When Sonja Kresojevic was hired at Pearson, she led digital transformation for the international part of their business. After a year, she was promoted and joined the Global Product Office to focus on driving change globally across the whole business. In this role, Sonja was a key part of the design and implementation of the award-winning Global Product Lifecycle program, which focused on transforming product development and delivering a faster and more entrepreneurial-focused organization.

During her years managing products, Sonja noticed that, just as companies deploy agile or lean startup practices to build products, the same principles can be applied in a broader organizational context. “I always see myself more as a practitioner than as a consultant, so my work is inspired by what I learned building products,” she says. Armed with this strategy, she sought to figure out how to apply such principles to transform an entire organization.

At first, Sonja encountered some resistance while trying to implement broad system changes at Pearson. “People’s reaction was often ‘This won’t work here’” she says. “However, this led to us focusing on bringing people on the journey and working to co-design solutions. We enabled them to deliver things that were important to their success and built strong communities of practice to enable learning at scale.”

Empathy and listening was key to the process. Her team invested time bringing stakeholders into the process, through town halls and workshops. She also found that words like “agile” and “lean” were scaring them off, so she listened to their struggles empathically and changed her messaging to help them solve the problem. Gradually internal and external stakeholders became involved and got on board.

Embrace flexibility

One of her main takeaways from this experience was that a process shouldn’t be followed just for the process’s sake. She didn’t approach restructuring Pearson from a perspective of merely implementing lean startup. Instead, she noted the significant issues that needed to be addressed and set out to work to solve them with the organization. Sonja shunned dogma for flexibility, pivoting when encountering obstacles rather than throwing her hands up and deciding things were not working.

The life cycle process was one part of the plan. Still, the company quickly realized that it was just one of the components of a much bigger program that involved how they behaved, how they acted as leaders, how they managed the organization, and how they made decisions regarding systems, tools, culture, and incentives. Sonja believes that even inside large organizations, it is possible to get teams to work and behave differently, applying agile principles and convincing people that value creation should be what drives the organization forward.

“I was very much of the mindset that we don’t have all the answers,” says Sonja, “and that it’s more fun to collaborate with people and to build that momentum through the internal and external community, and expose people to some interesting stuff that was happening elsewhere.”

After 20 years in the corporate world, Sonja passionately believed in her ability to instill change in large organizations but also learned that she was somewhat lonely doing it. She says that, if you talk to other people trying to change large organizations, they’re often going to tell you it’s the loneliest job in the world. You go against a brick wall every single day.

“What I had to do was work hard on myself. To figure out what is it that I want to do next, where do I see myself, how do I contribute to the world differently? I realized that the key is in me, and changing myself, and showing up differently for other people, and not separating my personal from my professional life, because I am one person, and I need to share who I am with the world. I cannot be one person at home and another in the workplace.”

For Sonja, it is of utmost importance to empower the whole organization to enable significant and successful change.

Upon leaving Pearson, Sonja became a strategist and created her consulting firm, Spinnaker Co. She regularly speaks on topics of transformation, business agility, leadership, innovation strategy, and culture. In this role, she sees that innovation efforts die over time because they are not connected to strategy. CEOs usually don’t realize that if they invest more in innovation and connect that to strategy, it can save the company or transform how it works. For Sonja, it is of utmost importance to empower the whole organization to enable significant and successful change, and for innovation at scale to work.

Empower the whole organization

According to Sonja, we need to start empowering people and making some significant changes when it comes to culture, and in how we incentivize people to bring them on the transformation journey. When companies have groups that are solely targeted at innovation, but the initiative is disconnected from the strategy, it is difficult for the groups to succeed. Direction must come from an executive team making deliberate strategic decisions.

“Innovation doesn’t work in isolation,” states Sonja. “You need to know why you are trying to innovate what the strategy is. You need to start to put measures in place. You need to change the way you find not just those projects, or products, or initiatives, but beyond that, you need to start looking at the balance of your portfolio. You need to start strategically investing in core versus adjacent versus transformative. It’s not something you can just stumble upon.”

