Category Archives: Innovation

Four Questions That Make Better Innovators

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1999, the day before his eighth startup went public, Steve Blank decided to retire at the age of 45. With time to reflect, he sat in a ski lodge and began to write a memoir with a “lessons learned” section at the end of each chapter. “In hindsight, it was a catharsis of moving from one part of my life to another,” he later told me.

“I was 80 pages in when I realized there was a pattern. When I sat inside the building things didn’t go very well, but when I got outside the building things turned around and got much better,” he remembered. What he meant was that it was only when he got out and talked to customers that he could really get a handle on the business.

We like to think that innovation is about ideas, but it’s really about solving problems. In order to surface problems, you need to ask questions, which is why Steve’s businesses started doing better when he got out of the building to talk to customers. The better questions you ask, the better problems you can identify. Here are four questions that will help you do that.

1.Why?

Problems come in all shapes and sizes. Some problems are relatively minor and can be worked around. Others are more fundamental and represent serious impediments to effective operations. Clearly, the more fundamental the problem you can identify, the greater the impact you can create by solving it.

One very effective technique to do that is called the 5 Whys. For example, when NY Times columnist Charles Duhigg noticed that however much he and his wife wanted to get home on time to eat dinner with their kids, they inevitably ended up getting caught up at work and arriving home late, he began to ask “why?”

The first “why” of he and his wife arriving late to dinner was because they had work to finish. Why? Because there were pesky little tasks, like responding to emails, that they needed to get done. Why? Because they couldn’t get to them during the day. Why? Because they arrived at work just before their first meeting. Why? Because they were busy getting the kids ready for school.

By the fifth “why” he realized that the problem wasn’t so much that they got caught up at work, but that it took too long to get the kids ready for school. The conundrum was solved by having the kids lay out their clothes for school the night before. The Duhiggs soon began having family dinners regularly.

It’s an incredibly powerful technique. Each why takes you a bit deeper into the problem and, as you begin to identify root causes, you’ll be able to come up with more effective solutions.

2. Where’s The Monkey?

When I work with executives, they often have a breakthrough idea they are excited about. They begin to tell me what a great opportunity it is and how they are perfectly positioned to capitalize on it. However, when I begin to dig a little deeper it appears that there is some big barrier to making it happen. When I try to ask about that, they just shut down.

One reason that this happens is that there is a fundamental tension between innovation and operations. Operational executives tend to focus on identifying clear benchmarks to track progress. That’s fine for a typical project, but when you are trying to do something truly new and different, you have to directly confront the unknown.

At Google X, the tech giant’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is #MonkeyFirst. The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal.

The problem is that most people start with the pedestal, because it’s what they know and by building it, they can show early progress against a timeline. Unfortunately, building a pedestal gets you nowhere. Unless you can actually train the monkey, working on the pedestal is wasted effort.

3. How Will We Fail?

Innovation is not a mere intellectual endeavor. It’s highly emotional. You thrive on your hopes and dreams. That’s what keeps you going and helps you block out doubts, both your own and those of others. Failure is just not something you want to contemplate. It’s just too painful.

Yet thinking seriously about failure can actually help you succeed and there are two techniques that can help you do that productively. The first, called pre-mortems, asks you to imagine that the project has failed and figure out why it happened. The second, called red teaming sets up an independent team to find flaws in the idea.

The idea isn’t to figure out ways to kill the project, but to identify holes to be plugged. For example, when the Obama administration thought it had identified Osama bin Laden’s hideout, it set up a red team to challenge the evidence. Because the red team had no emotional attachment to the initial analysis, they were able to look at it far more objectively.

As we now know, the raid on bin Laden’s compound went ahead, but the red team was able to raise important questions that strengthened the plan. To successfully innovate, you need to do the same. Identify every potential for failure that you can so that you can address those issues before going forward.

4. What Kind Of Problem Are We Trying To Solve?

Go to any innovation conference and you will undoubtedly see a wide variety of innovation experts championing their favored strategy and each will have stories that will amaze you. Design thinking, disruptive innovation, lean startup methods and open innovation have all become buzzwords because they have produced real results.

Yet none of them is a cure-all. Each performs well with some classes of problems, but not so well in others. That’s why in my book, Mapping Innovation, I advocated using the whole innovation toolbox. The trick is to match the right type of problem with the right type of solution.

Innovation Matrix Greg Satell

The truth is that there is no one “true” path to innovation. Many organizations get stuck because they end up locking themselves into a single strategy. They find something that works and say, “this is how we innovate” and end up trying to apply essentially the same solution no matter what the problem is. Eventually, that ends badly.

That’s why it’s so important to ask good questions. Every problem is, to some extent, unique. You can’t simply assume you know the solution beforehand. That’s why Steve Blank’s businesses failed when he stayed “in the building” and prospered when he got out of it. If you want to become a better innovator. Ask better questions.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Underground Innovation

How giving people space can make a big difference to your innovation profile

Underground Innovation

GUEST POST from John Bessant

If you’d snuck up behind me last weekend you’d have caught me in the act of painting walls. Not the most exciting of pursuits but it needed to be done so that now I can sit here and write in a freshly-painted room. And importantly one where even my clumsy brushwork doesn’t show in unsightly streaks and overruns. I am amongst millions of painters, professional and otherwise who regularly mutter small votes of thanks to Richard Drew and his invaluable contribution to the world of painting and decorating — masking tape.

This humble but essential innovation is getting on in years but still turns a profit for the company which originated it way back in 1925–3M. But it would never have seen the light of day if company strategy and official policy had prevailed. It exists because of Drew’s late night and unofficial efforts in direct defiance of his boss’s orders.

Drew was working as a technical salesman, dealing with some of the copmpany’s biggest customers for their core product — sandpaper. He spent a lot of time visiting car factories in that newly-growing industry, and in particular the paint shops where sandpaper was used to prepare metal surfaces for painting.

The paint crews were well aware of the good old days when Henry Ford had simplified their job — in 1909 he’d outlined a strategy for his company, which concentrated on a single model (the Model T) which could be built in high volume at low price. Doing this involved a number of trade-offs, not least in terms of massively editing down the choices available to customers. It was at this strategy meeting that he reputedly said ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.’

