Projects Don’t Go All Right or All Wrong

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Projects Don't Go All Right or All Wrong

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

What The Heck Went Right?!

Have you found yourself working on a project that’s having problems, missing deadlines, over budget and/or full of defects?

Or have you launched new products only to discover that they didn’t get the uptake you had hoped in the market?

On most such projects, at some point, someone will say “when this is all over we need to do a post-mortem” to determine what went wrong and how we avoid these kinds of problems in the future. This is certainly an important and worthwhile activity. In Agile practices, we refer to this as a “retrospective” instead of using the term “post-mortem.” We do this partly to avoid the ever so slightly negative death-related connotations of the term “post-mortem;” also because anything named in Latin tends to sound intimidating. But most importantly because we take the mindset that a retrospective should not be triggered because “there was a problem” (or death!) but rather should be part of the completion of every project (or even a phase of a project).

In fact, I recommend you don’t view the retrospective being exclusively, or even primarily about identifying “what went wrong” on a project. The first and primary focus of every retrospective is what went right. The recommended guideline is that over 75% of the time in every retrospective should be spent on what went right. Why is that?

What went right is more useful than what went wrong.

Sure, its good to understand what went wrong, but even once you’ve done that you have a lot more work to do. Just knowing what went wrong doesn’t make the next project more successful, you then need also to figure out what you will do differently to make that “wrong” thing not happen again. And then even once you have “figured that out,” the reality is you may or may not have gotten it correct. Your “fix” is not yet proven.

So, there is yet a third step to try that “fix” on another project and see if it has the desired effect. Hopefully, it does and if so, great. In fact, I heartily recommend you do take this three-step approach when looking at “what went wrong.” But, let’s contrast that with how many steps it takes to benefit from what went right. Step 1- determine what went right. Step 2- determine why that thing went right (which is usually a lot easier than finding the root cause of problems).

And once you have figured out what went right and why you just need to keep doing that thing. So it’s simpler to get future benefit from what’s right vs. what’s wrong.

Now I can hear your wheels spinning, and you may be thinking “yeah, but come on if we are already doing something right, why would we stop doing it anyway? We are already doing that thing; we aren’t going to get any “incremental value” by praising what we already know how to do! We should focus on improvements! I’d like to say, “good point,” but I can’t.

It’s a terrible point, and here is why.

This line of thinking is based on a fallacy. The fallacy is that good and beneficial practices sort of automatically perpetuate themselves. Having worked with scores of large enterprises, I have not found this to be the case. In fact, when project teams retrospect on “what went wrong,” very often the root cause of the problem was a failure to engage in practices which they have done in the past that led them to success.

There are many reasons for this – efforts to seek efficiency, change in project leadership, a desire for variation, or just old-fashioned “forgetting to do it.” That’s why it’s incredibly valuable to reinforce what went right, so we don’t forget to keep doing it, and we acknowledge the value of the practices that led to the successful outcome.

But here’s another reason to focus most of your time on “what went right.”

Talking about “what went right” makes people feel good.

Perhaps you are thinking, “Come on, this is a place of business! We don’t come here to feel good; we come here to get things done! You can feel good at home!” In reality, many studies have shown morale is a hugely important component of productivity. In one study, the Gallup organization estimated that low morale in the form of worker “disengagement” costs the US economy as much as $350 billion a year. Giving people the opportunity not just to say “good job” but really “get into” what was done right, by who and why is a huge morale booster for everybody.

And here’s one final benefit to focusing on “what’s right,” when it comes time to get to that last 25% of your retrospective where you do want to talk about “what can we do better next time,” the team is going to be a lot less defensive and a lot more open to acknowledging problems and responsibility if it’s preceded by discussion of the positive aspects of the project. Furthermore, when team members become accustomed to retrospectives being positive experiences, they are less likely to procrastinate scheduling them, less likely to find an excuse to miss them, and less likely to show up in a defensive posture. All good things.

