Category Archives: Leadership

Job Design as Innovation Strategy

How Complex Problem-Solving Creates Automation Champions

Job Design as Innovation Strategy

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Imagine a manufacturing company. On the factory floor, machines whirl and grind, torches flare up as welding helmets click closed, and parts and products fall off the line and into waiting hands or boxes, ready to be shipped to customers. Elsewhere, through several doors and a long hallway, you leave the cacophony of the shop floor for the quiet hum of the office. Computers ping with new emails while fingers clickety-clack across the keyboard. Occasionally, a printer whirs to life while forcing someone to raise their voice as they talk to a customer on the other end of the phone.

Now, imagine that you ask each person whether AI and automation will positively or negatively affect their jobs. Who will champion new technology and who will resist it?

Most people expect automation acceptance to be separated by the long hallway, with the office workers welcoming while the factory workers resist.

Most people are wrong.

The Business Case for Problem-Solving Job Design

Last week, I wrote about findings from an MIT study that indicated that trust, not technology, is the leading indicator of whether workers will adopt new AI and automation tools.

But there’s more to the story than that. Researchers found that the type of work people do has a bigger influence on automation perception than where they do it. Specifically, people who engage in work requiring high levels of complex problem-solving alongside routine work are more likely to see the benefit of automation than any other group.

Or, to put it more simply

Net Impact of Automation & New Technology on Your Work

While it’s not surprising that people who perform mostly routine tasks are more resistant than those who engage in complex tasks, it is surprising that this holds true for both office-based and production-floor employees.

Even more notable, this positive perception is significantly higher for complex problem solvers vs. the average across all workers::

Safety: 43% and 41% net positive for office and physical workers, respectively (vs. 32% avg)
Pay: 27% and 25% net positive for physical and office workers, respectively (vs. 3.9% avg)
Autonomy: 33% net positive for office workers (vs. 18% average)
Job security: 25% and 22% net positive for office and physical workers, respectively (vs. 3.5%)

Or, to put it more simply, blend problem-solving into routine-heavy roles, and you’ll transform potential technology resistors into champions.

3 Ways to Build Problem-Solving Into Any Role

The importance of incorporating problem-solving into every job isn’t just a theory – it’s one of the core principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS). Jidoka, or the union of automation with human intelligence, is best exemplified by the andon cord system, where employees can stop manufacturing if they perceive a quality issue.

But you don’t need to be a Six-Sigma black belt to build human intelligence into each role:

Create troubleshooting teams with decision authority
Workers who actively diagnose and fix process issues develop a nuanced understanding of where technology helps versus hinders. Cross-functional troubleshooting creates the perfect conditions for technology champions to emerge.
Design financial incentives around problem resolution
The MIT study’s embedded experiment showed that financial incentives significantly improved workers’ perception of new technologies while opportunities for input alone did not. When workers see personal benefit in solving problems with technology, adoption accelerates.
Establish learning pathways connected to problem complexity
Workers motivated by career growth (+33.9% positive view on automation’s impact on upward mobility) actively seek out technologies that help them tackle increasingly complex problems. Create visible advancement paths tied to problem-solving mastery.

Innovation’s Human Catalyst

The most powerful lever for technology adoption isn’t better technology—it’s better job design. By restructuring roles to include meaningful problem-solving, you transform the innovation equation.

So here’s the million-dollar question every executive should be asking: Are you designing jobs that create automation champions, or are you merely automating jobs as they currently exist?

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

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Shifting Mindsets to Compete in an Ecosystem-Driven World

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Shifting Mindsets to Compete in an Ecosystem-Driven World

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1980 Harvard professor Michael Porter published Competitive Strategy, which recommended that firms create advantage by driving efficiencies throughout the value chain and mastering competitive forces by maximizing bargaining power. These concepts drove corporate thinking for decades.

Yet as AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, around the same time that Porter’s ideas were ascending among CEOs in the establishment industries on the east coast, a very different way of doing business was gaining steam in Silicon Valley. The firms there saw themselves not as isolated fiefdoms, but as part of a larger ecosystem.

Competitive advantage can no longer be reduced to the sum of efficiencies in a value chain, but is embedded in webs of connections. To compete in an ecosystem-driven world, Leaders need to do more than adapt how we deploy assets, we need to look at things differently. It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action, we need to inspire and empower belief.

Shifting From “Compel And Control” To “Access And Empower”

In the 1920s Henry Ford built the almost completely vertically integrated River Rouge plant. Because the company had the ability to produce just about every facet of its product itself (the plant even had its own steel mill), it had tremendous control over the value chain, making it virtually immune to the bargaining power of suppliers.

