“Once people have the experience [to step] outside and they’re willing…to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, ‘Oh my, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.’” -Liya James 

In this episode of Control the Room, Liya James and I discuss the value of environment shifts in organizations to unleash creativity and the significance of a creative & courageous mindset in the workplace. We explore the space companies must offer employees so they can be their most authentic selves, and the unique purpose of Liya’s new book, The Get Real Method. Listen in to hear Liya’s perspective on empowering members of your organization to thrive in creativity and courageousness while simultaneously unlocking diversity & meaningful innovation. Liya also explains the impact of manifestation, creating the work-life career you want to live to start now, and sharing the skill sets necessary to living a fulfilled life. 

Show Highlights

[1:33] Liya’s UX Career Start
[9:01] The Environment Shift to Unleashing an Opening 
[16:34] The Creative & Courageous Mindset   
[26:56] Finding the Space 
[29:37] Liya’s Book: The Get Real Method

Links | Resources

Liya’s LinkedIn
Liya James
The Get Real Method

About the Guest

Liya James is a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. She offers opportunities to help people tap into their creative courage when it matters the most so that they can implement the power of their imagination to create anything they want in business and life. Her approach spans nearly two decades of experience in design innovation. She has worked alongside disruptive startup founders whose collective exits total several billion dollars. Liya has delivered innovation and creativity training to leaders at some of the world’s largest brands, including Mercedes, LinkedIn, AT&T, IBM, and HP. Her book “The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters” is now available.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, the series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download The Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Today, I’m with Liya James, a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. Her book The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters is available now. Welcome to the show, Liya.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s good to be here.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. It’s been a while since we connected and I’m super excited to have this conversation. So let’s get started with just a little background on how you got your start.

Liya James:

That’s a great question. Well, I don’t want to go way back, but I have spent about 20 years working in the UX field, UX problems of all sorts in all kinds of settings, startups, corporate environments, freelancing agency, you name it. That was really how I got my start. And that work was really about focusing on how to make machines more human, so when we interact with them, it works for us.

And essentially I got exposed to a lot of human suffering in that process. I saw teams trying to innovate and bring ideas to the table and designers basically trying to work on their charter of figuring out what’s the next big thing, right? And during this project and, and working with teams, I really saw that the processes that we were using for innovation worked to some extent, but they really failed people. A lot of times we were able to create products and launch them into the market and help our customers, but in the process we leave some bodies behind.

And so that experience helped me thought about… When I moved to Austin, I started a design studio. And as part of that business, we said, “Well, let’s figure this out. Let’s try and see if we can help executives and leaders understand creativity a little bit more and how they can apply it to their businesses.” So we started this, we launched and designed this whole training around design leadership, creative leadership, and all over the world we were teaching it.

And that’s when I really had a big aha moment about the work experience. I saw people reconnect with themselves in these trainings and workshops like where, I mean, I saw grown men cry at the end of the training, and I saw people tap into their creativity imagination. Just in this training, we had people sort of use all their senses to create and understand methods of how you connect with your customers, but also just connect with people at a human level.

And I would push people to tap into their own imagination and just let it go. Because it was a safe environment. You’re not at work. We take you out of that space. Right? And we said, “Just go,” right? Because I know in my teams know at that time that you’re born with creativity and all we have to do is get you to experience it. So you know what your designers and your creative teams are actually going through when they have to stare at a blank piece of paper and do the work you’re asking to do. Right?

And the result of that experience was me actually being present to these intimate moments of seeing people wake up to their own creativity and their God given power of imagination. And sometimes you see corporate executives being shaken by that.

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

You just have these glimpses of people doing that.

Douglas:

It’s really fascinating, just this idea of professionalism and how people have been kind of conditioned to almost not be creative because we needed to act in a certain way and behave and say certain things and dress a certain way. And I see so many people that are afraid to step out because that means there’ll be recognized as being a little different. But as soon as they do it, it’s so liberating. And so I’ve seen it a bunch and what you speak to is very powerful and it’s so great to see other people doing this kind of work.

What have you noticed to be kind of the triggers or the moves or prompts that are most effective, when you’re getting pushback or someone’s being a little bit resistant? What’s helpful to get them to basically get up and dance?

Liya James:

Well, sometimes it’s just a little push or shift in your environment, right? So when we were developing this training, I was very adamant that we find places that are natural. Take people out of the conference room. So leaving an environment and just getting a new perspective can sometimes draw people into, “Oh…” For example, in Silicon Valley, we would have the setting where there’s fruit trees everywhere. And it’s not a conference room, it’s like a house, you know?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

And so, in fact, the last design studio that I ran, we would often find spaces to have our studios where it doesn’t look like a corporate environment. And we’d bring in a lot of nature because for people to feel safe… I think safe is a really big deal when it comes to creativity. Right? So we want to craft places of belonging and places where people feel like, “Oh, this is like a home.” Right?

And you can do that inside a corporate environment too. Right? We’re seeing a lot of corporations starting to design where they would dedicate creativity spaces to do the work, where it’s not cubicles and it’s not necessarily conference rooms. IBM is a really good example of that. When they established their design studio here in Austin, they put a lot of intention into how the space makes somebody feel, right?

So I think space is one thing. And then the energy is the other thing. So one of the things that I always do in these trainings is I would incorporate things that may not seem like relevant. For breaks between exercises or between modules, where we’re teaching people new ideas, we might meditate for five minutes. So I do a lot of things that people don’t normally do or expect to do in a training setting where you’re in a corporate environment. And we would often hear people say, “We want to bottle up the energy in this training and bring it back to work.” So really paying a lot of attention to the experience side of it and not just the content I think is a big trick in thinking about that.

Douglas:

I think you’re dead on with all of that. The space, the context matters so much. And also this notion of the experience and this comes back to some advice that we give around meetings and how people… The classic advice is always make sure you’re having an agenda. Well, an agenda typically is a list of topics. It’s very content centered, where if we take a moment to step back and look and say, “What’s the experience? How do we want to start? How do we want to end? What kind of journey do we want to take people on?” I think that’s such good advice.

I want to come back to the space piece from a learning science and a retention and integration standpoint. I’ve always struggled with, there’s a risk of when we take someone out of their environment and they go learn some new thing. Now they have to bridge that gap between that place where they discovered these things and try to apply them in the day-to-day. Right?

Liya James:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And so what are some of your go-to approaches for helping people bridge that gap? Because I agree with you, it is helpful to not have the distractions of the office and to give people the courage to actually kind of jump into this new way of being. But once they’re now, they’ve felt that feeling, how do we help them translate that back into the day-to-day?

Liya James:

Well, what’s interesting is that we create an opening, right? And then people get curious, right? So one of the things that we were really intentional in doing, and I still do that to this day. First of all, I want to circle back to something you said, which is, I don’t think about meetings as its own separate thing, because if you think about it, we’re spending all of our time in meetings. So that’s essentially synonymous to work right?

Now, what’s awesome about what you guys are doing, and I think facilitators in general, is that now it’s becoming accepted that somebody can take the role of design in that experience for people so that we can go from elevate these okay or maybe not even okay meetings to amazing experiences. And to me, doing that is actually about elevating the human experience. Because it’s purely just because of how much time we’re spending in meetings in our lives in general. So I want to say that.

And then the second thing is it doesn’t take that much. That’s the great thing about shifting environment. So we shift the environment, take people out of their work so that they can open up, but once they open up that opening stays there. Right? And so for example, in a lot of the trainings and facilitation I do, I assemble kits. And in those kits are really simple things like Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, Post-its glue sticks, things that you’d find around your house, that your kids are playing with all the time. So it’s very accessible, right?

So once people have the experience outside and they’re willing to use these things to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, “Oh my God, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.” Right? Then what they can do is, at the end of the training, we always say, “It’s really simple. You don’t even have to have dedicated space. Put some big foam board up. Suddenly you have creative space. Buy eight pieces of foam core, put it up around your office, wherever, outside of your cubicle, put stuff up. Here’s a box.” And we actually let people take it home.

We usually give them a bag at the end, and we’re like, “Put all this stuff in there because we want you to have…” I actually created diagrams of what the things are, what are they good for and where they can go and buy them, pretty much at Michael’s or any store, Target. So we make it really accessible, right? So it’s not saying you have to invest tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in order to have innovation and creativity. All you have to do is have the willingness, but that connection to the self is super important, I think, in order for that opening to be there.

Douglas:

It also makes me think of, you mentioned creating this opening and creating this curiosity, and it made me think about how that negativity is addictive, right? If someone starts getting negative, all of a sudden you start seeing the negativity brewing because people love to commiserate. Curiosity is also addictive. If we start all actively practicing curiosity, everyone starts to kind of do it. Right? And so as leaders, if we can kind of shape the direction of kind of where we want our organizations to grow, it has a way of kind of infecting things in a good way, right? That curiosity can go viral.

And likewise, when you were talking about all you had to do is put up some foam core, et cetera. It made me think about this notion of exhaust. Activities have exhaust. They require supplies, they create artifacts, and that is a reminder of what we’ve been doing. And also if the supplies are laying around, then it’s really easy to go back into those activities. Right? We’ve got it. It’s at our fingertips. It’s not in a closet somewhere.

So just bringing those things out and honoring the fact that this is what we want to do. This is how we want to spend our time and making it easy to be curious and explore. I think that is so much more powerful than worrying about like, “Do we have the best view and is it all glass?” And all these kinds of things, right? Is it just comfortable to think and do people have stuff available to them?

Liya James:

Yeah, and I think a lot of… In the old days, I think it’s more accepted now to play. Playing at work, serious play is a bit more, I think, accepted in the corporate environment. But we also have this just limiting belief about work, that it has to be serious, quote-unquote. Right? But on the other hand, we’re demanding of every department at the company should be innovating. And unfortunately, if we’re not tapped in to our ability to have ideas and come up with new ways of thinking. If we’re not tapped into that, we really can’t be innovative. Right?

Douglas:

That strikes a big chord with me, Liya. What’s the classic place where everyone thinks of ideas? It’s the shower, right? That’s the classic example, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

I came up with it when I was… Why is that? Right? Well, it’s because I took a moment away from everything else and the idea came to me.

Liya James:

Right.

Douglas:

And so where does innovation and ideas come from? It comes from free space.

Liya James:

Yes, yes.