And I’ll anticipate one final question; you may be thinking, “But what if nothing went right on the project, it was a total disaster?” Believe this; something always went right; you just aren’t seeing it. Just like something can always be improved. On super successful projects its still very valuable to consider whether there are “things that went wrong” (once you’ve thoroughly covered what went right) and even on the most messed up projects, it’s worth digging to find what went right, it might be more than you think and its working from those past aspects of success, however small, that you will build towards an even more successful future.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Why Neglecting New Hire Ideas Hurts Revenue

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The Cost of Silence

Why Neglecting New Hire Ideas Hurts Revenue

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Stop me if this sounds familiar. A new hire bounces into your office and, with all the joy and enthusiasm of a new puppy, rattles off a list of ideas. You smile and, just like with new puppies, explain why their ideas won’t work, and encourage them to be patient and get to know the organization. 

Congratulations!  You just cost your company money. Not because the new hire’s idea was the silver bullet you’ve been seeking but because you taught them that it’s more critical for them to do their jobs and maintain the status quo than to ask questions and share ideas.

If that seems harsh, read the new research from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.

Year 1: Rainbows and Unicorns (mostly)

From 2017 through 2021, Dr. Edmonson and her colleagues collected data from over 10,000 physicians.  Using biannual (every two years) surveys, they asked physicians to rate on a 5-point scale how comfortable they felt offering opinions or calling out the mistakes of colleagues or superiors. 

It was little surprise that agreement with statements like “I can report patient safety mistakes without fear of punishment” were highest amongst people with less than one year of service at their employer.

These results all come down to one thing: high levels of psychological safety.

Years 2+: Resignation and Unhappiness

However, psychological safety erodes quickly in the first year because:

  • There’s a gap between words and actions: When new hires join an organization, they believe what they hear about its culture, values, priorities, and openness.  Once they’re in the organization and observe their colleagues’ and superiors’ daily behavior, they experience the disconnect, lose trust, and shift into self-protection mode.
  • Their feedback and ideas are rebuffed: This scenario is described above, but it’s not the only one.  Another common situation occurs when a new hire responds to requests for feedback only to be met with silence or exasperation, a lack of follow-through or follow-up, or is openly mocked or met with harsh pushback
  • Expectations increase with experience: It’s easier to ask questions when you’re new, and no one expects you to know the answers.  Over time, however, you are expected to learn the answers and you no longer feel comfortable asking questions, even if there’s no way you could know the answer.

20 years to regain what was lost in 1

According to Edmondson’s research, it takes up to 20 years to rebuild the safety lost in the first year.

As a leader, you can slow that erosion and accelerate the rebuilding when you:

  • Recognize the Risk: Knowing that new hires will experience a drop in psychological safety, staff them on teams that have higher levels of safety
  • Walk the Talk: Double down on demonstrating the behaviors you want. Immediately act on feedback that points out a gap between your words and actions.
  • Ask questions: Demonstrate your openness by being curious, asking questions, and asking follow-up questions.  As Edmonson writes, “You are training people to contribute by constantly asking questions.”
  • Promises Made = Promises Kept: If you ask for feedback, act on it.  If you ask for ideas, act on some and explain why you’re not executing others.
  • Be Vulnerable: Admit your mistakes and uncertainties.  It sets a powerful example that it’s okay to be imperfect and to ask for help. It also creates an environment for others to do the same.

The Cost of Silence vs. The Cost of Time

Building and maintaining psychological safety takes time and effort.  It takes 5 minutes to listen to and respond to an idea.  It takes hours to ensure new hires join safe teams.  It takes weeks to plan and secure support for post-hackathon ideas. 

But how does that compare to 20 years of lost ideas, improvements, innovations, and revenue?  To 20 years of lost collaboration, productivity, and peak effectiveness? To 20 years of slow progress, inefficiency, and cost?

How many of your employees stick around 20 years to give you the chance to rebuild what was lost?

Image credit: Pixabay

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AI Requires Conversational Intelligence

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AI Requires Conversational Intelligence

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Historically, building technology had been about capabilities and features. Engineers and product designers would come up with new things that they thought people wanted, figure out how to make them work and ship “new and improved” products. The result was often things that were maddeningly difficult to use.

That began to change when Don Norman published his classic, The Design of Everyday Things and introduced concepts like dominant design, affordances and natural mapping into industrial design. The book is largely seen as pioneering the user-centered design movement. Today, UX has become a thriving field.

