Category Archives: culture

Change Behavior to Change Culture

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Change Behavior to Change Culture

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

There’s always lots of talk about culture and how to change it. There is culture dial to turn or culture level to pull. Culture isn’t a thing in itself, it’s a sentiment that’s generated by behavioral themes. Culture is what we use to describe our worn paths of behavior. If you want to change culture, change behavior.

At the highest level, you can make the biggest cultural change when you change how you spend your resources. Want to change culture? Say yes to projects that are different than last year’s and say no to the ones that rehash old themes. And to provide guidance on how to choose those new projects create, formalize new ways you want to deliver new value to new customers. When you change the criteria people use to choose projects you change the projects. And when you change the projects people’s behaviors change. And when behavior changes, culture changes.

The other important class of resources is people. When you change who runs the project, they change what work is done. And when they prioritize a different task, they prioritize different behavior of the teams. They ask for new work and get new behavior. And when those project leaders get to choose new people to do the work, they choose in a way that changes how the work is done. New project leaders change the high-level behaviors of the project and the people doing the work change the day-to-day behavior within the projects.

Change how projects are chosen and culture changes. Change who runs the projects and culture changes. Change who does the project work and culture changes.

Image credits: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available for download at http://misterinnovation.com

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Beyond Continuous Improvement Culture

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Beyond Continuous Improvement Culture

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

We’ve been too successful with continuous improvement. Year-on-year, we’ve improved productivity and costs. We’ve improved on our existing products, making them slightly better and adding features.

Our recipe for success is the same as last year plus three percent. And because the customers liked the old one, they’ll like the new one just a bit more. And the sales can sell the new one because its sold the same way as the old one. And the people that buy the new one are the same people that bought the old one.

Continuous improvement is a tried-and-true approach that has generated the profits and made us successful. And everyone knows how to do it. Start with the old one and make it a little better. Do what you did last time (and what you did the time before). The trouble is that continuous improvement runs out of gas at some point. Each year it gets harder to squeeze out a little more and each year the return on investment diminishes. And at some point, the same old improvements don’t come. And if they do, customers don’t care because the product was already better than good enough.

But a bigger problem is that the company forgets to do innovative work. Though there’s recognition it’s time to do something different, the organization doesn’t have the muscles to pull it off. At every turn, the organization will revert to what it did last time.

It’s no small feat to inject new work into a company that has been successful with continuous improvement. A company gets hooked on the predictable results of continuous which grows into an unnatural aversion to all things different.

To start turning the innovation flywheel, many things must change. To start, a team is created and separated from the continuously improving core. Metrics are changed, leadership is changed and the projects are changed. In short, the people, processes, and tools must be built to deal with the inherent uncertainty that comes with new work.

Where continuous improvement is about the predictability of improving what is, innovation is about the uncertainty of creating what is yet to be. And the best way I know to battle uncertainty is to become a learning organization. And the best way to start that journey is to create formal learning objectives.

Define what you want to learn but make sure you’re not trying to learn the same old things. Learn how to create new value for customers; learn how to deliver that value to new customers; learn how to deliver that new value in new ways (new business models.)

If you’re learning the same old things in the same old way, you’re not doing innovation.

Image credits: misterinnovation.com (1 of 850+ free quote slides for download)

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From Resistance to Reinvention

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Overcoming Cultural Barriers to Transform Innovation Capability

From Resistance to Reinvention

GUEST POST from Noel Sobelman

For large, established companies, driving innovation is more than a strategic priority, it’s a necessity for survival in competitive and fast-changing markets. Yet, fostering innovation in a legacy organization can be a daunting task, especially when cultural inertia stands in the way. This article draws on my experiences working with global companies who have undertaken the bold initiative to transform their innovation capabilities and provides practical insights into overcoming the culture and behavior challenges that stand in the way of change.

I’ll share proven methods and tactics leaders can use to drive change. While some companies have seen significant progress in areas like employee involvement and crafting compelling cultural narratives, they have also encountered challenges in achieving consistency in leadership actions and aligning incentives. These successes and setbacks highlight the complexity of applying change management techniques in real-world settings and offer valuable lessons for senior leaders grappling with similar transformations.

To illustrate how companies have navigated these transformations, I’ll examine the key mechanisms that shape change initiatives while highlighting both successes and obstacles. By analyzing initiative governance, leadership actions, system interdependence, employee engagement strategies, rewards, symbols, and HR system alignment, I will identify the factors that drive lasting change and the barriers that hinder progress. This analysis will shed light on the practical realities of fostering a culture of continuous innovation, equipping leaders with actionable insights to guide their own transformation efforts.

Making the Case for Change

For meaningful change to occur, it is essential to first establish a shared understanding of the current state, the benefits of change, the risks of inaction, the specific capability gaps, and the precise ways the organization needs to adapt. In large, well-established companies, innovation spans multiple functions, business units, geographies, growth horizons, and management levels, each presenting its own unique challenges and perspectives. Consequently, reaching consensus on the core issues is rare and it often takes a crisis, such as declining revenue, a major product failure, the departure of critical team members, or the threat of disruption to ignite change. Successful transformations begin with a sharpened and clearly communicated “why change” narrative.

Figure 1 below illustrates how one company used a benchmark analysis to compare its current innovation performance to industry best-in-class standards across multiple dimensions. The benchmark helped identify performance gaps, highlighting the need for change and enabling the company to set realistic improvement targets. The data provided objectivity and fostered a shared understanding of the need for improvement.

Figure 1. Sample Performance Gap Analysis

Establishing Ownership & Governance

Innovation is inherently cross-functional, involving multiple management layers. But when execution issues or launch failures persist, who is responsible? The tendency is to assign blame to a specific function, often R&D or Marketing in technology-driven companies, and expect that group to diagnose and fix the problem. This siloed mindset fosters finger-pointing and defensiveness while overlooking the interconnected systems required for meaningful improvement. In reality, the necessary changes extend beyond the control of any single individual or department.

To overcome these challenges, it is essential to establish a clear governance framework that aligns responsibilities across different functions and organizational levels. In large corporations, this means differentiating between corporate, business unit, and product line levels, as each operates with distinct strategies, operational objectives, and decision-makers.

Governance for transformation is most effectively managed by a cross-functional steering team consisting of leaders from each impacted business unit and function, including R&D, marketing, operations, quality, regulatory, and finance. This team provides strategic oversight, sets performance targets, approves critical design and policy decisions, removes obstacles, and ensures consistent, enthusiastic communication. Strong endorsement from the CEO is essential to guarantee unwavering prioritization of the initiative and to secure organizational buy-in, while a dedicated cross-business working team handles day-to-day activities and champions the cultural changes needed to embed innovation practices throughout the organization.

The following graphic illustrates a sample governance structure that enables this coordinated approach. It outlines the key roles and responsibilities at various organizational levels, highlighting how leadership oversight, cross-functional collaboration, and operational execution come together to drive transformation success.

Figure 2. Sample Initiative Governance Structure

Demonstrating Leadership Action

Leaders shape employee behavior through consistent actions and messages that highlight priorities and expectations, demonstrating what they do, not what they say they do. Employees listen to what leaders say, observe their actions and where they focus their attention, recognize what they value, and use these cues to align their actions and priorities accordingly. For example, a CEO who makes time on his or her calendar to meet regularly with the initiative’s working team sends a powerful signal that the effort is a top priority for the organization.

