we’ve all seen the increase in mental health issues that accompanied the pandemic. But this is almost certainly the ‘tip of the iceberg’. Virtually everyone has experienced some degree of increased stress and negative emotions during Covid, and this directly impacts cognitive bandwidth and hence individual innovative capacity.

The Post-Covid Sucker Punch: One thing I think we were all looking forward to was a return to some semblance of normal. But unfortunately, as Covid (hopefully) subsides, reentry into the post Covid world is proving to be very bumpy, and we are facing the cornucopia of other issues described above. This not only creates a host of ‘fires’ that need to be put out, but it also inevitably takes an emotional toll. After two years of disrupted work and home-life, we are now asking people to again step up and be ‘unusually’ innovative in difficult circumstances, and against a backdrop of war and human suffering. Fatigue and burn-out are almost inevitable.

At a practical level, I see this on a day-to-day basis. I sit in a lot of innovation teams, and one pattern I observe consistently is the workforce getting increasingly stretched; both from a time and emotional perspective. I see more and more people getting pulled out of meetings to fight fires, people attempting to double task, or stepping in and out of meetings, or simply looking frazzled and overworked. Of course, none of this is new, overwork and stress existed log before Covid. But it’s also not surprising that it appears to be increasing during a long period of constant change.

The Neuroscience of the Creative Moment. Innovative thinking comes in multiple forms, but it all requires time. We need time to think deeply, and consciously about problems, and to assimilate data and knowledge. But ‘downtime’ is also a critical, if less understood part of the creative process. There is a very good reason that Eureka moments often happen in the bath, shower, or middle of the night. When the mind is relaxed, has time, and not focused on an immediate problem, it is more likely to make surprisingly obvious connections, or see things in different ways. This is often when the biggest ideas occur. We need conscious thinking to build essential foundations of knowledge, but the most interesting ideas and connections often happen when we are not trying. Have you ever had a name on the tip of your tongue, but no matter how hard you try, you cannot find it? Then a few hours later when you are not trying, it pops into your head? This is an analogous mechanism, where conscious focus simply reinforces and repeats converging on the same, sometimes unwanted result, but when we relax, it opens the channel to the needed connection. There is a lot of research around how this works, which includes the interaction between default mode and executive function, the role of alpha waves and flow state, and the conceptual blending process. It’s still very much an evolving science, but one thing that is fairly consistent across this research is that downtime and periods of reduced stress play an important role in the creative process and making connections. Unfortunately, for many, the pandemic reduced relaxation and ‘own time’. Needing to learn new skills and new ways of working, while also having to solve a myriad of new and ever changing problems sucked up time. Even the loss of commutes took away a period of solo reflection where many of us consciously or unconsciously processed and synthesized the day’s information. But perhaps the hardest pill to swallow has been that while we all hoped that the end of Covid would have provided some relief, if anything the news cycle has got worse. This takes an emotional toll. Part of this reflects the ratings competition within media that favors an ever-increasing stream of bad news. But unfortunately it also reflects a very challenging global reality and very real problems and suffering.

What Can We Do?

There are of course limits to what we can do within our sphere of influence. Most of us cannot directly impact the war in Ukraine, the supply chain crisis or global diplomacy. But we can take steps to reduce pressure on our teams, and ourselves, and thus make innovation and creativity a little easier.

1. Make tough strategic priority decisions. Primarily this is a leadership task, but it’s also something we can to some degree manage in our personal portfolios. One reason we see so much innovation during crisis is focus, and a willingness to sacrifice some goals or standards for more important ones. For us to replicate this means being very selective about what fires to fight, while also being willing to let others burn themselves out. This is not without risk, as short-term survival is of course a prerequisite for any successful long-term strategy. But during periods of rapid change, we also see rapid reversals. For example, spikes in raw material costs are often short-term, and developing alternatives can often take longer than the problem lasts. It sounds obvious, but is often deceptively difficult, especially as deciding to let the wrong fire burn itself out can be quite career limiting. But making difficult priority calls, and saying ‘no’ can be critical to maintaining our innovative and competitive edge, by keeping limited cognitive bandwidth focused of the most important tasks.