“Innovation doesn’t work in isolation. You need to know why you are trying to innovate…”

If leaders don’t show their human side to others, they’re going to struggle to get anyone to follow them, she says. The more we show the human side and reconnect with ourselves, the more we are going to be able to influence people around us and start to move the boulder in the right direction, whether it’s in societies or large companies.

“I don’t think I can influence leaders in large organizations unless I show them by example how I’m leading myself, or how I’m behaving with my friends,” she says. “I think we need to start to model those right behaviors for other people. We need to be brave enough, and we need to start to speak up and have the real conversation, instead of just the polished version of it. I think some of those softer skills, if you want, is what’s missing when you look at executive teams nowadays.”

The more we show the human side and reconnect with ourselves, the more we are going to be able to influence people around us and start to move the boulder in the right direction.

Global transformation one individual at a time

These days, Sonja talks to her clients about her evolution and transformation, humanity, and vulnerability as much as innovation or business transformation.

“Humanity needs a substantial upgrade,” she states. “I am finding myself more and more focused on the human side: whether it’s to do with all the personal changes we are all undergoing, or with how to bring communities together to facilitate change at scale. I am looking for new, innovative ways to get us working together and learning from each other.”

This belief has led Sonja to recently launch a community called the Seedtime Collective, along with co-founders Héloïse Ardley and Philip Horvath. As they describe in their site, Seedtime was “born out of our personal transformative experiences and a realization that global transformation can only happen one healed individual at the time. We believe that exposing people to transformative experiences that nurture body, mind, and soul, in a supportive and authentic community will create an environment where people can learn to trust their inner-guidance, unlock unique learnings and work together to bring a much-needed change in their communities, organizations, and society at large.”

I love the boldness of Seedtime’s vision and am looking forward to seeing the work that Sonja does there. Sonja has proven that a flexible, human-centered approach that is inclusive and honest will yield better results in bringing innovation and change, even at a large scale.

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

The post Applying Agile Principles to Corporate Transformation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

Jeff Gothelf’s path to top product strategy consultant may have started with wanting to take his girlfriend on some nice dates. Jeff was a self-declared broke musician looking to make extra money for dinners with his new girlfriend (now his wife). “I was a computer geek as a kid, so the internet (aka Web 1.0) was where I headed immediately. Back then, if you could spell HTML, you could get a job. The rest is history…”

Today, Jeff is a well-known coach, speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations build better products and works with executives to build the cultures that build better products. As well as Lean UX, he’s the co-author of Sense and Respond and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking. Recently, he co-founded Sense & Respond Press, a publishing house for modern, transformational business books.

He was nominated for a Thinkers50 award for innovation. Over his 20 years in technology, Jeff has worked to bring a customer-centric, evidence-based approach to product strategy, design, and leadership at a wide range of companies, like Neo Innovation, TheLadders, Webtrends, and AOL. He regularly keynotes conferences, teaches workshops, and works directly with client leadership teams across North America, Europe, and Asia.

A Lesson from the Circus

Before he got into tech, Jeff’s first “real” job was in the circus. He was graduating from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia with a degree in Mass Communications and a specialization in Audio Production. As the circus was about to come through town, they reached out to the school for an audio engineer recommendation. The job had Jeff’s name written all over it. With a little encouragement from his parents, Jeff joined a literal three-ring circus. “I put my junk in storage on Sunday. I had a motorcycle, a Bob Marley poster, and a mattress. That was it. On Monday, I’m in the circus.”

As the sound and lighting guy for Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers Circus, Jeff spent six months on the road. “I hung out with clowns. The human cannonball was my friend. We traveled around — every two days we were in a new place. I slept in the back of a semi with seven other dudes.”

“The circus opportunity helped me, or motivated me, to jump in the deep end and learn how to swim once I got there.”