In the most successful transformations, leadership begins by aligning on a clear change roadmap. This blueprint serves as a shared vision, mapping the path from the company’s current state to its desired future with well-defined actions, sequencing, and responsibilities. Leaders must agree on initiative goals, progress metrics, organizational changes, and time horizon. The roadmap incorporates both high impact “quick wins” and longer-term, advanced capabilities, along with the relative timing of activities and dependencies across each capability-building workstream. A well-constructed and actively maintained roadmap sets clear expectations for value realization and prevents isolated initiatives from emerging. By agreeing on this roadmap, leaders ensure that their messages, decisions, and actions remain consistent throughout the organization.

Figure 3. Sample Change Roadmap

Not all transformations maintain this level of cross-functional leadership alignment and focus. Over time, the priorities of well-intentioned leaders can shift, leading to unintended consequences. As the pressures of day-to-day operations and quarterly performance demands mount, these leaders often redirect their focus to immediate business needs, allocating resources to these areas or assigning transformation responsibilities as additional work without adjusting existing workloads. Similarly, when leadership priorities shift or the organization takes on too many initiatives simultaneously, focus on the transformation declines, and a wait-and-see approach tends to emerge.

This shift in focus has a ripple effect throughout the organization. What begins as a coordinated, integrated effort becomes piecemeal. Cross-business unit collaboration weakens, as leaders prioritize their own immediate challenges over broader, long-term goals. Pockets of resistance emerge, especially among middle managers who perceive the transformation as a threat to their authority or control. These managers openly question the legitimacy of the cross-business coalitions, making statements like, “They don’t really understand the nuances of how we operate in our business unit.” Such comments sow doubt and fracture the coalition, leaving the transformation adrift.

A transformation doesn’t fail overnight, it fades when leaders stop prioritizing it. Therefore, the CEO must act as the ultimate guardian, continuously and visibly reinforcing the business imperative, aligning leadership, and holding them accountable.

Building an Interdependent Innovation System

Companies typically start their improvement journey by making changes where there is an immediate need. This may involve implementing an improved gated-development process with Agile methods to guide core business execution or adopting design thinking and lean startup approaches to discover, incubate, and scale new business models. The results these capabilities provide can be significant, but unfortunately, they represent only a fraction of the potential value they can offer, and success is hard to sustain unless they are implemented as part of an interdependent innovation system.

Figure 4. The Innovation System

The above graphic illustrates innovation as an interconnected set of capability areas, where key elements, each with their own processes, organizational structures, governance mechanisms, workflows, and tools, function together as a cohesive system. While individual elements can be enhanced independently with significant success, the greatest value is achieved when all elements operate together. The effectiveness of any single element is ultimately reliant on the strength of the others. It takes a coordinated set of integrated initiatives that support and reinforce one another to achieve truly transformational results.

Involving Employees

Employee involvement is critical to transforming a company’s culture, fostering ownership, aligning diverse perspectives, and ensuring the adoption of new methodologies for lasting change. Employees are far more likely to embrace changes they help design, particularly in innovation process transformations.

Successful transformations prioritize employee involvement from the start. Establishing a cross-functional team with representatives from each business unit ensures a shared understanding of capability gaps and improvement opportunities. Using performance benchmarks, these teams gain insights into organizational challenges and build a collective commitment to address them.

Interactive workshops play a pivotal role giving key stakeholders the experience of being involved in shaping the future state. These sessions are designed to define guiding principles for new processes, build consensus around success metrics, and identify practical steps forward. Rather than generating extensive documentation, the focus is on creating actionable, outcome-driven processes that drive meaningful progress.

Process pilots are vital for testing and refining new approaches. Instead of lengthy design phases, pilot teams implement and validate key elements right away, demonstrating success and building momentum. Visible wins convert skeptics into advocates, creating enthusiasm and offering a clear vision of how the transformation benefits employees and the organization.

Hands-on engagement during these pilots fosters a sense of ownership as employees actively design, test, and refine new processes. This approach embeds new practices into the culture and drives the transformation forward.

However, when employee involvement is mishandled or overlooked, transformations can falter. Excluding employees from early stages, such as identifying performance gaps or defining future processes, leads to disengagement. Without a clear understanding of the reasons for change, employees may see the transformation as irrelevant or forced, leading to fear, resistance, and reversion to old habits.

How many people should be directly involved in the change effort? McKinsey research, shown below, finds that involving at least 7 percent of employees as transformation initiative owners significantly increases the likelihood of outperforming sector and geographic stock indices. This 7 percent can represent hundreds of fully engaged employees, a number far above the average 2 percent involvement in most organizations.

Figure 5. McKinsey Transformation Employee Involvement Study Results

While the number of employees involved will vary with the initiative’s scope and complexity, the principle remains clear: early, meaningful involvement drives success.

Aligning Incentive Systems

Aligned incentives, such as rewards, recognition, approval, and status, play a vital role in shaping behavior and reinforcing organizational culture. Innovation, which relies on collaboration across diverse teams, succeeds when incentives align with company, business unit, product line, and project goals.

Adjusting incentive systems in established companies is challenging, as these systems are deeply rooted in organizational culture and long-standing practices. Changes often face resistance from employees concerned about fairness or uncertainty. Balancing short-term performance goals with long-term strategic priorities adds complexity, requiring careful re-calibration to prevent misaligned priorities or unintended consequences.

Effective incentive systems must align with corporate strategy. Too often, a gap exists between a company’s innovation investments and its growth ambitions. Leaders driven by quarterly targets tend to prioritize safe, short-term innovation projects, resulting in an over-reliance on incremental improvements that hinder long-term growth and increase vulnerability to disruption. Successful companies link growth strategy to a balanced innovation project portfolio optimized across growth horizons.

A major challenge for companies enhancing their innovation capabilities is transitioning from siloed functional objectives to a model of team-based accountability. In this approach, team members share responsibility for product success, fostering a culture of mutual accountability. Leading organizations tackle this shift by restructuring reward systems to prioritize team performance. For example, they evaluate more than half of a team member’s performance based on peer feedback and project outcomes, ensuring that contributions to collective success are properly recognized.

However, even with the right structural changes, incentives can still fall short if they don’t resonate with employees. Many leaders unintentionally mis-align rewards with what employees truly value, leading to disengagement rather than motivation. As Jennifer Chojnacki, Executive Director, Innovation & New Product Introduction at Carrier Corporation, explains, “Incentives are a tough topic. I see leaders get this wrong more often than they get it right, offering unrealistic rewards that can’t be fulfilled or mis-aligning incentives with what employees actually value. Too often, leaders assume their own motivations apply universally, rather than taking the time to understand what truly drives their teams.”

Financial incentives, while important, must support desired behaviors to avoid undermining transformation efforts. Misaligned rewards, such as prioritizing individual achievements over team success, can hinder collaboration and innovation. Thoughtful design ensures financial incentives complement non-financial rewards, fostering a culture where employees and teams feel both valued and motivated.

Aligning HR Systems

Aligning human resource (HR) systems with transformational change initiatives ensures that recruitment, training, rewards, and promotions support change objectives and reinforce cultural norms. Candidates are evaluated on their skills and alignment with organizational values, and employees are trained in expected behaviors. Career paths and promotions recognize those excelling in both performance and cultural fit, ensuring the organization’s values and change objectives are consistently upheld.