However, as the industry matured, other companies began to specialize in particular components. Ford, unable to compete in so many directions, became integrated into the larger ecosystem. In fact, during the financial crisis in 2008, the company’s CEO, Alan Mulally, said this in testimony to Congress:

“In particular, the collapse of one or both of our domestic competitors would threaten Ford because we have 80 percent overlap in supplier networks and nearly 25 percent of Ford’s top dealers also own GM and Chrysler franchises”

In a value-chain-driven world, Ford would have welcomed its competitors’ demise. In an ecosystem-driven-world, however, their collapse would damage nodes that the company itself depended on. Clearly, the principles of competitive advantage have changed. Today your fate depends less on the assets and capabilities you control, than what you can access.

That, in essence, is why we need an ecosystem strategy. Control has become a dangerous illusion. It’s what led to the demise of the East Coast technology companies such as DEC and Data General that AnnaLee Saxenian wrote in her book. By seeking full control of their value chain, they cut off connection to important parts of the ecosystem. When the market and technology shifted, they were left on their own island.

Building Silos Of Excellence

It’s become so common for pundits to complain about organizational silos that few even think about what it means anymore. Why do silos form in the first place? Why do they persist? If silos are so egregious, why are they so common? And once we get rid of them, what takes their place? To “break down silos” and not ask these questions is just lazy thinking.

Silos aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Essentially, they are centers of excellence. It’s true that people who work closely together naturally form a working culture and tacit domain knowledge that can be hard for others to penetrate, but breaking those units apart can undermine the important work they do.

Another problem is that when you reorganize to break down one kind of silo, you inevitably create others. If, for example, your company is organized around functional groups, then you will get poor collaboration around products. But when you reorganize to focus on product groups, you get the same problem within functions.

The truth is that you don’t want to break down silos, you want to connect them. What we need to learn is how to network our organizations to help silos become interoperable with other silos that have complementary resources and areas of areas of expertise. That, essentially, is what an ecosystem is, a network of interoperable networks.

Paradoxically, we need silos of excellence to provide value to the ecosystem in order to get value out. The best way to form a connection is to have something attractive that others want to connect to.

Connecting Silos To Leverage Platforms

It’s become clear that no organization can survive focusing exclusively on capabilities it owns and controls. Today, we need to leverage platforms to access ecosystems of technology, talent and information from a variety of stakeholders, including customers, partners, vendors and open platforms. Yet, that is often easier said than done.

The truth is that while platforms offer enormous possibilities to scale, they also have deep vulnerabilities. Yes, platforms can help connect to capabilities and assets, but they are no substitute for a sound business model that creates, delivers and captures value. That was one problem with Uber, it created connection, but little else.

Organizations that successfully leverage platforms do so with silos of capability at the core. Amazon has leveraged decades of investment in building an unparalleled logistic capability to create a dominant commerce platform. In a similar way, IBM has leveraged its expertise in quantum computing to create a network of like-minded organizations. Corporate Venture Capital (VC) funds leverage industry expertise to access entrepreneurial innovation.

There are a number of ways even small firms can leverage platforms to access ecosystems. The Manufacturing USA Institutes cater to small and medium sized firms. Local universities are often overlooked resources to access deep expertise. Harley Owners Groups are a great example of how firms can leverage their own customer networks.

Strategy Is No Longer A Game Of Chess

Traditionally, strategy has been seen as a game of chess. Wise leaders survey the board of play, plan their moves carefully and execute flawlessly. That’s always been a fantasy, but it was close enough to reality to be helpful. Organizations could build up sustainable competitive advantage by painstakingly building up bargaining power within the value chain.

Yet as Rita McGrath has pointed out, it’s no longer as important to “learn to plan” as it is to “plan to learn.” Today, a better metaphor for strategy is an online role-playing game, where you bring you certain capabilities and assets and connect with others to go on quests and discover new things along the way.

Unlike chess, where everyone knows that their objective is to capture the opponent’s king, in today’s ecosystem-driven world the basis of competition is in continuous flux, so we cannot be absolutely sure of the objective when we start out, or even if our opponent is really an opponent and not a potential ally.

That’s why strategy today requires a more Bayesian approach in which we don’t expect to get things right as much as we hope to become less wrong over time. As I wrote in Harvard Business Review some years ago, “competitive advantage” is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections. Strategy, therefore, must be focused on deepening and widening networks of information, talent, partners, and consumers.”

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

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Three Ways Teamwork Can Fail

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Three Ways Teamwork Can Fail

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Teamwork is a constant in organizational life. You will work on teams for the majority of your career. Some of those teams will be an uplifting, engaging experience—but most will be an average or even a draining experience. Because most teams aren’t high-performing ones. Most teams fail to achieve a level of performance above the average of each individual’s capabilities. Most teams lack what Stephen Covey would call “synergy” but what organizational psychologists call “collective intelligence.”

Collective intelligence happens when a team’s performance on tasks exceeds what would be predicted by averaging the capabilities of each member. Collectively intelligence teams find a way to bring out more from each other than they even expected of themselves. And the inverse is true as well. When teams fail, it’s often because they fail to achieve collective intelligence.