Along with the great stories, Jeff left the circus with a life lesson that is still relevant to him today: “I think the main thing that it’s taught me is to just try. When the opportunity came to write my first book, [the publisher] came to me and said, ‘You’re the Lean UX guy. Do you want to write the Lean UX book?’ I’d never thought about writing a book. To me, it seemed like an insurmountable task. Like a mountain to climb and I’m not a mountain climber. But the circus opportunity helped me, or motivated me, to jump in the deep end and learn how to swim once I got there.”

What’s the Motivation?

In addition to his fascinating backstory, Jeff and I spoke about the prevalence of innovation labs at companies today. I was curious to know what he thought about how they worked or how they could be better. “The idea of an innovation lab is seductive and interesting, but almost every company gets it wrong. It can’t generate the kind of big innovative leaps they’d hoped for with these labs.”

Patience is one factor that Jeff identifies as an issue: “Organizations put the money into the lab, but they don’t have the patience of a VC firm. They’re not going to wait five to seven years for a good idea to return on that investment. They want something in three months or six months. So they start to get antsy, and the labs get a lot of pressure to generate something, and then they shut down.”

“What’s the motivation for them to take their excellent entrepreneurial ideas, spirit, and activities and do this without some kind of an equity stake?”

Another pitfall that Jeff talked about in regards to innovation groups at large companies is motivation: “You take smart people and build a team or a business unit around them. But what’s the motivation for them to take their excellent entrepreneurial ideas, spirit, and activities and do this without some equity stake?” I think it’s an important point and one that’s not often discussed. What rewards do employees reap at big companies for trying to push break-through ideas?

At a previous consulting company, Jeff and his team even created a concept that would try to tackle this issue: “Innovation Studio was a well-funded, patient in-house ‘lab’ that was adequately staffed, funded, and had a clear idea of what to do with the successful and unsuccessful ventures it housed. Most importantly, it brought in staff who had strong ideas and would end up with equity in their ideas should they be deemed successful. The lab would provide guidance, coaching, and the skillsets (design, engineering, product management, etc.) necessary for the best chance of success. In the end, it was all about incentive structures. I haven’t seen it done this way before.”

Expressed vs. Latent Customer Needs

Jeff is firmly customer-centric in his perspective. He defines innovation as: “Creating a new way to deliver value to customers that differentiates you from the competition.” And he feels that customer-centricity — “solve a real problem for a real customer in a meaningful way” — is the innovation silver bullet.

“Our job, as the makers of products and services, is to discover and understand customers’ latent needs.”

With this in mind, Jeff and I dug into the debate around whether or not we can trust customers to know or articulate what they need and want. (Maybe this should be called the Henry Ford debate since it often stems from Ford’s supposed quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”)

Jeff said: “Customers know what they need to do. They know what they’re trying to achieve. They know what problem they’re trying to solve, what task they’re trying complete, and what their goal is. Our job, as the makers of products and services, is to discover and understand those latent needs.”

As designers, we need to identify what is below or behind the needs that customers express. “An expressed need is something like: ‘I need to apply for a mortgage.’ The latent need is: ‘I need to find a home that I can afford, a mortgage that allows me to live the kind of life I’d like to give my kids…’ Good product people get to the latent needs through the various and manifold activities of customer discovery.”

“Good product people get to the latent needs through the various and manifold activities of customer discovery.”

Once you pinpoint the customer’s latent need, there’s certainly finesse in how you develop products to answer those needs. “How you solve those problems is product design and development work. There are people, like Steve Jobs, who were particularly good at this. They are very good at dreaming up amazing new ways to solve existing problems. They are either in charge of the company, willing to roll the success of a company on these ideas, or, were in a position of enough influence where they were able to get their ideas to see the light of day. But at the root, all of these ideas are solving real problems for real customers.”

He continued: “Customers have no idea that they want a touch screen necessarily. But what they do know, is that they’d like to carry fewer devices or they’d like to communicate more efficiently, or they’d like to be able to do certain things that their current devices don’t allow them to do. So there’s a conflation of customers not knowing what they want and being outstanding product people and innovators.”

