Category Archives: Innovation

Positive Power of Negative Emotions Drive Change

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Positive Power of Negative Emotions Drive Change

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You want to make life better for others. This desire is reflected in the optimism and positivity of your language – create value, love the problem, and delight the customer.  But making life better requires change, and, as the adage goes, “People want change, but they don’t want to be changed.”

You are confident that the solution you created will make life better and that the change people need to make is quite small and painless, well worth the dramatic improvement you offer.  Yet they resist.  No amount of explaining, showing, convincing, or cajoling changes their mind.  What else can you do?

To quote Darth Vader, “Give yourself to the Dark Side.  It is the only way to save your friends.”

“If only you knew the power of the Dark Side…”

The Dark Side is populated by “negative” emotions like anger, fear, and frustration, which are incredibly powerful.

Consider that:

Unfortunately, these are also some of the first emotions experienced when confronting change.   

Change requires people to let go of what they know in exchange for the promise of something better.  This immediately triggers Loss Aversion, the cognitive bias in which the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. 

As a result, people won’t let go of what they know until the pain of holding on becomes unbearable.  When you point out the problems and pain of the current situation, you help people understand and experience the unbearableness of the current situation. 

“Anger, fear, aggression; the Dark Side of the Force are they”

Not every “negative” emotion elicits the same behavior, so carefully choose the one to tap into.

Fear motivates people to seek safety, which can be good if your solution truly offers a safer alternative.  It’s a motivator used well by companies such as Volvo, SimpliSafe, and Graco.  But lean on it too much, and people may feel overwhelmed and remain frozen to the status quo.

Anger motivates people to take risks, which can be good when the change requires bold decisions and dogged persistence.  It can be great when it bonds people together to achieve a shared goal or protect a common value.  Apple used this emotion to brilliant effect in its famous “1984” commercial announcing the launch of Macintosh.  But incite too much anger, and things can get broken and not in a helpful way like Apple’s ad.

Frustration, one of the emotions that often drives aggression, is anger’s polite little sister.  When people feel frustrated, they’re likely to act, persistently pursue solutions, and creatively approach and overcome obstacles.  But if the change is big, feels scary, and puts their sense of self at risk, frustration isn’t powerful enough to convince people to let go of the old and embrace the new.

“If you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.”

Yoda is incredibly wise, but he gets this one wrong.  Using the Dark Side to speak to people’s “negative” emotions doesn’t doom you to a life or career of fear-mongering or inciting violence.  Start here, don’t stay here.

Multiple research studies show that positive emotions, like hope and joy, are more powerful than negative ones in maintaining motivation and even enable more creative thinking and problem-solving.  By speaking to both negative and positive emotions, the Dark Side and the Light, you enable change by giving people a reason to let go of the past and a future worth reaching for.

When people stop resisting and start reaching to the future you’re offering, change happens, and you realize that Yoda was right, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”

Image credit: Pixabay

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The Tension Between Yes and No

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The Tension Between Yes and No

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If the project could obsolete your best work, do it. Otherwise, do something else.

But first, makes sure there’s solid execution on the turn-the-crank projects that pay the bills.

If you always say yes to projects, you never have the bandwidth to do the magical work no one is asking for.

When was the last time you used your discretion to work on a project of your choosing? How do you feel about that?

If you’re told to stop the project by the most successful business unit, stomp on the accelerator.

The best projects aren’t the ones with the best ROI. The best projects are the ones that threaten success.

If you’re certain of a project’s ROI, there is no novelty.

If the project has novelty, you can’t predict the ROI. All you can do is decide if it’s worth doing.

There’s a big difference between calculating an ROI and predicting the commercial success of a project.

If your company demands certainty, you can be certain the new projects will be just like the old ones.

If the success of a project hinges on work hasn’t been done before, you may have a winner.

Say yes to predictability and you say no to novelty.

Say no to novelty and you say no to innovation.

Say no to innovation and you say no to growth.

Say no to growth and the game is over.

Say no to good projects so you can say yes to the magical ones.

Say no to ROI so you work on projects that could reinvent the industry.

If the project doesn’t excite, just say no.

Image credit: Pexels

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3 Innovation Lessons from The Departed

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3 Innovation Lessons from The Departed

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s award season, which means that, as a resident of Boston, I have the responsibility and privilege to talk about The Departed (pronounced: The Dep-ah-ted).  The film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2007 and earned Martin Scorsese his first, and to date only, Academy Award for Best Director.  It is also chock-full of great lessons for corporate innovators.

Quick Synopsis

If you’ve seen The Departed, you can skip this part.  If you haven’t, why not and read on.