In this article, we’ll outline three different reasons teamwork fails—or at least fails to achieve collective intelligence.

1. Social Loafing

The first reason teamwork fails is social loafing. Social loafing is a phenomenon that can seriously undermine the effectiveness of a team. It refers to individuals who do not fully commit to tasks or deadlines, taking advantage of the interdependence of work in teams. This lack of commitment can lead to missed deadlines, incomplete tasks, and a general decrease in team productivity.

The key to addressing social loafing is accountability. By holding each team member accountable for their assigned tasks, it is possible to remove the opportunity for social loafing. Regular check-ins can also be beneficial, as they allow team leaders to monitor progress and ensure that everyone is pulling their weight. By fostering a culture of accountability, teams can minimize the impact of social loafing and ensure that all members are contributing effectively.

2. Unequal Sharing

The second reason teamwork fails is unequal sharing. This occurs when certain individuals dominate conversations, preventing the full range of ideas from being expressed. When this happens, the benefits of all the team’s diversity are not fully utilized, leading to sub-optimal decision making.

To address unequal sharing, it can be helpful to introduce structure into team meetings. This could involve using timers to ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak or breaking larger teams into smaller groups to facilitate more balanced conversation. Encouraging conversational turn-taking can also be beneficial, as it ensures that all voices are heard.

3. Lack of Social Sensitivity

The third reason teamwork fails is a lack of social sensitivity. This is a less obvious, but equally damaging, issue that can affect team performance. It refers to the inability to perceive and empathize with the emotions and beliefs of others. This lack of empathy can lead to misunderstandings, conflict, and a lack of cohesion within the team.

Increasing social sensitivity within a team can be achieved in several ways. One effective strategy is to add more women to the team, as research has shown that teams with a higher proportion of women tend to have higher levels of social sensitivity. Additionally, taking steps to better understand and empathize with team members can also be beneficial. This could involve team-building exercises, training in emotional intelligence, or simply taking the time to listen and understand each other’s perspectives. By modeling behavior and teaching empathy, teams can become more socially sensitive and therefore more effective.

Building collective intelligence within a team is not always straightforward. It requires careful management and a commitment to fostering a positive team culture. By addressing issues such as social loafing, unequal sharing, and lack of social sensitivity, teams can become smarter and less likely to fail. The strategies outlined in this article provide a starting point for teams looking to improve their effectiveness and achieve their goals.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on December 10, 2023

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5 Business Myths You Cannot Afford to Believe

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5 Business Myths You Cannot Afford To Believe

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Sometimes a business idea or strategy seems to make total sense. Yet once it is implemented, it turns out to be a mistake. We rely upon research, stories and data to help us formulate what might work best. It’s okay to fail. But if you already know something is wrong, don’t make it worse by relying on a flawed business strategy.

I’ve taken some of my favorite topics I’ve researched and written about over the years and uncovered five myths that, while seeming to make sense, could cost you money, customers and maybe even your business. So, with that in mind, here are my five favorite business myths and the explanations behind why believing them cost your organization dearly.

A Repeat Customer Is a Loyal Customer – The customer keeps coming back, so they must be loyal … wrong! Just because a customer comes back doesn’t always mean they love you. You must find out why they keep coming back. Maybe you have a physical location that is two miles closer than your competitor’s location. What if a competitor builds a store between you and your customer? You may find out they were loyal to your location and not to you. Or maybe your price is the lowest. If that’s what the customer loves, guess what happens when your competition offers a lower price? It turns out they were loyal to their wallet, not your store. There are a number of reasons customers come back that have nothing to do with how much they love the experience of doing business with you. But when you find someone who is truly loyal, keep doing what they love about you, and you may have them forever.
We Want Satisfied Customers – This is a perfect follow-up to A Repeat Customer Is a Loyal Customer. No, you don’t want satisfied customers. You want loyal customers. In my customer service and CX research (sponsored by RingCentral), we asked more than 1,000 U.S. consumers if they were to rate an experience as “average” or “satisfactory,” how likely would they be to come back. Almost one in four (23%) said if they had a satisfactory experience, they would not be likely to or would never come back. Satisfactory is average, and the first opportunity the customer has to do business with a place that’s even slightly better than average, it’s a good possibility that they will move on.
Only the Front Line Needs Customer Service Training – Customer service is not a department. It’s a philosophy that everyone in an organization must embrace. Everyone either deals directly with a customer, supports someone who does or is part of the process that drives or supports the customer experience. Someone in the warehouse may never see a customer, but if they fail to pack merchandise properly, they will negatively impact the experience, causing the customer to call and complain and make the company double its effort to send a product that isn’t damaged. Once the employees in the warehouse realize their impact on the experience, they will view their job in a new way and be focused on creating a better customer experience.
Customer Loyalty Programs Create Loyal Customers – Customer loyalty programs are often about points, perks and discounts. An important question to consider is, “If you take those perks away, would the customer still be loyal to you?” That doesn’t mean you should do away with the program. While these types of programs may not drive true loyalty, what they will do is drive repeat business. So, recognize a loyalty program for what it is: a repeat business and marketing program. And if the customer keeps coming back, each and every time is an opportunity (beyond the points and perks) to validate their decision to do so with an experience that will keep them from even considering switching to your competition.
The Customer Is Always Right – No, the customer is NOT always right, but they are always the customer. This is one of my favorite myths. Ten years ago, I wrote an entire article (Your Customers Are Not Always Right) devoted to this concept. For today, I’ll summarize it in one sentence: If the customer is wrong, let them be wrong with dignity and respect.