Leaders Who Get It

Jeff stresses the importance of leadership and cultural change for organizations that want to work in new and innovative ways. “Many organizations attempt to implement ‘agile,’ ‘lean startup,’ or ‘lean UX’ in their ways of working, but don’t realize that without a cultural and leadership mindset shift, these things would never yield their full benefits.”

That’s why Jeff does significant coaching work with leaders. He’s most excited when he gets a chance to work with “leaders who get it.” He said, “When I meet leaders at companies who truly want to change how THEY work and THEN how their company works, I am excited to find ways to collaborate with them.”

“When I meet leaders at companies who truly want to change how THEY work and THEN how their company works, I am excited to find ways to collaborate with them.”

When it comes to leadership, Jeff’s less concerned with teaching the methods of lean, agile, or design thinking. He’s more interested in how the mindset behind these concepts lives at the top level of an organization.

“The reality is that [leaders] don’t care necessarily about sprints, retros, burn down charts, and velocity. But agility? If you can teach them what agility means, how to lead with agility, or how to lead an agile organization, then you stand a shot of getting the methodologies implemented and the teams working differently.”

“There has to be a realization that this means that how you lead and how you manage is also changing.”

Jeff believes that it has to be top-down. For innovation to take root in a company, leadership must provide support, have a deep understanding of what something like “agility” means, and be willing to change themselves. “There has to be a realization that this means that how you lead and how you manage is also changing.”

“Changing the way that you manage, changing the way that you lead, changing the way that you incentivize an organization to outcomes is the key to all of this.”

Jeff just launched a Professional Scrum with UX course. He created with Josh Seiden and in conjunction with scrum.org. “It’s a new certification course that does a good job of bridging the gap between user experience, design, and scrum — how do you reconcile these things together. It was over a year’s worth of work with lots of iterations and test classes.”

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

The post From Circus Tech to Keynote Speaker appeared first on Voltage Control.

Andi Plantenberg is an innovation consultant who brings entrepreneurial practices into the enterprise. She’s a long-time mentor for startups in the Bay Area, focused on giving them tools to know if their product and business strategies are working. Prior, Andi co-founded Singlebound Creative in 2000. The Product Studio / Digital Agency had an eleven-year run and served Fortune 500 clients and visionary startups.

In addition to consulting large companies, Andi is also a faculty member at Lean Startup Co, and mentors at 500 startups and Singularity University. Something you might not know about Andi is that she’s the founder of Qoopy.co, a luxury daycare for chickens, the fake business that went viral a few years back.

Innovation for Enterprises

Andi spends most of her days working with big companies to help them adopt principles of innovation from the startup world. These Fortune 500 companies get so big, they forget how to scale to the next level, or test new product ideas with a small group, and most spend millions more than they need to get data they don’t need.

Even in the startup world, Andi believes, the traditional approach to innovation is somewhat flawed. Within the accelerator and incubator programs, there’s a general approach to do some customer discovery upfront, then build something to show at their pitch day, and then hopefully participants will get funding.

“The world is full of really important problems to solve, but there’s not always an obvious market for them.”

The problem with this, Andi says, is “You can have problem-solution fit without a product-market fit. The world is full of really important problems to solve, but there’s not always a viable market for them or an obvious market for them. The two are different.” Taking time to consider if the problem has a viable product before you build it might save a lot of time and money.

This incubator model also assumes that you do all the learning you’ll need to in the beginning and then scale and keep scaling. Andi believes, “In the early years, there’s just so much learning to be had that it’s a mistake not to have an emphasis on being optimized for learning from the get-go. You see that mirrored in corporate innovation as well.”

Andi sees how the mistakes that start at the very beginning of a company are easily carried over and have a significant impact on how that company will scale and ultimately run and innovate.