Douglas:

When you create space, innovation rushes in. Yet companies are so fearful of their need to change and move fast that they just literally cram their schedules full of activities, and they don’t leave that room for innovation to creep in. And what you say resonates with me deeply because it’s like if we don’t allow ourselves that ability in that space, then we’re just kind of just stamping stuff and just on repetition.

It brings me back to something you mentioned in the pre-show chat, which is this kind of conundrum around when we’re faced with this idea of serious play or kind of just letting loose a little bit of this kind of pre-conceived notion of what is work. People are confronted with this question of: Is this professional? And how can people move past that moment of maybe anxiety and actually bring their best self to work? I mean, you told me that that is the only way that people can be truly courageous.

Liya James:

Yeah. So we were talking earlier about this pyramid that I’m developing with belonging on the bottom, creativity, courage and innovation… Innovation ultimately at the very top, right? If there was a hierarchy of company culture and on the other side, you get innovation. The company’s self-actualization, right? I think that belonging’s on the bottom and you have to have creativity and courage in the middle.

And the reason for that is that feature parity is such a common thing still, right? If a competitor’s doing that so we have to do that. We have to do more than that. Right? But we all know though that deep inside that’s not how innovation happens and that’s not how you beat the competition. Okay? And it does sound counterintuitive to go back to belonging. How does that even belong in the conversation of innovation, right?

And the more I’m studying this, the more I’m realizing that the experience of work has to allow for the whole person to come to it. And because why? Because creativity, the root of innovation, has to do with lots of ideas. Where do lots of ideas come from? Diversity. And if people can’t bring their whole selves to work, you have uniformity. Uniformity, it is the opposite of diversity.

So as facilitators and designers and leaders of all kinds, our mission then is really to say, “How do we create an inclusive culture where people feel comfortable bringing themselves to work, their whole selves, all of their perspectives, all of their background and knowledge and lived experience?” Because without that, you’re not going to get unique perspectives. And guess what? The world, the people you’re selling to, are made up of people with all of these unique experiences, shared experiences as well as unique experiences, right? It’s a very intersectional world out there.

And if we’re not tapping into these perspectives, innovation’s not really possible, because we’re just recycling the same ideas over and over again, and sure there’s a place for remixing. Right? But there’s definitely… You and I both know because we’ve been in this space for so long. There’s definitely limits to that. Right? So I think right now there’s just a really amazing opening right now where people are asking corporations, organizations of all kinds are asking, how can we be more inclusive? And what I would say is start with allowing people to bring their whole selves to work and be creatively courageous. Right?

Douglas:

Yeah. The thing that really jumps to me, it was a quote that I’ve lived by for years now, which is, if we’re all thinking the same, nobody’s thinking.

Liya James:

Yeah, yeah, that fish bowl effect.

Douglas:

It’s not condemning anybody. It’s actually condemning the system if anything. Because if we’ve created a culture or a system where people don’t feel safe, the psychological safety is just so abysmal that they can’t bring their whole self and they’re not able to even let those thoughts surface because they’ve got barriers in place, protective barriers. They’ve had to set boundaries just so that they can even show up. And that’s very dysfunctional and we may be doing just fine as a company, but we might be missing out on excellence, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

And that’s where it’s sometimes hard for people to really understand or factor these things in. But any leader will tell you their number one expense is payroll. And you hire and spend so much time recruiting these amazing people. Why would you want them functioning at 50%, 60, 70, even 80%? When we could be functioning at 80% and it’s not that hard to do. It’s just to your point about making people feel safe, including them, making sure they’re seen, heard, and respected. And next thing you know, the things start flourishing.

And if someone’s not flourishing in that environment, that’s a really healthy thing. It becomes very clear and we can understand, “Hey, you’re going to flourish somewhere else. The values are mismatch here and our work to create more belonging has made that more apparent. Let’s find a place that you’ll be better fit for.” And then we can likewise find someone that’s going to thrive in this environment. And so belonging is not about, in my mind, not about just kind of changing the company to suit everybody, but it’s about making sure that we create space for everyone to thrive that aligns with the values.

So anyway, I get really passionate about this and I love that your work has focused on it now. I want to come back to, I started thinking a bit during this conversation about maybe how courage and curiosity kind of work together in an interesting way. And I hadn’t thought about this much before, but during this conversation that’s been coming up a bunch for me. And because the curiosity that opened that door for folks in the example you gave, gave them the courage to change their thinking and change their behaviors. And so I’d just be interested to hear your thoughts on this kind of connection between curiosity and courage,

Liya James:

Curiosity and courage, they go hand in hand. So I’m so glad you made that connection. Actually, there was a book, I think it came out in the ’80s called Tribal Leadership. Have you come across that book? And it was a really cool study that they did with like 12,000 people in all different corporate environments. And they were looking at groups of people and how they form effective tribes at work. Okay?

And in that finding, they put tribes in different levels. And what they found is level five, which not even Apple as a company can stay in, in that space. But one of the key indicators of top performing teams from the study is that they have this really interesting thing where everybody in the company have access to what they call innocent wonderment. And what that means… David Kelly talks about it, the IDEO founder, about sort of this childlike, innocent, creative opening to thinking about ideas. And it’s connected to our ability to not always be thinking about who are we competing with, but what is our ultimate kind of purpose and goal for existing, right?

So we all know that the why is really important at work. But I think people have a really hard time tapping into that like, “How do I connect my work with the why? How do I be productive?” Right? And what’s really cool about this skillset, I think it’s a skillset, innocent wonderment, is to be able to have the space to say, “What if? What if this happened? What if I were to combine this and that?” And to say, “You know what, I don’t have data to support that. But my company says it’s okay for me to tap into my courage and try things anyway.”

Because as you and I both know, innovation isn’t… When you come up with ideas that actually work in the market and in a way that it blows everybody’s mind, the path there is never bulletproof data. Right? It’s courage. You wrote a book on remix, right? So it’s our ability to put ideas that normally don’t go together together and try it. And then you create data along the way. So in order for us to have real creative courage, that possibility, that safety to be able to do this, to sometimes tap into that creative wonderment or that innocent wonderment is really important.

Douglas:

This concept of innocent wonderment’s so beautiful. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier on space and slack time, because I don’t think you can find that innocent wonderment if your cortisol levels are just totally jacked up and you’re just high anxiety and running from task to task. It’s just like that space for innovation. Right? We can’t find that momentum unless we kind of nurture it and give space for it to emerge.

And likewise, there’s an element of courage that comes from, I would say, endorsement, or when authority gives permission so to speak. And that might sound a bit too controlling, but it can be kind of almost inherent permission or just the culture is set up to where everyone feels like they have permission. That gives you courage, right? Versus feeling like you have to get things approved or everything gets shut down.

And then it also reminds me of a topic that’s very prevalent in the innovation space, which is creating a learning culture, right? Or some people will talk about fast to fail or safe to fail. But to me it’s really about learning versus failure, but still the point is if we develop a culture where we’re really focused on learning and we get excited about what we learn, that creates courage, because then we don’t have any fear about repercussions or failing.

Liya James:

And I want to go back to one more point that you were trying to get at before too, is this idea of how do we give people space? How do we give people permission? And sometimes it’s really from a leadership perspective and a facilitator perspective, because I don’t see the difference between the two, is sometimes it’s a one minute thing, right? So about five years ago, I shifted my practice to primarily work with mission-based companies. And one of the first ones that I worked with really changed my perspective because I was really struggling with this idea of like, “Well, how do you be professional and do all these things I know works?”

And we’re all really secretive about it. We don’t talk about it at work, but we do it at home, right? Like you said, we do yoga, we meditate or we journal, we do all these things that we know helps us tap into our creativity and our thinking. Right? But we don’t do it at work because we don’t think there’s a place for it. But I was working with this company and they happened to be in the space of meditation. And so oftentimes I would be part of really important meetings, because we were consulting on some strategic work.

And they often would open an important meeting with a meditation. It’s not hierarchical. Anybody who would feel called to do it would lead it. And sometimes it’s about intention setting with the meditation. And it really puts you in this place of like, “Oh yeah, this is what we’re here to do. This is our intention.” And sometimes, for example, if there’s like major world events going on or during this time with pandemic and racism and all this stuff going, sometimes we would do wellness scans at a check-in. We just go around and say, “Okay, how are we feeling at a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level?” And people can just go around and check in on that, 30 seconds, a minute per person. Right?

And since then I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have different cultures like this, not all the same and not all the same methodologies, but it’s a reflection of what the group wants at work. And what I noticed is that it does not take away from the productivity and the professionalism. In fact, it’s key to it. And it’s addictive like you said. I look forward to seeing these groups of people instead of… Sometimes I’ve had experiences with client work where you just dread it, like, “Ugh, Wednesday, there’s a meeting and I’m dreading it.”

Douglas:

So I want to move into a bit of a closer and we haven’t had much opportunity to talk about The Get Real Method and the book is out now. And I’d love just to hear a little bit about what’s it all about and what should our listeners know? Is there any tidbit that you might think that they’ll find especially helpful? What’s it all about?

Liya James:

Yeah. So The Get Real Method, so on my journey of figuring out this innovation thing and how belonging plays into it, what I realized is that right now we have this great turning, great opening where organizations are saying, “We want people to feel a sense of belonging. McKinsey is telling us this is good and there’s data to support it.” Well, if people aren’t used to that, it will be really hard for them to bring their full selves to work. And so this book was actually the beginning of this pyramid.

So I wanted to arm people with the techniques and tools that we designers actually know very well. So the book is actually really about arming people with the skillsets to find their whole selves, what it means for them individually to be fulfilled, to do meaningful work. Who are you? I have a three-step method in there that talks about how do you sense where you are, how to attune, use attunement to understand where you want to go next and manifesting your visions.

And this is actually all the same methodologies we use in design thinking. And so the book is really how to be your own design strategist in life and be powerful at work. Right? How to stand for something, and also at the end of the day, what it’s really about is to be able to show up with your full self, wherever you are, whether at home, at work at play. Right? So The Get Real Method is really about the first step in that creative courage, innovation journey.

And I’m hoping that, for your audience, I think when I say the word design strategist, that they’ll get it. And there’s a little sprinkle of ancient wisdom in there too. So it should be really fun and it’s filled with workshops and step-by-step how-tos, so I’m not leaving you with just ideas and concepts, but it’s very practical.