The Departed is loosely based on notorious Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger and features three main characters:

  1. Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), a vicious and slightly unhinged Irish mob boss
  2. Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a Massachusetts State Trooper in the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) formed to catch Costello, who, in his spare time, is a spy for Costello.
  3. Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a police academy recruit who goes undercover to infiltrate Costello’s organization

But wait!  There’s more.  Alec Baldwin plays Colin’s SIU boss, George Ellerby.  Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg (who received an Oscar nomination for this role) play Billy’s Mass State Police (MSP) bosses, Captain Queenan and Staff Sergeant Dignam, respectively.  Completing the chaos is Vera Farmiga, who plays Madolyn Madden, Colin’s girlfriend and Billy’s court-ordered psychiatrist.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on, but that gives you enough context for the following quotes to hopefully make sense.

Listen to the words people use.

Colin (after Dignam refuses to hand over undercover files): I need those passwords.

Ellerby: No, you want those passwords

It’s not often that Ellerby says something useful, let alone wise, but he nails it with this one.  Colin wants the passwords to Dignam’s files on undercover agents because it will make both Colin’s official job of finding Costello’s rat in the MSP and his unofficial job of finding the MSP officer in Costello’s crew easier.  He doesn’t need the passwords, however, because, with enough time and effort, he can find the rats he’s looking for.

When we hear from customers that they want something, it’s tempting to run off and create it.  But as Ellerby points out, wants and needs are different.  Just because customers want something doesn’t mean they are willing to pay for or change their behavior to get and use it. 

Figuring out what a customer needs is difficult because it requires them to trust you enough to admit they have a problem they can’t solve.  It’s also difficult because most of us have access to solutions to our functional needs (think the bottom few layers of Maslow’s hierarchy).  As a result, the needs consumers grapple with tend to be emotional and social, and it’s far more challenging to admit those to a stranger, especially in a focus group or product-focused interview.

How you feel impacts everyone around you

Madolyn (after a counseling session): Why is the last patient of the day always the hardest?

Billy: Because you’re tired, and you don’t give a sh*t.  It’s not super-natural.

Billy and Madolyn get off to a rough start in their first counseling session, culminating in Billy asking for a prescription for Valium.  Madolyn calls him out for “drug-seeking behavior” and throws two Valiums across the desk before Billy storms out.  A few minutes later, Madolyn catches up with Billy, hands him a prescription for Valium, and asks the above question.

Being a corporate innovator can be difficult, sometimes soul-crushing work (ask the good people at Store 8).  It can also be thrilling and inspiring.  It can even be all those things in one day.  That’s what makes it tiring, even when you give a sh*t. 

Managing your energy and monitoring your behavior are leadership qualities we don’t discuss often enough.  It’s okay to be exhausted after a day of facilitating ideation sessions or intense strategic meetings.  It’s normal to be frustrated after a contentious conversation or demotivated when you get bad news.  But leaders usually find a way to not take those emotions out on their teams.  And, in the rare instance when they punish the team for someone else’s sin, they apologize and explain. 

Your job is not your identity.

Billy: Look, I just want my identity back, all right?  That’s all.

Colin: All right, I understand.  You want to be a cop again.

Billy: No, no, being a cop’s not an identity.  I want my identity back.

Towards the end of the film, Billy is tired of working undercover and reports to MSP headquarters to complete the paperwork required to expunge his criminal record and get his identity back.  That’s when Colin makes the same mistake most of us make and confuses Billy’s job with his identity.

We spend so much time at work.  We rely on our paychecks for so much.  We even introduce ourselves to new people using our job titles.  It’s easy for your job to feel like your identity, especially when your job aligns so closely with your deeply held beliefs and values.  But your job is not your identity.  You are still a Tempered Radical, even without your corporate title.   You are still an optimistic problem-solver, even when it’s been months since your last brainstorming session. 

You are an innovator, even if you don’t have a business card to prove it.

Image credit: RadioTimes.com

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Don’t Blame Technology When Innovation Goes Wrong

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Don't Blame Technology When Innovation Goes Wrong

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I speak at conferences, I’ve noticed that people are increasingly asking me about the unintended consequences of technological advance. As our technology becomes almost unimaginably powerful, there is growing apprehension and fear that we will be unable to control what we create.

This, of course, isn’t anything new. When trains first appeared, many worried that human bodies would melt at the high speeds. In ancient Greece, Plato argued that the invention of writing would destroy conversation. None of these things ever came to pass, of course, but clearly technology has changed the world for good and bad.

The truth is that we can’t fully control technology any more than we can fully control nature or each other. The emergence of significant new technologies unleash forces we can’t hope to understand at the outset and struggle to deal with long after. Yet the most significant issues are most likely to be social in nature and those are the ones we desperately need to focus on.

The Frankenstein Archetype

It’s no accident that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was published at roughly the same time as the Luddite movement was in full swing. As cottage industries were replaced by smoke belching factories, the sense that man’s creations could turn against him was palpable and the gruesome tale, considered by many to be the first true work of science fiction, touched a nerve.

In many ways, trepidation about technology can be healthy. Concern about industrialization led to social policies that helped mitigate its worst effects. In much the same way, scientists concerned about the threat of nuclear Armageddon did much to help establish policies that would prevent it.