Don’t make the mistake of believing any of these myths. Rather than clinging to conventional wisdom that sounds good but potentially fails in practice, focus on understanding what’s behind these myths and what will work. Brainstorm with your team how you can “bust” these myths and create the experience that customers love and come back for.

Image Credit: Unsplash

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

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Automation Success More About Trust Than Technology

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Automation Success More About Trust Than Technology

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

We’ve all seen the apocalyptic headlines about robots coming for our jobs. The AI revolution has companies throwing money at shiny new tech while workers polish their résumés, bracing for the inevitable pink slip. But what if we have it completely, totally, and utterly backward? What if the real drivers of automation success have nothing to do with the technology itself?

That’s precisely what an MIT study of 9,000+ workers across nine countries asserts. While the doomsayers have predicted the end of human workers since the introduction of the assembly line, those very workers are challenging everything we think we know about automation in the workplace.

The Secret Ingredient for Technology ROI

MIT surveyed workers across the manufacturing industry—50% of whom reported frequently performing routine tasks—and found that the majority ultimately welcome automation. But only when one critical condition is present. And it’s one that most executives completely miss while they’re busy signing purchase orders for the latest AI and automation systems.

Trust.

Read that again because while you’re focused on selecting the perfect technology, your actual return depends more on whether your team feels valued and believes you are invested in their safety and professional growth.

Workers Who Trust, Automate

This trust dynamic explains why identical technologies succeed in some organizations and fail in others. According to MIT’s research:

Job satisfaction is the second strongest indicator of technology acceptance, with a 10% improvement that researchers identified as consistently significant across all analytical models
Feeling valued by their employer shows a highly significant 9% increase in positive attitudes toward automation
Trust also consistently predicts automation acceptance, as workers scoring higher on trust measures are significantly more likely to view new technologies positively.

For example, Sam Sayer, an employee at a New Hampshire cutting tool manufacturer, has become an automation champion because his employer helped him experience how factory-floor robots could free him from routine tasks and allow him to focus on more complex problem-solving. “I worked in factories for years before I ever saw a robot. Now I’m teaching my colleagues on the factory floor how to use them.”

This contrasts with an aerospace manufacturer in Ohio that hired a third party to integrate a robot into its warehouse processes. Despite the company’s efforts to position the robot as a teammate, even giving it a name, workers resisted the technology because they didn’t trust the implementation process or see clear personal benefits.

These patterns hold across industries and countries: When workers perceive their employer as invested in their development and well-being, automation initiatives succeed. When that foundation is missing, even the most sophisticated technologies falter.

Four Steps to Convert Resistors to Champions

Whether it’s for the factory floor or the office laptop, if you want ROI and revenue growth from your automation investments, start with your people:

Design roles that connect workers to outcomes: When people see how their input shapes results, they become natural technology allies.
Create visible growth pathways. Workers motivated by career advancement are significantly more likely to embrace new technologies.
Align financial incentives with implementation goals. When workers see the personal benefits of adoption, resistance evaporates faster than free donuts in the break room.
Make safety improvements the leading edge of your technology story. It’s the most universally appreciated benefit of automation.

A Provocative Challenge

Ask yourself this (potentially) uncomfortable question: Are you investing as much in trust as you are in technology?

Because if not, you might as well set fire to a portion of your automation budget right now. At least you’d get some heat from it.

The choice isn’t between technology and workers—it’s between implementations that honor human relationships and those that don’t. The former generates returns; the latter generates résumé updates.

What are you choosing?

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

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Better Decision Making at Speed

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Better Decision Making at Speed

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want to go faster there are three things to focus on: decisions, decisions, and decisions.

First things first – define the decision criteria before the work starts. That’s right – before. This is unnatural and difficult because decision criteria are typically poorly defined, if not undefined, even when the work is almost complete. Don’t believe me? Try to find the agreed-upon decision criteria for an active project. If you can find them, they’ll be ambiguous and incomplete. If you can’t find them, well, there you go.

Decision criteria aren’t just categories -like sales revenue, speed, weight – they all must have a go-no-go threshold. Sales must be greater than X, speed must be greater than Y and weight must be less than Z. A decision criterion is a category with a threshold value.