Douglas:

Yeah. So good. I love this idea of an environment scan and then kind of just checking in and attuning and going, “Well, what’s really going on here?” And then also kind of this future casting. Well, if I want this bad enough, what does it really mean to manifest it? And it’s important work if we really want to shape our future versus just sitting around and waiting for it just to happen to us.

Liya James:

Yeah. There’s no reason to wait.

Douglas:

No doubt. Liya, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on today. I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Liya James:

Well, creative courage means doing what it takes to make a vision real, even if you don’t have all the answers. So I would encourage everyone to not wait for the answers. Don’t do a whole lot of planning and go for it, whatever it is you’re searching for and whatever you’re trying to make happen.

Douglas:

And how can they find the book and maybe connect with you or learn more about the work that you continue to do?

Liya James:

Definitely. I am on LinkedIn. That’s my only social media platform. So Liya James, look me up. I think I’m the only Liya James, and then liyajames.com is where I share all of my latest thinking and the book is available on Amazon now so definitely go get it.

Douglas:

Yeah, definitely check out The Get Real Method. And, Liya, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for joining me.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 53: Create a Courageous Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

“Failure is my middle name,” says Dr. Jay Rao. That designation certainly doesn’t fit this professor from Babson’s MBA and Executive Education programs, who has consulted for companies around the world such as Medtronic, Novartis, Ocean Spray, and BAE Systems. However, Jay wears that “failure” badge as a badge of honor. By his estimation, he failed at being a naval architect, a mathematician, and at three start-ups. “I’ll probably fail again, but I’ll kick myself if I don’t try. It’s better to try and fail than not try at all. And hopefully the next time I will make fewer mistakes.”

In addition to his teaching and work with executives, Jay’s research has appeared in The Sloan Management Review, Journal of Innovative Management, The European Business Review, and others. He is the author of the book “The Discipline and Culture of Innovation” and he currently sits on the Innovation Advisory Board of Bancolombia (Colombia), and on the Flavor Advisory Board of Firmenich (Switzerland).

Lessons from Naval Architecture

Jay began by studying naval architecture in undergrad. However, he quickly decided it wasn’t the career for him after spending a summer in a sweltering shipyard, braving 100-degree temperatures with 90% humidity. While he didn’t continue down that path, his experience in engineering is linked to his current work in innovation: “I think engineering gives you a very structured way of thinking or problem-solving.” Similarly, Jay is a strong believer that innovation is about problem-solving, and not about idea generation, as is often thought.

“What I bring to innovation for companies is very structured problem-solving. It’s not about ideas.”

He also went on to expand on his definition of innovation: “Innovation has a very specific purpose. Innovation should change the dynamics of competition in the market. It should help you either capture or grab market share, or it should create some new value to society that did not exist before. Otherwise, it’s purely catching up to industry standards or the rest of the world. In which case, the word innovation is meaningless.”

To sum it up, innovation comes when there is a gap that needs to be filled in the market: “At the heart of it is, there’s a pain or an opportunity and how do I go and take advantage of that and help change the competitive nature in the market?”

Innovation is Not Magic

In addition to not being about ideas, Jay stressed that innovation is also not about magic or luck. (Perhaps something that gets forgotten in our cultural focus on a handful of start-up ‘unicorns’.) “Innovation is a discipline, like finance, like marketing. It’s a field of study, it’s a body of knowledge. People have to learn the tools and the techniques and the methodologies. So you have to approach it as a science.”

Jay works with companies and executives and brings this very thoughtful, very disciplined approach. And, it all starts with strategy for him: “Innovation always has to be in service of the strategy of a company. You can’t really separate out innovation and strategy because both of them are about growth.”

“You can’t really separate out innovation and strategy because both of them are about growth.”

Jay also talked about the need for companies to have the right processes to ensure innovation. It’s only after companies have put the right strategy and processes in place — over five to ten years — that you get an innovation culture. “Innovation culture is an outcome because you have a strategy: you approached it as a science, you put in resources, you selected projects carefully, you put in processes to scale, and you were able to measure the success of all your efforts. That’s culture.”

“Most executives approach it as: ‘I want you to be innovative, I want you to be creative, I want you to be thinking out of the box. I want it for free.’ I always tell them, if you want it for free and you want it tomorrow, go to Las Vegas.”

The Building Blocks

Jay created a framework that he calls the Six Building Blocks of an Innovative Culture. The simple, but powerful, idea is that an innovative culture rests on a foundation of six key things: resources, processes, values, behavior, climate, and success. It’s been a very successful and oft-cited model, as Jay has found that executives can really wrap their heads around the pillars and see their organization in them.

I loved learning how Jay uses this framework in practice with companies. He doesn’t always talk about it or question around these six areas overtly, especially at first: “It has to emerge. It has to be organic. I ask things like: ‘How do you describe your company to others?’ Those are the kinds of subtle prompts I give them. Based on their responses, I organize according to these blocks without them knowing about it. Then I bring those building blocks alive. People immediately jump on it, and say, ‘Oh my god. That’s us. That is who we are!’”

How to understand company culture

Another insider tip I learned from our conversation is Jay’s tactic for getting a realistic, non-candy-coated view into a company’s culture. Especially in large companies, Jay believes in going directly to the project management office.

“When you go and talk to people in the project management office, you learn a lot about the company’s culture, because that’s how they get things done. That’s how they prioritize their opportunities for the future. It’ll tell you all the bureaucracy that’s inside the organization. It’ll tell you what metrics they’re using to evaluating people and projects. It will reveal your culture. It’s a backdoor way of understanding culture.”

This more intuitive way of understanding a particular organization’s culture is smart; people don’t always tell you how things really are when asked directly, but they will show you how things are if you observe and ask other important questions. By coming at things from an angle, Jay uncovers critical learnings about corporate culture.

Uncertainty Navigators

Jay and I talked a bit about how companies can structure successful innovation programs. As well as innovation that is deeply connected to strategy, Jay pointed to leadership as key. In particular, he talked about the need for entrepreneurial leaders, which he defined as people who are “very focused on the future, not just the current.”

“All enterprises have a scarcity of uncertainty navigators. All big corporations have an abundance of risk managers.”

“In every organization, there are risk managers and there are uncertainty navigators. Risk managers are managing the current products, current markets, current technologies, current business models. This is about current cash.”

He continued: “Uncertainty is about the future products, future customers, future business models, future technologies. You don’t have data, and you have to make investments and decisions with very minimal or limited data. That’s uncertainty. All enterprises have a scarcity of uncertainty navigators. All big corporations have an abundance of risk managers.”

Walk, Not Talk

This idea of leadership links back to culture, which, for Jay, connects with values. “Our values are not what we speak. Values are how we spend our time and money. That shows up in our behaviors, how we spend our time and money.”

Values are a matter of a company “walking the walk.” It’s about doing what they say they believe. He gave Wells Fargo as a timely example of a company not necessarily living their values: “Wells Fargo had amazing things in their value statements. But they were totally rubbish. The way they defined success was very clear: cross-selling its products.”

He continued: “You can look at Wells Fargo through the lens of the six building blocks, and you can almost predict disaster. Or you can predict Netflix, how they have a very strong way of protecting these six building blocks.”

Multiple Metrics

When you are looking to measure the success of a particular innovation program, Jay does not think there is one way to measure it. (“Does it change human behavior? Does it add significant value to a segment of society? Can it get people out of poverty?”) Instead, he believes in measuring success from multiple angles, through what he calls input, output, and process metrics.

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“R&D budget is an input metric. It’s not an output metric. An output metric would be something like what 3M has had for a long time, the new product vitality index. What percentage of our revenue is coming from products, services, and markets that did not exist three or five years ago?”

“Output methods are: how fresh are our products? How many products have we introduced in the last five years? What is our profitability linked to these new products that we are creating?

“Good companies are measuring all three: input, process, and output methods.”

He also urges companies to track process metrics. “Process metrics are: ‘How many projects are we running? What are we learning? What experiments are we doing? What new capability did we create that we didn’t have before?”

Gorillas, chimps, and monkeys

One of the courses that Jay teaches at Babson is called “Leading Innovation: Gorillas, Chimps & Monkeys.” The course title is based on a concept from Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm. Jay explained: “[Moore] talked about the concept of gorillas, chimpanzees, and monkeys: large companies, medium companies, and small companies. How do they approach innovation differently? They approach it very differently: your budget allocation is different, your project choices are different, your target segments are different.”

Jay sees this model as a helpful way to understand how different-sized companies tackle innovation and what mistakes they make based on their size and particular challenges.

For example, with small companies (aka “monkeys”), Jay sees that: “innovation dies because of starvation. In a large gorilla, innovation actually dies because of obesity. They throw too much money too prematurely, and if you spend too much money too early, the finance people will expect very fast returns.”

Start Small

Speaking of monkeys and small companies, Jay had some thoughts that I think are sage advice to those entering the start-up world. And, surprisingly, that advice is not to dream big.

“Everybody wants to become an Insta-billionaire, but the fact of the matter is that it took 20 years for Pixar to come up with their first movie. History is irrelevant for most people because you’re asked to dream and dream big. You have to think big. You need to go big or go home. That’s the most bullshit advice that most people give, once they’re successful.”

He continued to talk about how the media doesn’t help this “dream big” attitude; Silicon Valley is fetishized when, in fact, the possibility of making it “big” is extremely rare. “Everybody wants to be Silicon Valley. Out of the six million companies that were born in the U.S., in the last 10 years, only 14,000 of them got some kind of external funding. That’s .2% of all companies that are born in the U.S. And, there are only 4,000 publicly traded companies out of six million companies in the U.S. That’s .07%. So 99.8% of companies that are born in the U.S. don’t get funding or don’t become publicly traded.”

The lesson here is not to discourage start-ups or innovations, but how you approach it. As Jay says: “You have to start incredibly small. All great innovations start incredibly small.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Gorillas, Chimps, Monkeys, and…Innovators appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Yoram Solomon is a thought leader in the innovation field who focuses on the nature of creativity and the important role organizational culture plays in supporting innovative thought. A former Israeli Defense Forces marksman, he’s adept at nailing a physical target. However, Yoram’s sharpshooter precision isn’t limited to the shooting range. After years of studying the cognitive processes surrounding knowledge work and creativity, he’s pinpointed a single, necessary foundation: trust.