Successful companies also align recruitment strategies and career development to address skill gaps, enhance competencies, and teach new ways of working. Training programs are tailored to specific roles, including project team members, functional managers, and business leaders governing the innovation pipeline. Just-in-time training, meaning applied training on live projects, and role-playing exercises prove far more effective than traditional classroom methods for driving significant behavior and process changes.

To support recruitment and career progression, organizations establish clear role expectations that extend beyond standard job descriptions. These expectations define the skills, capabilities, and success criteria for roles within innovation teams, functional management, and portfolio management.

By aligning HR systems with initiative goals, organizations create a unified approach to change. This empowers employees to embrace the desired culture, building a strong foundation for sustainable innovation and long-term success.

Reinforcing Through Signals, Symbols, & Rituals

In transformational initiatives, organizations establish clear behavioral expectations to signal shared values and emphasize cultural evolution. Celebrating individuals who embody these values reinforces desired behaviors, while symbols like unique language or rituals foster belonging and alignment with the organization’s identity. These elements embed cultural messages throughout the initiative, ensuring consistent reinforcement.

Cultural alignment is strengthened by the tone and actions of senior leaders, whose influence shapes innovation teams and their approach to challenges. During project funding reviews, for instance, leaders can demonstrate trust and foster accountability through the questions they ask and the perspectives they promote. Instead of demanding, “Pull in your schedule,” they might ask, “What would it take to pull in your schedule?” This subtle shift in tone signals confidence in the team’s ability to evaluate tradeoffs and make informed recommendations. In customer-centric cultures, directives like “Start development as soon as possible” give way to “Ensure unmet customer needs are fully understood before advancing to development.” Similarly, leaders foster progress by re-framing early innovation project failure as rapid learning, celebrating cost savings when un-viable projects are identified and cancelled prior to full-scale development.

The use of distinctive language further encapsulates cultural values and reinforces the organization’s identity. Phrases like “customer obsession” or “bias for action” become part of daily conversations, serving as constant reminders of priorities. Successful companies also adapt leading innovation practices, such as lean startup, design thinking, and Agile, to suit their unique needs and culture. Instead of rigidly adhering to a single approach, they tailor terminology and processes to align with their organizational context.

Sustaining Momentum and Long-Term Commitment

Large, established companies often underestimate the effort required to achieve lasting success and embed it into the organization. Transforming the way a company innovates impacts every function and management level, necessitating significant cultural change. This is challenging because employees have operated within the existing culture for years. Some may perceive the initiative as a threat to their power and authority, while others may strongly resist any deviation from the status quo. Moreover, these changes must be implemented without disrupting daily operations.

Transformation is an ongoing process, not just a destination. While early results can emerge within months, providing momentum for the initiative, full internalization of the changes takes years. Successful rollout and adoption require all innovation teams and their leaders to experience the new processes and learn how to integrate them into their daily routines. The transformation unfolds gradually as success builds credibility and reinforces the new approach.

As Bridget Sheriff, VP of Engineering at Carrier Corporation, puts it, “I learned long ago that you never get something for nothing—true transformation demands relentless effort and stamina. Lasting change isn’t achieved through sporadic bursts of energy; it’s a journey that requires persistence, resilience, and a willingness to push through resistance. People are naturally inclined to stick with what they know, so shifting mindsets and behaviors takes time, trust, and continuous reinforcement.”

Start with the fundamentals, demonstrate success, build momentum, be willing to evolve as you learn, and layer in advanced processes, techniques, and tools over time. Leaders with a short-term outlook will struggle to sustain the necessary support for this long-term effort. Moreover, inconsistent effort, fluctuating funding, and repeated starts and stops will undermine progress and lead to change fatigue.

This is why leaders must embrace transformation as a long-term commitment, prioritizing continuous improvement, fostering a culture of learning and adaptability, and celebrating each stage of value realization. By sustaining momentum and consistently reinforcing the value of change, they can prevent complacency and drive lasting success.

Conclusion

Transforming innovation processes in large, established companies is no small feat, but the rewards of a cohesive, adaptive, and innovation-driven culture are immeasurable. The experiences shared in this article illuminate the power and complexity of cultural transformation, highlighting both the potential for extraordinary progress and the pitfalls that can derail well-intentioned efforts.

The keys to successful transformation demonstrate that success lies not in isolated actions but in a carefully orchestrated, holistic approach. From the unwavering commitment of leadership to the deep engagement of employees, aligned reward systems, compelling cultural narratives, supportive HR systems, and a commitment to stay the course, every lever plays a vital role in driving sustainable change.

However, true transformation goes beyond implementing processes and frameworks; it demands a steadfast dedication to consistency, collaboration, and learning. It calls for organizations to move beyond short-term wins to foster an enduring culture of innovation that can withstand market pressures and disruptions. Leaders must be relentless in their alignment, employees must feel empowered to design and execute the change, and integration must take precedence over fragmented solutions.

As Tobi Karchmer, Chief Medical and Scientific Officer for Baxter International, explains, “Transforming innovation capability isn’t just about changing processes, it requires shifting deeply ingrained mindsets. Without addressing cultural barriers, even the most well-designed initiatives will struggle to take hold and deliver meaningful impact.”

The lessons outlined here provide a roadmap for companies embarking on similar journeys. By embracing both the successes and the missteps, organizations can navigate the challenges of transformation and position themselves as innovation leaders. In the end, the path to innovation excellence may be complex, but it is a journey well worth taking for the organization, its employees, and the customers who value their breakthroughs.

References

  1. Laura London, Stephanie Madner, and Dominic Skerritt, “How many people are really needed in a transformation?” McKinsey Insights, 2021
  2. Daniel Coyle, The Culture Playbook: 60 Highly Effective Actions to Help Your Group Succeed, 2022
  3. Charles O’Reilly, “How Microsoft Transformed Its Culture,” Management and Business Review, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2024

Related articles for a deeper dive on the topic:

  1. “Pizzas, Minivans, and the Innovation Core Team,” Mind the Product, 2018
  2. “Innovation Process Design and Software Tool Enablement,” PDMA Visions, Issue 2, 2014, Volume 38, 2014
  3. Noel Sobelman and Tony Ulwick, “Outcome-Driven Venturing: Build the Right Solutions and Build Them Right,” The Marketing Journal, 2021
  4. “The Journey Toward World Class Innovation: 5 Keys to Successful Implementation,” 2022
  5. “Innovation Project Governance Do’s & Don’ts,” 2022

Image credits: Noel Sobelman, McKinsey, Pixabay

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‘Twas the Night Before Launch Day

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Twas the Night Before Launch Day

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

‘Twas the night before launch day, when throughout HQ,
Not a worker had left, there was too much to do;
The plans were laid out by the whiteboard with care,
While our Innovation Chief Sarah planned with great flair;

The team was all nestled all snug at their posts,
While visions of success inspired them the most;
And Sarah in her blazer, so sharp and so bright,
Had just settled in for a long working night,

When out in the hall there arose such a clatter,
She sprang from her desk to see what was the matter.
When what to her wondering eyes should appear,
But the CEO and board, spreading holiday cheer!

