Innovation as an Invitational Agenda
Do you employ the next Mae C. Jemison? Or a future Steve Jobs? How about the next Melanie Perkins?
In a world where every large corporation touts their about their innovative culture, most team leaders will answer "No."
Professor and The Wall Street Journal best-selling author John Danner has a different view of who in your company could be responsible for innovation. Through questions and exercises, he guides you through finding these folks - and how to activate them.
(If you missed John's last article we highly recommend it)
The time to start is now. Enjoy.
By Elke Boogert, Mach49 Managing Editor
Innovation as an Invitational Agenda
Growth is usually a good thing for companies, but – as I suggested in my last instalment –strategically valuable growth has to mean more than just more. It needs to be informed and propelled by innovation, the exploration for and discovery of better paths to create value. Those paths don’t need to be wholly new, as in “never before new,” just new in the context of your company or market.
But too many companies go about their search for innovation in an unnecessarily narrow and frequently counterproductive way that stifles the very resource innovation usually depends on: the ideas and ingenuity of their own people.
In the process, while they may tout their support of a “trial and error” environment that encourages an innovative spirit, they too often create a culture that to many of their employees feels more like “trial and terror.” A place where experimentation is the exception and failure has career-compromising consequences. And that leaves genuine innovation as the casualty.
Fear of failure remains one of the biggest challenges leaders face in business today. I came to that conclusion from research my co-author and I did in preparing our bestselling book, The Other “F” Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work.
So, what can you do to improve your company’s own “IP” (Innovation Potential)? Here are two suggestions.
Translate Innovation as a “Growth for Both” Opportunity
Chances are your company’s annual reports, customer ads and investor presentations often tout your commitment to innovation. That’s understandable. After all, who wants to be known as stodgy or resistant to change?
But being a cheerleader for innovation is not the same as being an effective translator of it for your colleagues and employees. They need to understand not simply that it’s important to the future of your company, but that it’s potentially valuable to them in their own terms, both professionally and personally.
I often ask executive teams to answer a simple question:
“What is your personal working definition of innovation?”
Not surprisingly, many use terms like “new,” “creative,” “bold,” “disruptive,” “out of the box,” “brand new,” etc.
After comparing ideas with one another, I then ask:
“What and who are examples of that definition to you?”
I invite them to think across history, cultures and fields of human endeavour – from science and business to arts and politics. Examples often range from the Isaac Newtons and Albert Einsteins to the Steve Jobs and Jack Mas, from the Picassos to the Barack Obamas; from the invention of dynamite to the unlocking of DNA, from the creation of the internet to hip hop.
Then I ask my final question:
“What percent of the people in your organization today see themselves as the next [Newton, Jobs, etc.] or discoverer/creator of those examples?”
Those answers are telling: usually they range from a rare high of 5% to a much more common low of 1% or even 0%.
Think about that for a second. It suggests that our own notions of what innovation is and who and what exemplify it, may exclude 95-99+% of the very people we depend on to create it for our own companies.
So, what should you do? Start by examining your own definition, because it informs how you talk about innovation with your people, and what kinds of examples you use and what you’re looking for in your organization. You are the messenger by example. Is your definition exclusionary or inclusive? Does it truly invite your associates to share their own their ideas, hunches or even dreams about how your team might generate more innovation to drive growth?
My own definition is simple:
That’s a definition that virtually anybody in your company can contribute to. You may hope for, or even need, disruptive innovation in your business, but few of us are smart enough to know in advance which ideas will evolve to that level.
Give your people a reason besides “We need innovation for company growth.” Ask them to help you think of more compelling answers to what’s in it for them – personally as well as professionally. Listen, learn and then use those ideas to better translate how growth for your business can help them grow in ways that matter to them. That’s what I mean by creating a “Growth for Both” culture of innovation.
Harness the Power of Curiosity to ACT
Like it or not, most of us are guilty of one crime in our day-to-day business lives: “ideacide.” We know all too well how to kill ideas, especially early-stage, poorly phrased ones. Often all it takes is a snide remark, a cynical question or a derisive joke. But those ideas are the oxygen on which innovation depends.
Regardless of your industry, products or your own team’s caliber, your innovation aspirations face one extremely powerful obstacle: the STATUS QUO. Worse, it’s an obstacle that psychologists and behavioral economists like Dan Kahneman have discovered resides in our own heads and unconscious minds. It’s that “box” we talk about so often, that “comfort zone” we default to. We defend and rationalize it in too many ways to count.