Yet artificial intelligence poses new challenges. We speak or type into an interface and expect machines to respond appropriately. Often they do not. With the popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, we have a dire need for clear principles for human-AI interactions. A few years ago, two researchers at IBM embarked on a journey to do just that.

The Science Of Conversations

Bob Moore first came across conversation analysis as an undergraduate in the late 1980s, became intensely interested and later earned a PhD based on his work in the field. The central problems are well known to anybody who has ever watched Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, our conversations are riddled with complex, unwritten rules that aren’t always obvious.

For example, every conversation has an unstated goal, whether it is just to pass the time, exchange information or to inspire an emotion. Yet our conversations are also shaped by context. For example, the unwritten rules would be different for a conversation between a pair of friends, a boss and subordinate, in a courtroom setting or in a doctor’s office.

“What conversation analysis basically tries to reveal are the unwritten rules people follow, bend and break when engaging in conversations,” Moore told me and he soon found that the tech industry was beginning to ask similar questions. So he took a position at Xerox PARC and then Yahoo! before landing at IBM in 2012.

As the company was working to integrate its Watson system with applications from other industries, he began to work with Raphael Arar, an award-winning visual designer and user experience expert. The two began to see that their interests were strangely intertwined and formed a partnership to design better conversations for machines.

Establishing The Rules Of Engagement

Typically, we use natural language interfaces, both voice and text, like a search box. We announce our intention to seek information by saying, “Hey Siri,” or “Hey Alexa,” followed by a simple query, like “where is the nearest Starbucks.” This can be useful, especially when driving or walking down the street,” but is also fairly limited, especially for more complex tasks.

What’s far more interesting — and potentially far more useful — is being able to use natural language interfaces in conjunction with other interfaces, like a screen. That’s where the marriage of conversational analysis and user experience becomes important, because it will help us build conventions for more complex human-computer interactions.

“We wanted to come up with a clear set of principles for how the various aspects of the interface would relate to each other,” Arar told me. “What happens in the conversation when someone clicks on a button to initiate an action?” What makes this so complex is that different conversations will necessarily have different contexts.

For example, when we search for a restaurant on our phone, should the screen bring up a map, information about pricing, pictures of food, user ratings or some combination? How should the rules change when we are looking for a doctor, a plumber or a travel destination?

Deriving Meaning Through Preserving Context

Another aspect of conversations is that they are highly dependent on context, which can shift and evolve over time. For example, if we ask someone for a restaurant nearby, it would be natural for them to ask a question to narrow down the options, such as “what kind of food are you looking for?” If we answer, “Mexican,” we would expect that person to know we are still interested in restaurants, not, say, the Mexican economy or culture.

Another issue is that when we follow a particular logical chain, we often find some disqualifying factor. For instance, a doctor might be looking for a clinical trial for her patient, find one that looks promising but then see that that particular study is closed. Typically, she would have to retrace her steps to go back to find other options.

“A true conversational interface allows us to preserve context across the multiple turns in the interaction,” Moore says. “If we’re successful, the machine will be able to adapt to the user’s level of competence, serving the expert efficiently but also walking the novice through the system, explaining itself as needed.”

And that’s the true potential of the ability to initiate more natural conversations with computers. Much like working with humans, the better we are able to communicate, the more value we can get out of our relationships.

Making The Interface Disappear

In the early days of web usability, there was a constant tension between user experience and design. Media designers were striving to be original. User experience engineers, on the other hand, were trying to build conventions. Putting a search box in the upper right hand corner of a web page might not be creative, but that’s where users look to find it.

Yet eventually a productive partnership formed and today most websites seem fairly intuitive. We mostly know where things are supposed to be and can navigate things easily. The challenge now is to build that same type of experience for artificial intelligence, so that our relationships with the technology become more natural and more useful.

“Much like we started to do with user experience for conventional websites two decades ago, we want the user interface to disappear,” Arar says. Because when we aren’t wrestling with the interface and constantly having to repeat ourselves or figuring out how to rephrase our questions, we can make our interactions much more efficient and productive.

As Moore put it to me, “Much of the value of systems today is locked in the data and, as we add exabytes to that every year, the potential is truly enormous. However, our ability to derive value from that data is limited by the effectiveness of the user interface. The more we can make the interface become intelligent and largely disappear, the more value we will be able unlock.”