Lessons from the 90s

Defining a concept is easier when you first establishing what it is not. According to Yoram, innovation efforts that focus on specific technologies have a flawed approach. It’s tempting to jump on the bandwagon of the next big thing in technology. But the Gartner hype cycle illustrates where this approach quickly runs into issues.

In the beginning of the cycle, a new technology appears to be the answer to all the world’s problems. As organizations and individuals begin to explore its applications, interest begins to wane sharply as experiments fail to produce useful results. “There have been quite a few technologies that just died by the sidelines because they weren’t producing anything that was of value. Yet, we tend to latch onto those buzzwords.”

Nowadays, many companies are focused on innovation borne out of must-have technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Internet of Things, etc. These technologies are often considered the starting place for innovation, much like the website was in Silicon Valley in the late 90’s. “All you had to do if you wanted to be successful and innovative [in the 90’s] was just buy a website, add the dot com to your name and success was guaranteed.” The tunnel vision of the technology-based approach of yesterday provides a cautionary tale to modern organizations. “Of course, we know how [the dot com boom] ended. I think that one of the problems we have today is our focus on technologies.”

“All you had to do if you wanted to be successful and innovative [in the 90’s] was just buy a website, add the dot com to your name and success was guaranteed.”

Left without a clear starting point, many companies resort to a focus on processes to bring innovation into the organization. “There are people who swear by design thinking, lean startup, agile, anything…The thing is you focus on one process as if this process is going to generate ideas, and it doesn’t. It’s facilitating the generation of ideas.”

More resources isn’t the answer

Companies experiencing a dearth of ideas often fall into the trap of believing more resources thrown at the problem leads to better results. Yoram describes this fallacy through the story of the airplane. Samuel Langley, head of the Smithsonian Institute in the late 1900’s, received a $50,000 grant and a charter to build the first heavier-than-air, manned flying machine. On December 8th, 1903, he declared failure despite years of work and ample resources. “The funny thing is [that] not nine days later, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers, two bicycle makers from Ohio on a budget of $1,000, actually made it. So it’s not about money.”

This holds true for program resources as well as using financial rewards to incentivize employees. Creativity is a critical element of innovation, but the relationship between motivation and creativity lies in intrinsic factors. During his PhD research, Yoram set out to answer why people are so much more creative when they work for startups than in mature or large companies. He found that it mostly boils down to the type of work people are doing and whether it’s labor-intensive or knowledge-intensive. “If it’s just pure hard labor or effort, then if you give me incentives, I will work faster. That’s where financial incentives work. However, when it comes to tasks related to creativity, using your brain more than your hands or legs, financial incentives don’t help. They actually hurt.”

This conclusion is supported by an experiment done by scientist Sam Glucksberg adapting the candle problem created by psychologist Karl Duncker in which participants are given a box of tacks, a candle, and matches. The objective of the experiment involves attaching the candle to a wall so that, when lit, the wax doesn’t drop on the floor. Glucksberg extended the original experiment by offering participants in one group a financial incentive for solving the creative problem faster. The surprising results? Participants offered a financial incentive took 3.5 minutes longer to solve the problem than those who weren’t offered compensation.

Yoram’s own research shows the role resources can play in creativity as well. One person he interviewed shared that working in a startup forced him to be more creative because he didn’t have access to resources. Doing more with less led to more creative solutions. “So we tend to think that [if] we throw money at the problem we’re going to solve it. That’s true if what you’re trying to do is produce more light bulbs in the same amount of time. If what you’re trying to do is produce more ideas, don’t throw resources at it.”

“If what you’re trying to do is produce more ideas, don’t throw resources at it.”

So what should innovation programs be based on? Through his PhD research, Yoram discovered that “the one element that causes a company to be innovative on a consistent, continuous basis is having an innovation culture. And innovation culture is based on one thing, that’s trust.”

Structural gaps in building innovation culture

Yoram considers the implementation of innovation programs in two ways. First, he evaluates the cause and effect chain. “If you want to be innovative, you need to deploy the latest technologies and the latest processes in a very pragmatic way. But, in order to do that, you need to be motivated to go into ideation sessions so that they are going to be effective. For that to happen you need to have an innovation culture. For innovation culture to happen you need to have the right behaviors. To have the right behaviors, you need to have trust.”

The cause and effect chain Yoram describes creates a clear picture of why innovation programs that start at the endpoint — technologies, processes, and resources — often struggle to achieve productive results. “It starts with trust, behaviors, cultures, innovation culture, and then you have ideation processes, technologies, and you’ll find the next big thing.”

The Five I’s

Yoram works with organizations seeking to innovate by taking them through his 5 step process:

1. Introspection
2. Intervention
3. Ideation
4. Implementation
5. Innovation

The first step is characterized by a line he borrowed from the opening sequence of the pilot of the HBO TV show Newsroom. “The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.” Starting with Introspection, Yoram challenges organizations to reflect on the level of trust that exists. Before the following steps can be fruitful, barriers to trust must be identified and removed.

The second step, Intervention, identifies what steps need to be taken to remove barriers to trust. “Once I can tell you that we have an innovation culture, [we can] move on to ideation.”

Ideation — step 3 — is where processes like design thinking are productive. Employees who do the difficult work of making it through steps 1–3 became frustrated when ideas are shelved and nothing happens with them.

The fourth step, Implementation, is critical in putting the ideas from step 1–3 into action as well as maintaining high morale. Successful execution of steps 1–4 leads to step 5, Innovation.

The trickle down effect

Yoram has found that building an innovation culture starts with the leadership team.

“You start with the leadership team for two reasons. One is [that] the leadership team controls the largest amount of resources. The second is [that] whatever the leadership team’s behavior is trickles down. It’s imitated, copied, and followed by the rest of the organization.”

If those behaviors don’t exist at the highest level, there’s still hope for building innovation culture further down the chain. “The best example of this is Kelly Johnson who created the Skunk Works group at Lockheed Martin. He said, ‘I don’t care how the organization above me behaves, all I care about is that we’re going to have the right culture in our organization below me.’”

After years of work and study, Yoram has a formula for building trust. One of the first elements is shared values. “If we don’t have shared values, I’m not going to trust you, and you’re not going to trust me.” Another aspect of building trust is the intensity of human interaction. “A big part of this goes back to the 10,000 hour rule that Ericsson found. The more time I spend with you, the better we’re going to build trust.”

Yoram points out that the time of interaction also hinges on the intensity of that interaction. “The work of Albert Mehrabian, published in the book Silent Messages, says that 7% of our intent is conveyed through our words, 38% through our tone of voice, and 55% through our body language. So one powerful thing I encourage is to spend more time face-to-face with the people you need to work with and trust.”

Constructive disagreement

As human interaction increases, so does the likelihood for disagreement. Yoram believes a key behavior in continuing down the path of trust building is the ability to have constructive disagreement. “Let’s say that you and I are arguing over something. What happens if all of a sudden you have an idea that will make my case instead of yours. Would you share it?” The answer to this question helps to elucidate the level of trust between colleagues. “If the answer is no, then we’re not really conducting a constructive disagreement. You have to get to the point where, if I have an idea that would actually make your point, I feel comfortable bringing it up.”

The constructive nature of this disagreement is that the goal for each individual is not to win the argument but for both parties to reach the shared goal of their team. “Unfortunately, what we do today is have destructive disagreements where everything becomes emotional and irrational, and really all I want is to win. Maybe even more than I want to win, I want you to lose and that is a problem.”

The option that many people opt for in the face of destructive disagreement is the safer, less conflict-ridden approach of agreeing to disagree. “When we say let’s agree to disagree, what I’m saying is you have your position. I don’t care why. I have my position. I don’t care to share with you why, so let’s agree to disagree and not pursue this. That means that our focus is on winning and not on reaching the overall goal.”

Prospect theory & human interaction

Another aspect of human interaction in trust building is the ratio of positive to negative experiences. Drawing conclusions from the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Yoram posits that positive and negative interactions at a ratio higher than 3:1, respectively, produce a net positive experience and contribute to greater trust building.

“We are three times more worried about negative things than we are about positive things. If you and I have an interaction and it’s negative, it’s going to take three positive interactions just to compensate.”

Yoram, ever a proponent for constructive disagreement, believes that positive interactions can include arguments. “A positive interaction can be that you and I will argue to the point where we lose our voices, but if we reach a conclusion and we’re both happy with what we reach, that would be a very positive outcome.”

New, useful, and feasible

With innovation culture well established, organizations can consider ideas through the lens of innovation which Yoram defines as something new, useful, and feasible. He bases this definition off what the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office uses to determine whether something should be allowed to be a patent.

“I can file a patent for the first teleporter. It’s new. It doesn’t exist. It is useful. It allows us to go from one place to another without using roads or consuming fuel. It’s a bit problematic when we get to the feasible part because I really don’t know how to [build] it.”

Innovation has to meet those three criteria, “but as far as what it can be — it can be a product, a service, a process, or a business model. Uber did not invent a car. They created a new business model.”

Within those categories, innovation can be incremental or radical. Incremental innovation has significant value to Yoram. “USB 3.0 was incremental, but it has a lot of value because there are more than four billion ports [shipped] every year.” Radical innovation, the other extreme, supplants an existing approach entirely.

“Gary Hamel said once in a Stanford executive morning briefing, ‘Those who live by the sword are shot by those who don’t.’”

Revenue alone is a weak measurement

In formulating his metrics for innovation, Yoram looks for a few key characteristics. “The data has to be available, and it has to be relatively easy to measure and calculate.” Measurement approaches that consider revenue more generally run into problems when evaluated against this criteria. The New Product Vitality Index (NPVI), considers the percentage of gross revenue generated from products launched in the past X years. “One of the problems is, how do you define X? For example, is it what percentage of revenue we generate from a product that didn’t exist four years ago?”

To illustrate the problem, Yoram compares the iPhone 6S and the vacuum cleaner. The iPhone 6S didn’t exist four years ago, and neither were later models like the iPhone 8. “Do we count the revenue from the iPhone 6S as revenue from innovation because it didn’t exist four years ago?” On the other hand, vacuum cleaners last forever in the market and there’s a lot of brand loyalty. “So if I asked myself what percentage of my revenue is generated for both

Yoram’s measurement of choice, which he calls the Growth Innovation Index (GII), instead focuses on percentage of profit growth.