That decision helped establish the Model T as ‘a car for Everyman at a price every man can afford’, bringing the price down by 75% and putting it within the reach of many people. But it didn’t satisfy the market for long. People wanted more choice in models, styles — and colour schemes. All of which made life more difficult for the skilled craftsmen in the paint shops, trying to deliver ever more exotic paint jobs without slowing down production.

The problem is that when you want to paint with more than one colour then you need to cover up the area you don’t want painted. Which is a clumsy fussy business; early attempts involved using rags, newspapers and scraps of cardboard but then they had to be held in place, making a one-man job into a two-man job. Attempts to solve this by using sticky tape to hold the mask in place also failed; the solvents in the paint dissolved the adhesive on the tape making the whole mask slip and slide all over the surface.

An Innovation Dust-up

Which is where Richard Drew came in, trying to sell a new kind of sandpaper which 3M had launched which offered to cut down the dust created when preparing a metal surface for painting. Hearing some choice language coming from one corner of the shop he walked over to ask what the problem was — to be given an expletive filled tutorial in how not to mask up a paint job. What was needed — he was told in no uncertain terms — was a better adhesive tape which would actually stick and stay stuck!

He went back to his office and began to tinker around with various formulations to try and make something suitable. His boss wasn’t too pleased, ordering him to get back to his main job of selling sandpaper — but he kept on with the quest.

It took him two years and involved a variety of vegetable oils, chicle, linseed, various resins, glue, glycerine and treated crepe paper. What he eventually came up with was a tape strong enough to stick to the surfaces but easy enough to peel off without leaving any scars on the paintwork. Despite its promise his boss wouldn’t allow him to buy the machinery he needed to produce it in quantity — so Drew turned his innovative skills to the problem of financing capital equipment. He bought his machinery in small pieces, each of which cost less than the $99 he was permitted to spend on an item of equipment., and then assembled the machine himself.

This last act finally convinced his boss to let him go ahead — and also provided a lesson which became a company mantra. The boss in question was William McKnight and he made a key policy out of the experience. “If you have the right person on the right project, and they are absolutely dedicated to finding a solution — leave them alone. Tolerate their initiative and trust them.”

And so 3M’s ‘bootlegging’ approach was born, and it persists today embodied now in formal company policy. Give people permission to play around, don’t control them too tightly and let their natural creativity and entrepreneurship do the rest. Their 15% policy (allowing employees to spend up to 15% of their time in pursuit of their own ideas and hunches) has been responsible for thousands of product and process innovations, a few of which (like PostIt Notes) have gone on to be breakthrough radical innovations.

Operating Below the Radar

The masking tape story is a classic example of innovation happening below the radar screen (except the radar wasn’t invented in 1925!). We know today that smart companies who care about innovation invest in the capacity for innovation — R&D and market research, future scoping, etc. Organized innovation, buying themselves options on the future. All good — but maybe only focusing on the formal means potentially missing out on what might be happening underground. Because by their nature people are innovators, prone to experiment and tinker around, frustrated with aspects of their work which they think a little hacking around the edges might help them with. Why not tap into this as another source of innovation?

(Especially since it’s actually not that expensive in terms of lost productive time. The origin of the 15% figure at 3M was McKnight’s the observation that this was the time people spent on coffee breaks and on lunch breaks and so on, times when they could do some of this unofficial innovation).

It’s not just the benefits in terms of the possible product and process innovations which it might lead to. It’s also a powerful motivator, something which can help retain and inspire employees. Allowing people time and space to explore communicates a core company value — — it’s an invitation to tinker to hack things, to play around. And it has certainly paid off for 3M and other companies; consider these examples:

The Sony PlayStation started as a bootleg project by Ken Kutaragi, an engineer who secretly worked on a video game console with Nintendo without Sony’s approval.
The HP DeskJet printer was originally developed by a group of HP engineers who wanted to create a low-cost inkjet printer for personal use. They used bootleg parts and software to build their first prototype, which they hid under a tablecloth when not in use.
The first spreadsheet software was created by two programmers Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who worked on their project without any formal support or funding from their employers. They went on to found their own company, Visicalc, which for a while was the market leader in the field.
Google’s 20% allowing employees time to spend on personal projects led to several innovations including Google Maps, Google News and Gmail.
Toshiba’s pioneering notebook computer was developed by a team of engineers who worked on it covertly for four years. They used their own laptops and software tools to create a prototype that featured innovative elements such as a lightweight design, a long battery life and a high-performance processor. The project was initially rejected by the management, but later accepted after some modifications. Introduced in 1985 it became a global leader in the portable computer market.
BMW has a long history of bootleg innovations which have gone on to become success stories. For example the Z1 roadster was developed by a small team of engineers who worked on it secretly for four years. They used their own time and resources to create a prototype that featured innovative elements such as a plastic body, retractable doors and a modular design. The project was eventually discovered by the top management and approved for production in 1986. And the iDrive was developed by a team of engineers who worked on it without any formal mandate or budget, using their own laptops and software tools. They also conducted user tests with their own cars and friends. The project was initially rejected by the management, but later became a standard feature in many BMW models. These projects helped legitimise what the company now calls ‘U-boat’ projects , recognising the value of the bootlegging approach.

Forbidden Fruit

Peter Augsdorfer made a classic study of the phenomenon, reported it in his wonderful book ‘Forbidden fruit’ in which he highlights many examples of such ‘bootlegging’ approaches. (The term originated during the 1920s when the US government banned the manufacture and sale of hard liquor; the measure didn’t have the desired effect of wiping out the industry and sobering up the country. Instead it triggered a wave of illegal but at times highly innovative ways around the problem, essentially driving innovation underground and out of sight . This included hiding illicit liquor down the inside of boots).

Augsdorfer argues that bootlegging can be seen as a form of learning under uncertainty, where employees experiment with new ideas and technologies without formal approval or support. In other words it’s an unofficial extension of the R&D/exploration work which companies need to do anyway.

Importantly it’s an approach which can have other positive benefits for organizations beyond the innovations which its employees create, such as enhancing motivation and employee retention and fostering a culture of internal entrepreneurship. But it has its ‘dark side’; there are negative outcomes including wasting time and resources, violating ethical norms and — a big challenge for those trying to ‘manage’ it — undermining organizational control and co-ordination frameworks.