Yet the initial fears almost always prove to be unfounded. While the Luddites burned mills and smashed machines to prevent their economic disenfranchisement, the industrial age led to a rise in the living standards of working people. In a similar vein, more advanced weapons has coincided with a reduction of violent deaths throughout history.

On the other hand, the most challenging aspects of technological advance are often things that we do not expect. While industrialization led to rising incomes, it also led to climate change, something neither the fears of the Luddites nor the creative brilliance of Shelley could have ever conceived of.

The New Frankensteins

Today, the technologies we create will shape the world as never before. Artificially intelligent systems are automating not only physical, but cognitive labor. Gene editing techniques, such as CRISPR, are enabling us to re-engineer life itself. Digital and social media have reshaped human discourse.

So it’s not surprising that there are newfound fears about where it’s all going. A study at Oxford found that 47% of US jobs are at risk of being automated over the next 20 years. The speed and ease of gene editing raises the possibility of biohackers wreaking havoc and the rise of social media has coincided with a disturbing rise of authoritarianism around the globe.

Yet I suspect these fears are mostly misplaced. Instead of massive unemployment, we find ourselves in a labor shortage. While it is true that the biohacking is a real possibility, our increased ability to cure disease will most probably greatly exceed the threat. The increased velocity of information also allows good ideas to travel faster and farther.

On the other hand, these technologies will undoubtedly unleash new challenges that we are only beginning to understand. Artificial intelligence raises disturbing questions about what it means to be human, just as the power of genomics will force us to grapple with questions about the nature of the individual and social media forces us to define the meaning of truth.

Revealing And Building

Clearly, Shelly and the Luddites were very different. While Shelley was an aristocratic intellectual, the Luddites were working class weavers. Yet both saw the rise of technology as the end to a way of life and, in that way, both were right. Technology, if nothing else, forces us to adapt, often in ways we don’t expect.

In his 1954 essay, The Question Concerning Technology the German philosopher Martin Heidegger sheds some light on these issues. He described technology as akin to art, in that it reveals truths about the nature of the world, brings them forth and puts them to some specific use. In the process, human nature and its capacity for good and evil is also revealed.

He gives the example of a hydroelectric dam, which reveals the energy of a river and puts it to use making electricity. In much the same sense, Mark Zuckerberg did not “build” a social network at Facebook, but took natural human tendencies and channeled them in a particular way. After all, we go online not for bits or electrons, but to connect with each other.

Yet in another essay, Building Dwelling Thinking, he explains that building also plays an important role, because to build for the world, we first must understand what it means to live in it. The revealing power of technology forces us to rethink old truths and re-imagine new societal norms. That, more than anything else, is where the challenges lie.

Learning To Ask The Hard Questions

We are now nearing the end of the digital age and entering a new era of innovation which will likely be more impactful than anything we’ve seen since the rise of electricity and internal combustion a century ago. This, in turn, will initiate a new cycle of revealing and building that will be as challenging as anything humanity has ever faced.

So while it is unlikely that we will ever face a robot uprising, artificial intelligence does pose a number of troubling questions. Should safety systems in a car prioritize the life of a passenger or a pedestrian? Who is accountable for the decisions an automated system makes? We worry about who is teaching our children, but scarcely stop to think about who is training our algorithms.

These are all questions that need answers within the next decade. Beyond that, we will have further quandaries to unravel, such as what is the nature of work and how do we value it? How should we deal with the rising inequality that automation creates? Who should benefit from technological breakthroughs?

The unintentional consequences of technology have less to do with the relationship between us and our inventions than it does between us and each other. Every technological shift brings about a societal shift that reshapes values and norms. Clearly, we are not helpless, but we are responsible. These are very difficult questions and we need to start asking them. Only then can we begin the cycle of revealing truths and building a better future.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Derision Means You’re Doing It Right

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Derision Means You're Doing It Right

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you see good work, say so.

When you see exceptional work, say so in public.

When you’ve had good teachers, be thankful.

When you’ve had exceptional teachers, send them a text because texts are personal.

When you do great work and no one acknowledges it, take some time to feel the pain and get back to work.

When you do great work and no one acknowledges it, take more time to feel the pain and get back to work.

When you’ve done great work, tell your family.

When you’ve done exceptional work, tell them twice.

When you do the work no one is asking for, remember your time horizon is longer than theirs.

When you do the work that threatens the successful business model, despite the anguish it creates, keep going.

When they’re not telling you to stop, try harder.

When they’re telling you to stop it’s because your work threatens. Stomp on the accelerator.

When you can’t do a project because the ROI is insufficient, that’s fine.

When no one can calculate an ROI because no one can imagine a return, that’s better.

When you give a little ground on what worked, you can improve other dimensions of goodness.

When you outlaw what worked, you can create new market segments.

When everyone understands why you’re doing it, your work may lead to something good.