“If you have products that are in the first half of their market life cycle, this is where you make a lot of profit. Once we reach maturity, that’s when the product margins become cutthroat.”

For Yoram to view a company as innovative he wants to see that a majority of their products are in the first half of their market lifecycle where a higher margin of profit can be gained. “I’m not talking about revenue. What I care about is how profit grows in your company. This is what distinguishes an innovative market leader from a ‘me too’ player.”

Pragmatism in innovation

Yoram approaches the idea of failure with humor. “The funny thing is I never failed in my life. I was always successful. Obviously that’s not true. I failed more than I’ve succeeded.” But Yoram believes failure that involves learning is success.

His experience with PCTEL taught him the value of pragmatism in innovation. In 2000, PCTEL was the second fastest growing company in Silicon Valley that endeavored to reduce the cost of dial-up modems by relying on the CPU’s processing power in order to power the modem. When DSL came into the picture, PCTEL attempted to use the same strategy to lower the cost of DSL modems. “Today, when I teach at SMU I tell [my students] there are four factors that make your company successful. One of them is trust and another one is pragmatism. Where PCTEL failed [with DSL] was a lack of pragmatism. There are reasons why a DSL modem will never be internal to a PC. [It’s] because you want to share it. PCTEL did not realize what their immediate customer, which at this point was the service provider, was going to face when deploying an internal DSL modem.”

Customers who were unable to get DSL service in their area were forced to send back the entire PC, not just the modem. “Why as a PC manufacturer or service provider [would] I want that? It sunk about $10,000,000 of investment because the project lacked pragmatism.”

“I truly believe the one thing that stops every organization, the most innovative in the world, is not having trust.”

The thing that excites Yoram the most right now is helping organizations build trust. He begins engagements with the question, “Do you think you have a high level of trust?” For organizations who answer “no”, Yoram advises them to start with trust and innovation will come. “How do you know I’m excited? Because I work 16 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week and I don’t feel like I’m working. I feel that I have this mission now. I truly believe the one thing that stops every organization, the most innovative in the world, is not having trust.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post It’s All About Trust appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

After years of leading innovation teams at companies large and small, Eugene Yamnitsky took on the challenge of establishing an Innovation Center of Excellence at Citrix. Like many of the innovation leaders I have spoken to for this series, Eugene believes there is no silver bullet for successful innovation.

We discussed some of the ways the Citrix innovation program has changed over the years and how those learnings have impacted how his teams approach innovation as well as his views on what it means to fail and succeed.

Embracing Experimentation Instead of Failure

Eugene believes that, rather than having a culture that embraces failure, companies that want to innovate should focus on a culture that encourages experimentation paired with appropriate success criteria. In order for this culture to exist there are four key success factors that can be summed up under two important themes: speed and alignment.

Eugene’s 4 Success Factors for Innovation Programs

1. The team is cross functional (made up of people with varying skillsets).
2. The team is allowed to follow their own process, ignoring the company’s processes for the most part.
3. The team is assigned a mentor — someone who launched successful products in the past, and ideally has failed before as well.
4. The team is given proper executive attention in a form of resources, support, and advice

The idea of running an innovation program like a startup is a recurring theme across innovations programs. Eugene’s take on this concept centers around a need for speed and measurement to ensure companies can adequately invest in promising ideas without over-investing in solutions that don’t meet business goals.

Cross Functional Teams

To brainstorm, iterate on, and validate a potential solution for the least amount of cost possible, teams must have all the skills on board to create a model or prototype on which they can gather customer feedback. Delays introduced by waiting on a designer or developer, for example, result in added cost and less time for validation and implementation.

Team-initiated Processes

Allowing teams to follow their own process is another opportunity to reduce time and cost. Many companies’ processes exist for good reasons — perhaps to ensure quality for customers. However, in the arena of innovation, goals shift and processes must adapt in kind. “Letting the innovation team work the way they believe they can accomplish results fast is the best way to go.”

“Letting the innovation team work the way they believe they can accomplish results fast is the best way to go.”

Enabling quick decision making through validation can necessitate lower quality standards in exchange for faster feedback. Innovation teams afforded the flexibility to follow their own process are empowered with opportunities to find innovative solutions in more time and cost-effective ways.

Executive Support

With flexibility in process comes the added responsibility of demonstrating progress. In the same way a startup must show results in order to secure funding, “[innovation] teams should understand that their progress will be evaluated frequently, and their funding will not continue if they do not show results.”

“Great ideas that are not strategically aligned with a company’s mission and vision won’t get funded in the long run no matter how well the program is structured.”

This lesson came as a result of the inaugural project of the Citrix Incubator. While the successful execution of this project had the promise to be disruptive in the market, the team faced some heavy risks. First, the solution was dependent on Apple making changes to their software to allow developers more access. Second, Citrix is a software company and this project was based on a hardware solution.

“Great ideas that are not strategically aligned with a company’s mission and vision won’t get funded in the long run no matter how well the program is structured,” says Eugene.

Mentorship

For Eugene, the inaugural incubator project highlighted the need for executive sponsorship to ensure innovation efforts coincide with strategic business goals and receive adequate support from the top. Learning from past projects, Eugene mentors teams by helping them focus their energies on solutions that will garner support and avoid past missteps. Now the Citrix Incubator has adapted to conduct innovation projects in 3 month increments followed by funding at 3 month intervals based on results that are evaluated against business goals.

Organizational Support for Innovation

Embracing experimentation should also be accompanied by adaptations to how employees are evaluated. To demonstrate support for innovation programs, the annual review process should incorporate goals for an employee’s participation in innovation programs. Eugene suggests an individual’s review include a goal specifically geared toward deliverables from an innovation project as well as a corresponding goal for their manager that’s tied to supporting the individual’s participation in the project. This provides a clear signal from the company that innovation is supported and aligns the goals of individuals and their managers removing a potential source of conflict.

Measuring Traction

“The definition of traction becomes more robust and changes shape as you go from raw idea, to business concept, to prototype, to an actual solution that you launch.”

When it comes to measuring results, Eugene ascribes to Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics model that focuses on the metrics of acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue (AARRR). Each of these measurements seek to quantify a product’s traction or desirability with potential customers. But how do you measure traction for an idea before it exists as a tangible product? Eugene suggests that the first opportunity for measurement is discussing the idea with multiple potential customers and tracking how many people believe the problem must be solved versus those who just think it would be nice to solve.

As each stage of development progresses, the traction metrics progress toward greater and greater commitment to the proposed solution. In the example above, the next step might be to flesh out a prototype and measure traction by how many people would agree to pay $1 for the product or service.

“The definition of traction becomes more robust and changes shape as you go from raw idea, to business concept, to prototype, to an actual solution that you launch.”

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Customer Discovery

Eugene shared that the main ingredients to getting innovation right revolve around experimentation that is supported by customer discovery — finding your existing or potential customers and talking to them about their needs and pain points. “I think that [innovation] programs are just a part of a solution. Ideally the culture is such that every product development organization is attuned to their customers and continuously innovates by doing customer discovery and experimenting.”

Not only does customer discovery provide valuable, fresh data, it can also help combat teams getting stuck in the realm of incremental innovation (smaller improvements to existing products) by providing them fodder for more disruptive ideas.

Brainstorming with Monopoly

Paired with newfound inspiration from customer discovery, brainstorming activities can help teams think in different ways to come up with out-of-the-box solutions. One activity Eugene has adapted from the Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange Conference is a game that looks a lot like Monopoly.

This approach involves dividing a sheet of paper into squares like a Monopoly game board. In each square a type of technology is listed and the squares are divided between technology the company already uses (ex. online collaboration tools) as well as new technologies to explore (ex. artificial intelligence). The activity creates opportunities for teams to combine new and existing technologies in innovative ways that can then be put through the customer discovery and validation process.

Amazon’s Customer Discovery

Eugene admires Amazon for their agility in generating revenue from their innovation endeavors and for their relentless focus on pleasing their customers by solving their problems through customer discovery. This focus is embedded in Amazon’s culture to the extent that new ideas, rather than being shared through Power Point, are presented in the form of press releases geared toward inducing market or customer excitement even during internal discussions.

Decoupling Success from Specific Outcomes

In addition to being good practice, the process of getting customer feedback and measuring traction can create opportunities for success in unexpected places. Eugene shared a story about a team who, in the process of validating a solution, identified a new problem that surfaced in their customer interviews.

In response, the team built a solution that directly addressed the reported problem by enabling the Citrix sales team to onboard new customers faster. A lack of alignment with business goals, however, forced the team to acknowledge that the product (an onboarding tool) didn’t align with the company mission, and the project was ultimately abandoned in favor of an off-the-shelf solution. But rather than seeing a failed project, Eugene sees a successful execution of customer discovery, identification of a pain point, and validation of a solution that resulted in remedying a problem the company wasn’t even aware of prior to the venture.

Re-evaluating Success and Failure

Taking the time to reflect on past projects like this has shaped how Eugene views failure and success. He believes that, as long the learnings are quick, and decisions were made based on that learning, success has been achieved. By embracing experimentation rather than failure, teams can follow their curiosity without being tied to specific outcomes. “It’s actually a success that we didn’t validate an assumption because now we’re not going to spend time and money on working on something that is not desirable, viable, or feasible.”

A Longer Horizon for Success

Even when the company decides to abandon the project or go in another direction there’s the potential for success. The story Eugene shared of the inaugural incubator project has a surprise ending that perfectly illustrates the value of his four key success factors.

A few years after the project was cancelled the idea found its way back into the Citrix portfolio. This time, however, it had executive sponsorship, strategic alignment, and lessons learned from the first attempt. The end result was a new solution to the same problem, executed in collaboration with a hardware partner, and reliant on Citrix technology without a dependency on Apple’s software.

Executive Buy-in and Sponsorship

While it’s clear executive support is key to success, gaining buy-in for innovation programs can be difficult. Eugene’s advice is to put less emphasis on calling it a big innovation program and instead take the time to understand the strategic goals of the company in order to uncover how innovation team’s can help achieve those goals.