2. Help talent to focus on what is really important, and to grow skills that are most relevant to the future. There has been an ongoing trend to increasingly ask talent to handle their own administrative and organizational work. This is partly driven by technology that reduces the need for specialized knowledge to manage many logistics tasks. And eliminating support roles looks good on margins and fixed costs. But asking a highly skilled technical expert to cover their own admin not only adds to their workload, but it is also inefficient, as we are effectively overpaying them to complete tasks that often don’t play to their core skills. Conversely, there is also a lot of skill on the sidelines at the moment, while many have developed skills in working remotely. So is one option is to leverage this to free up innovators and experts. Let them focus more on their areas of expertise, by bringing back more general support roles. Or bring in temporary outside help where short-term issues require expertise that is not anticipated to be part of long-term strategy.

3. Schedule down-time, and create a culture where it is encouraged. Build protected spaces in calendars when meetings are not allowed. Encourage lunch breaks, and enable casual team-building events and wellness practices. It’s easy to view these as non-essential, and the type of activities that we cut first when times get tough. But they are critical to an innovative culture. Mental downtime is not a luxury or a perk, but an essential part of the creative process. And in too many cases, we’ve been in crisis mode for so long, that tool has become blunt or burnt out.

4. Further support this with the design of our physical environments. Another trend has been the move to open offices and shared space. This has benefits for both collaboration, and for space efficiency as hybrid home/office working models emerge. But studies have also shown more innovative ideas emerge when people work alone than in brainstorming environments. So it is critical to provide both physical spaces and a culture that enable private reflection and quiet concentration where people can potentially synthesize information and make connections. The key to a cognitively diverse innovation culture is to provide options for different thinking styles. And this also means that acknowledging that benefits of work from home are not one size fits all. For some it’s a blessing, but both work style and personal circumstance can make working from home a challenge for others. To support a cognitively diverse workforce, some people, especially those early in their careers, may need work as a sanctuary, and a bigger physical footprint at work than others.

5. Finally, distribute work evenly. I remember someone telling me early in my career that, ‘if you need something done quickly, go to the busiest person’. There is some truth in that, and some people thrive on high workload. But it only works to a point, and if taken too far, we risk overloading the cognitive bandwidth of our most creative people, even if they may not realize it themselves. By all means give the most challenging and most important tasks to the best people. But don’t overload them too much. They will often be happy to take on more, but it may not be best for them, their creativity, or the organization. Look very hard to see if the load is evenly distributed within an organization, and if not, ask hard questions why not? And if you are the person everyone comes to, practice saying ‘no’ occasionally!

The good news is that humans are pretty resilient, so it doesn’t always take huge changes to get significant results. We are all the progeny of ancestors who survived wars, famine, disease, social upheaval and natural disasters. And it’s worth noting that we are often at our most creative during periods of greatest tragedy.

Technology advanced at a phenomenal pace during WW-II, and more recently the speed of development of Covid vaccines was staggering. But there are clues in those situations that we can learn from. Resources and focus were unprecedented. During WW-II virtually everything was thrown against the war effort, and tough, sometimes brutal priority calls were the norm.

Project Warp Speed put enormous resources against the Covid vaccine and took huge risks on uncertain bets. Of course, most of us working in innovation don’t have these almost infinite resources, but we can be very strategic in how we use what we have. And keep in mind that wartime mentality is meant to be short-term, while Project Warp Speed was designed to last about a year.

We are in the business of creating a sustainable innovation culture. So, we are not just about protecting the cognitive bandwidth of individuals in the short-term, but also preventing burn out, and creating a sustainable cognitive culture.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Innovation in the time of Covid – Satisfycing Organizations

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Innovation in the time of Covid - Satisfycing Organizations

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

Many of us spend a lot of time thinking about consumer habits, and how to change or reinforce them. As innovators that’s pretty central to our job. And Covid has presented us with a unique opportunity, as so many consumer habits have been disrupted. But work habits are as ingrained and as hard to break as consumer behavior, and so Covid provides a similar once in a generation opportunity to change work processes.

We have been forced us to work differently. Remote working has meant less oversight and more autonomy. In parallel, the world has changed rapidly around us, forcing us to make quicker decisions while relying on less data. As a result, we’ve also probably made a few mistakes, but hopefully also learned from them. It’s been tough, but it’s also been a unique opportunity for learning and change.

The Organizational Brain: I love analogies, and an obvious one is that the change in many organizations brings their processes closer to how the human brain makes decisions. They’ve been satisfycing – a concept borrowed from Behavioral Economics, that describes decisions that are good enough, not always perfect, but reached faster, and with less ‘process’.