When no one understands why you’re doing it, your work may reinvent the industry.

When you do new work, don’t listen to the critics. Do it despite them.

When you do work that threatens, you will be misunderstood. That’s a sign you’re on to something.

When you want credit for the work, you can’t do amazing work.

When you don’t need credit for the work, it opens up design space where the amazing work lives.

When your work makes waves, that’s nice.

When your work creates a tsunami, that’s better.

When you’re willing to forget what got you here, you can create what could be.

When you’re willing to disrespect what got you here, you can create what couldn’t be.

When your work is ignored, at least you’re doing something different.

When you and your work are derided, you’re doing it right.

Image credit: Pexels

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Cover versions, Sequels, Taylor Swift and Innovation

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Taylor Swift and Innovation

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

An inherent contradiction in almost any new innovation is that it needs to be both new, but also somewhat familiar.  If it doesn’t offer anything new, there is little motivation for consumers to risk abandoning existing habits or preferences to try it.  But if it is not at least anchored in familiarity, then we ask consumers to put a lot of effort into understanding it, in addition to any opportunity cost from what they give up for trying something new.  Innovation is difficult, and a lot of innovations fail, at least in part because of this fundamental contradiction. 

Transformative Performance:  Of course, innovations can be successful, which means we do navigate this challenge.  But how? One way is to deliver something with such transformative benefits that people are willing to push themselves over the hump of learning something new. Huge benefits also create their own ‘gravity’, often spreading via world of mouth via media, social media, and even old-fashioned human-to-human conversations. This avoids the need for brute force mass marketing spend that can create the illusion of familiarity, but with a hefty price tag that is typically beyond smaller companies

Familiarity: The second option is to leverage what people already know in such a way that the ‘adoption hump’ becomes relatively insignificant, because new users intuitively know what the innovation is and how to use it.

Wow!  The best innovations do both.  CHATgpt Generative AI is a contemporary example, where transformative performance has created an enormous amount of word of mouth, but the interface is so intuitive there is little barrier to adoption, at least superficially. 

Of course, using it skillfully is another thing altogether, but I think there is an insight there too.  It’s OK to have an ongoing learning curve after initial adoption, but initial engagement needs to be relatively simple.  The gaming industry are masters of this.    

Little Wows!  CHATgpt is brilliant innovation.  But realistically, few of us are gong to create something quite that extraordinary.  So how do we manage to create more modest wows that still drive trial, engagement and ultimately repeat business?

Science, Art and Analogy:  As a believer that a lot of interesting things happen at the interface between science and art, and that analogy is a great tool, I think we cam learn a little about solving this by taking insight from the arts.  In this case, music and movies. For example, popular music routinely plunders the familiar, and repackages it as new via cover versions.  I often do the same myself!   Movies do something similar, either with the cycle of remakes of classic movies, or with sequels that often closely follow the narrative structure of the original.  

But this highlights some of the challenges in solving this dichotomy.  It’s rare for a remake, cover version, or sequel to do better than the original.  But a few do, so what is their secret?  What works, and what doesn’t? 

  1. Distance from the original.  Some of the best movie remakes completely reframe the original in ways that maintain a largely implicit familiarity, but do so without inviting direct comparisons of alignable differences to the original. For example, West Side Story is a brilliant retelling of Romeo and Juliet, Bridget Jones Diary reframes Pride and Prejudice, She’s All That is a retelling of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, while The Lion King retools Hamlet, etc.  I’m not suggesting that nobody sees these connections, but many don’t, and even if they do, the context is sufficiently different to avoid constant comparisons throughout the experience.  And of course, in most of these cases, the originals are not contemporary, so there is temporal as well as conceptual distance between original and remake.   Similarly with cover versions, Hendrix and the Byrds both completely and very successfully reframed Dylan (All Along the Watchtower and Mr. Tambourine Man).  Sinead O’Connor achieved similar success with Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”.  For those of you with less grey in their hairl, last summers cover of Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ by Luke Combs shows that covers can still do this. 

2.  Something New.   A different way to fail is to tap familiarity, but without adding anything sufficiently new or interesting.  All too often covers, sequels and remakes are simply weaker copies of the original.  I’m sure that anyone reading this can come up with their own examples of a disappointing remake or sequel.   Footloose, Annie, Psycho, Tom Cruise’s the Mummy or Karate Kid are all candidates for me.  As for sequels, again, I’m sure you can all name a respectable list of your own wasted 2 hours, with Highlander 2 and Jaws the Revenge being my personal cures for insomnia.   And even if we include novelty, it cannot be too predictable either.  It needs to at least be a little surprising.   For example, the gender reversal of the remake of Overboard has a point of difference in comparison to the Goldie Hawn original, but its not exactly staggeringly novel or surprising.  It’s a lot like a joke, if you can see it coming, it’s not going too create a wow.    