For example, by learning about the strategies of a new executive sponsor and offering to help uncover ways to drive them forward innovation team’s can gain support for future efforts and learn something new in the process. “If we work on something that deliberately aligns with the executive’s vision we may discover something new and unexpected.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Four Success Factors for Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Cam Houser is obsessed with helping people unlock entrepreneurial potential. Working with companies like the LIVESTRONG Foundation, The Onion, and Despair, Inc. quickly indoctrinated Cam into the realm of rapid growth startups and led him to pursue an MBA at the University of Texas. Frustrated by entrepreneurship courses focused on theory, textbooks, and essays, Cam and his cofounders were inspired to create 3 Day Startup (3DS), an organization that runs immersive, cross-disciplinary innovation programs to activate entrepreneurial potential in audiences ranging from MIT students to Dell employees through hands-on experience.

Be Action-Oriented

In order to move the needle on innovation, Cam believes organizations have to move away from fixation on ideas as currency in favor of an action-oriented approach.

“As an entrepreneur your ideas are far less important than your ability to execute.”

As an alternative, he suggests that organizations place more focus on the process, culture, and execution of ideas as the true source of innovation.

Focus on execution not judgement

Venture capitalists provide an analogy that exemplifies this concept. VCs are in the business of ideas — for every ten companies they invest in, only one needs to be a huge hit to pay for the other nine. The ratio of investment to success is low because picking good ideas every time is difficult even for people whose livelihood depends on it. This is further complicated by the reality that many good ideas don’t look good when they are first discussed.

When the founder of FedEx presented the idea of next day shipping it was met with disbelief that anyone would ever need a package delivered the next day. The same is true for the well known history of the personal computer — upon its debut, there was disbelief from experts that a larger market for PCs existed. These examples and his personal experience have taught Cam that “getting away from value judgment around ideas [and focusing on] process and execution tends to deliver innovation.”

Shake up your routines

While expertise is usually valued in the market, it isn’t always an asset in the context of innovation. Expertise can bias individuals toward routine thought processes instead of new approaches.

“If you’re recognized as an expert in an industry it probably means you’re an expert on what that industry was ten years ago.”

To shake up routines, Cam likes to work with teams in an atypical environment. “When we run our innovation programs we will do them at the home office, but we always prefer to do them at a coworking space or startup accelerator — some place where the professionals in that organization are getting outside of their standard operating zone so they can see things in a new way.”

Getting outside of the building is about altering human behaviors to be more open to change. The separateness of a new setting gives our brains permission to think outside our normal patterns without the constant reminder that there are emails and to do lists waiting at a desk fifty yards away.

The power of process

“If you’re following a good process something of value will emerge.”

According to Cam the core of any innovation program is all about process. When Cam and his team at 3DS work with corporations their coaching focuses on adapting their processes to be more similar to startups. He contrasts the two approaches: While corporations are often trying to get from point A to point B, then reevaluating, startups are trying to go from point A to something of value asking questions and evaluating progress continually along the way.

Through this approach, startups outperform corporations by realizing as early as possible when they are headed in the wrong direction and can pivot quickly in the direction of greater value.

Demonstrating value

The nature of innovation is that it’s new and the future is often unclear, so measurement early in the process is something that Cam typically tries to avoid. Working within these natural constraints, Cam evaluates whether value has been created as a signal to keep going or pivot. He’s found that demonstrating value can also help in gaining buy-in for innovation efforts within an organization. “If we can get a win pretty early on [through] projects that show some promise of driving value to the organization, trust gets brought in. Then you have a lot more latitude to truly innovate.”

For organizations at the beginning of their innovation journey, Cam recommends they “try a lot of very cheap experiments that do not require much social or financial capital — [Identify] low hanging fruit then get yourself some wins and figure out what’s working.” He suggests this approach over announcing innovation initiatives with a lot of fanfare for two reasons. The first is that successful outcomes are difficult to define in the beginning of an initiative when the future is less clear. The second is that getting started with experiments right away provides opportunities for the early wins that garner buy-in within the organization. The early results of cheap experiments provide insights on where an organization can invest more and increase value.

Knowledge sharing

In lieu of traditional styles of measurements, Cam advocates regular checkins to evaluate the direction of an initiative and what a team is learning. These checkins also serve the dual purpose of institutional knowledge sharing where teams can learn from prior attempts of a particular initiative.

In the process of knowledge sharing it can be helpful to have such conversations facilitated so ideas that have been tried before have a chance to be explored for learning opportunities rather than shot down simply due to a failed prior attempt.

This point is well illustrated by the success of existing companies. Cam astutely pointed out that Google was not the first search engine (actually the 13th) and Facebook was not the first social network.

“There’s a lot of examples in the world that prove that ‘we’ve done it before’ is not an appropriate rebuttal.”

Storytelling

The examples above also illustrate another of Cam’s insights: Ideas are only as powerful as how well they are communicated. Cam believes that good communication is “the story you tell about that idea” and it’s “the difference between getting stakeholder buy-in and sponsorship” or not. Rather than being a “function of sitting in your desk and thinking harder about how to communicate the idea”, good communication is about sharing “the idea with tons of people and having them give you feedback.” The reaction of an audience is one of the quickest ways to learn. “If they have a deer in headlights look when you explain [an idea] you know it’s too complicated or boring.”

“If they have a deer in headlights look when you explain [an idea] you know it’s too complicated or boring.”

For anyone who ascribes to the epistemological perspective that there’s nothing new under the sun, the importance of communication or expression of an idea is all the more clear. Cam shared that human beings are full of biases and unique perspectives that cause them to see things through a distorted lens. This distortion is the context in which innovation works and often means good ideas are not always immediately recognized. “In order to win over our teams on ideas, the communication piece matters so much.”

“In order to win over our teams on ideas, the communication piece matters so much.”

Action not just ideas

Consistent with his preference for action over ideas, Cam finds approaches that place too much emphasis on idea banks or platforms — repositories where people submit ideas for future consideration — incentivize the wrong behaviors.

“Submitting an idea to a platform does not sound like a triumphant moment. That does not sound like an aha ‘Eureka’ insight into the nature of how the world works or how you’re going to apply it to be better at what you do and increase your impact on the world. That’s why we want a participatory action- based approach to innovation. Submitting a form to an idea platform and waiting is the least innovative thing I’ve heard.”

Practices like idea banks can also inhibit innovation by creating the notion that there’s a specific team or department responsible for innovation within an organization. Cam has observed this phenomenon in corporate structures where importance is placed on defining titles and departments. Cam cautions against creating unnecessary silos and instead focusing on creating evangelists and diplomats who help “permeate a literacy of innovation” throughout the organization.

A culture of entrepreneurship

By establishing a culture of entrepreneurship and emphasizing that anyone can be part of an innovation initiative, companies benefit from the knowledge employees gain through direct customer contact. Oftentimes these employees that work on the front lines “have the best insights on how the company needs to innovate going forward.

Involving people at all levels of the organization has demonstrated to Cam that, rather than requiring a certain skillset, innovation is often just about giving people permission.

“A lot of people just need to know that if they have an idea something can happen out of it, and all of that goes to how you manage the communication.”

Instead of submitting an idea to a platform and waiting, Cam encourages organizations to give employees the flexibility to suggest an idea and see it through execution.

“We don’t really like handing [an idea] off and losing the nuance of the perspective of the person who came up with the idea. It’s a tricky thing to do because, again, there are structure to maintain. But a lot of times it just tends to generate better outcomes.”

The Microsoft example

Steve Balmer of Microsoft is someone who Cam believes had an interesting, while maybe not the most cost effective, approach to innovation. In the 2000s when Microsoft was awash with success from decades of Windows licensing, Steve Balmer would task two or three teams with building a product for a new domain he wanted to explore. Each team would work on the same problem and then pitch the result to Balmer who cherry picked the things that worked best from each.

While it was incredibly inefficient having three teams building three different versions of the same product, the process drove some interesting innovations at Microsoft. “What I like about it is how it’s execution focused which is very startup-like. What I can’t relate to is it’s a very expensive way of doing it which is not very startup-like.”

Quick pitching

One tool Cam uses when coaching organizations to develop startup-like habits is quick pitching, a process whereby up to 50 people have one minute to pitch an idea followed by instant, time boxed feedback from the pitch group that serves to evolve and develop the idea. “What’s really powerful is when peers, the people in the company who know the domain, give rapid feedback about why this would or wouldn’t work.” Cam is a proponent of including sponsors and leadership into the quick pitch process as a way to generate excitement and gain buy-in.

“Trying to impress stakeholders and sponsors needs to happen for them to get to know you [and] fund these things. So, again, there’s value in generating good ideas, but it’s also communicating the innovation narratives to the rest of the organization in a really powerful way.”

Ideas that have already been attempted can benefit from the quick pitch process as well. Through the process of feedback, for example, people may realize that there’s a kernel of an idea someone else caught that they missed. Discussion can cause ideas to be reframed or expressed in a new way that reveals hidden potential. To demonstrate this point, Cam shared the story of the Post-it by 3M. “That product was kicked around for so long before it made it out they almost put the guy who submitted it in a closet. That was an idea that took a while to weave its way through the company and different ways of expressing it until it finally happened.”

Just as it’s important to have planned idea pitching and discussion sessions, it’s also advantageous to allow slack time for more informal discussions. When Cam takes teams through the quick pitch process he includes a ten minute beak in the middle. “Getting a break means that people can go talk more about these ideas informally. We’re creating an environment where collisions can happen, where chemical reactions can happen, and giving a break in the middle allows that to happen.”

Throughout the quick pitch process Cam advocates having someone serve as facilitator to keep the process moving. When questions move away from the concept toward more superficial discussions (ex. what a product should be named), a facilitator can help redirect the conversation and keep the activity focused on creating value.

Quantum entanglement

As someone who knows innovation is about changing mindsets and unlocking entrepreneurial potential, Cam is intensely interested in human behavior. While this area of study can be frustrating in its lack of certainty, Cam finds comfort in the concept of quantum entanglement. “As a kid I always thought the world was this discrete place and that if I didn’t understand something it just meant I needed to research it more, ask more people about it, and get an answer.

Quantum entanglement embodies the idea that reality is not definite and that the world is a weirder, wilder place than we ever can imagine. When I get annoyed about something being uncertain, quantum entanglement reminds me that theoretical physicists are the smartest people in the world, and it doesn’t even make sense to them.”

Beyond helping him make sense of the world, Cam believes exploring other fields has a huge influence on getting innovation right.