Second, before the work starts, define the actions you’ll take if the threshold values are achieved and if they are not. If sales are greater than X, speed is greater than Y and weight is less than Z, we’ll invest A dollars a year for B years to scale the business. If one of X, Y or Z are less than their threshold value, we’ll scrap the project and distribute the team throughout the organization.

Lastly, before the work starts, define the decision-maker and how their decision will be documented and communicated. In practice, there is usually just one decision-maker. So, strive to write down just one person’s name as the decision-maker. But that person will be reluctant to sign up as the decision-maker because they don’t want to be mapped the decision if things flop. Instead, the real decision-maker will put together a committee to make the decision.

To tighten things down for the committee, define how the decision will be made. Will it be a simple majority vote, a super-majority, unanimous decision or the purposefully ambiguous consensus vote. My bet is on consensus, which allows the individual committee members to distance themselves from the decision if it goes badly. And, it allows the real decision-maker to influence the consensus and effectively make the decision without making it.

Formalizing the decision process creates speed. The decision categories help the team avoid the wrong work and the threshold values eliminate the time-wasting is-it-good-enough arguments. When the follow-on actions are predefined, there’s no waiting there’s just action. And defining upfront the decision-maker and the mechanism eliminates the time-sucking ambiguity that delays decisions.

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

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The Role Platforms Play in Business Networks

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The Role Platforms Play in Business Networks

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

A decade and a half ago, my colleague at TCG Advisors, Philip Lay, led a body of work with SAP around the topic of business network transformation. It was spurred by the unfolding transition from client-server architecture to a cloud-first, mobile-first world, and it explored the implications for managing both high-volume transactions as well as high-complexity relationships. Our hypothesis was that high-volume networks would be dominated by a small number of very powerful concentrators whereas the high-complexity networks would be orchestrated by a small number of very influential orchestrators.

The concentrator model has played out pretty much as expected, although the astounding success of Amazon in dominating retail is in itself a story for the ages. The key has been how IT platforms anchored in cloud and mobile, now supplemented with AI, have enabled transactional enterprises in multiple sectors of the economy to scale to levels previously unimaginable. And these same platforms, when opened to third parties, have proved equally valuable to the long tail of small entrepreneurial businesses, garnering them access to a mass-market distribution channel for their offerings, something well beyond their reach in the prior era.

The impact on the orchestrator model, by contrast, is harder to see, in part because so much of it plays out behind closed doors “in the room where it happens.” Enterprises like JP Morgan Chase, Accenture, Salesforce, Cisco, and SAP clearly extend their influence well beyond their borders. Their ability to orchestrate their value chains, however, has historically been grounded primarily in a network of personal relationships maintained through trustworthiness, experience, and intelligence, not technology. So, where does an IT platform fit into that kind of ecosystem?

Here it helps to bring in a distinction between core and context. Core is what differentiates your business; context is everything else you do. Unless you are yourself a major platform provider, the platform per se is always context, never core. So, all the talk about what is your platform strategy is frankly a bit overblown. Nonetheless, in both the business models under discussion, platforms can impinge upon the core, and that is where your attention does need to be focused.

In the case of the high-volume transaction model, where commoditization is an everyday fact of life, many vendors have sought to differentiate the customer experience, both during the buying process and over the useful life of the offer. This calls for deep engagement with the digital resources available, including accessing and managing multiple sources of data, applying sophisticated analytics, and programming real-time interactions. That said, such data-driven personalization is a tactic that has been pursued for well over a decade now, and the opportunities to differentiate have diminished considerably. The best of those remaining are in industries dominated by an oligopoly of Old Guard enterprises that are so encumbered with legacy systems that they cannot field a credible digital game. If you are playing elsewhere, you will likely fare better if you get back to innovating on the offering itself.

In the case of managing context in a high-complexity relationship model, it is friction that is the everyday fact of life worth worrying about. Most of it lies in the domain of transaction processing, the “paperwork” that tags along with every complex sale. Anything vendors can do to simplify transactional processes will pay off not only in higher customer satisfaction but also in faster order processing, better retention, and improved cross-sell and up-sell. It is not core, it does not differentiate, but it does make everyone breathe easier, including your own workforce. Here, given the remarkable recent advances in data management, machine learning, and generative AI, there is enormous opportunity to change the game, and very little downside risk for so doing. The challenge is to prioritize this effort, especially in established enterprises where the inertia of budget entitlement keeps resources trapped in the coffers of the prior era’s winning teams.

The key takeaway from all this is that for most of us platforms are not strategic so much as they are operational. That is, the risk is less that you might choose an unsuitable platform and more that you may insufficiently invest in exploiting whatever one you do choose. So, the sooner you get this issue off the board’s agenda and into your OKRs, the better.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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Getting Buy-In for Change Now That Innovation is Dead

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Getting Buy-In for Change Now That Innovation is Dead

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation is undergoing a metamorphosis, and while it may seem like the current goo-stage is the hard part (it’s certainly not easy!), our greatest challenge is still ahead. Because while we may emerge as beautiful butterflies, we still need to get buy-in for change from a colony of skeptical caterpillars who’ve grown weary of transformation talk.