3.  Don’t Get De-Selected.  Learning from the two previous approaches can help us to create sufficient separation from past experience to engage and hopefully delight potential consumers.  But it’s important to not get carried away, and become un-tethered from familiarity.  For example, I personally enjoy a lot of jazz, but despite their often extraordinary skill, jazz musicians don’t fill many arenas.  That’s in part because jazz asks the listener to invest a lot of cognitive bandwidth and time to develop an ‘ear’, or musical expertise in order to appreciate it. It often moves a long way from the familiar original, and adds lot of new into the equation.  As a result, it is a somewhat niche musical form.  Pop music generally doesn’t require the same skill or engagement, and successful artists like Taylor Swift understand that.   And when it comes to innovation, most of us want to be mainstream, not niche. This is compounded because consumers today face a bewildering array of options, and a huge amount of information.  One way our brains have evolved to deal with complexity is to quickly ignore or ‘de-select’ things that don’t appear relevant to our goals. A lot of the time, we do this unconsciously.  Faced with more information than we can process, we quickly narrow our choices down to a consideration set that is ‘right-sized’ for us to make a decision.   From an innovation perspective, if our innovations are too ‘jazzy’, they risk being de-selected by a majority on consumers before they can be fully appreciated, or even consciously noticed.     

There’s no precise right or wrong strategy in this context. It’s possible to deliver successful innovations by tapping and balancing these approaches in many different ways.   But there are certainly good and bad executions, and I personally find it helpful to use these kinds of analogy when evaluating an innovation.   Are we too jazzy? Do we have separation from incumbents that is meaningful for consumers, and not just ourselves? And the latter is a real challenge for experts. When we are deeply engaged in a category, it’s all too easy to get lost in the magic of our own creations.  We see differences more clearly than consumers. It’s easy for us to become overly excited by relatively small changes that excite us, but that lack sufficient newness and separation from existing products for consumers who are nowhere near as engaged in our category as we are.  But it’s also easy to create ‘jazz’ for similar reasons, by forgetting that real world consumers are typically far less interested in our products than we are, and so miss the brilliance of our ‘performance’, or perhaps don’t ‘get it’ at all. 

For me, it is useful to simply ask myself whether I’m a Godfather II or a Highlander II, a Taylor Swift or a Dupree Bolton, or even Larry Coryell.  And there’s the rub.  As a musician, I’d rather be Larry, but as a record company exec, I’d far rather have Taylor Swift on my label. 

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of March 2024

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of March 2024Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are March’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Agile Innovation Management — by Diana Porumboiu
  2. How to Re-engineer the Incubation Zone — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  3. It’s Not Clear What Innovation Success Is — by Robyn Bolton
  4. How Do You Know If Your Idea is Novel? — by Mike Shipulski
  5. How to Tell if You Are Trusted — by Mike Shipulski
  6. Innovation is Rubbish! — by John Bessant
  7. Celebrating the Trailblazing Women Pioneers of Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
  8. Thinking Differently About Leadership and Innovation — by Janet Sernack
  9. The Remarkable Power of Negative Feedback — by Dennis Stauffer
  10. 10 CX and Customer Service Predictions for 2024 (Part 1) — by Shep Hyken

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in February that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Good Intentions Pave the Way to Innovation Hell

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The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and nowhere is that more true than in innovation.

Good Intentions Pave the Way to Innovation Hell

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

That’s one of the insights I took away from InnoLead’s Q1 report on corporate innovation priorities.  The report is an eye-opening look at the impact of AI on corporate innovation as experienced by corporate entrepreneurs themselves.  But before deep diving into that topic, the report’s authors shared intriguing data about member companies’ innovation structure, leadership engagement, organizational connections, and results. Nestled amongst the charts were several that, when taken together, got my Spidey senses tingling.

61.0% of innovation teams are “directly under a high-visibility leader with a broad company focus.”

This is great because innovation needs senior leaders’ support and active engagement to survive, let alone survive for long enough to produce meaningful results. Add this to the fact that 45% of senior leadership teams frequently discuss the “progress and value of the innovation program,” and all signs point to innovation as a strategic priority.

But (you knew there was a but, didn’t you)…

If “broad company focus” means “no P&L responsibility,” we have a problem.  In every for-profit company I’ve worked for and with, people with P&L responsibility have greater power, influence, and access to resources than people without a P&L.  This division may not feel fair, but it makes sense – the people who bring in profit and revenue will always be more influential than people who represent “cost centers.”

You can see the impact of P&L owners who are, understandably, focused entirely on delivering short-term results throughout the report – 75% of companies have shifted their focus more towards near-term priorities, and 61% shifted their innovation portfolio away from Horizon 3 (also known as radical, breakthrough, or disruptive innovation).

As for all those discussions, it’d be great if they focused on walking the talk of innovation. But suppose it’s only innovation platitudes or, worse, questioning innovation’s ROI. That doesn’t bode well for the “high-visibility leader with broad company focus,” the innovation team, or the company’s culture.