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

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Are You Leading in the Wrong Zone?

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Are You Leading in the Wrong Zone?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

I get tired of listening to “experts” explain how leaders need to be bolder. Usually what they are advocating for is more disruptive innovation, less business as usual. But this completely ignores the impact of context and ends up patronizing behavior that may actually be well-grounded. It depends on which zone you are operating out of.

In the Performance Zone, the goal is to deliver on the quarterly plan. It is not the time or place for disruptive innovation. Leadership means getting your team to the finish line despite whatever roadblocks may crop up. Grit and resourcefulness, combined with attention to tactics, is what is wanted here.

In the Productivity Zone, the goal is to be there for the long haul. Again, disruptive innovation is not on the docket. Analysis and optimization are the keys here, and leaders must be willing to step back, take a systems view of things, and invest in efforts that will enable the Performance Zone to perform better in the future.

By contrast, the Incubation Zone is all about disruptive innovation, and most pundits champion a leadership style that is a perfect fit for this zone. So, if you are in this zone, by all means embrace hypothesis testing, agility, fast failure and the like. Just remember that what works here does not work well in any of the other three zones.

Finally, the Transformation Zone is where the pundits ought to be focusing because transformation is a bear, and no one can ever really tame it. Business lore celebrates the amazing disrupters here — Jobs, Musk, Bezos, etc. — as well we should. But in so doing we should not ignore the amazing disruptees, the leaders who redirected their enterprises to bring them kicking and screaming into a new age — Gerstner, Nadella, Iger, and company. For my money, their leadership style is the single most important one for any aspiring CEO to master.

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

Image Credit: Pexels

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Creating a Giving Cycle

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Creating a Giving Cycle

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

The best gifts are the ones that demonstrate to the recipients that you understand them. You understand what they want; you understand their size (I’m and men’s large); you understand their favorite color; you know what they already have; you know what they’re missing, and you know what they need.

On birthdays and holidays, everyone knows it’s time to give gifts and this makes it easy for us to know them for what they are. And, just to make sure everyone knows the gift is a gift, we wrap them in colorful paper or place them in a fancy basket and formally present them. But gifts given at work are different.

Work isn’t about birthdays and holidays, it’s about the work. There’s no fixed day or date to give them. And there’s no expectation that gifts are supposed to be given. And gifts given at work are not the type that can be wrapped in colorful paper. In that way, gifts given at work are rare. And when they are given, often they’re not recognized as gifts.

1. The Gift of a Challenge

When you give someone a challenge, that’s a gift. Yes, the task is difficult. Yes, the request is unreasonable. Yes, it’s something they’ve never done before. And, yes, you believe they’re up to the challenge. And, yes, you’re telling them they’re worthy of the work. And whether the complete 100% of the challenge or only 5% of it, you praise them. You tell them, Holy sh*t! That was amazing. I gave you an impossible task and you took it on. Most people wouldn’t have even tried and you put your whole self into it. You gave it a go. Wow. I hope you’re proud of what you did because I am. The trick for the giver is to praise.

2. The Gift of Support

When you support someone that shouldn’t need it, that’s a gift. When the work is clearly within a person’s responsibility and the situation temporarily outgrows them, and you give them what they need, that’s a gift. Yes, it’s their responsibility. Yes, they should be able to handle it. And, yes, you recognize the support they need. Yes, you give them support in a veiled way so that others don’t recognize the gift-giving. And, yes, you do it in a way that the receiver doesn’t have to acknowledge the support and they can save face. The trick for the giver is to give without leaving fingerprints.

3. The Gift of LEVEL TWO Support

When you give the gift of support defined above and the gift is left unopened, it’s time to give the gift of level 2 support. Yes, you did what you could to signal you left a gift on their doorstep. Yes, they should have seen it for what it was. And, yes, it’s time to send a level 2 gift to their boss in the form of an email sent in confidence. Tell their boss what you tried to do and why you tried to do it. And tell them the guidance you tried to give. This one is called level 2 giving because two people get gifts and because it’s higher-level giving. The trick for the giver is to give in confidence and leave no fingerprints.