The Old Playbook Is Dead, Too

Picture this: A butterfly lands, armed with PowerPoint slides about “The Future of Leaf-Eating” and projections showing “10x Nectar Collection Potential.” The caterpillars stare blankly, having seen this show before.

The old approach – big presentations, executive sponsorship, and promises of massive returns within 24 months – isn’t just ineffective. It’s harmful. Each failed transformation makes the next one harder, turning your caterpillars more cynical and more determined to cling to their leaves.

The Secret Most Change Experts Miss

Butterflies don’t convince caterpillars to transform by showing off their wings. They create conditions where transformation feels possible, necessary, and safe. Your job isn’t to sell the end state – it’s to help others see their own potential for change.

Here’s how:

Start With the Hungriest Caterpillars

Find those who feel the limitations of their current state most acutely. They’re not satisfied with their current leaf, and they’re curious about what lies beyond. These early adopters become your first chrysalis cohort.

Make it About Their Problems, Not Your Vision

Instead of talking about transformation, focus on specific pain points. “Wouldn’t it be easier to reach that juicy leaf if you could fly?” is more compelling than “Flying represents a paradigm shift in leaf acquisition strategy.”

Build a Network of Proof

Every successful mini-transformation creates evidence that change is possible. When one caterpillar successfully navigates their chrysalis phase, others pay attention. Let your transformed allies tell their stories.

Set Realistic Expectations

Metamorphosis takes time and isn’t always pretty. Be honest about the goo phase – that messy middle where things fall apart before they come together. This builds trust and prepares people for the real journey, not the sanitized version.

Where to Start

Identify your first chrysalis cohort – the people already feeling the limits of their current state
Focus on solving immediate problems that showcase the benefits of change
Document and share small victories, letting others tell their transformation stories
Create realistic timelines that acknowledge both quick wins and longer-term metamorphosis

What’s your experience? Have you successfully guided a transformation without relying on buzzwords and fancy presentations? Drop your stories in the comments.

After all, we’re all just caterpillars and butterflies helping each other find our wings.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Six Keys to Effective Teamwork

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Six Keys to Effective Teamwork

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Teamwork is the secret that makes common people achieve uncommon results. However, effective teamwork doesn’t just happen; it requires careful planning and implementation. This article provides six keys to effective teamwork that will help you build a high-performing team. These keys are not just theoretical concepts, but practical strategies that have been proven to work in real-world settings. They are designed to address the common challenges that teams face, such as lack of clarity, poor communication, personality clashes, fear of taking risks, lack of diversity, and lack of motivation. By addressing these issues, you can create a team that is not only effective but also enjoyable to be a part of.

1. Set Clear Goals

Setting clear goals is the first step towards effective teamwork. Goals provide direction and purpose, and they help team members understand what they are working towards. It’s important to set goals at both the team and individual levels. Team goals help to align everyone’s efforts, while individual goals help each team member understand their role and contribution to the team.

Setting clear milestones is also crucial. Milestones are like signposts on the road to success. They help you track progress, identify issues, and celebrate achievements. So, don’t just set goals, but also define clear milestones to guide your team’s journey.

2. Communicate Activity

Communication is the lifeblood of any team. Effective teamwork requires regular communication that keeps everyone on the same page and fosters a sense of camaraderie. One way to facilitate communication is through daily huddles or standups. These meetings provide a platform for team members to share their completed tasks, upcoming focus, and potential obstacles.

Regular check-ins also enhance collaboration and teamwork. They allow team members to share their progress, ask for help, and offer support to others. So, make communication a priority in your team, and watch as it transforms your team’s dynamics and performance.

3. Understand Differences

Every team is a melting pot of different personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and behaviors. Understanding these differences is key to effective teamwork. By recognizing and utilizing individual strengths and weaknesses, you can create a team that is greater than the sum of its parts.

A “manual of me” can be a useful tool in this regard. This is a document where each team member shares their preferences, strengths, weaknesses, and support needs. It helps team members understand each other better and work together more effectively.

4. Create Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a state where team members feel comfortable taking risks, speaking up, and sharing failures. It’s a culture where people feel safe to be themselves and express their thoughts and ideas. Creating such a culture requires encouraging a safe environment for interpersonal risks and disagreements, embracing failures as learning opportunities, and modeling vulnerability and trust as a leader.

Remember, a team that fears making mistakes will never innovate. So, foster a culture of psychological safety, and watch as your team becomes a hotbed of creativity and innovation.