71.2% of innovation teams’ customers or business partners are unaware of the team’s existence, don’t engage, or engage only occasionally.

Welcome to Innovation Island!  Where the cool people work on cool things in cool offices while all you drones slave away doing the same thing you’ve always done and making the money that pays for the cool people to do cool things in their cool offices.

I’m sure this isn’t the message the innovation team intends to send, but it’s the one received by most organizations.

When arguing for Innovation Island, managers often point to the organizational antibodies likely to swarm and kill H3/radical/breakthrough innovation and even some H2/adjacent innovations.  They’re right, and those innovations must be “protected.” But not every innovation needs protection.  H2 and certainly H1 innovations, where most portfolios are now, should be shared with the core business because the core business will eventually run them.

The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that innovation teams don’t seem to be reaching out to others in the organization.  Like the P&L owners they report to, people in the core business are busy running the business and generating revenue.  Very few have the time or energy to seek out the innovation team to discuss and explore innovation.  Companies that want to build a culture of innovation need to turn their innovators into evangelists, not residents of an island connected to the mainland by a single drawbridge.

23.4% of innovation teams are considered outsiders or actively undermined by other functions and business units.

This may not sound bad, but add to it the 55.0% that are “somewhat integrated with occasional collaboration” with other departments and business units, and you may be tempted to believe that Innovation Island would be wise to invest in a surface-to-air missile defense system.

Sadly, this perception of the innovation team as “The Others” isn’t surprising when considering that the most important tactic for building a relationship between innovation and the functions or business units is already having strong relationships and interpersonal trust (75.3% of respondents).  The least effective (4.7% of respondents) is “writing down shared objectives and expectations.”  So, no, the email you sent is not enough to win friends and influence people.

Bottom line

Well-intended companies appoint a senior executive to lead the innovation team because they’ve been told that doing so is powerful proof that innovation is a strategic priority.  They hire outsiders to inject new thinking into the organization because they know that “what got you here won’t get you there.”  They cordon the team and their work off from the rest of the organization because they read that separation is essential to preserving innovation’s disruptive nature. 

But if the senior executive doesn’t have the organizational power and influence that comes with P&L ownership, the team doesn’t have strong personal relationships with others in the business, and other functions and business units don’t know the team exists or how to interact with it, innovation will go nowhere.

But that’s better than where it could go.

Image credit: Unsplash

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The Innovation Enthusiasm Gap

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The Innovation Enthusiasm Gap

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Getting new innovations launched within companies of any significant size typically requires buy-in from a number of different people and groups around the organization.

And moving towards a “culture” of innovation that the most successful companies create definitely requires that there be a critical mass of people with common understanding of the value of innovation.

Different Attitudes Towards Innovation

In any given enterprise there are generally many people who are hungry for the excitement of innovation and at the same time there are often many people who are resistant. Innovation, after all, inherently means change. And while change is viewed by some as exciting, challenging and fun, others view change as risky, scary and something to be avoided wherever possible.

Understanding how to segment your key stakeholders at all levels of an organization based on their appetite and attitude towards change is very helpful in devising a plan to “bring along” as many people as possible on the innovation bandwagon. All people are unique and hold certain beliefs and attitudes for a variety of reasons including their personality, past experiences, and reward constructs. But we’ll talk about one high level trend that we have found to apply in most cases regarding how to gauge the likelihood that people will have initial enthusiasm for innovation based on their level in the organization. This is not the only way of slicing the onion to predict who will favor vs resist innovation, this is just one model, but it’s the one we’ll focus on in this article.

The Innovation Enthusiasm Inverted Bell Curve

The Inverted Bell Curve

While we have no quantitative research to support this, we have generally observed an inverted bell curve trend as it applies to “Innovation Enthusiasm.” Let’s consider three basic groups:

  1. The company leadership team: Primarily the CEO, but also the other members of the leadership team (CFO, COO, COO etc) who are held directly responsible for the company’s success.
  2. The “troops”: The bottom couple of tiers of the organization that typically make up 90% of the employees
  3. The managers: Specifically the middle to upper level managers. These may be department heads, marketing executives, product managers — people who have achieved some level of status and success within the organization’s hierarchy but who are not at the top level.

So lets take these groups one at a time.

CEOs Like Innovation

The vast majority of CEOs of large enterprises recognize that innovation is essential to their company’s success and consequently essential to their success and continued tenure as CEO.

Why is this the case? A CEO’s job is to grow a company. In most cases, A CEO whose company is not growing is a CEO who is soon to be fired. And growth almost always requires innovation. Why? Well let’s be a bit simplistic and say there are two primary market conditions in which a company can find itself — a market which is not fundamentally growing and one which is.