Innovation Missionaries

Augsdorfer orginally wrote about this 25 years ago but a recent article in the Sloan Management Review reminds us that such underground innovation is alive and well. It’s not a case of ‘one size fits all’ and their article highlights a number of different approaches. It also usefully identifies three key archetypes of characters who may be innovators of this kind. They call them ‘missionaries’, ‘users’ and ‘explorers’.

Missionaries have a particular interest in the development of the company; their self-adopted ‘mission’ is to improve things. Characters like Richard Drew would fall into this category, seeing their own progress as being tied up with the fortunes of the company they work for and tapping into its resources to help them achieve their goals.

User innovators are essentially frustrated in what they are doing — they develop hacks and work arounds to solve problems particularly in the area of process innovation and their ideas can often be surfaced through suggestion schemes and other mechanisms.

And explorers are concerned with pushing the frontiers of what they do, sometimes going in directions which the company does not believe is possible. The risk here is that they pursue their ideas too far, detracting from their mainstream work and official company strategy.

Making Space for Innovation

So what makes underground innovation work? It’s not simply waving a magic wand, Harry Potter style, and casting the ‘Innovate!’ spell. Instead a number of things need to come together:

Allowing space — time, access to resources, etc. The exact amount — 15, 20 or even higher percentages of time — is irrelevant. It’s the signal that matters, communicating that it is OK to experiment around the edges and that there won’t be negative consequences for such action. What often happens is that this small amount of investment encourages employees to spend much more of their own time and initiative, often working long unpaid hours in pursuit of their ideas. At the limit (as Paula Criscuouolo and her colleagues point out) there are good examples of bootlegging arising from contexts in which there is no formal space or time allocation but an underlying perception that it is still OK to ‘dig around a little’.
Giving boundaries — defining the space within which innovation is possible and permission to explore there. For example we don’t necessarily want bootleg innovation in the formulation of pharmaceutical products but that leaves plenty of scope for other ideas, particularly in process innovation.
Establishing a development pathway to pick up on bootleg ideas. There’s no point stimulating lots of bootlegging behaviour if employees have nowhere to channel their ideas once they start to develop. In the case of 3M there’s a clear pathway which allows employees to take bright ideas and pitch for varying amounts of internal funding and other resources to grow and scale their innovations. Such functionality is increasingly built into innovation collaboration platforms and many companies — such as Liberty Global with their Spark programme — have established employee entrepreneurship pathways in parallel to their suggestion schemes.
Communicate trust as a core value — allowing bootleggers to feel a sense of psychological safety about what they are doing and that they will not be penalised for their activities.
Reward and recognise — it’s no coincidence that one of the things about 3M is that the people who have been involved in developing bootleg projects to fruition are then rewarded not just with resources and money but also with the opportunity to carry their venture forward. One of the two people involved in the development of Post it notes was Art Fry who moved on to run the division for 3M. The originator of the laptop computer within Toshiba similarly went on to run that division of their business.
Encourage intelligent failure — the down-side of allowing people to take initiative is that they will make mistakes. Importantly one of McKnight’s famous comments was that ‘Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.’

Underground innovation has a lot to offer -but as the above suggests it isn’t a simple matter of mimicking Google or 3M, allocating a percentage of time and then waiting for the magic to happen. Successful organizations make employee involvement a key plank in building their innovation culture; something William Mcknight learned from his experience as Richard Drew’s manager. By 1929 he was running the entire 3M company and he pulled together some of the core principles through which their culture developed — including what he called his ‘Basic rule of management’. It’s deceptively simple and it serves well as a motto for anyone interested in tapping into underground innovation:

“delegate responsibility and encourage men and women to exercise their initiative.”

Image Credits: Pixabay

You can find a podcast version of this here and a video version here

And if you’d like to learn with me take a look at my online course here

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3 Innovation Types Not What You Think They Are

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But They Do Determine Your Success

3 Innovation Types Not What You Think They Are

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The Official Story

When discussing innovation, you must be specific so people know what you expect. This is why so many thought leaders, consultants, and practitioners preach the importance of defining different types of innovation.

Clayton Christensen encourages focusing on WHY innovation is happening – improve performance, improve efficiency, or create markets – in his 2014 HBR article.
The classic Core/Adjacent/Transformational model focuses on WHAT is changing – target customer, offering, financial model, and resources and processes.
McKinsey’s 3 Horizons focus on WHEN the results are achieved – this year, 2-3 years, 3-6 years.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options and worry about which approach is “best.” But, like all frameworks, they’re all a little bit right and a little bit wrong, and the best one is the one that will be used and get results in your organization.

The REAL story

Everything in the official story is true, but not the whole truth.

“Innovation” is not peanut butter.

You can’t smear it all over everything and expect deliciousness.

When doing innovation, you must remember your customer – the executives who make decisions, allocate resources, and can accelerate or decimate your efforts.

More importantly, you need to remember their Jobs to be Done (JTBD) – keep my job, feel safe and respected, and be perceived as competent/a rising star – because these jobs define the innovations that will get to market.

Three (3) REAL types of innovation

SAFE – The delightful solution to decision-makers’ JTBD

Most closely aligned with Core innovation, improving performance or efficiency, and Horizon 1 because the focus is on improving what exists in a way that will generate revenue this year or next. Decision-makers feel confident because they’ve “been there and done that” (heck, doing “that” is probably what got them promoted in the first place). In fact, they’re more likely to get in trouble for NOT investing in these types of innovations than they are for investing in them.

STRETCH – The Good Enough solution

Most like Adjacent innovation because they allow decision-makers to keep one foot in the known while “stretching” their other foot into a new (to them) area. This type of innovation makes decision-makers nervous because they don’t have all the answers, but they feel like they at least know what questions to ask. Progress will require more data, and decisions will take longer than most intrapreneurs want. But eventually, enough time and resources (and ego/reputation) will be invested that, unless the team recommends killing it, the project will launch.