5. Disagree Respectfully

Disagreements are inevitable in any team. However, it’s how you handle these disagreements that determines the success of your team. Encourage your team members to disagree respectfully and value diverse ideas and opinions. This not only prevents conflicts but also leads to better decisions and solutions.

Active listening and asking questions instead of making statements can be a powerful tool in this regard. It helps to explore the assumptions behind differing ideas and promotes understanding and respect. So, don’t fear disagreements, but use them as an opportunity to learn and grow.

6. Celebrate Small Wins

Finally, don’t forget to celebrate small wins and milestones. Celebrations not only boost morale but also foster a sense of achievement and appreciation. Regularly share and celebrate individual and team wins, recognize contributions, and create a culture of appreciation and motivation.

Remember, a team that feels appreciated will always do more than what is expected. So, make it a habit to celebrate small wins, and watch as your team’s motivation and performance soar.

Effective teamwork is not a destination, but a journey. It requires continuous effort, commitment, and learning. However, with these six tips, you can make this journey smoother and more enjoyable. So, start implementing these tips today, and watch as your team transforms into a high-performing, cohesive unit that is capable of doing their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on December 4, 2023

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Turning Bold Ideas into Tangible Results

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Exclusive Interview with Robyn Bolton

Innovation doesn’t happen without the right kind of leadership, it’s not all about the lightbulb moment or the idea that results. Innovation begins with an insight and it is effective leadership that helps pay off my definition of innovation:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.” — Braden Kelley

It is no easy task to identify an insight worth investing in or to organize and lead a team to successfully pick the right idea out of a sea of possibilities, to develop it, to understand its potential advantages versus the alternatives it must displace, and to align the organization in the ways necessary to overcome any idea’s fatal flaw and shepherd it to successful launch and possibly even market development if the market for the solution does not already exist.

Innovation of course requires leadership, but do the same leadership principles apply to successfully leading innovation?

Today we will explore this question, along with many others surrounding culture, obstacles, process, strategy, and other aspects of innovation success with our special guest.

Unlocking Innovation for Leaders

I had the opportunity recently to interview Robyn Bolton, who works with senior executives at medium and large companies who are committed to using innovation to confidently and consistently drive revenue growth. She works with companies in various industries, including industrial goods, healthcare, consumer goods, and education under her consulting firm MileZero. She is also a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in the Master of Design Innovation program. Prior to founding MileZero, Robyn served as a Partner at Innosight, the innovation and growth strategy consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, worked as a consultant and project leader for The Boston Consulting Group in both Boston and Copenhagen Denmark, and earned her MBA at Harvard Business School.

Below is the text of my interview with Robyn and a preview of the kinds of insights you’ll find in Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas Into Tangible Results presented in a Q&A format:

1. Why do so many companies struggle to innovate?

Companies struggle because they think innovation is an idea problem. It’s not. It’s a leadership problem. What I mean by that is executives who excel at running the core business are often asked to innovate (create new things) while they operate (run the existing business). Naturally, these executives rely on the very instincts and behaviors that made them successful – making quick decisions based on data and experience, striving to rapidly eliminate risk, and repeatedly and consistently delivering results. The problem is that these behaviors doom innovation efforts. They demand detailed financial forecasts when no data exists, expect quick returns on long-term investments, and try to eliminate risk from an inherently uncertain process. Success requires leaders who recognize that innovation is the opposite of operations and are willing to do the opposite of what made them successful operators.

2. Why is it so hard for innovation labs to last more than a couple of years?

Innovation labs struggle because organizations treat them like startups but expect them to operate and produce results like the core business. Executives launch labs with promises of freedom and flexibility but quickly start demanding predictable results and quick returns. By the start of the second year, executives are anxious for tangible financial results, especially as economic pressures mount, core business results slip, or a new executive arrives questioning innovation investments. Without a plan to demonstrate measurable progress in Year 2, deliver tangible results in Year 3, and a leader willing to advocate for innovation and the organizational clout to stave off skeptics, labs are easy targets for cost-cutting.

3. What does it take to build a solid foundation for innovation?

A solid innovation foundation requires a holistic approach, what I call the ABCs: Architecture, Behavior, and Culture. Architecture includes the strategies, structures, and processes that guide how work gets done. Behavior – specifically leadership behavior – turns words into actions and demonstrates what the organization truly values and believes about innovation. Culture establishes, expands, and sustains an environment where creativity and experimentation can thrive. But behavior is the most critical element because without leaders modeling the right behaviors, the best architectures fail and cultures crumble.

4. What is it that makes innovation almost the opposite of operations?

Operations exist in what Rita McGrath describes as a high-knowledge, low-assumption environment where leaders can predict outcomes based on past experience. Innovation occurs in low-knowledge, high-assumption environments where no one knows what will work, and past experiences are more likely to be misleading than helpful. Operational excellence comes from eliminating variation and risk. Innovation requires embracing uncertainty and learning from failure. The mindsets and behaviors that make someone a great operator – decisiveness, risk elimination, decisions based on quantitative historical data – hinder innovation success.