“Now, ARCHITECTURE!” they cried, “We need strategy and rules!
Now BEHAVIORS and CULTURE!” – these ABC tools.
“Tell us Sarah,” they said, “how you’ll lead us to glory,
Through bringing new value – tell us your story!”

She smiled as she stood, confidence in her stance,
“The ABCs of Innovation aren’t left up to chance.
Architecture’s our framework, our process and measure,
Our governance model not built at our leisure;

“The Behaviors we foster? Curiosity leads,
With courage and commitment to meet future needs.
And Culture,” she said, with a twinkle of pride,
“Is how innovation becomes our natural stride.”

Her cross-functional team gathered ’round with delight,
Each bringing their skills to help win this big fight:
“From concept to testing, from planning to more,
We’re ready to launch what we’ve worked toward before!”

The CEO beamed and the board gave a cheer,
“This is exactly the progress we’d hoped for this year!
With Architecture to guide us, and Behaviors so strong,
Plus Culture to fuel us – well, nothing could go wrong!”

Then Sarah exclaimed, as they turned out the light,
“Happy launching to all, and to all a good night!
For tomorrow we share what’s been worth all the wait,
Guided by ABCs, we’ll make something great!”

Image credit: Microsoft CoPilot

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Purpose Matters Because …

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Purpose Matters Because ...

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When the Business Roundtable issued a statement in 2019 that discarded the old notion that the sole purpose of a business is to provide value to shareholders, many were dismayed. Some thought it was just another example of misguided altruism by “elites.” Others saw it as a cynical and disingenuous ploy.

Yet the primacy of shareholder value is hardly a well-established economic principle. The concept does not appear even once in Adam Smith’s seminal treatise, The Wealth of Nations. In fact, it is a relatively recent idea and when the economist Milton Friedman first proposed it in 1970, it was considered radical, even subversive, certainly not to be taken as gospel.

It has also been tremendously unsuccessful. Since Friedman’s essay we have become less productive, not more. One reason for the poor results is that Friedman and others like him failed to recognize that our economy is made up of people, not inanimate pieces of data that make up economic charts, and these people search for meaning and purpose in their lives.

Failed Cartesians

Often regarded as the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes was obsessed with human fallibility. Cursed with imperfect senses and emotions that can warp logic, he sought to build a new intellectual foundation based on cool, rational thought. “I think, therefore I am,” he wrote, proving that at least one thing could be known without referring to the use of the senses.

Descartes’ ideas led to the Rationalist school of philosophy as others tried to build on his work. The idea that, through pure reason, we could see truths with greater clarity held enormous attraction for intellectual giants such as Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. Unfortunately, other than in the field of mathematics, little was achieved.

That didn’t stop others from trying though. In the early 20th century, the Vienna Circle arose in response to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and others in order to create a logical system to guide human affairs. Wittgenstein himself would later disown it and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems would eventually expose the whole exercise as a failure.

Undeterred by centuries of failure, business consultants have tried to sell the same idea to executives. Yet despite fancy names like scientific management, financial engineering and six sigma, these didn’t fare any better. One study found that of 58 large companies that announced Six Sigma programs, 91 percent trailed the S&P 500 in stock performance.

Still, many remain undeterred. The idea of an infallible technocracy is just too tempting for many to resist.

The End Of History And The Washington Consensus

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History to great acclaim. The Cold War had ended and capitalism was triumphant. Communism was shown to be a corrupt system bereft of any real legitimacy. It seemed that, as many philosophers had predicted, we had reached an end point in which human sociocultural evolution was complete.

A new ideology took hold, often referred to as the “Washington Consensus,” that preached fiscal discipline, free trade, privatization and deregulation. The world was going to be remade in capitalism’s image. Countries that hit hard times would be offered aid from multilateral institutions like the IMF and the World Bank in return for favored policy reforms.

Many pointed out that international bureaucrats were mandating policies for developing nations that citizens in their own countries would never accept. Strict austerity programs led to human costs that were both significant and real. In a sense, the Soviet error was being repeated. Ideology was being put before people.

Yet Fukuyama’s message had been misunderstood. His book was not meant as a prophecy, but as a warning. He pointed to the ancient Greek concept of thymos, a spirited blend of dignity and pride, to caution against rationalist explanations for human behavior. Given a choice between a well trod path and one less certain, he predicted that many will “set their eyes on a new and more distant journey.”

The Silicon Valley Myth

I was working on Wall Street in 1995 when the Netscape IPO hit like a bombshell. It was the first big Internet stock and, although originally priced at $14 per share, it opened at double that amount and quickly zoomed to $75. By the end of the day, it had settled back at $58.25 and, just like that, a tiny company with no profits was worth $2.9 billion.

It seemed crazy, but economists soon explained that certain conditions, such as negligible marginal costs and network effects, would lead to “winner take all markets” and increasing returns to investment. Venture capitalists who bet on this logic would, in many cases, become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

The conditions for increasing returns, however, only apply to a narrow swath of businesses, mostly limited to software and electronic gadgets. Nevertheless, entrepreneurs and their investors became convinced that they could apply the Silicon Valley model anywhere, leading to high profile failures like WeWork and Theranos.

That’s the Silicon Valley myth, that the rational logic of code can be applied to any problem. It’s the same fantasy that has been repeated throughout history, handed from Cartesians to logical positivists to “scientific” managers and now to the software engineers, puffed up with stock options who can’t seem to understand why everyone else doesn’t “get it.”

The costs have been substantial. Evidence suggests that the billions wantonly plowed into massive failures are crowding out real businesses. Productivity has been depressed for half a century. The Facebook papers revealed a culture that has lost its way, so single-mindedly focused on optimizing engagement it lost sight of the humanity it was supposed to engage.

Identity, Dignity And Purpose

If you believe in a rational Cartesian universe, a business is little more than a set of transactions. The nature of the firm, in this view, is simply to minimize transaction costs and skilled managers should focus on maximizing bargaining power among stakeholders in order to build a sustainable competitive advantage. Yet the world doesn’t actually work that way.

Consider the ultimatum game. One player is given a dollar and needs to propose how to split it with another player. If it is accepted, both players get the agreed upon shares. If it is not accepted, neither player gets anything. If the world was completely rational, the second player would accept even a single penny. After all, a penny is better than nothing.

Yet decades of experiments across different cultures show that most people do not accept a penny. In fact, offers of less than 30 cents are routinely rejected as unfair. It offends people’s dignity and sense of self. For many of the same reasons, there is increasing evidence that financial targets don’t motivate employees. No one wants to be a cog in someone else’s wheel.

That is the value of purpose. It bolsters, rather than undermines, our identity. When people feel that they are part of a common project, they feel a sense of ownership, that they are ends in themselves rather than means to an end. It uplifts, rather than demeans, us. It fortifies, rather than undermines, our spirit.

What separates great leaders from mediocre managers is that the leaders do more than calculate, they provide meaning to an endeavor that makes it more than merely a common enterprise. It becomes a collective mission.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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We Are in an Employee Experience Recession

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We Are in an Employee Experience Recession

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

The title of this article is very similar to the title of the first chapter of John DiJulius and David Murray’s latest book, The Employee Experience Revolution. As the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, many employees realized what made them happy—and unhappy. The result was that many companies experienced The Great Resignation, as employees left their current employers hoping for something better.