SPLATTER – The Terrible solution

No matter what you call them – transformational, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or moonshots – these innovations make everyone’s eyes light up before reality kicks in and crushes our dreams. These innovations “define the next chapter of our business” and “disrupt ourselves before we’re disrupted.” These innovations also require decision-makers to let go of everything they know and wander entirely into the unknown. To invest resources in the hope of seeing the return (and reward) come back to their successor (or successor’s successor). To defend their decisions, their team, and themselves when things don’t go exactly as planned.

How to find the REAL type that will get real results.

“You said you want X. Would you describe that for me?” (you may need to give examples). When I worked at Clayton Christensen’s firm, executives would always call and ask for our help to create a disruptive innovation. When I would explain what they were actually asking for (something with “good enough” performance and a low selling price that appeals to non-consumers), they would back away from the table, wave their hands, and say, “Oh, not that. We don’t want that.”
“How much are you willing to risk?” If they’re willing to go to their boss to ask for resources, they’re willing to Stretch. If they’re willing to get fired, they’re willing to Splatter. If everything needs to stay within their signing authority, it’s all about staying Safe.
“What would you need to see to risk more?” As an innovator, you’ll always want more freedom to push boundaries and feel confident that you can convince others to see things your way. But before you pitch Stretch to a boss that wants Safe, or Splatter to a boss barely willing to Stretch, learn what they need to change their minds. Maybe it will be worth your effort, maybe it won’t. Better to know sooner rather than later.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Sprint Toward the Innovation Action

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Sprint Toward the Innovation Action

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Companies have control over one thing: how to allocate their resources. Companies allocate resources by deciding which projects to start, accelerate, and stop; whom to allocate to the projects; how to go about the projects; and whom to hire, invest in, and fire. That’s it.

Taking a broad view of project selection to include starting, accelerating, and stopping projects, as a leader, what is your role in project selection, or, at a grander scale, initiative selection? When was the last time you initiated a disruptive yet heretical new project from scratch? When was the last time you advocated for incremental funding to accelerate a floundering yet revolutionary project? When was the last time you stopped a tired project that should have been put to rest last year? And because the projects are the only thing that generates revenue for your company, how do you feel about all that?

Without your active advocacy and direct involvement, it’s likely the disruptive project won’t see the light of day. Without you to listen to the complaints of heresy and actively disregard them, the organization will block the much-needed disruption. Without your brazen zeal, it’s likely the insufficiently-funded project won’t revolutionize anything. Without you to put your reputation on the line and decree that it’s time for a revolution, the organization will starve the project and the revolution will wither. Without your critical eye and thought-provoking questions, it’s likely the tired project will limp along for another year and suck up the much-needed resources to fund the disruptions, revolutions, and heresy.

Now, I ask you again. How do you feel about your (in)active (un)involvement with starting projects that should be started, accelerating projects that should be accelerated, and stopping projects that should be stopped?

And with regard to project staffing, when was the last time you stepped in and replaced a project manager who was over their head? Or, when was the last time you set up a recurring meeting with a project manager whose project was in trouble? Or, more significantly, when was the last time you cleared your schedule and ran toward the smoke of an important project on fire? Without your involvement, the over-their-head project manager will drown. Without your investment in a weekly meeting, the troubled project will spiral into the ground. Without your active involvement in the smoldering project, it will flame out.

As a leader, do you have your fingers on the pulse of the most important projects? Do you have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to know which projects need help? And do you have the chops to step in and do what must be done? And how do you feel about all that?

As a leader, do you know enough about the work to provide guidance on a major course change? Do you know enough to advise the project team on a novel approach? Do you have the gumption to push back on the project team when they don’t want to listen to you? As a leader, how do you feel about that?

As a leader, you probably have direct involvement in important hiring and firing decisions. And that’s good. But, as a leader, how much of your time do you spend developing young talent? How many hours per week do you talk to them about the details of their projects and deliverables? How many hours per week do you devote to refactoring troubled projects with the young project managers? And how do you feel about that?

If you want to grow revenue, shape the projects so they generate more revenue. If you want to grow new businesses, advocate for projects that create new businesses. If you need a revolution, start revolutionary projects and protect them. And if you want to accelerate the flywheel, help your best project managers elevate their game.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Psychological Safety, Growth Mindset and Difficult Conversations to Shape the Future

Introduction

The purpose is to help individuals, teams and leaders get even better at shaping the future in the context of people and organizational as well as market and business perspectives.

The key pillars are the growth mindset, psychological safety and innovation for an agile, learning organization.

The problem/challenge

In general, the leaders in most large organizations are very capable at managing the day-to-day activities while they struggle in terms of mindset, skills and tool-box on shaping the future activities.

The challenge is that leaders can’t become great leaders – or even good leaders – who can take your organization to the next level if they do not find the right balance between managing the day-to-day activities and shaping the future.

This balance should not be 50/50. It should not even be close to that as the day-to-day issues will always require more focus and attention than the future-shaping activities. However, the current balance of 90/10 as we see in most companies is not healthy and we need to change this in order to develop an organization that will be even more ready for a future driven by constant change and disruption on many levels.

Why do we need to work with the growth mindset and psychological safety in this context?

It’s quite simple. If these pre-requisites are not in place, you can’t build an environment that allows your organization to be good at shaping the future and then you are left with only being good at managing the day-to-day activities.

This has been enough to be successful for decades, but it will not work for the future. So, do you want your leaders to be stuck at the past and present or should they get ready for shaping the future as well?

The approach, solution

You can develop a tailored program based on The Collective Growth Mindset framework which helps you embrace and implement the growth mindset approach and complementary attributes such as psychological safety within your organization.

It’s a training and coaching program that builds on these five elements: Mindset, Shape/Pulse, Communicate, Learn and Network.

Here’s a short description on the elements for each area.

The mindset of your team

Know the mindset of yourself and your team members
Map the mindset of key stakeholders and/or a specific leadership team
Group reflection on behaviors and actions (if any) to be taken on this

The shape and pulse of your team

What’s in it for me? – address an important question
Know the T-shapes
Understand your level of psychological safety and ability to have hard conversations
Do you play to win or not to lose?
Know your barriers, obstacles and attack the root causes in the context of getting stuff done

The communication of and around your team

Know how to have the hard conversations
Build mechanisms to ensure better feedback
Create a common language (big picture, smaller tasks)
Work your stakeholders with consistent messages

The learning ways for your team

Know how you learn the best as individuals and as a team
Apply shared, peer learning for better access to “tacit” knowledge
Take the first steps for a PLC, a personal learning cloud

The network and networking capabilities of your team

Network for the future, not the past
The mindset of your network
Learn to build better networks and relationships

The key delivery elements within our program are training sessions (physical and on-demand) and coaching for individuals and teams. See more on this below.