5. What would your advice be to an innovation professional on how to prevent innovation zombie projects from emerging?

Zombies exist because managers are reluctant to kill projects because that may mean that they were wrong. Instead, they put the projects on pause or delay work until the next round of funding. The key to preventing zombie projects is recognizing and communicating that the decision to start wasn’t wrong. It was based on the information available at the time. New information is now available, resulting in a different understanding of the situation and, therefore, a different decision. This learning process becomes infinitely easier when you have a (relatively) objective and (completely) transparent decision-making tool outlining clear criteria for what makes an innovation attractive and worth pursuing – what I call an “innovation playground.” This framework defines what’s “in play” (attractive), “in bounds” (worth discussing), and “out of bounds” (not worth pursuing) across multiple dimensions like strategic fit, customer benefit, and required capabilities. Of course, this tool is only as useful as the people who use it, so leaders need the courage to make and stick to hard decisions about stopping projects that don’t meet the criteria.

6. Which is more important for innovation success? Leadership, strategy or culture?

Leadership behavior is the foundation for everything else. I’ve worked with companies that have brilliant strategies or are famous for their innovation cultures but are unable to get results from their innovation investments because their leaders don’t demonstrate the right behaviors – embracing uncertainty, making decisions with incomplete information, treating failure as learning. That’s why the “B” in the ABCs of Innovation (Behavior) comes first. Executives must recognize that their instincts and behaviors need to change before they can become successful innovation leaders.

7. Is there any such thing as a perfect innovation process? If not, what are the key components for any innovation process?

There is no perfect process. Innovation isn’t baking, where following a precise recipe guarantees success. However, there are essential components that every innovation process needs: diagnosing the real problem to solve, designing multiple potential solutions, developing and testing assumptions, de-risking through experimentation, and delivering value. The order of these steps matters, but everything else – the specific activities, tools, metrics, and timelines – can and should be adapted to your organization’s needs and culture.

8. What makes one innovation culture more successful than another?

Successful innovation cultures share three characteristics: First, they’re authentic to the organization rather than copied from another company. Second, they recognize that operators and innovators are equally important and valuable to the organization and work hard to strike the right balance between protecting innovation teams and connecting them to the core business. Third, and most importantly, they’re actively demonstrated through leadership behaviors, not just written on posters or mentioned in town halls.

9. Innovation labs/teams/groups often have a different culture from the rest of the organization. Is it possible to spread the culture out of the lab and infect the rest of the organization? How?

Yes, but it requires patience and intentionality. Start by sharing stories that make innovation relatable and relevant to everyone. If you can’t answer “What’s In It for Me” for each person in the organization, you can’t expect them to change their focus or behavior. When people express interest, invite them into your team’s traditions and events. Don’t force participation – remember that not everyone wants to or needs to be an innovator. Most importantly, teach and support those who are interested in innovation while celebrating the operators who keep the core business running. Culture spreads through pull, not push.

10. One of the most dangerous moments for any promising innovation project is the transfer of out of the lab and into an operational unit of the main organization to scale it. How can organizations do better at scaling up innovation experiments into equal members of the organization’s solution catalog?

The valley of death is real! The key to crossing it is to view it as a relay rather than just chucking something across the chasm. Historically, executives have been afraid of distracting core business teams with uncertain projects so they wait until launch to involve the people who will ultimately own the innovation. While this still occurs, I’m starting to see companies over-correct and bring operators into the process at the very start, including them in activities and decisions when the team is still operating in a highly ambiguous and uncertain space. Success requires meeting in the middle. When innovation teams know more than they don’t know, that’s when collaboration between innovation and operational teams starts. From that point through launch, innovators and operators should work hand-in-hand to understand and navigate uncertainty while adapting their plans, processes and metrics to ensure market success without losing the critical insights that sparked the innovation. Most importantly, Senior leaders must stay engaged, understanding and supporting the additional time and resources needed during the transition period.

11. Anything you wish I’d asked?

I wish you’d asked, “What does innovation leadership success really look like?” Because while revenue and survival rates are measures of success, I believe that the real measure is the lives you change. Given that only 0.002% of incubated ideas generate meaningful revenue, and 90% of innovation labs shut down within three years, there’s no guarantee that your work will become a wild, world-changing success. That doesn’t mean that you failed. For me and so many of the successful leaders with whom I’ve worked, success is also giving someone the courage to challenge the status quo because they see you doing it. It’s inspiring someone to take risks when you break the rules thoughtfully and responsibly. If you’ve helped even one person discover their potential as an innovator or creative problem-solver, you’ve succeeded.

Conclusion

Thank you for the great conversation Robyn!

I hope everyone has enjoyed this peek into the mind of the woman behind the insightful new title Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas Into Tangible Results!

Image credits: MileZero (Robyn Bolton)

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