4. The Gift of Truth

When you give someone the truth of the situation when you know they don’t want to hear it, that’s a gift. Yes, they misunderstand the situation. Yes, it’s their responsibility to understand it. Yes, they don’t want your gift of truth. And, yes, you give it to them because they’re off-track. Yes, you give it to them because you care about them. And, yes you give the gift respectfully and privately. You don’t give a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum. And you don’t make the decision for them. You tell them why you see it differently and tell them you hope they see your gift as it was intended – as a gift. The trick for the giver is to give respectfully and be okay whether the gift is opened or not.

5. The Gift of Forgiveness

When someone has mistreated you or hurt you, and you help them anyway, that’s a gift. Yes, they need help. Yes, the pain is still there. And, yes, you help them anyway. They hurt you because of the causes and conditions of their situation. It wasn’t personal. They would have treated anyone that way. And, yes, this is the most difficult gift to give. And that’s why it’s last on the list. And the trick for the giver is to feel the hurt and give anyway. It will help the hurt go away.

It may not seem this way, but the gifts are for the giver. Givers grow by giving. And best of all for the givers, they get to watch as their gifts grow getters into givers. And that’s magical. And that brings joy.

And the giving cycle spirals on.

Image credit: Pexels

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

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

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

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

  1. SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification — by Pete Foley
  2. Secrets to Overcoming Resistance to Change — by David Burkus
  3. Five Things Most Managers Don’t Know About Innovation — by Greg Satell
  4. Are We Doing Social Innovation Wrong? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. Only One Type of Innovation Will Win the Future — by Greg Satell
  6. What Your Website Reveals About Your Brand — by Howard Tiersky
  7. The Coming Leadership Confidence Crisis — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Adjacent Innovation is the Key to Growth and Risk — by Robyn Bolton
  9. Bringing Emotional Energy and Creative Thinking to AI — by Janet Sernack
  10. Delivering Customer Value is the Key to Success — by Mike Shipulski

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

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

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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Five Keys to Maintaining Your Customer Experience

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Five Keys to Maintaining Your Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

I was talking to a friend the other day. He purchased an expensive new car just eight months ago. Unfortunately, the car turned out to be a “lemon,” and he has taken it back to the dealer multiple times for various problems. The car has spent more time at the repair center than in his garage. If it were me, I’d ask the dealer to replace the car. Apparently, he has more patience than I do and was giving the dealer another chance to fix the car. Regardless, it made me think that what looks good on the outside may not be so good on the inside.

Unfortunately, there are businesses that fall into the same category as my friend’s automobile. They look good on the outside, with amazing marketing and advertising, a beautiful website, a beautiful building, etc., but when it comes to taking care of the customer, they fail.

This made me think further about how cars are maintained, and it’s not much different from how you would want to run your business. Consider these five customer experience (CX) maintenance ideas:

1. Reliability: First, you want to build a car that works. Assuming you have a good product, you want to create processes that are customer- and employee-friendly. The experience must, at a minimum, meet your customers’ expectations. That creates confidence and increases overall customer satisfaction.

2. Routine Maintenance: You want to keep your car properly maintained with routine maintenance. In the customer service world, we could consider this to be ongoing training that keeps your employees sharp with the latest tools and technology to help provide the best possible support and experience.

3. Alignment: We want to keep the car in alignment. A few years ago, I wrote about focusing on employees first. My weekly cartoon included the caption, “If an employee’s experience (EX) isn’t at least as good as the customer’s, the customer’s experience can be shaky, and the entire company can suffer.” In other words, there needs to be alignment between the CX and the EX.

Customer Experience Maintenance Cartoon from Shep Hyken

4. Feedback: When we take our car to a dealer or repair center, a mechanic hooks a computer up to the car to perform a “diagnostic check.” The computer can deliver feedback on many issues, from the electronics to how soon the brakes need to be replaced. In the business world, this is akin to the feedback your customers give you. You must have a system that collects feedback and gives you a chance to repair and maintain the experience so it continues to meet, if not exceed, your customer’s expectations.

5. Update: Most cars don’t last forever. At some point, you need to replace them. New cars offer an updated look in addition to updates under the hood, which could include more efficient engines, the latest technology, and more. Your business is the same. Product improvements, new technology, new processes, and more can give your customers a fresh experience.