Actions, desired achievements

Having the above five elements as the starting point, we focus on specific actions and desired achievements such as:

Identification of needs and opportunities

The Collective Growth Mindset framework offers much depth, but we need to make sure our efforts fit the needs and opportunities of our participants. We map this out and use it as the main guiding tool for our activities.

Training sessions

Shorter sessions (even micro-learning – few minutes) and up to full-day workshops are used to address the needs and opportunities. It will be a mix of inspirational insights and hands-on workshops. We focus on mindset as well as actions. This will be delivered physically and virtually and when possible, we will save this for on-demand learning.

Coaching

Constructively thought-provoking coaching sessions will be made available for individuals as well as teams. Here, we can go in-depth with more specific and even personal elements.

Role models

We help leaders become role models on the growth mindset. We do this by minimizing and eliminating the negative behaviors while enforcing the positive behavior in the context of the growth mindset for teams and the organization.

Story-tellers

Once, we are on track to help leaders become better role-models, we work with them to become good story-tellers on the growth mindset. This allows us to build a positive circle of strong communication that can help change behaviors for the better.

Hard conversations

Great leaders can facilitate hard conversation within their own leadership teams as well as within the teams they lead themselves. For this, we help them identify and address the weaknesses and strengths and we give them practical tools for having such conversations.

Conversation and feedback guides

We develop feedback guides and tools to help your people, teams and leaders get better at feedback. This goes for giving as well as receiving.

Network for the future, not just the past and the present

Networking, relationship skills are underrated and underserved. It’s unfortunately often assumed that this – networking – happens by itself. Not true as this requires direction, effort and time. We address this in the context that the people you network and associate yourself with are highly influential on what and how you learn. Thus, this impacts your mindset.

Behavioral metrics and KPI’s

There are too few metrics and KPI’s that focuses on behaviors and in particular some that can measure a “live” progress. We will address this through on-going self- and team assessments and the tracking a chosen keywords within the communication of our target groups.

Creating the psychological safety, team by team

Professor Amy C. Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” We work with assessments and exercises to help your teams and organization to create a high level of psychological safety.

Personal learning cloud

Within the current learning systems at Wartsila, we build a personal learning cloud with training and materials that are targeted to and relevant for each participant. Although this has a personal starting point, it will also be social and collaborative as this is how we need to embrace and implement the growth mindset and its attributes.

Conclusion

I sense a lot of power and value in the growth mindset approach and its attributes like psychological safety, hard conversations, networking etc.

However, we are also in the early phases of developing the concepts and frameworks we need to make this happen within our organizations.

My ambition is to share what I know to help move this forward in a collective way. The tide rises all boats. We all win. Let’s help each other get better!

Thanks for reading this. Your likes, shares, questions and comments are much appreciated.

Image Credit: Pexels

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Moneyball and the Beginning, Middle, and End of Innovation

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Moneyball and the Beginning, Middle, and End of Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Recently, pitchers and catchers reported to MLB Spring Training facilities in Florida and Arizona. For baseball fans, this is the first sign of Spring, an occasion that heralds months of warmth and sunshine, ballparks filled (hopefully) with cheering fans, dinners of beers and brats, and the undying belief that this year will be the year.

Of course, there was still a lot of dark, dreary cold between then and Opening Day. Perfect weather for watching baseball movies – Bull Durham, Major League, The Natural, Field of Dreams, and, of course, Moneyball.

Moneyball is based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis and chronicles the 2002 Oakland Athletics season. The ’02 Oakland A’s, led by General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), forever changed baseball by adopting an approach that valued rigorous statistical analysis over the collective wisdom of baseball insiders (coaches, scouts, front office personnel) when building a team. This approach, termed “Moneyball,” enabled the A’s to reach the postseason with a team that cost only $44M in salary, compared to the NY Yankees that spent $125M to achieve the same outcome.

While the whole movie (and book) is a testament to the courage and perseverance required to challenge and change the status quo, time and again I come back to three lines that perfectly sum up the journey of every successful intrapreneur I’ve ever met.

The Beginning

“I know you’ve taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall…he always gets bloody…always always gets bloody. This is threatening not just a way of doing business… but in their minds, it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It’s threatening the way they do things… and every time that happens, whether it’s the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins – they have their hands on the switch – they go batshit crazy.”

John Henry, Owner of the Boston Red Sox

Context

The 2002 season is over, and the A’s were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. John Henry, an owner of the Boston Red Sox, has invited Bill Beane to Boston to offer him the Red Sox GM job.

Lesson

This is what you sign up for when you decide to be an Intrapreneur. The more you challenge the status quo, the more you question how business is done, the more you ask Why and demand an answer, the closer you get to “tak(ing) it in the teeth.”

This is why courage, perseverance, and an unshakeable belief that things can and should be better are absolutely essential for intrapreneurs. Your job is to run at the wall over and over until you get through it.

People will follow. The Red Sox did. They won the World Series in 2004, breaking an 84-year-old curse.

The Middle

“It’s a process, it’s a process, it’s a process”

Bill Beane

Context

Billy has to convince the ballplayers to forget all the habits that made them great and embrace the philosophy of Moneyball. To stop stealing bases, turning double plays on bunts, and swinging for the fences and to start taking walks, throwing to first for the easy out, and prioritize getting on base over hitting a home run.

The players are confused and frustrated. Suddenly, everything that they once did right is wrong and what was not valued is deeply prized.

Lesson

Innovation is something new that creates value. Something new doesn’t just require change, it requires people to stop doing things that work and start doing things that seem strange or even wrong.

Change doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a switch to be flipped. It’s a process to be learned. It takes time, practice, reminders, and patience.

The End

“When you get an answer you’re looking for, hang up.”