It encourages us to stay where we are. But innovation requires action. It depends on experimentation, and experimentation depends on curiosity. Both usually involve failure en route to possible discovery and insight. So how you and your team deal with experimental failure may be the mirror not of your own eagerness to grow, but your readiness to innovate to grow.
So, how might you shake off that warm blanket?
A few years ago, I was asked to talk with the executive team of a very large bureaucratic organization with billions of budget dollars and tens of thousands of employees. Its CEO wanted me to simplify the complexities of innovation into a message his people could understand and deploy. And to do that without a lot of academic language or consulting jargon.
I wanted to get at that “warm blanket” problem, with a call for action powered by curiosity. Remember: some of those Hall of Fame innovations – penicillin, Viagra, matches, Post-It notes, Velcro, Coca Cola and teabags - have come not from strategy, but serendipity: the unexpected collision of coincidence, context and most importantly, curiosity.
This is what I came up with: A.C.T. Simple enough, maybe even memorable (at least in English), but what does it stand for?
A.C.T. – Ask Questions
If your people are struggling coming up with innovation candidates themselves, ask them to start by identifying “questions worth answering,” i.e., customer or product questions they think need better answers.
(You can re-use that simple 2 X 2 What:Who/Now:New matrix I introduced last time to keep track.)
Or ask them:
What Would [competitor x or customer y or innovator z] Do to possibly answer this question or solve that need?
Think about the boundaries of your everyday conversations in meetings with your colleagues. How often does someone bring up an idea from outside the range of your business today – some new technology or discovery in a seemingly unrelated field, a startup that just set up camp on your perimeter or perhaps a new way of thinking in an article by a respected observer? When’s the last time someone shared some news or development from a competitor’s website or analyst report on a key customer or product segment?
These may be indicators of just how curious, how inquisitive, your team is today. Simple questions – like why, what if or why not – can open up promising insights that suggest targets for your innovation explorations. But only if you take off that warm blanket!
A.C.T. – Challenge Assumptions
Assumptions and authority are the border patrol agents for the Status Quo. They reinforce what is at the expense of what might be. And if you’re a true innovator, you’re in search of the latter.
Identifying and then challenging the assumptions underlying your present situation and strategy is a good start. It’s not easy, but the questions can be IF you ask them frequently and honestly enough. That’s the innate wisdom of the iterative “5 Whys” approach by way of Plato and Toyota.
It takes tenacity (sometimes tempered by diplomacy) to keep uncovering the key assumptions (or root causes) that may be constraining your company’s true innovative potential. Often that results in radically different framing of the problem or issue itself, or changing the perspective from which you are asking the question at hand. Those are both examples of getting out of that box.
Now that you’ve got a team comfortable with asking questions and challenging assumptions, what’s next?
A.C.T. – Try Something Different
I suggested earlier “collision of coincidence, context and most importantly, curiosity.” This last suggestion depends on another “c” word: courage. After all the analysis and arguments, it’s time for action. But action tied to humility, because we are trying something that hasn’t been done before by us in this way.
Not every questioner or challenger is necessarily a good trier, so be prepared to give some new people a role at this stage. They’ll benefit from the curiosity and rigor of their predecessors, while preserving their predilection for acting, not just thinking or arguing.
If innovation were simple, everybody would be doing it
It’s not, even though many people and companies talk about it. Hopefully some of these ideas I’ve shared may help you develop your own team’s capability to try something better that moves something else that matters in your business.
Faculty Partner JOHN DANNER is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University, and a sought-after advisor to Fortune 500 enterprises, mid-market businesses, and emerging ventures worldwide.
A thought leader, trusted advisor, and respected teacher at the intersection of leadership, innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship, John anchors executive education programs on 5 continents — including Aspen Institute leadership seminars, co-founded a national healthcare business newspaper, and is credited with the original idea for TED University.
He previously held senior-level positions in state and federal government — working for then-Governor Bill Clinton and the first US Secretary of Education — and represented major clients in telecommunications, real estate, energy, and investment banking at Morrison & Foerster.
John has been highlighted in the New York Times, the Economist, and the Los Angeles Times, and is a popular keynote speaker for audiences of industry leaders and executives. He holds a BA from Harvard as well as master’s degrees in public health and education from the University of California, Berkeley.