Some companies have struggled to replace employees. Many claim there is a shortage of workers. I’ll argue that a shortage of workers isn’t the problem. There is a shortage of workers for that specific company. Why? They haven’t created the employee experience that makes employees want to stay. For example, one of my favorite restaurants has the same employees today as it did pre-pandemic. But the restaurant across the street has struggled to get good people to stay. The reason is simple—and it’s not the food. It’s the management/ownership.

Just as you want your customers to come back, you want your employees to come back. That’s why the employee experience must be in alignment with the customer experience. For years, I’ve preached the Employee Golden Rule, which is to do unto your employees as you want done unto your customers. You can’t treat employees harshly and expect them to go out and be nice to customers. Incongruent behavior can eventually result in a company’s version of The Great Resignation.

I had a chance to interview John DiJulius for an episode of Amazing Business Radio to talk about his new book. I’m so in alignment with his ideas that I thought it was an interview with myself. Below are five of his concepts (in bold), followed by my commentary.

  1. There is not a labor shortage. There is a turnover crisis. As mentioned above in the restaurant example, two restaurants on opposite sides of the street have completely different labor experiences. One has kept its core group of employees. The other can’t keep employees. It’s not a labor shortage. As DiJulius points out, “I don’t think there are fewer human beings walking planet Earth than there were five years ago.” It’s all a turnover problem.
  2. Because some companies struggle to keep people, they hire almost anyone. When many employees leave, some companies are too quick to hire. Desperation can cause companies to hire too quickly, which means they may get the wrong people. What’s worse, according to DiJulius, is that “Companies look the other way on poor performers and people with bad attitudes because they need to replace so many employees.”
  3. Your employees are the average of the five people they work closest to. Motivational speaker Jim Rohn is often credited with saying, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” DiJulius says this is the same in a company, but there’s a difference. In your personal life, you choose your friends. At work, you don’t get a choice. If you put a superstar in the midst of a group of underachievers, you shouldn’t be surprised if your expectations aren’t met.
  4. The employee experience starts with the recruitment experience. DiJulius believes that everything should be an experience. That includes your recruiting, hiring and on-boarding process. Today we are in an “employees’ market.” Candidates can demand more money and benefits. But what if you created an experience that transcended a paycheck? Yes, we need to pay a fair wage, but if the experience of working at a company is strong enough, employees will factor that into their decision to come and work for you. I summarize this concept by asking, “Do you want an employee working for a paycheck or working for the company?”
  5. Build a moat around your rock stars. Just as you work to attract and keep your customers, you should focus similar efforts on hiring the right employees and keeping them. So what are you doing to ensure that after 90 days, your employees think, “This is where I belong”? What experience are you creating that would have them turn down offers from others? DiJulius says, “This is the moat you build around your employees.”

How do we beat the Employee Experience Recession? Cultivate an engaging experience — an appealing and supportive work environment that extends beyond competitive salaries. Foster a culture in which employees feel valued and are an integral part of the organization. Just like you create an experience that gets customers to return, you must prioritize building a workplace where employees are inspired to sign on, come back, and not leave.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Image Credits: Pixabay

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Don’t ‘Follow the Science’, Follow the Scientific Method

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Don't 'Follow the Science', Follow the Scientific Method

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

The scientific method is probably the most useful thing I’ve learnt in my life. It is a near universal tool that can be used in so many ways and so many places.  It unleashes a whole world of assisted critical thinking that is invaluable to innovators, but also in our personal lives.  Teaching it to individuals or teams who are not trained as scientists is one of the most powerful and enabling things we can do for them.  And teaching it to kids, as opposed to endless facts and data that they can easily access from the web is something we should do far more of.  

Recruiting Skills not Expertise:  When I was involved in recruiting, I always valued PhD’s and engineers.  Sometimes that was for their unique, specialized knowledge.  But more often than not it was more for the critical thinking skills they had acquired while gaining that specialized knowledge. In today’s rapidly evolving world, specific knowledge typically has a relatively short shelf-life.  But the cognitive framework embodied by the scientific method is a tool for life, and one that can be reapplied in so many ways.  .

Don’t Follow the Science, Follow the Process:  All too often today the scientific method gets confused with ‘following the science’.  The scientific process is almost infinitely useful, but blindly ‘following the science’ is often far less so, and can be counter productive.  The scientific method is a process that helps us to evaluate information, challenge assumptions, and in so doing, get us closer to truth.  Sometimes it confirms our existing ideas, sometimes it improves them, and sometimes it completely replaces them.  But it is grounded in productive and informed skepticism, and this is at the heart of why science is constantly evolving.

‘Follow the Science’ in many ways the opposite.  It assumes someone in a position of power already has the right answer.  At it’s best it means blindly follow the consensus of today’s experts.  All too often it really means ‘do as you are told’.   Frequently the people saying this are not the experts themselves, but are instead evoking third party expertise to support their viewpoint.  That of course is the opposite of science.  It’s often well intended, but not always good advice.

Science is not a Religion:  At the heart of this is a fundamental misunderstanding of science, and scientists. In today’s media and social media, all too often science and scientists are presented with a quasi-religious reverence, and challenging the current view is framed as heretical.  How often do you here the framing ‘scientists tell us… ‘ as a way of validating a position?   

This is understandable.  The sheer quantity and complexity of information we are faced with in our everyday lives is increasingly unmanageable, while big challenges like climate unimaginably complex.  I find it almost impossible to keep up with my own interests, let alone everything that is happening.  And some topics are so technical that they simply require translation by experts.  When someone announces they’ve discovered the Higgs boson particle, it’s not really practical for any of us to pop over to the local particle accelerator and check for ourselves.  So expertise is clearly an important part of any decision chain. But experts come with their own biases. An engineer naturally tends to see problems and through, an engineering lens, a chemist through a chemical one.

Science in Support of an Agenda:  One danger with the ‘follow the science’ mantra is that it is often used to reinforce a belief, opinion, or even agenda.  I’ve seen this all too often in my work life, with the question, ‘can you find me a paper that supports ‘x’.  This is often benign, in that someone passionately believes something, and wants to find evidence to support it.   But this is fundamentally the wrong question, and of course, completely ‘unscientific’.

The scientific literature is filled with competing theories, disproven or outdated ideas, and bad science.   If you look for literature to support an idea you can usually find it, even if it’s wrong.   Scientists are not gods.  They make mistakes, they run poor experiments, and they are subject to confirmation biases, ego, and other human frailties. There is a good reason for the phrase that science evolves one death at a time. Science, like virtually every human organization is hierarchical, and a prestigious scientist can advance a discipline, but can also slow it down by holding onto a deeply held belief. And mea culpa, I know from personal experience that it’s all too easy to fall in love with a theory, and resist evidence to the contrary. 

Of course, some theories are more robust than others.   Both consensus and longevity are therefore important considerations.  Some science is so well established, and supported by so much observation that it’s unlikely that it will fundamentally change.  For example, we may still have a great deal to learn about gravity, but for practical purposes, apples will still drop from trees.    