Billy Beane

Context

In this scene, Billy has offered one of his players to multiple teams, searching for the best deal. When the phone rings with a deal he likes, he and the other General Manager (GM) agree to it, Billy hangs up. Even though the other GM was in the middle of a sentence. When Peter Brand, the Assistant GM played by Jonah Hill, points out that Billy had just hung up on the other GM, Billy responds with this nugget of wisdom.

Lesson

It’s advice intrapreneurs should take very much to heart. I often see Innovation teams walk into management presentations with long presentations, full of data and projections, anxious to share their progress, and hoping for continued funding and support. When the meeting starts, a senior exec will say something like, “We’re excited by the progress we’re hearing about and what it will take to continue.”

That’s the cue to “hang up.”

Instead of starting the presentation from the beginning, start with “what it will take to continue.” You got the answer you’re looking for – they’re excited about the progress you’ve made – don’t spend time giving them the info they already have or, worse, could raise questions and dim their enthusiasm. Hang up on the conversation you want to have and have the conversation they want to have.

In closing

Moneyball was an innovation that fundamentally changed one of the most tradition-bound businesses in sports. To be successful, it required someone willing to take it in the teeth, to coach people through a process, and to hang up when they got the answer they wanted. It wasn’t easy but real change rarely is.

The same is true in corporations. They need their own Bill Beanes.

Are you willing to step up to the plate?

Image credits: Pixabay

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Unintended Consequences. The Hidden Risk of Fast-Paced Innovation

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Unintended Consequences. The Hidden Risk of Fast-Paced Innovation

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

Most innovations go through a similar cycle, often represented as an s-curve.

We start with something potentially game changing. It’s inevitably a rough-cut diamond; un-optimized and not fully understood. But we then optimize it. This usually starts with a fairly steep leaning curve as we address ‘low hanging fruit’ but then evolves into a fine-tuning stage. Eventually we squeeze efficiency from it to the point where the incremental cost of improving it becomes inefficient. We then either commoditize it, or jump to another s-curve.

This is certainly not a new model, and there are multiple variations on the theme. But as the pace of innovation accelerates, something fundamentally new is happening with this s-curve pattern. S-curves are getting closer together. Increasingly we are jumping to new s-curves before we’ve fully optimized the previous one. This means that we are innovating quickly, but also that we are often taking more ‘leaps into the dark’ than ever before.

This has some unintended consequences of its own:

1. Cumulative Unanticipated Consequences. No matter how much we try to anticipate how a new technology will fare in the real world, there are always surprises. Many surprises emerge soon after we hit the market, and create fires than have to be put out quite quickly (and literally in the cases of some battery technologies). But other unanticipated effects can be slower burn (pun intended). The most pertinent example of this is of course greenhouse gasses from Industrialization, and their impact on our climate. This of course took us years to recognize. But there are many more examples, including the rise of antibiotic resistance, plastic pollution, hidden carcinogens, the rising cost of healthcare and the mental health issues associated with social media. Just as the killer application for a new innovation is often missed at its inception, it’s killer flaws can be too. And if the causal relationship between these issues and the innovation are indirect, they can accumulate across multiple s-curves before we notice them. By the time we do, technology is often so entrenched it can be a huge challenge to extract ourselves from it.

2. Poorly understood complex network effects. The impact of new innovation is very hard to predict when it is introduced into a complex, multivariable system. A butterfly flapping its wings can cascade and amplify through a system, and when the butterfly is transformative technology, the effect can be profound. We usually have line of sight of first generation causal effects: For example, we know that electric cars use an existing electric grid, as do solar energy farms. But in today’s complex, interconnected world, it’s difficult to predict second, third or fourth generation network effects, and likely not cost effective or efficient for an innovator to try and do so. For example, the supply-demand interdependency of solar and electric cars is a second-generation network effect that we are aware of, but that is already challenging to fully predict. More causally distant effects can be even more challenging. For example, funding for the road network without gas tax, the interdependency of gas and electric cost and supply as we transition, the impact that will have on broader on global energy costs and socio political stability. Then add in complexities supply of new raw materials needed to support the new battery technologies. These are pretty challenging to model, and of course, are the challenges we are at least aware of. The unanticipated consequences of such a major change are, by definition, unanticipated!

3. Fragile Foundations. In many cases, one s-curve forms the foundation of the next. So if we have not optimized the previous s-curve sufficiently, flaws potentially carry over into the next, often in the form of ‘givens’. For example, an electric car is a classic s-curve jump from internal combustion engines. But for reasons that include design efficiency, compatibility with existing infrastructure, and perhaps most importantly, consumer cognitive comfort, much of the supporting design and technology carries over from previous designs. We have redesigned the engine, but have only evolved wheels, breaks, etc., and have kept legacies such as 4+ seats. But automotives are in many, one of our more stable foundations. We have had a lot of time to stabilize past s-curves before jumping to new ones. But newer technologies such as AI, social media and quantum computing have enjoyed far less time to stabilize foundational s-curves before we dance across to embrace closely spaced new ones. That will likely increase the chances of unintended consequences. And we are already seeing the canary in the coal mine with some, with unexpected mental health and social instability increasingly associated with social media

What’s the Answer? We cannot, or should not stop innovating. We face too many fundamental issues with climate, food security and socio political stability that need solutions, and need them quite quickly.

But the conundrum we face is that many, if not all of these issue are rooted in past, well intentioned innovation, and the unintended consequences that derive from it. So a lot of our innovation efforts are focused on solving issues created by previous rounds of innovation. Nobody expected or intended the industrial revolution to impact our climate, but now much of our current innovation capability is rightly focused on managing the fall out it has created (again, pun intended). Our challenge is that we need to continue to innovate, but also to break the cycle of todays innovation being increasingly focused on fixing yesterdays!

Today new waves of innovation associated with ‘sustainable’ technology, genetic manipulation, AI and quantum computing are already crashing onto our shores. These interdependent innovations will likely dwarf the industrial revolution in scale and complexity, and have the potential for massive impact, both good and bad. And they are occurring at a pace that gives us little time to deal with anticipated consequences, let alone unanticipated ones.