This is a key concept in understanding real human behavior. Time is critical to survival. An early human being chased by a hungry saber tooth didn’t have time to ponder every possible escape route. He or she just had to get away from the predator before it reached them, or at least move away faster than the slowest member of the tribe. As a result, we are the ancestors of people who made timely decisions based on limited data, not those who stood pondering every possibility in search of perfection.

Even contemporary decisions, while often not quite as urgent as escaping from a hungry predator, typically involve an analogous trade off between time and completeness of information. How many people know every detail about a stock, or even a car, before they buy? In reality we rarely have time to fully process every relevant piece of information for any decision we make, but instead use a mixture of heuristics, proxy’s and our gut, together with some analysis to make good enough, but often not perfect decisions.

A Corporate Flaw: A flaw in traditional economics was that time was largely ignored. It assumed that humans made perfect decisions based on all available data, no matter how long that took. In many ways, businesses, especially big corporations lean towards this much slower, data based type of decision. Employees have to justify decisions to a far greater degree than we do as individuals. Telling a boss or a shareholder that a decision ‘just felt right’ is probably career limiting, especially if it turns out to be the wrong decision. But this slows them down, and leaves them vulnerably to more agile, less risk averse competition making good enough decisions faster. I’d also argue that a lot of time is also spent creating the illusion of certainty. We collect supporting data, pre-align with a boss, or seek consensus via a team, but all too often this is an exercise in precision, not accuracy. We are only as good as our models, and these often struggle to accurately predict the complex, fast moving real world we live in. I’m sure a few people will not be comfortable with this premise, and I’ll dive a little deeper later, but it’s born out by the high proportion of innovations that fail, despite great supporting consumer data and business projections.

The Covid Change: The good news is that Covid has forced us to change. Meetings have been switched to virtual, and in many cases participation has been trimmed. We haven’t abandoned consensus, but in many cases we’ve had to be more choiceful about when and where it’s needed. We have been forced to give people more autonomy, if only because oversight has been impossible. And hand in hand with all of this, in many cases we’ve also been forced to make decisions without the same level of supporting data we are used to. The pace of change has accelerated, while many of our usual methods of testing have been stymied, or at least had to go through significant changes. Before Covid we may have debated and aligned, or run additional research or tests, both to make more informed decisions, but also to CYA should things go wrong. In the last 18 months we’ve more often had to go with our gut, or at least make decisions where we’re far less ‘ certain’ about the outcome.

We will not know how this has worked out for some time, if ever, as we lack a frame of reference for operating in a pandemic. But my guess is it this has probably worked out fairly well. We probably have made a few more mistakes, or at least sub optimal decisions. And we’ve likely learnt a few hard lessons as well. But most of the time, we’ve probably made good enough decisions. And we’ve likely compensated by learning and adapting on the fly, or have perhaps built more flexibility into our plans to compensate for the lack of ‘certainty’ in our business plans. In other words we’ve been more closely mirroring at an organization level how the human brain works.

I’m going to argue that this is a good thing, for at least four reasons.

1. Less Meetings!! When the work we have to do is too big, too difficult, or beyond the expertise of one person, we create a team to do it. But teams also represent a trade-off. It’s a conundrum that the very differences that make teams so valuable can also make them cumbersome and time consuming. As we add different skills and perspectives in a team, transaction costs increase, all too often resulting in seemingly endless meetings in the pursuit of consensus. At P&G it wasn’t uncommon to have entire days of back-to-back meetings.

And Mea Culpa, I’m a recovering meeting addict. At times that back-to-back schedule almost felt like a badge of honor. Conversely sitting at a desk and thinking, or quietly reading was treated with deep suspicion in some circles, despite it often being a highly productive exercise

2. We’ve grown capability. We’ve been forced to give people more autonomy, which develops skills and motivation. Not everyone will have thrived when pushed out of their comfort zones, but we’ll have given people opportunity, and that will ultimately pay dividends

3. We’ve been forced to embrace more learning from failure.We talk a lot about this, especially in innovation, but more often than not we still celebrate success far more than failure. But a good scientist designs tests to fail, in order to challenge a hypothesis. This does happen in business, but realistically most consumer research is designed to demonstrate success, and hence move us through the next stage-gate in our business process. But we’ve probably made a few more mistakes, so we’ve probably learned a bit more.

4. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve learned to live, and act with less data. Humans all have a risk aversion bias, albeit some more, some less. Data makes us believe we are increasing the quality of our decisions. It can even provide a rational for procrastination.- “Let’s get more data before we push the button’. Historically this has often caused us to run big, expensive consumer research, generate complex volume forecasts, and present detailed and precise (if not accurate) business plans to management. It feels good to believe we are betting on a near certainty, but that’s often unrealistic. A majority of new products fail, despite having excellent consumer and volume forecasting data to back them up. The reality is that the world we place innovation into is usually too complex to accurately predict. The very act of introducing something new disrupts the system, as does any competitive response. And if we are truly introducing something innovative or disruptive, it should by its very nature invalidate at least some of the careful validation work that has gone into our forecasting models and methodologies. All too often, our research creates an illusion of certainty, or at best, over estimates our ability to predict the future. It feels better than it performs.

I’m not suggesting we completely abandon consensus, or consumer testing and modeling. These are great tools for weeding out bad ideas, and for anticipating and fixing issues that are more obvious in hindsight than in enthusiastic foresight. And they can certainly help us to ball-park initiatives, especially if they are not too disruptive. But the success rate of innovation in market strongly suggests that our models are not as reliably predictive as we’d like to believe. It certainly suggests that if we can, we are betting off fine-tuning in market than we are fine tuning for a volume forecast.

Conversely, the human brain is, at least for the next few years, the smartest decision-making ‘entity’ we know. It routinely makes satisfycing decisions that balance the need for action against the cost of obtaining and processing additional information. It accepts ‘good enough’ as a start point, and is really, really good at not locking into decisions prematurely, but using feedback loops to adjust on the fly. It uses heuristics for quick decisions rather than certainty. Given that it’s the pinnacle of millions of years of evolution, it’s probably not a bad thing if our organizations more closely mirror it.

Assuming we eventually vanquish Covid, we’ll all be searching for new equilibriums as the world restabilizes. There are things I’m personally really keen to bring back, such as the serendipity that comes from real human-to-human interaction. But I also hope we don’t loose what we’ve learned. Risk aversion will nudge us to revert back to higher degrees of certainty. And there will certainly be contexts where this makes sense, especially in pharmaceuticals and medicine, where we’ve taken unusual risks because of exceptional time constraints. But in less life and death fields, we may have found we can give people more autonomy, be more selective about consensus, have less meetings, better embrace learning from failure, and may not need as many consumer tests or as precise volume forecasts, as we previously thought. A little bit of agility built into the back end can go a long way to reduce the perceived need of illusory certainty at the front.

Image credit: Pixabay

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COVID-19 Presents an Opportunity to Create an Innovation Culture

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GUEST POST from Pete Foley

I left P&G about eight years ago, and one of my last jobs involved working on innovation culture. It was a passion project, and the topic of one of my first blogs published outside of P&G. It’s also something I keep coming back to, as I believe it is one of, if not the most important components of a successful innovation organization. But I’m writing this because I believe Covid19, together with recent socio-political dynamics has created a once in a lifetime window to effect cultural change in our organizations. It’s a huge opportunity, but one that comes with commensurate risk.

Changing culture is hard. A leadership team can often make a strategic change almost on a dime, but culture has much deeper roots, and so takes longer to change. Strategy is more about what we are doing, culture is more about how we do it. It’s comprised of a multitude of little everyday things that ultimately much of our time. It’s how we make decisions, take risks, act or procrastinate, how much we share, how much we listen. In other words it’s deeply linked to fundamental behavior and values, and is heavily influenced by habits and the unconscious decisions frameworks that Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking. As such, it cannot be changed by management decree. It can be nudged by changing reward or organizational structure, something we tried every few years at P&G. But ultimately changing culture means either changing people’s deeply rooted behaviors, or changing the people themselves.

That’s hard to do, and also inefficient, at least in the short-term. If an innovation team is thinking about process, it’s not thinking about innovations. But Covid19 created a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’d not wish the last 18 months on anyone, but like it or not, our cultures have been disrupted, and that gives us a semblance of a fresh start, and hence an opportunity for change. Habits have already been broken, ‘givens’ challenged and new skills learned. And if the great resignation actually occurs, we can expect an elevated level of personnel movement both between and within companies to go along with broken habits and new skills. A perfect storm for cultural change. .