“The language and marketing around innovation doesn’t feel much different than weight loss pills. The people who get innovation right learn from outsiders, from other domains. The more folks you talk to who are operating in spaces that are not your own, the more you can learn about what’s going to make you as an individual more innovative and what’s going to make your organization more innovative.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Innovation Requires Action and Storytelling appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

There’s a difference between doing innovation projects and being innovative. The latter requires a holistic approach that involves a reimagining of how we learn, listen, and live in the present to create a future of abundance. For Janet Sernack, the path toward that future started in Israel working with StartupNation where she discovered an intense curiosity about the cultural drivers of innovation. Now the founder and CEO of ImagineNation, Janet has spent her career researching, analyzing, and modeling the entrepreneurial spirit. I talked to Janet about her path to innovation coaching and the personal transformations she experienced along the way.

Unleashing Passionate Potential

Innovation can be scary. With a laser focus on the bottom line, the disruptive constants of change and experimentation are often enough to give any company a healthy dose of commitment phobia. Janet has learned that, to overcome short term thinking and fully invest in innovation, companies must shift their focus from the bottom line to unleashing the potential and collective genius of their most valuable assets: people.

“Innovation is a tough gig. It’s an emotional, or visceral, and cognitive rollercoaster, so you’re not going to stay in the game unless there’s a really solid foundation.”

As the lifespan of the average company gets shorter, Janet believes that companies seeking sustainability have to make long term investments in creating a culture where failure and the creative energy that has driven the startup movement are embraced as learning opportunities. In exchange for investing in people, companies become the beneficiaries of innovative solutions that carry them into the future. But how do you convince people to disrupt the status quo and embark upon a journey that is full of the discomfort required for growth? The lessons from her own personal failures have taught Janet that it boils down to a matter of pull vs push. Rather than pushing teams toward a painful change she focuses on pulling them toward the benefits waiting for them at the finish line by keeping mission and values at the forefront of each engagement.

“Innovation is a tough gig. It’s an emotional, or visceral, and cognitive rollercoaster, so you’re not going to stay in the game unless there’s a really solid foundation.”

Deep Learning

Janet has discovered that a solid foundation for innovation relies on the capacity for deep learning. Deep learning, a concept she encountered exploring the work of Peter Senge, happens at the level of needs, and values, and beliefs and focuses on how people are thinking and feeling — their mindset. The capacity for deep learning is supported by what Clayton Christensen refers to in The Innovator’s Dilemma as the discovery skillset. Mastering this skillset allows an individual or organization to approach innovation work with curiosity, mindfulness, deep attention, and intention.

The discovery skillset in conjunction with compassion, connectedness, and courage form the basic tenets of Janet’s approach to transformation that enables teams to identify the threats that face their business and develop the awareness to realize new opportunities for innovation.

The most common thing that trips people up in the path to deep learning is winning the war for attention. In order to truly hear and consider a new idea, Janet coaches teams to develop a deep sense of presence and to re-learn how to pay attention by listening to new ideas from a place of possibility. Instead of being drawn into one’s inner dialogue or listening for the purpose of evaluation, team’s seeking to take control of their attention listen with generosity and focus on asking thoughtful questions.

The Four Levels of Listening

Being generous when considering the ideas of others isn’t always a style of listening people are accustomed to in day to day conversation. To aid teams in developing deeper listening skills, Janet teaches a concept in her Coaching for Innovators program called the Four Levels of Listening.

Level one: Listening to evaluate and pass some kind of judgment on whether the information is right or wrong, smart or stupid, creative or useless. For many people this is the default mode of listening.

Level two: Listening to confirm what someone is saying in order to debate a point at a deeper level, or come up with an opposing idea.

Level three: Deep empathic listening that requires presence and emotional connectedness with the goal of meaningful conversation. This type of listening is aspirational, especially in politics, which requires an open dialogue.

Level four: Generative listening that builds on the presence and connectedness of level three and creates what Janet calls a collective holding space. The goal of level four is to identify a “crack” or opening that leads to the possibility for a new idea to emerge.

“The presupposition is that all those possibilities are out there in the world, 24/7. But most of the time, we don’t pay attention to them, and we’re not listening for them.” Level four is the realm of the breakthrough, the inflection point, the paradigm shift that unleashes the human potential that fuels innovation.

Culture Transformation

Mastering the discovery skillset, listening at deeper levels, unlocking human potential — all of the above speaks to a larger need for a culture shift. At its basic level, culture spawns from a common understanding and a common language. Janet has found the first step toward a lasting culture shift is to build in readiness and receptivity to change and create an emotional charge around innovation in the organization. That starts with taking the fuzziness out of innovation by defining it within the specific context of an organization.

Once innovation is defined, Janet helps organizations uncover data about their ability to adapt and grow in line with their financial goals using the OGI, Organizational Growth Indicator. Created by Dr. Bret Richards, the OGI is an organizational diagnostic tool that evaluates an organization’s ability to drive growth, create value, and adapt to change by identifying the prevailing mindsets and leadership styles that support or inhibit innovation efforts. By demystifying the notion of mindset, the OGI provides tangible ways to transform organizational culture by pinpointing the learning or process interventions that need to take place for a successful shift.

The goal of intervention is to build a culture that embraces experimentation and failure by creating a safe space for learning. In order to achieve this goal Janet has found that top level leadership engagement is a critical component. That begins with an upfront acknowledgement among leadership teams that a transformation of this magnitude requires a commitment of two to three years. In order to demonstrate that commitment, leaders serve as sponsors and role models for the transformation which provides a public endorsement for the shift and an example for employees at all levels to model.

Mindfulness

“At the core of any transformation process, is an open mind, an open heart, and an open will to the possibility of something different or better.”

Janet has found that achieving the connectedness and presence required for deep learning, generative listening, and a supportive culture is best facilitated by a practice in mindfulness. “In a way, we’re teaching innovation as a consciousness process.”

A self-proclaimed serial meditator, Janet has discovered that meditation allows her to be deeply connected to the present and simultaneously detached from the emotionally disruptive process of coaching organizations through cultural transformation.

She has attended a number of courses and retreats hosted by the Brahma Kumaris who believe meditative states can be achieved while one is engaged in everyday life and have the power to transform thinking patterns and actions. Considering the mindset shifts required to truly embrace innovation, it’s easy to see how a holistic approach that incorporates mindfulness and meditation can help teams and leaders to challenge their habits and explore new paths of learning.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post A Holistic Approach to Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

“My role often becomes removing barriers to innovation so that innovation can happen in the company as it exists.”

Many successful, established companies call on Miguel Encarnação when they need innovation leadership at the highest level. I think of him like an innovation superhero; but, he’d probably describe his superpower is being able to break down internal boundaries to innovation so that companies can unleash what they already have.

Miguel and I spoke over the phone about the current state of innovation and how it works inside of companies who are just getting started with their innovation program. What follows is my big takeaways and favorite ideas from of our conversation.

About Miguel

First, here’s a bit of Miguel’s bio: an innovation executive who’s been working in the industry for over 20 years, he specializes in digital transformation through technology and structured innovation. Through his company ibdi Consulting he provides management consulting services to the executive level of companies and organizations across industries.

He is also an adjunct professor of computer science, the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine, and the author of two books, three patents, and numerous contributions to peer-reviewed journals and conferences as well as a Maddock-Douglas Innovation Fellow.

Reacting to a Rapid Changes

Through his consulting work, Miguel often comes in as an interim Chief Innovation Officer for companies that are looking to develop an innovation program. Recently he’s worked for organizations like the healthcare company Humana and ACT, the standardized testing company.

Because of the current startup culture, many companies are finally deciding that they need innovation capabilities — and fast. As Miguel puts in: “A lot of companies that have been very successful, and around for many years, are now frantically trying to innovate because the environment is changing. Technology is changing at a very rapid pace and they don’t have an innovation culture because they didn’t have to.”

“They see the writing on the wall and they want to quickly innovate. But they don’t really know what that means. They don’t have a clear definition of innovation and don’t have the processes or the capabilities in place.” That’s when they reach out to Miguel for help.

When he goes into a company, he approaches it from a systemic perspective, rather than looking for one-off innovation projects. For him, it’s important to talk to the CEO and make a plan for how things are going to change across the entire organization. “Innovation is not sustainable if you just do these one-offs in the room with Post-It notes on the walls…It takes more to make the company innovative.”

Innovation is Already There
To Miguel, innovation is not some magical thing that happens because of a few creative people: “Innovation is not special. Innovation is really a little bit of restructuring, reorganizing corporate processes and capabilities, and maybe adding a few new capabilities. In general, a lot of the aspects are already there.”

“Innovation is not special. Innovation is really a little bit of a restructuring, reorganizing corporate processes and capabilities, and maybe adding a few new capabilities.”

It’s not about creating something new, but uncovering what is already there. That’s where his expertise comes in: “My role often becomes removing barriers to innovation so that innovation can happen in the company as it exists. It’s more about orchestration: how to make it all work together, which ultimately leads to innovation.”

When barriers are removed, Miguel feels that it unleashes people’s natural, but often stifled, inclination to innovative ways of working: “Unfortunately, we’ve hamstrung some of people’s energy and inclination. We have to turn the clock back and unleash people’s capabilities.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve hamstrung some of people’s energy and inclination. We have to turn the clock back and unleash people’s capabilities.”

Culture Needs

We dug a little deeper into Miguel’s perspective on the common barriers to innovation and he boiled it down to 1). Culture and 2.) Technical capabilities.

Culture is key to workplace innovation. He feels that the common traits that the human resources department typically fosters when trying to be a “Great Place to Work”, for example, are also the essential qualities needed for innovation: “What I have done in organizations in the past is work with the H.R. department, taking their Great Place to Work methodologies and then overlaying what we need for innovation.”

“It’s about creating a permission space for failure. It’s about collaboration. It’s about trust. It’s about leadership. It’s about growth.”

He described what he sees as some of the building blocks for an innovative culture: “It’s about creating a permission space for failure. It’s about collaboration. It’s about trust. It’s about leadership. It’s about growth.”

Data Analytics Literacy

Miguel and I then moved on to the technology barriers to innovation, and there are quite a few facets to what he means by technology. It starts with data. “Innovation has to do with acting on insight, creating new, unique, and surprising insights that you can design for. How do you create insights that are not just blue sky, but actionable? That has to do with being able to collect, analyze, and effectively communicate with data,” he said. “Data analytics literacy is typically a huge void in companies.”