“For the past 100 years or so, we have been running our businesses as if we can do a bunch of research, make plans, fund those plans, do things, and have those things work. That’s the way the world was before this huge technological shift of the past two decades turned everything upside down. We have institutions that are built around that reality which no longer exists, and we’re all slowly waking up to the new reality.”

In her years of working through these problems with different startups and enterprises, she’s broken down what innovation is and the processes behind it — they have tremendous value for all of us (regardless of the stage our business is in.)

A Better Definition for Innovation

I found Andi’s definition of innovation refreshing. She adds more meaning than we’ve heard before, “Innovation is not just a new way to add value, but it’s done in a manner that can be sustained,” she says. Adding on that sustained piece is a big differentiator.

This kind of innovation, Andi says, starts with “getting committed to learning fast.” Companies are choosing a few ideas and spending too much time researching and pouring money into these ideas with no assurance they’ll work. Andi asks, “What happens when your two best ideas that you’ve been lovingly caressing for the past three years are failed experiments?”

When I asked Andi how she goes about changing this in large companies, she said, “An ‘innovation thesis’ is an important thing to have. Which ideas are the right ideas to put through the paces? Of those ideas, we might get a hit. The innovation thesis is similar to what venture capitalists would call an investment thesis, but it’s about where we’re innovating and why.” (Note: Andi credits the concept of the ‘innovation thesis’ to Dan Toma, author of The Corporate Startup.)

She mentioned that it’s something that changes over time, a living document, like FutureTight’s Business Model Canvas Workshop. From this sort of document, “we look at emerging trends in society, in technology, in the political arenas and in things that are megatrends that are likely to impact the business model but are not directly involved in the business model.”

All of this information is great, but what do we do with it? How does it impact where we go? Andi has an insightful take on the numbers.

Measuring Innovation ROI

Measuring something as abstract as innovation can seem impossible, but that, Andi says, is because companies are measuring the wrong things. Andi reminded us that, “ROI is meant to measure known solutions rolling out into a known market.” And because that is the purpose of ROI, it has no place this early in the funnel. It can undoubtedly inform our innovation thesis and help us consider what’s vital for our success, but instead of measuring ROI directly, you have to measure the leading indicators. She calls these learning goals.

“I’m a huge fan of measurement, of innovation accounting, and spreadsheets, but you can’t measure success.”

“I’m a huge fan of measurement, of innovation accounting, and spreadsheets, but you can’t measure success.” The customer behavior that you do measure can show you the small hints at the likelihood that something will be successful. So while you can’t measure success exactly, Andi teaches companies how to measure the likelihood of success through specific data.

“A lot of what I do is get out the leaf blower, and I blow away all the data that is not the most important data for today.”

While Andi loves measurement and data, she believes that we simultaneously must be cautious about the data we let shape our decisions. “People get lost in the complexity of data, and people dither around in analysis paralysis. A lot of what I do is get out the leaf blower, and I blow away all the data that is not the most important data for today.” With all of this in mind, I asked Andi to take us through the process she uses for companies like NASA and Bissell.

It Starts With Permission

Let’s say we’re in a Western mining town and we’re building railroads. To build these railroads, we’re going to have to go through the mountains and come close to some of the buildings in the town. Now, one option to say to the people in the town is, “Alright, we’re going to go through this mountain, lay down our tracks, the train design is going to look like this, and we’re just going to send it through. Get ready.” But this way of working might not get the best results if your goal is to have a good relationship with the community.

Another option is to negotiate with the communities on the rail line and bring them in as part of the process. In having these conversations with them, they have the option to get them excited that the train’s going through their area and understand just how the train is going to work for them.

This same process is how innovation works. Andi explains, “Start with permission from the highest levels. You start with one team and use that team as a tracer bullet through the organization. That team is going to get stuck like crazy, and you’re going to look at each of those points up close and sand them down.”

Andi describes that as the first step, and once you do that, these ideas will start to gain momentum and after proven results, the exception to the rule will catch on as a new way of working. The problem is that most companies and even innovation houses force this process too quickly. “They scale their solution for the companies they’re trying to serve to quickly, and they don’t have the opportunity to see how it needs to work before they scale.”