But how do we take advantage of this rare opportunity? Culture is a big, hairy topic, with a lot of moving parts, so one option is to be a little reductionist, and break it down into it’s component parts. My personal culture model is a hybrid derived from many sources, and comprises Capability, Space, Psychological Safety, Designed Serendipity and Motivation. Let’s look at them in turn:

Capability– Innovation needs people with knowledge and experience. But it also needs fresh perspective. Too much experience locks us into isolated pillars of expertise that make it hard embrace new technology. But too little experience risks the merry-go-round of constantly reinventing the wheel. We need to balance between the two. But we can hit that balance far more effectively if we retain the right kind of experience, experts who are also cognitively agile, open to new experience, and so able to integrate fresh ideas with their hard earned knowledge. The conundrum is that these experts are often the most likely to seek out new challenges, or to relish the risk of career changes. In other words, those most likely to participate in a ‘great resignation’. This makes it imperative to proactively identify, recruit or retain experts with high mental agility, or T-Shaped innovators who can bridge between different groups.

But it’s not enough to get the right mix at the organizational level, we need it to drill down into individual teams. Humans have a habit of self selecting groups that they feel comfortable working with, which can mean diversity within an organization translates into diversity between, rather than within teams. Curating teams to ensure each fully team reflects organizational diversity reduces factions, spreads knowledge, enables cross mentoring and thus creates a stable but not stagnant culture more quickly after a period of change. It also grows the next generation of innovation leaders who have learnt bridging skills ‘on the job’, by working in cognitively diverse teams.

Space –Innovators need time and autonomy. Obviously this needs to be within some reasonable constraints, as businesses today cannot afford ivory towers.. But truly disruptive ideas take time, and some failure along the road to success. Build too much stage gate control into innovation, enforce unrealistic timelines, or talk about productive failure without actually embracing it, and the result will be mediocrity and increasingly smaller innovations. Everything becomes disruptive in name, but not reality. The good news is that this is perhaps the biggest opportunity to come out of Covid19, as for many, remote working has increased both time and autonomy. Of course, remote working comes with downsides, some of which I discuss below, and not everybody has more time at home. But overall we’ve been given a gift of more time and more autonomy. It’s critical that we take full advantage of this, and don’t lose it, or over-manage it in the name of efficiency.

2. Psychological Safety. Failure is now widely acknowledged as part of the innovation process. But in reality, but when the rubber hits the road, it’s still often considered as a negative. After all, we build a culture that values capability and expertise so that we can anticipate ‘obvious’ pitfalls, and so avoid failure. But if we’ve sufficient capability, that makes failures more valuable, as the unexpected is the single biggest source of disruptive and breakthrough innovation. Furthermore, the scientific method, when employed correctly, designs tests to challenge our assumptions, not confirm them. We run tests to uncover unexpected issues before we go to market. So as we rebuild innovation culture, it is critical that the psychology safety needed to fail productively is not just preserved, but enhanced. It really is the key to big ideas. But at the same time, it’s also critical not to confuse it with ‘safe spaces’. Psychological safety has nothing to do with avoiding ideas we are uncomfortable with. Instead it’s about creating an environment where people can safely challenge their own and others’ ideas, share unpopular opinions and failures, and be treated with respect when they do so. That is fundamental to the scientific method, and hence to an effective innovation culture.

3. Designed Serendipity. While this is a reductionist analysis, it’s impossible to avoid how interdependent these components are. Capability needs space to operate, while space helps to create psychological safety. That in turn makes it easier to fail, and share unexpected results. And our most disruptive ideas typically come from those results experts weren’t expecting. Assuming that most competitors have similar pools of expertise, surprising results are the only way to break a close innovation race. These can come from failures, as discussed above. But they can also come from outside, either from someone viewing our results through a different lens, and so seeing something we miss because of confirmation bias, or from somebody sharing information that they wouldn’t realize is relevant to us. While we cannot force this type of cross- disciplinary interaction to occur per se, we can design organizations to facilitate it. We can create spaces where people mix and communicate informally. Or run training sessions that bring together mixed teams. A coffee bar in a work place, or an excellent cafeteria that encourages people to stay on site and mix all have benefits that are hard to quantify, but can also do an enormous amount to trigger an innovative culture. But much of this requires people to be physically present. Remote working provides time and convenience benefits, and works well for some tasks. But we need to prevent the pendulum from swinging too far. Whether it’s the serendipity of unexpected discussions at the water cooler, or the subtle body language that encourages someone to share a counter intuitive idea, or a failure, some personal interactions work better when people are physically in the same place. We can certainly learn from our Covid experience, and reduce non productive time in the office. But subtleties such as body language and microexpressions get lost on Facetime, making tough discussions tougher, sharing ‘bad’ results harder. And without physical presence, we’ll lose much of the serendipity of insight and information sharing in common physical spaces. We don’t have to go back to where we were, but getting the balance right will drive competitive advantage by optimizing sharing, serendipity, and recruitment and retention.