Miguel has personally tackled this void by starting data analytics literacy campaigns in companies to help people feel comfortable with data interpretation and communicating their findings with data.

Set Up to Experiment

Another key technology capability that Miguel talked about is being set up organizationally to do quick iterations and experiments. “It’s something that is not typically done in organizations because they often have a traditional waterfall mentality that you can plan everything three years ahead of time: you cast the plan in concrete and then you execute on it.”

He spoke about the positive trend toward an integrated “DevOps” model and how it is important: “because there is this interplay between the small iterations, the experiments, rolling out, and testing.”

Avoid Innovation Fatigue

I also asked Miguel what I ask everyone: “What is your innovation silver bullet?” At first, he didn’t think there was one. “Innovation needs to be custom-tailored to any organization and its pre-existing culture and emerging business strategy.” He thought about it further: “But then, maybe this strategic approach to innovation is the silver bullet.”

Miguel isn’t interested in finding the one thing: “This whole metaphor doesn’t work for me. It’s more like throwing the net as wide as possible.” It goes back to the question — should innovation happen in a silo or more widely permeate the institution? He’s a firm believer that innovation should be a company-wide effort:“You don’t want to create innovation as this parallel universe that knows everything better and is going to make everything cooler.”

This brings us back to his belief that the ingredients for innovation are already inside an organization: “You just have integrate it differently and add a few things here and there. But it’s not as if everything you have done for the last 50 years is wrong.”

Miguel is aware of the risk of “innovation fatigue” if people get overwhelmed with too many new ideas and not knowing where to focus or go next. “If innovation becomes too hard then it will not be successful. If it becomes too time-consuming, investment-intensive, or just too hard to understand, it will not be successful. That’s why it’s so important to lay the groundwork and make it part of the existing processes rather than trying to turn the company inside out.”

The Third Hype Curve

I’ll conclude with a fascinating discussion that we had about AI. Miguel comes with a unique “historical” view of this topic as his 1997 Ph.D. thesis was about applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to intelligent user interfaces. So he’s been very close to the different waves of interest in this field and he says: “I’m experiencing what I call ‘the third hype curve.’”

He feels that there is a lot we could learn from the past hype around AI and VR: “I wish people would do their homework. Step back and think about why didn’t it work last time. What were the problems and barriers then? Try to solve those problems.”

“Step back and think about why didn’t it work last time. What were the problems and barriers then? Try to solve those problems.”

He gave the example of Google Glass. “It was a failure that I called as soon as it came out. The fundamental problem is not the technology, it’s human-human interaction. If somebody has a device on their head where you know they can tape you and call up information about you, you don’t want to talk to them anymore. That is a fundamental problem of augmented reality that we already identified in the 90s.”

“That’s why those technologies became successful in applications where it was not about human-human, but it was about remote maintenance or the military. Virtual reality again got better, but unless you really have all the whole sensory system of the human involved, it will also hit a ceiling again.”

With that, I’ll leave you to ponder all of the things that we learned about technology just 30 short years ago that we’ve already forgotten.

If you want to read more articles with perspectives from innovation experts, check out my Innovation Series.

The post Innovation is Already There appeared first on Voltage Control.

In June, I had the pleasure of meeting Anna Jackson, of Alpinista Consulting and she introduced me to Liberating Structures. I’m always seeking new ways to compliment and enhance my skills and it was immediately clear to me that Liberating Structures would be applicable to my innovation workshops and potentially more. Luckily, Anna was facilitating a Liberating Structures workshop in 6 weeks and my schedule allowed me to attend. Also, she generously agreed to meet with me prior to the seminar to give me an overview of the process.

Liberating Structures is a framework created by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, intended to provide simple rules that make it easy to include and unleash everyone in shaping your future. The framework consists of a collection of 33 structures or methods that introduce tiny shifts in the protocols of how we meet, plan, decide, learn, and relate to each other. They put the innovative power once reserved for experts only, into the hands of everyone.

“Liberating Structures are participatory methods that disrupt conventional patterns in how we work together. One Liberating Structure changes a meeting; the repertoire can change an organization.”

Most organizations rely on what Henri and Keith refer to as conventional microstructures. These microstructures are structures we default to when meeting and organizing into groups. Examples of conventional microstructures include open discussion, brainstorm, status reports, managed discussion, and presentations. Every time you are having a conversation or a meeting you are using microstructures.

Conventional microstructures are limited in the number of participants and the control is isolated to one individual or a select few. As a result, these conventional structures routinely work together to stifle inclusion and engagement. Liberating Structures provides more effective alternatives to our conventional structures by including everybody regardless of group size and distributing the control of content among all participants.

Five elements define the underlying design of all microstructures — conventional or liberating. Henri and Keith call them design elements because you can make choices about them based on what you want to accomplish. The five design elements and how they are implemented for a conventional presentation are illustrated below:

1. Make an invitation: listen to me (the presenter)
2. Distribute participation & roles: nearly 100% of total time for presenter
3. Configure Groups: one listener group, one presenter
4. Arrange Space and Materials: rows facing presenter and slides
5. Sequence and Allocate Time: presentation followed by some Q&A

The Invitation

While participating in Anna’s workshop, I gained a deeper respect for the power of a well-crafted invitation. Invitations provide the necessary context for participants to fully engage and must be linked to tangible activities, local reality, or practical purpose. This allows participants to understand how they relate to the problem and why this is important the them. Invitations should be loving, provocative, and ambiguous in a way that each person brings their own meaning to the party. When in doubt, ask the group if the invitation is clear to them.

Which structure(s) should I use?

It is somewhat daunting to stare at the list of 33 structures. Each of the structures are effective in different situations and it’s difficult to know how to dive in. If you are struggling with which structure to use, consider referencing the LS Matchmaker. It is important to keep in mind that all of these structures are more effective than conventional microstructures so experiment and see what happens.

Below I’ve included some of the structures that I was able to personally use at Anna’s workshop and have subsequently put into action. These are some of my current favorites and I’m still exploring the full repertoire so I’m sure I’ll develop new favorites over time.

1–2–4-All (12 mins)

This simple and elegant structure complements other structures and is easy to integrate into existing meetings and workshops. It is often paired with other structures; we actually used it many times throughout the course of the workshop I attended. I was impressed at how easy 1–2–4-All allows you to to quickly include everyone regardless of how large the group. I noticed that we were able to generate great ideas much quicker than conventional methods and since participants owned the ideas, follow-up and implementation was guaranteed.

The sequence is: 1 minute silent self-reflection by individuals on a shared challenge, framed as a question , 2 min generating ideas in pairs, building on ideas from self-reflection. 4 min sharing and developing ideas in a group of 4, 5 min reflecting with the entire group, prompt them with invitations like: “What is one idea that stood out in your conversation?”

Impromptu Networking (20 mins)

This is a personal favorite and I’ve found myself using it often. In fact, I used it just last week at the beginning of my talk a Product Camp, as I needed a way to boost the energy in the room. It is especially useful when the energy in the room is lagging or people in the group don’t know each other very well.

The sequence is: Organize the group into pairs. Then, have each pair rapidly answer a question you provide them (the invitation). This is repeated for a total of three rounds, so it’s a good way to warm up, get to know people, and help people set an intention for their participation.

TRIZ (35 mins)

This structure clears space for innovation by providing the group a safe environment to be vulnerable and let go of what they know (but rarely admit) limits their success. It does this by inviting creative destruction. It’s great at helping stagnant teams discover nascent opportunities for improvement, while also empowering teams that have been wanting change. I enjoyed how outrageous some of the ideas became and found it amusing that often the most outrageous ideas resembled things we needed to stop doing and until now haven’t been willing to admit.

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The sequence is: Spend 5 min selecting a most unwanted result, 10 min 1–2–4-All making a list of things to do to ensure the unwanted result, 10 min 1–2–4-All making a list of things they are currently doing that resemble items on the first list, 10 min 1–2–4-All making a list of things they can do to address items on the second list.

Troika Consulting (15 mins per person)

This structure helps participants gain insight on a challenge they decide to share and unleashes local wisdom for addressing that challenge. During the workshop, I was a consultant and my client was curious to learn how he might better manage his time. The other consultant and I took vastly different directions, which led to interesting dialog, all the while the client was silently learning through eavesdropping and not influencing our conversation. This is a simple and effective way to extend coaching support for individuals beyond formal reporting relationships.

The sequence is: Organize into groups of 3, 1 min participants to reflect on the challenge and the help needed, 1–2 min groups have the first client share his or her challenge, 1-2 min consultants ask the client clarifying questions, 4–5 min client turns around with his or her back facing consultants and together, the consultants generate ideas, suggestions, coaching advice, 1–2 min client turns around and shares what was most valuable about the experience, switch to next client and repeat.

25/10 Crowdsourcing (30 mins)

This is one of my favorite structures and I’ve used it previously, with Fusebox Festival, without realizing it was a part of Liberating Structures. In fact, several of the Design Sprint exercises, including the How Might We voting, bear strong resemblances. If you, like me, are frustrated by conventional brainstorming that generates ideas that go nowhere, this structure is a rapid way to share and vote on potential ideas and tap into the wisdom of the crowd.

The Sequence is: 3 min explain the process, 2 min demonstrate how to exchange the cards and write record your vote, 5 min each participant writes down a bold idea and first step, 3 min pass the cards around, when bell rings stop, read the card, flip over and score it 1–5, repeat 4 more times for a total of 5 scores, participants add up all scores, write the number on the front of the card, circle it, then hold it up. Find the best scoring ideas and discuss with the entire group.

Anna’s 3-day workshop is broken up into 2 sessions. I’m looking forward to attending the 3rd day which is scheduled for mid-September. I’m curious to hear how others have begun to adopt the Liberating Structures and to share my experiences as well.

Getting Started

Instructions for using Liberating Structures are on the website , book, and mobile app. The website has lots of information. If you are wanting to learn more about the structures, I suggest going straight to the LS Menu and start to read about each structure in the menu. A tip to quickly digest each structure is to begin with the purpose at the top and then skip to step 5 and read the sequence and allocation to get an overview of how the structure functions.

If you are in the central Texas area, Anna runs a Central TX Liberating Structures Meetup. I encourage you to join and attend.

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