Peer Review:  Policing the literature is hard.  Consensus is right until its not. Another phrase I often hear is ‘peer reviewed’, in the context that this makes the paper ‘right’.  Of course, peer review is valuable, part of the scientific process, and helps ensure that content has quality, and has been subject to a high level of rigor.   If one person says it, it can be a breakthrough or utter nonsense.  If a lot of smart people agree, it’s more likely to be ‘right’.  But that is far from guaranteed, especially if they share the same ingoing assumptions. Scientific consensus has historically embraced many poor theories; a flat earth, or the sun revolving around the earth are early examples. More tragically, I grew up with the thalidomide generation in Europe.  On an even bigger scale, the industrial revolution gave us so much, but also precipitated climate change.  And on a personal level, I’ve just been told by my physician to take a statin, and I am in the process of fighting my way through rapidly growing and evolving literature in order to decide if that is the right decision.  So next time you see a scientist, or worse, a politician, journalist, or a random poster on Twitter claim they own scientific truth, enjoin you to ‘follow the science’, or accuse someone else of being a science denier, treat it with a grain of sodium chloride.

They may of course be right, but the more strident they are, or the less qualified, the less likely they are to really understand science, and hence what they are asking you to follow.  And the science they pick is quite possibly influenced by their own goals, biases or experience. Of course, practically we cannot challenge everything. We need to be selective, and the amount of personal effort we put into challenging an idea will depend upon how important it is to us as individuals.      

Owning your Health:  Take physicians as an example.  At some time or other, we’ve all looked to a physician for expert advise.  And there is a good reason to do so.  They work very hard to secure deep knowledge of their chosen field, and the daily practice of medicine gives then a wealth of practical as well as well as theoretical knowledge.  But physicians are not gods either.  The human body is a very complex system, physicians have very little time with an individual patient (over the last 10 years, the average time a physician spends with a patient has shrunk to a little over 15 minutes), the field is vast and expanding, and our theories around how to diagnose and treat disease are constantly evolving.  In that way, medicine is a great example of the scientific method in action, but also how transient ‘scientific truths’ can be.  

I already mentioned my current dilemma with statins.   But to give an even more deeply personal example, neither my wife or I would be alive today if we’d blindly followed a physicians diagnosis.

I had two compounding and comparatively rare conditions that combined to appear like a more common one.  The physician went with the high probability answer.  I took time to dig deeper and incorporate more details.  Together we got to the right answer, and I’m still around!

This is a personal and pragmatic example of how valuable the scientific process can be.  My health is important, so I chose to invest considerable time in the diagnosis I was given, and challenge it productively, instead of blindly accepting an expert opinion. My physicians had far more expertise than I did, but I had far more time and motivation.  We ultimately complemented each other by partnering, and using the scientific method both as a process, and as a way to communicate.   

The Challenge of Science Communication:  To be fair, science communication is hard.   It requires communicating an often complex concept with sufficient simplicity for it to be understandable, often requires giving guidance, while also embracing appropriate uncertainty. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of Covid 19, where a lot of ‘follow the science’, and ‘science denier’ language came from.  At the beginning of the pandemic, the science was understandably poorly developed, but we still had to make important decisions on often limited data.  At first we simply didn’t understand even the basics like the transmission vectors (was it airborne or surface, how long did it survive outside of the body, etc).  I find it almost surreal to think back to those early months, how little we knew, the now bizarre clean room protocols we used on our weekly shopping, and some of the fear that has now faded into the past.  

But because we understood so little, we made a lot of mistakes.  The over enthusiastic use of ventilators may have killed some patients, although that is still a hotly debated topic. Early in the pandemic masks, later to become a controversial and oddly politically charged topic, masks were specifically not recommended by the US government for the general public. Who knows how many people contracted the disease by following this advice?   It was well intentioned, as authorities were trying to prevent a mask shortage for health workers. But it was also mechanistically completely wrong.

At the time I used simple scientific reasoning, and realized this made little sense.  If the virus was transmitted via an airborne vector, a mask would help.  If it wasn’t, it would do no harm, at least as long as I didn’t subtract from someone with greater need. By that time the government had complete control of the mask supply chain anyway, so that was largely a moot point. Instead I dug out a few old N95 masks that had been used for spray painting and DIY, and used them outside of the house (hospitals would not accept donations of used masks). I was lambasted with ‘follow the science’ by at least one friend for doing so, but followed an approach with high potential reward and virtually zero downside. I’ll never know if that specifically worked, but I didn’t get Covid, at least not until much later when it was far less dangerous.

Science doesn’t own truth: Unlike a religion, good science doesn’t pretend to own ultimate truths.  But unfortunately it can get used that way.  Journalists, politicians, technocrats and others sometimes weaponize (selective) science to support an opinion. Even s few scientists who have become frustrated with ‘science deniers’ can slip into this trap.

Science is a Journey: I should clarify that the scientific method is more of a journey, not so much a single process. To suggest is is a single ‘thing’ so is probably an unscientific simplification in its own right. It’s more a way of thinking that embraces empiricism, observation, description, productive skepticism, and the use of experimentation to test and challenge hypothesis. It also helps us to collaborate and communicate with experts in different areas, creating a common framework for collaboration, rather than blindly following directions or other expert opinions.    

It can be taught, and is incredibly useful.  But like any tool, it requires time and effort to become a skilled user.   But if we invest in it, it can be extraordinarily valuable, both in innovation and life. It’s perhaps not for every situation, as that would mire us in unmanageable procrastination.  But if something is important, it’s an invaluable tool. 

Image credits: Pixabay

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The Power of Cultural Competence in Leadership

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The Power of Cultural Competence in Leadership

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I first moved to Kyiv about 20 years ago, I met my friend Pavlo, who is from Belarus. Eventually our talk turned to that country’s leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and an incident in which he turned off the utilities at the US Ambassador’s residence, as well as those of other diplomats. It seemed totally outlandish and crazy to me.

“But he won,” Pavlo countered. I was incredulous, until he explained. “Lukashenko knows he’s a bastard and that the world will never accept him. In that situation all you can win is your freedom and that’s what he won.” It was a mode of thinking so outrageous and foreign to me that I could scarcely believe it.

Yet it opened my eyes and made me a more effective operator. We tend to think of empathy as an act of generosity, but it’s far more than that. Learning how to internalize diverse viewpoints is a skill we should learn not only because it helps make others more comfortable, but because it empowers us to successfully navigate an often complex and difficult world.

Shared Identity And Dominant Culture

We naturally tend to form groups based on identity. For example, in a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to outgroup members. Similar results were found in a study involving five year-old children and even in infants. So to a certain extent, tribalism is unavoidable.

Evolutionary psychologists attribute this tendency to kin selection. Essentially, groups favor those who are most like them are more likely to see their own genes passed on. As Richard Dawkins famously pointed out, what we traditionally consider altruism can also be seen as selfish genes conniving to perpetuate themselves.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that organizational and institutional settings sustain our penchant for tribalism. Managers will tend to hire people who think and act in familiar ways. Those who reflect the preferences of the higher-ups will be more likely to get promoted and, in turn, recruit people like themselves. This all leads to a level of homogeneity that provides comfort and confidence.

We rarely welcome someone who threatens our sense of self. So those outside the dominant culture are encouraged to conform and are often punished when they don’t. They are less often invited to join in routine office socializing and promotions are less likely to come their way. When things go poorly, it’s much easier to blame the odd duck than the trusted insider.