Just like maintaining a car, fine-tuning your customer service and CX ensures your business runs smoothly, remains competitive, and gets your customers to say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons, Shep Hyken

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What is Your Mindset? Fixed, Growth or Hybrid?

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What is Your Mindset? Fixed, Growth or Hybrid?

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

What does it mean to have a mindset? How does it shape your actions, and those of the people you interact with? Is it steadfast, or does it evolve? Could it perhaps be a fusion of elements? It’s crucial to understand mindsets as they influence not only our behaviors but also the behaviors of those we engage with, allowing us to better navigate the world.

Research defines “mindset” as a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and interprets information, orienting an individual’s understanding of experiences and guiding their responses and actions.

This definition, adapted from Carol Dweck by Salovey and Achor, illuminates that our mindset, composed of our thoughts and beliefs, influences our perception of ourselves, our environment, and the broader world. Such understanding is vital in team dynamics, leadership, and organizational contexts.

Dweck identified two primary mindsets:

1. A fixed mindset, in which intelligence is viewed as static, leading to the desire to appear intelligent and influencing specific behaviors.

2. A growth mindset, where intelligence is seen as something that can be developed, sparking a desire to learn and driving diverse behaviors.

The growth mindset, characterized by the belief that abilities can be honed with consistent effort, is shaped by how we perceive and tackle five critical areas:

  1. Viewing effort as a path to mastery
  2. Demonstrating persistence in the face of obstacles
  3. Seeing others’ success as a source of inspiration and learning
  4. Embracing challenges
  5. Welcoming criticism as an opportunity to learn and grow

However, we need to acknowledge that our mindsets aren’t strictly “fixed” or “growth” in nature. They’re typically a hybrid of both, influenced by the context and phase of our lives. It’s is also situational. Our response to situations can shift, revealing the dominance of one mindset over the other at different times. Recognizing this within ourselves and avoiding prematurely labeling others is vital.

A Few Cases, Examples

To give a practical example, let’s look at the world of education. Imagine a student who struggles with math. With a fixed mindset, they might think, “I’m just not good at math,” and subsequently put less effort into learning. However, if they adopt a growth mindset, they would perceive math as a challenge they can overcome with practice and effort. Using different strategies and seeking help when necessary, the student’s math skills can improve, highlighting the practical application of a growth mindset.

In the business world, Microsoft provides an excellent case study. Under CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft shifted from a fixed to a growth mindset. Nadella introduced Dweck’s growth mindset concept to the company culture, fostering innovation and collaboration. The shift, encapsulated in the motto “Learn it all” vs. “Know it all,” encouraged employees to remain open-minded, learn from their mistakes, and continually improve. This change in mindset led to increased employee engagement, innovation, and contributed to Microsoft’s recent growth.

In sports, athletes often exemplify the growth mindset. Consider basketball legend Michael Jordan. He was cut from his high school varsity team because he was deemed “not good enough.” Rather than accepting this as an unchangeable state, he viewed it as a challenge and redoubled his efforts to improve. His eventual rise to becoming one of the greatest basketball players of all time showcases how a growth mindset can lead to superior performance in the face of setbacks and criticism.

As I often say, “The essence of the growth mindset in an organizational context is to instill a mindset focused on continuous improvement rather than the need to prove that one is the best.”

Implementing the growth mindset in team dynamics is part of my work. However, it doesn’t stand alone. It must be complemented by other factors like fostering a learning culture, ensuring psychological safety, and expanding the comfort zone. All these components are critical to effective team, leadership, and organizational development.

If you have questions or interesting perspectives on these topics, I would be more than happy to discuss them. Get in touch!

Image Credit: Pixabay, Stefan Lindegaard

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How to Build Innovation Resilience in Uncertainty

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Reality Strikes Back

How to Build Innovation Resilience in Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“This time feels different.”  I’ve been hearing this from innovation practitioners and partners for months  We’ve seen innovation resilience tested in times of economic uncertainty and geopolitical volatility.  We’ve seen it flourish when markets soar and capital is abundant.  We’ve seen it all, but this time feels different.

In fact, we feel a great disturbance in the innovation force.

Disturbances aren’t always bad.  They’re often the spark that ignites innovation.  But understand the disturbance you must, before work with it you can.

So, to help us understand and navigate a time that feels, and likely is, different, I present “The Corporate Innovator’s Saga.”