We’ll Find a Way? One answer is to just let it happen, and fix things as we go. Innovation has always been a bumpy road, and humanity has a long history of muddling through. The agricultural revolution ultimately allowed humans to exponentially expand our population, but only after concentrating people into larger social groups that caused disease to ravage many societies. We largely solved that by dying in large numbers and creating herd immunity. It was a solution, but not an optimum one. When London was in danger of being buried in horse poop, the internal combustion engine saved us, but that in turn ultimately resulted in climate change. According to projections from the Club of Rome in the 70’s, economic growth should have ground to a halt long ago, mired in starvation and population contraction. Instead advances in farming technology have allowed us to keep growing. But that increase in population contributes substantially to our issues with climate today. ‘We’ll find a way’ is an approach that works until it doesn’t. and even when it works, it is usually not painless, and often simply defers rather than solves issues.

Anticipation? Another option is that we have to get better at both anticipating issues, and at triaging the unexpected. Maybe AI will give us the processing power to do this, provided of course that it doesn’t become our biggest issue in of itself.

Slow Down and Be More Selective? In a previous article I asked if ‘just because we can do it, does it mean we should?’. That was through a primarily moral lens. But I think unintended consequences make this an even bigger question for broader innovation strategy. The more we innovate, the more consequences we likely create. And the faster we innovate, the more vulnerable we are to fragility. Slowing down creates resilience, speed reduces it. So one option is to be more choiceful about innovations, and look more critically at benefit risk balance. For example, how badly do we need some of the new medications and vaccines being rushed to market? Is all of our gene manipulation research needed? Do we really need a new phone every two years? For sure, in some cases the benefits are clear, but in other cases, is profit driving us more than it should?

In a similar vein, but to be provocative, are we also moving too quickly with renewable energy? It certainly something we need. But are we, for example, pinning too much on a single, almost first generation form of large scale solar technology? We are still at that steep part of the learning curve, so are quite likely missing unintended consequences. Would a more staged transition over a decade or so add more resilience, allow us to optimize the technology based on real world experience, and help us ferret out unanticipated issues? Should we be creating a more balanced portfolio, and leaning more on more established technology such as nuclear? Sometimes moving a bit more slowly ultimately gets you there faster, and a long-term issue like climate is a prime candidate for balancing speed, optimization and resilience to ultimately create a more efficient, robust and better understood network.

The speed of AI development is another obvious question, but I suspect more difficult to evaluate. In this case, Pandora’s box is open, and calls to slow AI research would likely mean responsible players would stop, but research would continue elsewhere, either underground or in less responsible nations. A North Korean AI that is superior to anyone else’s is an example where the risk of not moving likely outweighs the risk of unintended consequences

Regulation? Regulation is a good way of forcing more thoughtful evaluation of benefit versus risk. But it only works if regulators (government) understand technology, or at least its benefits versus risks, better than its developers. This can work reasonably well in pharma, where we have a long track record. But it is much more challenging in newer areas of technology. AI is a prime example where this is almost certainly not the case. And as the complexity of all innovation increases, regulation will become less effective, and increasingly likely to create unintended consequences of its own.

I realize that this may all sound a bit alarmist, and certainly any call to slow down renewable energy conversion or pharma development is going to be unpopular. But history has shown that slowing down creates resilience, while speeding up creates instability and waves of growth and collapse. And an arms race where much of our current innovative capability is focused on fixing issues created by previous innovations is one we always risk losing. So as unanticipated consequences are by definition, really difficult to anticipate, is this a point in time where we in the innovation community need to have a discussion on slowing down and being more selective? Where should we innovate and where not? When should we move fast, and when we might be better served by some productive procrastination. Do we need better risk assessment processes? It’s always easier to do this kind of analysis in hindsight, but do we really have that luxury?

Image credit: Pixabay

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A 90% Project Failure Rate Means You’re Doing it Wrong

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A 90% Project Failure Rate Means You're Doing it Wrong

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

For work that has not been done before, there’s no right answer. The only wrong answer is to say “no” to trying something new. Sure, it might not work. But, the only way to guarantee it won’t work is to say no to trying.

If innovation projects fail nine out of ten times, you can increase the number of projects you try or you can get better at choosing the projects to say no to. I suggest you say learn to say yes to the one in ten projects that will be successful.

If you believe that nine out of ten innovation projects will fail, you shouldn’t do innovation for a living. Even if true, you can’t have a happy life going to work every day with a ninety percent chance of failure. That failure rate is simply not sustainable. In baseball, the very best hitters of all time were unsuccessful sixty percent of the time, yet, even they focused on the forty percent of the time they got it right. Innovation should be like that.

If you’ve failed on ninety percent of the projects you’ve worked on, you’ve probably been run out of town at least several times. No one can fail ninety percent of the time and hold onto their job.

If you’ve failed ninety percent of the time, you’re doing it wrong.

If you’ve failed ninety percent of the time, you’ve likely tried to solve the wrong problems. If so, it’s time to learn how to solve the right problems. The right problems have two important attributes:

People will pay you if they are solved
They’re solvable

I think we know a lot about the first attribute and far too little about the second. The problem with solvability is that there’s no partial credit, meaning, if a problem is almost solvable, it’s not solvable. And here’s the troubling part: if a problem is almost solved, you get none of the money. I suggest you tattoo that one on your arm.

As a subject matter expert, you know what could work and what won’t. And if you don’t think you can tell the difference, you’re not a subject matter expert.

Here’s a rule to live by: Don’t work on projects that you know won’t work.

Here’s a corollary: If your boss asks you to work on something that won’t work, run.

If you don’t think it will work, you’re right, even if you’re not.

If it might work, that’s about right. If it will work, let someone else do it. If it won’t work, run.

If you’ve got no reason to believe it will work, it won’t.

If you can’t imagine it will work, it won’t.

If someone else says it won’t work, it might.

If someone else tries to convince you it won’t work, they may have selfish reasons to think that way.

It doesn’t matter if others think it won’t work. It matters what you think.

So, what do you think?

If you someone asks you to believe something you don’t, what will you do?

If you try to fake it until you make it, the Universe will make you pay.

If you think you can outsmart or outlast the Universe, you can’t.

If you have a bad feeling about a project, it’s a bad project.

If others tell you that it’s a bad project, it may be a good one.

Only you can decide if a project is worth doing.