How Success Leads To Failure

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, author Thomas Kuhn describes how paradigms have a life cycle. They begin as an insight that succeeds in helping to solve a certain class of problems. As their usefulness grows, they rise to dominance and they are rarely questioned or scrutinized anymore. People use them almost reflexively.

Yet over time certain anomalies arise in which the paradigm doesn’t quite fit. For example, in the 1970s and 80s, the minicomputer industry in Boston reigned supreme. Yes, there were some small startup firms out in California, but they were no match for giants like DEC, Data General and Apollo Computer. The California firms were gaining traction, but weren’t considered threats.

Unfortunately for the Boston firms, paradigms were shifting in a way that was extremely disadvantageous to them. They had built strong, dominant cultures that could execute plans efficiently, but weren’t sensitive to outside information. The Silicon Valley firms, which were more diverse and interconnected, were much more able to adapt to changing market realities.

The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. That’s why we so often miss it. If it was obvious, everyone would know about it and it wouldn’t surprise us. That’s why it’s so often those odd ducks, the anomalies that don’t quite fit with the dominant culture, that end up disrupting industries.

Acknowledging Difference

Organizations crave efficiency. It’s easy to measure, evaluate and compensate for. That’s why managers tend to favor cohesive cultures. If you hire and promote likeminded people they will tend to be able to achieve consensus quickly without much deliberation or debate, and move quickly to action.

At the same time, inserting diversity stirs things up and makes people uneasy. For example, in a 2003 study involving 242 members of sororities and fraternities at Northwestern University, groups of students were asked to solve a murder mystery. The more homogenous teams felt more comfortable and confident, but were also much more likely to be wrong.

Real world data suggests that these results are the rule, rather than the exception. A McKinsey report that covered 366 public companies in a variety of countries and industries found that groups that were more ethnically and gender diverse performed significantly better than others. Many other studies have shown similar results

What’s crucial to grasp is that diverse teams don’t perform better in spite of discomfort, but because of it. When people expect people to think like them, they look to build an easy consensus. However, when they expect a range of opinions and perspectives, they need to entertain more possibilities and scrutinize information more skeptically.

That’s why it’s so important to acknowledge differences. If we see the world as homogeneous, we are more likely to see dissenting opinions as hostile challenges instead of new possibilities to be explored. It is through acknowledging diverse viewpoints that we can best catalyze the kind of creativity and innovation that helps solve complex and important problems.

Building Shared Identity Through Shared Purpose

Living as a foreigner for 15 years forced me to acknowledge viewpoints very different from my own. Many seemed strange to me, some I found morally questionable, but all forced me to grow. Perhaps even more importantly, I made friends like Pavlo, all of whom helped shape me and how I perceive things.

Our identity and sense of self drives a lot of what we see and do, yet we rarely examine these things because we spend most of our time with people who are a lot like us, who live in similar places and experience similar things. That’s why our innate perceptions and beliefs seem normal and those of others strange, because our social networks shape us that way.

The purpose of an education is to help us see beyond our own experience, but that is in no way a passive skill. We need to continually renew it. Diversity only has value if we appreciate difference; are willing to explore and learn from it. It is only then that we can glean new insights and apply them to some useful endeavor

It is at this nexus of identity and purpose that creativity and innovation reside, because when we learn to collaborate with others who possess knowledge, skills and perspectives that we don’t, new possibilities emerge. Make no mistake, however, breakthroughs are never truly serendipitous or random, but the product of a prepared mind.

And you prepare your mind through building cultural competence.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification

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SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

This capture from a recent SpaceX tweet is a stunning visual example of smart innovation and simplification. 

While I’m not even close to being a rocket scientist, and so am far from familiar with all of the technical details, I’ve heard that breakthroughs incorporated into this include innovative sensor design that allows for streamlined feedback loops. But this goes beyond just impressive technical innovation.   To innovate at this level requires organizational and cultural flexibility as well as technical brilliance. That latter flexibility is probably far more broadly transferable and adoptable than specific advances in rocket science, and hence more useful to the broader innovation community. So let’s dig a little deeper into that space.

Secret Sauce?  Organizationally SpaceX is well known for less formal hierarchies, passion, ownership and engineers working on the production floor.  This hands on approach creates a different, but important kind of feedback, while passion feeds intrinsic motivation, ownership and engagement, which is so critical to consistent innovation. 

Learning from Failure – An Innovation Superpower?  But perhaps most important of all is the innovation culture. Within SpaceX there is a very clear willingness to experiment and learn from failure.  Not lip service, or the sometimes half-hearted embrace of failure often found in large, bureaucratic organizations, where rewards and career progression often doesn’t reflect the mantra of learning by failing.  This is an authentic willingness to publicly treat productive failure of individual launches as a learning success for the program, and to reward productive failure and appropriate risk taking.  Of course, it’s not always easy to walk the talk of celebrating failure, especially in spacecraft design, where failures are often spectacular, public, and visual gold for the media.  And no doubt this is compounded by Musk’s controversial public profile, where media and social media are often only too keen to highlight failures.  But the visual of Raptor 3 is for me a compelling advertisement for authentically embedding learning by failure deeply into the DNA of an innovative organization. 

Stretch Goals:  Musk is famous for, and sometimes ridiculed for setting ambitious stretch goals, and for not always achieving them.   But in a culture where failure is tolerated, or if done right, celebrated, missing a stretch goal is not a problem, especially if it propelled innovation along at a pace that goes beyond conventional expectation.    

Challenging Legacy and ‘Givens’:  Culturally, this kind of radical simplification requires the systematic challenge of givens that were part of previous iterations.  You cannot make these kind of innovation leaps unless you are both willing and able to discard legacy technical and organizational structures.  

At risk of kicking Boeing while it is down, it is hard not to contrast SpaceX with Boeing, whose space (and commercial aviation) program is very publicly floundering, and facing the potentially humiliating prospect of needing rescue from the more agile SpaceX program. 

Innovation Plaque:  But in the spirit of learning from failure, if we look a bit deeper, perhaps it should not be a surprise that Boeing are struggling to keep up. They have a long, storied, and successful history as a leader in aerospace.  But history and leadership can be a blessing and a curse, as I know from P&G. It brings experience, but also bureaucracy, rigid systems, and deeply rooted culture that may or may not be optimum for managing change.  Deep institutional knowledge can be a similar mixed blessing.  It of course allows easy access to in-domain experience, and is key to not repeating past mistakes, or making naïve errors.  But is also comes with an inherent bias towards traditional solutions, and technologies.  Perhaps even more important is the organizationally remembered pain of past failures, especially if a ‘learn by failure’ culture isn’t fully embraced.  Failure is good at telling us what didn’t work, and plays an important role in putting processes in place that help us to avoid repeating errors.  But over time these ‘defensive’ processes can build up like plaque in an artery, making it difficult to push cutting edge technologies or radical changes through the system.