Episode I: The R&D Men (are) Aces

(Sorry, that’s the most tortured one.  The titles get better, I promise)

A long time ago (1876), in a place not so far away (New Jersey), one man established what many consider the first R&D Lab.  A year later, Thomas Edison and his Menlo Park colleagues debuted the phonograph.

In the 20th century, as technology became more complex, invention shifted from individual inventors to corporate R&D labs. By the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed 15,000 people, including 1,200 PhDs.  In 1970, Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) opened.

Episode II: Attack of the Disruptors

For most of the twentieth century, R&D labs were the heroes or villains of executives’ innovation stories.  Then, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. 

He revealed that executives’ myopic focus on serving their best (most profitable) customers caused them to miss new waves of innovation. In example after example, he showed that R&D often worked on disruptive (cheaper, good enough) technologies only to have their efforts shut down by executives worried about cannibalizing their existing businesses.

C-suites listened, and innovation went from an R&D problem to a business one.

Episode III: Revenge of the Designers

Design Thinking’s origins date back to the 1940s, its application to business gained prominence with l Tim Brown’s 2009 book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.

This book introduced frameworks still used today’s: desirability, feasibility, and viability; divergent and convergent thinking; and the process of empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. 

Innovation now required business people to become designers, question the status quo, and operate untethered from the short-termism of business,

Episode IV: A New Hope (Startups)

The early 2000s were a dizzying time for corporate innovation. Executives feared disruption and poured resources into internal innovation teams and trainings. Meanwhile, a movement was gaining steam in Silicon Valley.

Y Combinator, the first seed accelerator, launched in 2005 and was followed a year later by TechStars. When Eric Ries published The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses in 2011, the US was home to nearly 100 startup accelerators.

Now, businesspeople needed to become entrepreneurs capable of building, and scaling startups in environments purpose-built to kill risk and change.

In response, companies spun up internal accelerators, established corporate venture capital teams, and partnered with startup studios.

Episode V: Reality Strikes Back

Today, the combination of a global pandemic, regional wars, and a single year in which elections will affect 49% of the world’s population has everyone reeling. 

Naturally, this uncertainty triggered out need for a sense of control.  The first cut were “hobbies” like innovation and DEI.  Then, “non-essentials” like “extra” people and perks.  For losses continued into the “need to haves,” like operational investments and business expansion.

Recently, the idea of “growth at all costs” has come under scrutiny with advocates for more thoughtful growth strategies emerging There is still room for innovation IF it produces meaningful, measurable value.

Episode VI: Return of the Innovator (?)

I don’t know what’s next, but I hope this is the title.  And, if not, I hope whatever is next has Ewoks.

What do you hope for in the next episode?

Image credit: Pexels

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Three Reasons Nobody Cares About Your Ideas

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Three Reasons Nobody Cares About Your Ideas

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have written (he didn’t) and since that time thousands of mousetraps have been patented. Still, despite all that creative energy and all those ideas, the original “snap trap,” invented by William Hooker in 1894, remains the most popular.

We’ve come to glorify ideas, thinking that more of them will lead to better results. This cult of ideas has led to a large cottage industry of consultants that offer workshops to exercise our creative capabilities with tools like brainstorming and SWOT analysis. We are, to a large extent, still chasing better mousetraps.

Still, one thing I constantly hear from executives I work with is that no one wants to hear about their ideas. The truth is that, just like all those mousetrap patents, most ideas are useless, very few are original and many have been tried before. So if you’re frustrated that nobody listens to your ideas, here’s why that happens and what you can do to fix it.

1. Your Ideas Aren’t Original

Having a new idea is thrilling, because it takes us to new places. Once we get an idea, it leads to other ideas and, as we follow the logical chain, we can see important real-world implications. The process of connecting the dots is so exhilarating — and so personal — that it seems unlikely, impossible even, that someone else had the same thoughts at the same time.

Yet history clearly shows that’s exactly what happens. Newton and Leibniz simultaneously invented calculus. Darwin and Wallace discovered the principles of evolution at about the same time. Alexander Graham Bell just narrowly beat Elisha Gray to the patent office to receive credit for inventing the telephone. Einstein beat David Hilbert to general relativity by a matter of weeks.