4. Motivation. I’ve saved what I think is the hardest topic until last. Intrinsic motivation is absolutely key to an innovative culture. If people love what they are doing they will go the extra mile. Passion means problems stay top of mind, increasing the chances of serendipitous innovation, or ‘Eureka moments’. Money is important if you don’t have enough, but it’s intrinsic motivation that drives disruptive innovation. That motivation largely comes from one or all of three places; fascination with a problem, deep commitment to a team or authentic alignment between project and individual purpose. The first two are fairly self-evident. But the last one has always been tricky, and has become more difficult in our post Covid, more polarized world. Firstly, it must be authentic. For example, motivating a team to get behind a sustainability project that turns out to be largely greenwashing, or that evolves from authentic to greenwashing under timing or economic pressure can quickly turn motivation into indifference, or worse. And the line between greenwashing and real environmental initiatives is often more fuzzy than we like to admit. There are inevitably trade offs as we try and balance the needs of a business with the need to improve an environmental footprint, and often what starts as a major benefit gets trimmed en route to market. And it’s not one size fit’s all, as one persons authentic is another persons greenwashing. Furthermore, environmental is probably the easiest of the ‘purpose motivators’ to manage.

For more contentious social justice areas, it’s increasingly likely that not everyone in a team will be aligned with a project. Even if they put aside their personal views, intrinsic motivation will inevitably fall in this situation. Conversely, tap into a teams passions too well, and we risk the core brand or product becoming secondary to the ‘cause’. But even bigger risks as we look outward to the consumer. Even if we have an organization that shares common values, taking a position on a contentious social justice issue is quite likely to alienate a significant segment of consumers. Yet we know from Ehrenburg-Bass research that broad appeal and availability usually generates more volume than loyalty, and so even initiatives that enjoy short-term bumps in volume from socio-political positions can suffer long-term damage. The short-term loyalty they create is often more short-lived than any emotional disconnection from a brand from consumers who disagree. There are also additional issues with cognitive fluency, as while some brands are a good fit with environmental or social justice positions, many are not. Consumers only associate about 1-3 attributes with a brand, and there is a significant risk of with subtraction by addition if a brand starts focusing on communications that are not a fluent fit with core equity.

None of this means we shouldn’t strive to create greener products, and indeed for many categories a healthy environmental profile is rapidly becoming price of entry. The picture with social justice is more complex and more polarized, but again, all companies should strive to do the right thing, and be good corporate citizens. But it’s important to do so carefully, ensure that we’re not alienating consumers, that initiatives are a fit with equity, and are sufficiently differentiated at a time when environmental and social justice communication is pervasive. And there is always the question of source validity, and whether your brand has the perceived authority to take a position on an issue. And if our goal is to improve intrinsic motivation and employee satisfaction, it’s also worth considering that internal cultural benefits can often be achieved more effectively via inwardly facing initiatives that don’t risk alienating consumers.

In conclusion, Covid19 has created opportunity for significant change in innovation culture, and in some cases, that change is already irreversible. But it is sill important to step back, ask ourselves how much we want to change, and what parts of our culture we may want to protect. If you are reading this, you are probably an innovator, and so change is in your blood. But do keep in mind that the grass is always greener. Whether we are innovating products, services or organizations, the new often looks better simply because we don’t know the issues we haven’t yet discovered.

I sometimes think innovation is like a giant game of wack-a-mole, where we innovate to improve one area, only to inadvertently create a new unexpected one along the way. Sometimes these are minor, and just a part of the innovation process, sometimes they are much bigger, as in Boeings 737 Max. This does not mean we should stagnate, or miss a once in a generation opportunity. But just as culture is usually slow to change, it’s also slow to fix if we get it wrong. So before messing too much with the DNA of an organization, it’s worth at least considering if the upside is worth the inevitable disruption, both anticipated and unanticipated. We have a once in a lifetime opportunity – don’t miss it, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater either!

Image credit: Pixabay

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