Balance is everything.  Nobody wants to be the Space Cowboy.  Space exploration is expensive, and risks the lives of some extraordinarily brave people.  Getting the balance between risk taking and the right kind of failure is even more critical than in most other contexts. But SpaceX are doing it right, certainly until now. Whatever the technical details, the impact on speed, efficiency and $$ behind the simplification of Raptor 3 is stunning.  I suspect that ultimately reliability and efficiency will also likely helped by increased simplicity.  But it’s a delicate line.  The aforementioned ‘plaque’ does slow the process, but done right, it can also prevent unnecessary failure.   It’s important to be lean, but  not ‘slice the salami’ too thin.  Great innovation teams mix diverse experience, backgrounds and personalities for this reason.  We need the cynic as well as the gung-ho risk taker.  For SpaceX, so far, so good, but it’s important that they don’t become over confident.  

The Elon Musk Factor:  For anyone who hasn’t noticed. Musk has become a somewhat controversial figure of late. But even if you dislike him, you can still learn from him, and as innovators, I don’t think we can afford not to. He is the most effective innovator, or at least innovation leader for at least a generation. The teams he puts together are brilliant at challenging ‘givens’, and breaking out of legacy constraints and the ‘ghosts of evolution’. We see it across the SpaceX design, not just the engine, but also the launch systems, recycling of parts, etc. We also see an analogous innovation strategy in the way Tesla cars so dramatically challenged so many givens in the auto industry, or the ‘Boring company in my hometown of Las Vegas.

Ghosts of Evolution I’d mentioned the challenges of legacy designs and legacy constraints. I think this is central to SpaceX’s success, and so I think it’s worth going a little deeper on this topic.  Every technology, and every living thing on our planet comes with its own ghosts.   They are why humans have a literal blind-spot in our vision, why our bodies pleasure centers are co-located with our effluent outlets, and why the close proximity of our air and liquid/solid intakes lead to thousands of choking deaths every year. Nature is largely stuck with incrementally building on top of past designs, often leading to the types of inefficiency described above. Another example is the Pronghorn antelope that lives in my adopted American West. It can achieve speeds of close to 90 mph. This is impressive, but vastly over-designed and inefficient for it’s current environment. But it is a legacy design, evolved at a time when it was predated upon by long extinct North American Cheetah. It cannot simply undo that capability now that it’s no longer useful. So far, it’s survived this disadvantage, but it is vulnerable to both competition and changing environment simply because it is over-designed.

Bio-Inspiration:  I’ve long believed we can learn a great deal from nature and bio-inspired design, but sometimes learning what not to do is as useful as ‘stealing’ usable insights. It’s OK to love nature, but also acknowledge that evolution has far more failures than successes. There are far, far more extinct species than living ones.  And virtually every one was either too specialized, or lacked the ability to pivot and adapt in the face of changing context.  

As innovators, we have unique option of creating totally new 2.0 designs, and challenging the often unarticulated givens that are held within a category. And we have the option of changing our culture and organizational structures too.  But often we fail do so because we are individually or organizationally blind to legacy elements that are implicitly part of our assumptions for a category or a company.  The fish doesn’t see the water, or at least not until it’s dangling from a hook. By then it’s too late.   Whatever you think of Musk, he’s taught us it is possible to create innovation cultures that challenge legacy designs extremely effectively.  It’s a lesson worth learning

Image credits: Twitter (via SpaceX)

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Giving Your Team a Sense of Shared Purpose

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Giving Your Team a Sense Of Shared Purpose

GUEST POST from David Burkus

With work and life becoming more intertwined than ever, people increasingly seek purpose through work. So, leaders are being called upon to create a sense of purpose on a team. When team members feel that their work is connected to a larger company-wide purpose, they are more motivated and perform better. This gives managers and leaders an opportunity to facilitate work environments that provide the sense of purpose people need to thrive.

In this article, we will explore five effective ways to create a sense of purpose on a team, ensuring that everyone is aligned and driven towards a common goal.

Give The “It’s A Wonderful Life” Test

The first way to create a sense of purpose on a team is to give the “It’s A Wonderful Life Test.” This test is derived from reflecting on the movie It’s a Wonderful Life and its premise. In the movie, the main character, George Bailey, is saved from committing suicide by an angel. Clarence (worst name for an angel ever) shows how different his community would be if George had never existed. This test doesn’t get as morbid as the movie, but the idea is to run a thought experiment that leads the team to examine its importance by considering the impact of its absence. By applying this test to your team, you can gain a deeper understanding of who is served by their work and the significance of their contributions. This knowledge allows them to see the value they bring to the organization and the difference they make in the lives of others.

Draft a Rallying Cry

The second way to create a sense of purpose on a team is to draft a rallying cry. A rallying cry is a powerful tool that embodies the team’s purpose and serves as a motivational phrase that everyone on the team knows. It should be simple, catchy, and inspiring. Many successful teams have used rallying cries to unite their members and keep them focused on their shared purpose. For example, the San Antonio Spurs adopted the rallying cry “pound the rock,” tapping into the imagery of a stonecutter hitting away at a rock hundreds of times before it finally cracks. They use it as a powerful reminder that the day-to-day strain of training and drilling hundreds of times is what brings victory. By creating a rallying cry that resonates with the team’s purpose, you can foster a strong sense of unity and motivation.

Create Team Symbols

The third way to create a sense of purpose on a team is to create team symbols. Symbols are visual representations that embody the team’s purpose and values. They serve as reminders of the team’s mission and can help team members stay connected to their sense of purpose. They can be visual symbols, objects, gestures, or anything else that can contains a meaning specific to the team—even better if it can tie into the rallying cry. To use the San Antonio Spurs again, their practice facility contains a powerful symbol—a boulder and sledgehammer displayed behind glass. Players walk by it before every practice. Your team may not have as elaborate a symbol. But anything that can remind the team of its rallying cry can help build a sense of purpose on a team. And as a bonus, you can reinforce a sense of shared identity on the team as well.

Collect Impact Stories

The fourth way to create a sense of purpose on a team is to collecting impact stories. Stories are one of the most powerful ways humans communicate—and hence they’re a powerful way to highlight the team’s successes and reinforce their sense of purpose. Impact stories can come from various sources, such as media coverage, customer testimonials, or thank you notes. But managers and leaders play a crucial role in collecting these stories and sharing them with the team. Ideally, every positive email or story in the media that aligns with either the team’s or the organization’s purpose gets captured so it can be shared at regular meetings. By regularly sharing impact stories, team members can see the tangible results of their work and the positive impact they have on others. This boosts their morale and motivation, reminding them of the importance of their contributions and the purpose behind their efforts.

Outsource Inspiration

The final way to create a sense of purpose on a team is to outsource inspiration. Outsourcing inspiration involves bringing in individuals who have been directly impacted by the team’s work to share their stories. It’s like collecting impact stories but amplified. Hearing firsthand accounts of how their work has made a difference can be incredibly motivating for team members. For example, medical device company Medtronic invites patients to their annual holiday party to share how the company’s technology helps them live better. When team members see the real-world impact of their efforts, it reinforces their sense of purpose and reminds them of the importance of their work. It also provides an opportunity for them to connect with the people they are serving, fostering empathy and a deeper understanding of their purpose.

Creating a sense of purpose on a team is crucial for its success. By using the “It’s a Wonderful Life” test, drafting a rallying cry, creating team symbols, collecting impact stories, and outsourcing inspiration, teams can foster a strong sense of purpose and motivation. These activities should be ongoing to maintain a sense of purpose and drive within the team, motivating them to do their best work ever.

Image credit: Unsplash

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on July 31, 2023

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