In fact, in a landmark study published in 1922, sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas identified 148 major inventions or discoveries that at least two different people, working independently, arrived at the same time. And those are historic successes that are well documented. Just imagine how often it happens with normal, everyday ideas.

The truth is that ideas don’t simply arise out of some mysterious ether. We get them by making connections between existing ideas and new things we observe ourselves. So it shouldn’t be surprising that others have seen similar things and drawn the same conclusions that we have.

2. Others Had The Same Idea — And Failed

Jim Allison spent most of his life as a fairly ordinary bench scientist and that’s all he really wanted to be. He told me once that he “just liked figuring things out” and by doing so, he gained some level of prominence in the field of immunology, making discoveries that were primarily of interest to other immunologists.

His path diverged when he began to research the ability of our immune system to fight cancer. Using a novel approach, he was able to show amazing results in mice. “The tumors just melted away,” he told me. Excited, he ran to go tell pharmaceutical companies about his idea and get them to invest in his research.

Unfortunately, they were not impressed. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t understand Jim’s idea, but that they had already invested — and squandered — billions of dollars on similar ideas. Hundreds of trials had been undertaken on immunological approaches to cancer and there hadn’t been one real success.

Nonetheless, Jim persevered and today, cancer immunotherapy has emerged as major field of its own. Today, hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists are combining their ideas with Jim’s to create amazing breakthroughs in cancer treatment and tens of thousands of people are alive today because of it.

3. You Can’t Make An Idea Work By Yourself

One of the most famous stories about innovation is that of Alexander Fleming. Returning to his lab after a summer vacation, he found that a mysterious mold had contaminated his petri dishes, which was eradicating the bacteria colonies he was working to grow. He decided to study the mold and discovered penicillin.

It’s one of those stories that’s told and retold because it encapsulates so much of what we love about innovation — the power of a single “Eureka! moment” to change the world. The problem is that innovation never really happens that way, not generally and certainly not in the case of penicillin.

The real story is decidedly different. When Alexander Fleming published his findings, no one really noticed because it had little, if any, medical value. It was just a secretion from a mold that could kill bacteria in a petri dish. The compound was unstable and you couldn’t store it. It couldn’t be injected or ingested. You also couldn’t make enough of it to cure anyone.

Ten years later, a completely different team of scientists led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain rediscovered Fleming’s work and began adding their own ideas. Then they traveled to America to work with US labs and improved the process. Finally, pharmaceutical companies worked feverishly to mass produce penicillin.

So it wasn’t just a single person or a single “Eureka! moment,” but a number of different teams of people, working on different aspects of the problem and it took nearly 20 years to make penicillin the miracle cure we know today.

The Fundamental Difference Between Ideation and Creation

While most ideas lead to nothing, some create enormous value. Calculus, the theory of evolution and the telephone made our lives better no matter who came up with them first. That’s not because of the idea itself, but what was built on top of it. Ideas only create a better future when they mix with other ideas. Innovation, to a large degree, is combination.

The stories of Alexander Fleming and Jim Allison are instructive. In Fleming’s case it was scientists at another lab that picked up the initial idea and did the work to make it into a useful cure. Then they went to America to work with other labs and, eventually, pharmaceutical companies to do the work needed to go from milliliters in the lab to metric tons in the real world.

One thing that struck me in talking to Jim Allison was how he described having the idea for cancer immunotherapy. He didn’t talk about a flash of brilliance, but said he slowly began to piece things together, combining the work of others with what he saw in his own lab. His breakthrough discovery was the culmination of a life’s work.

That was in 1995. It then took him three more years to find the small biotech company to back his idea. Clinical trials didn’t begin until 2004. FDA approval came through in 2011. Today, 20 years after the initial idea, he still goes to the lab every day, to combine his ideas with others and enhance the initial concept.

Kevin Ashton, who himself first came up with the idea for RFID chips, wrote in his book, How to Fly A Horse, “Creation is a long journey, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.”

A good idea is not a mere moment of epiphany, but a call to action. It proves its value not by its elegance or through the brilliance of its conception, but in its ability to solve problems in the real world. So if you want people to start listening to your ideas, focus less on the fact that you have them and more on what value they can deliver to others.

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

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