It’s time for you to decide.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Sustaining Imagination is Hard

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by Braden Kelley

Recently I stumbled across a new Royal Institute video of Martin Reeves, a managing director and senior partner in BCG’s San Francisco office. Martin leads the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG’s vehicle for exploring ideas from beyond the world of business, which have implications for business strategy management.

I previously interviewed Martin along with his co-author Dr. Jack Fuller in a post titled ‘Building an Imagination Machine‘. In this video you’ll find him presenting content along similar themes. I think you’ll enjoy it:

Bonus points to anyone who can name this napkin sketch in the comments.

In the video Martin explores several of the frameworks introduced in his book The Imagination Machine. One of the central tenets of Martin’s video is the fact that sustaining imagination is hard. There are three core reasons why this is so:

Overspecialization – As companies grow, jobs become increasingly smaller in scope and greater in specialization, leading to myopia as fewer and fewer people see the problems that the company started to solve in the first place
Insularity – As companies grow, the majority of employees shift from being externally facing to being internally facing, isolating more and more employees from the customer and their evolving wants and needs
Complacency – As companies become successful, predictably, the successful parts of the business receive most of the attention and investment, making it difficult for new efforts to receive the care and feeding necessary for them to grow and dare I say – replace – the currently idolized parts of the business

I do like the notion Martin presents that companies wishing to be continuously successful, continuously seek to be surprised and invest energy in rethinking, exploring and probing in areas where they find themselves surprised.

Martin also explores some of the common misconceptions about imagination, including the ideas that imagination is:

A solitary endeavor
It comes out of nowhere
Unmanageable

And finally, Martin puts forward his ideas on how imagination can be harnessed systematically, using a simple six-step model:

Seduction – Where can we find surprise?
Idea – Do we embrace the messiness of the napkin sketch? Or expect perfection?
Collision – Where can we collide this idea with the real world for validation or more surprise?
Epidemic – How can we foster collective imagination? What behaviors are we encouraging?
New Ordinary – How can we create new norms? What evolvable scripts can we create that live inbetween the 500-page manual and the one-sentence vision?
Encore – How can we sustain imagination? How can we maintain a Day One mentality?

And no speech in 2023 would be complete without some analysis of what role artificial intelligence (AI) has to play. Martin’s perspective is that when it comes to the different levels of cognition, AI might be good at finding patterns of correlation, but humans have more advanced capabilities than machines when it comes to finding causation and counterfactual opportunities. There is an opportunity for all of us to think about how we can leverage AI across the six steps in the model above to accelerate or enhance our human efforts.

To close, Martin highlighted that when it comes to leading re-imagination, it is important to look outward, to self-disrupt, to establish heroic goals, utilize multiple mental models, and foster playfulness and experimentation across the organization to help keep imagination alive for developing an entrepreneurial mindset.

p.s. If you’re committed to learning the art and science of getting to the future first, then be sure and subscribe to my newsletter to make sure you’re one of the first to get certified in the FutureHacking™ methodology.

Image credits: Netflix

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‘Innovation’ is Killing Innovation. How Do We Save It?

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'Innovation' is Killing Innovation. How Do We Save It?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

How do people react when you say “innovation?”

Lean forward, eyes glittering, eager to hear more
Stare blankly and nod slowly
Roll their eyes and sigh
Wave their hands dismissively and tell you to focus on other, more urgent priorities.

If you answered C, you’re in good company.

Innovation is a buzzword. Quick searches of Amazon and Google Scholar result in 100,000+ books and 200,000+ articles on the topic, while a scan of the SEC’s database yields 8,000 K-1 filings with the word “innovation” in 2020 alone.

“Innovation” is meaningless, like all buzzwords. There’s a reason that practitioners and consultants insist on establishing a common definition before starting innovation work. I’ve been in meetings with ten people, asked each person to define “innovation,” and heard 12 different answers.

But all this pales in comparison to the emotional response it elicits. Some people get incredibly excited, bouncing out of their seats, ready to bring their latest idea to life (whether it should be brought to life is a different story.). Some nod solemnly as if confronted by a necessary evil, accepting a fate beyond their control. Most roll their eyes because they’ve been through this before and, like all management “flavors of the month,” this too shall pass.

“Innovation” is killing Innovation

The emotions and opinions we tie to “innovation” overwhelm the dictionary definition, making it difficult to believe that the process and, more importantly, the result will be different this time.

We need a different word.

One that has the same meaning and none of the baggage.

This may feel impossible, but if “literally” can mean “figuratively” (do NOT get me started on this 2013 decision) and the Oxford English Dictionary can add 700 new words in 2022, surely we can figure this out.

10 alternatives to ‘Innovation’

The following options are sourced primarily from conversations with other experts and practitioners.

Invention
Ideation
Incubation
Improvement
Creation
Design
Growth
Transformation
Business R&D*

Yes, #10 is intentionally missing because…

What do you think?

Finding a new word (or maybe changing how “innovation” is perceived, understood, and pursued) is a group effort. One person alone can’t do it, and a few people on a call complaining about the state of things certainly won’t (we’ve tried).

What do you think?

Do we need a different word for “innovation,” or should we keep it and deal with the baggage?

If we need a different word, what could it be? What do YOU use?

If we keep it, how do you combat the misunderstanding, eye rolls, and emotional baggage?

Let us know in the comments.

* This option came directly from a conversation with a client last week, and I kinda love it.

We discussed the challenge of getting engineers to stay in a discovery mindset rather than jumping immediately to solutions. Even though they work in R&D (the function), he observed that 99.9% of their work (and, honestly, their careers) is spent on the D in R&D (development).

That’s when it clicked.

Research begins with investigation and inquiry to understand a broad problem and then uses the resulting insights to solve a specific problem. It is a learning process, just like the early stages of Innovation. And, just like in the early days of Innovation, you can’t predict the result or routinize the work.

Development focuses on bringing the “new or modified product or process to production,” Just like the later phases of Innovation when prototyping and experimentation are required, and risk is driven out of the proposition.

Traditional R&D focuses on technical and scientific exploration and solutioning,

Innovation focuses on market, consumer/customer, and business model exploration and solutioning.

It is R&D for the business.

Business R&D.

Image credits: Pixabay

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