In a market that is fundamentally not growing, the three main ways that a company can grow would be for it to:

  1. Out-innovate competitors so as to take their share
  2. Move into new product categories or businesses
  3. Acquire competitors

All three of these require some level of innovation. Number one is obviously about innovation. Number two requires a healthy amount of innovation around creation of new capabilities. And even number three, the seeming least innovative of the three, still usually requires innovation from a scale management perspective.

In a market that is fundamentally growing, sitting back and riding the “rising tide” is not necessarily the key to growth. Innovation is also critical for a company to grow in the midst of a strong market. Successfully riding the rising tide requires innovation. Why?

  • Substantial scaling requires innovation – As markets increase in size, a company may find that in order to take full advantage of the scale of the opportunity they need to be able to serve 2x, 10x, even 100x the customers or orders they did previously. That level of scaling generally requires a substantial change to how business is done. Apple has had to be just as innovative in their supply chain and distribution approach as they have had to be with their product development in order to capitalize on the success in the growing market for mobile devices.
  • Growing markets attract disruptors – If the market demand for a product or service is surging, that tends to attract investment and competitive innovation. If the market is growing but a competitor out-innovates you, you might find yourself shrinking even though the market is growing. Consider Research in Motion.

So a CEO has every reason to like innovation. Does a CEO have any reason to fear innovation? Not much. Innovation isn’t always successful, however most boards are far more patient with a CEO who is innovating and not finding success than they are with a CEO who isn’t innovating at all. Furthermore, even unsuccessful innovation gives a CEO something to tell his board and investors to keep them optimistic about the future, so even innovations that are unsuccessful in the market can, for a while at least, keep a stock price up which is, after all, a CEO’s main performance metric.

The Troops Like Innovation

We’ll call the 90%+ of employees of a given company, the “troops”. While of course nothing is absolute, troops, on the whole, tend to like innovation. Why?

  • They want the company to be successful – They can see that changing with the times and bringing new products to market will help the company. They take pride in the brand and they know that financial success and growth means job security and raises, and that their long term job security will be in danger if the company doesn’t keep up with the times.
  • It can help them serve the customer better – Troops who face customers directly most of the time want to do their job as well as possible since part of their job satisfaction can be the direct and immediate feedback they get when interacting with the end-customers.
  • It creates opportunity – For ambitious people lower down in the organization, change creates new needs and new opportunities which could accelerate their rise.
  • Its exciting and interesting – Lots of jobs are boring. Change creates interest.

There are certain types of change that can be threatening to the Troops; such as innovation via overseas outsourcing or automation that eliminates employees, so those are exceptions. There definitely are also members of the troops who tend to fear and resist change as a first reaction, however at most companies these are the minority. Properly communicated innovation initiatives that don’t have an obvious or direct threat to employees job security is generally embraced by the majority of the troops.

Managers Don’t Really Like Innovation

So if The CEO’s like innovation, and the troops like it, whats the problem? You have both the top leadership of the company and the overwhelming majority of the employees ready to embrace innovation, surely that should be enough, right? It’s not. We see over and over again CEOs who feel stuck because they are asking their “people” to innovate and its just not happening. What we find at many companies is that despite being encouraged by the CEO and top management, most middle and upper-level managers have limited reasons to be motivated to truly innovate in a dramatic way. Why is this the case?

Change creates risk. Middle and upper-level managers have the most “stake” in the status quo – they have the most to lose. Middle and upper-level managers tend to own processes and products. When new processes and products arise to potentially replace their existing fiefdom, managers will often do their best to ensure that they wind up with the same scope of responsibility, the same budget and the same number of direct reports. While its possible for managers to move up in a new order, very often a “bird in the hand” mentality among managers encourages a stance which is about defending the status quo and supporting “innovations” which inherently work within the existing structure. Ultimately, this often means only very incremental innovations.

One might think that middle and upper managers have the same loyalty to the company and shared interest in the company’s overall success, but in our experience this is not quite so. Individuals generally rise to these ranks because they are fairly savvy and that savviness generally extends to the recognition that their personal career success is not necessarily tied to the company overall. For example a product manager with a successful product at a company which overall is going down the tubes can, at the right moment, jump ship and leverage their demonstrated track record of success. However an individual who becomes marginalized by change at their current company (or simply winding up with reduced responsibilities), while they certainly can still move to another position, is all of the sudden playing defense.

Furthermore, that mindset of innovation “within the current structure” is then telegraphed to their team members. Its common for the troops to realize that the CEO wants dramatic improvements based on his communications, however if lower level employees also perceive that the head of their department is looking to not rock the boat too much, the troops may ultimately shift their loyalty to the manager who conducts their performance evaluation, decides their increases and determines promotions.

The truth is that collectively within an organization, while the CEO might be the single most powerful individual in terms of influencing the organization, the middle and upper-level managers are the most powerful layer, so if they are not embracing of innovation, they can stifle it fairly easily, no matter what the CEO’s and troops’ wishes may be.

Rogues

However, we do see in most organizations that there are “rogue” upper and middle managers who buck the trend. They are either passionate about the company or just turned on by the new and innovative to such an extent that it makes sense for them to take the risk and go “all in” in support of massive innovation. We see that typically about one in twenty middle and upper-level managers are of this type. These individuals can be a key to turning the tide, however there is great risk that these mavericks will face such pressure from their peers in an organization that they either stifle their own tendencies, or more likely, leave for an organization where the culture is more welcoming of innovation. By allowing this “weeding out” of the true innovators at the middle and upper-level management layer, the ratio of rogues can drop from one in twenty to one in a hundred or even less.

Summary

Here is a summary of the attitudinal tendencies. Remember, there are always outliers, this model is only meant to help provide understanding around how different circumstances and levels of risk and reward from change influence people differently at different levels.

CEO + Leadership Team​

Leadership TeamAttitude: Favor innovation that drives up stock price. Often has sense of urgency.

Risk: The risk is not innovating. CEOs must drive growth which usually requires innovation. If the CEO does not drive growth he, and his immediate reports, are likely to be looking for new jobs.

Reward: Even the appearance of innovation (say, an improved product pipeline) can give a CEO room to breathe with a board and investors as it creates optimism. True innovation at the Apple or WalMart level of course creates superstar CEOs.

Troops

TroopsAttitude: Tend to be open to the idea of innovation except when it is targeting outsourcing, staff reductions, or automation which risks their job.

Risk: The biggest risk in typical organizations is that “getting involved” with innovation projects might be seen as negative by the middle and upper managers by whom troops are evaluated.

Reward: The rewards are greater job security if innovation is successful as it helps the whole company as well as the ability to better serve customers an

Middle-Upper Management

ManagersAttitude: Tend to resist innovation or seek to compartmentalize innovations that do not jeopardize the organizational structure

Risk: The risk is that true innovation might change the organization so completely that their current position or its level of power, budget or scope would be jeopardized.

Reward: The potential exists for a middle/upper manager to “break out” and prove themselves a superstar by innovating. However most innovation requires collaboration with peers and if they cannot find willing partners in their peers their likelihood of failure is so high that the rewards seems unattainable. For middle/upper managers who are naturally inclined towards innovation despite the risks, the rewards are more emotional—they thrive on either improving things, helping their company or being a part of something new and exciting.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Howard Tiersky

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It is Possible to Have Too Much

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It is Possible to Have Too Much

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When your best isn’t good enough, how do you feel? When your best isn’t good enough, what do you do? But more importantly, when your best isn’t good enough, what does that say about you?

If your best used to be good enough and now it isn’t, there are three possible explanations:

  1. Expectations increased and your performance is unchanged.
  2. Expectations increased and your performance increased less.
  3. Expectations increased and your performance decreased.

If expectations of your performance haven’t increased over last year, I want to work where you work because your company is an oasis (and an aberration). Since nearly all industries and occupations are governed by the unnatural mindset of growth-year-on-year-no-matter-what, it’s highly likely your performance expectations have increased. There’s no need to review this scenario.

In scenario one, your performance is unchanged. Why? Well, you may have tried to increase your performance but issues unrelated to work have consumed huge amounts of your emotional energy, and this new drain on your emotional energy consumed the energy you needed to increase your performance. A list of such issues includes global warming, deforestation, plastic in our water supply, COVID, political unrest, and the regular issues such as medical care for aging parents, death of your parents, inevitable health issues related to your aging. What does that say about you?

In scenario two, your performance increased, but the increase was insufficient. Maybe your performance would have increased quite a bit, but the special cause issues (COVID, etc.) along with the common cause issues (you and your parents get older every year) impacted your performance in a way that lessened the increase in your performance. Without the special causes, you would have met the increased expectations, but because of them, you did not. What does that say about you?

In scenario three, even though expectations increased, your performance decreased. In this case, it could be that political unrest and the other special causes teamed up with the common causes (stress of everyday life) to reduce your performance. What does that say about you?

In thermodynamics, there’s a law whose implications make it certain that there’s a limit to the amount of matter (stuff) you can put in a control volume (a defined volume that has a limit). That means that if every year you add air to a balloon, eventually it pops. Even the strongest ones. And when you extend this notion to people, it says that no matter how much pressure you apply to people, there’s a limit to what they can achieve. And if you apply pressure that overcomes their physical limit, they pop. Even the strongest ones. Or, maybe, especially the strongest ones because they try to take on more than their share.

People have a physical limit, and people cannot indefinitely support a mindset of growth-every-year-no-matter-what. No matter what, people will pop. It’s not if, it’s when. And add in the special causes of COVID, political unrest, and environmental problems and people pop sooner and cannot do what they did last year, no matter what.

And what does all this say about you? It says you are trying harder than ever. It says you are strong. It says you are amazing.

And what does it say about growth-every-year-no-matter-what? It says we should stop with all that, at least for a while.

Image credit: Unsplash

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