The Lean Startup was built out of this idea of starting small. The notion of measuring based on real customer behavior, customer actions, what’s working and what’s not working, do that at a small scale so that you can roll that back into your plans. And it works so well that we’re not calling it lean startup anymore. We’re just calling it best practice.

Iterating on Innovation

Figuring out these processes isn’t a one and done sort of thing. Andi’s learned this from digging in elbows deep in different teams in startups, in organizations, and the government sector for the past ten plus years, and being an entrepreneur herself and running a digital design agency for ten years before that. The way she has approached innovation has changed and evolved as she’s iterated.

“Entrepreneurship is not about drafting the perfect plan. Entrepreneurship is about figuring it out live.”

It’s like professional athletes and musicians. They are professionals, but they continue to practice their craft, refine their skills, and get better. Andi believes the same goes for businesses and entrepreneurs. “It’s not practicing your trade as a researcher or data analyst — it’s refining your practice around entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not about drafting the perfect plan. Entrepreneurship is about figuring it out live.”

She argues a solid point that: “There’s no world that I’ve seen where someone highly skilled in their trade, whatever it might be, can be put together with other people and just have a business unit stand up out of that.”

No matter who you are and what you’re doing, everything is done through iteration, even innovation.

Gaining an Appetite to Unlearn

Andi teaches big organizations how to make considerable changes to the way they’re operating. She explained that they start small and build up momentum to get everyone on board. While teaching them these processes, she saw that there were many practices these same organizations needed to unlearn to grow. (For more on this concept, I recommend checking out Barry O’Reilly’s book Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results.)

She gives examples like, for the $800 million a year private company that had two or three ideas they loved and researched for three years, this company needs to unlearn this and test sooner. “Don’t be afraid to kill an idea,” Andi encourages.

“You need to be willing to unlearn what you think the right thing to do is. You have to be willing to learn that a lot of your research might not hold up to customer behavior.”

“When you start doing the work, we might shoot two of those down in a week. You need to be willing to unlearn what you think the right thing to do is. You have to be willing to learn that a lot of your research might not hold up to customer behavior. You have to unlearn some things that you’re thinking that you don’t even realize you’re thinking.”

Innovation in the World

In most startup organizations and tech hubs like the Bay Area, Andi says most people know that the Lean Startup Method is just a best practice, you don’t even speak to it. She believes that the next wave where these ideas and tools can cause a significant shift in the world at large. “If we retool our systems, organizations, and our processes to be able to learn and adapt, they can have a huge impact. There’s a huge appetite for it, and there’s a huge need. It’s creative destruction. It’s happening.”

Andi is excited by the accelerating pace of change and what it means for the world we live in. “It creates a tremendous opportunity (and responsibility) to be purposeful about the world we want to have in 10, 20, and 30 years.”

The post What We Need to Unlearn to Innovate appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Travis McCutcheon started his career at a company called Digital Insight building internet banking software and promoting usability testing and user experience at a time when he says “no one at the company knew what I was talking about.” Now Travis is the Founder and Innovation Consultant at Leap for Mankind where he helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into products through a three-pillar approach.

I talked to Travis about his work as an innovation consultant and he shared with me some of the patterns he’s observed for organizations embracing a culture of innovation.

A few years into his role, an acquisition of Digital Insight by Intuit introduced Travis to the concept of lean manufacturing where his team experimented with adapting the Toyota Production System for the world of software development. “If you could create an experiment, measure the baseline and then make an improvement to cycle time or reduce the work effort then it was automatically bought in by the company.” Learning through experimentation was now a company mandate rather than just a personal cause.

Getting Lean

While Travis was working to push forward a lean-style approach in the design and product domain at Intuit, Eric Ries was promoting the approach at the company level. After hearing Mr. Ries speak at Intuit, Travis was sold on the principles of Lean Startup. “My head was nodding — this is all the stuff I’ve been trying to push through.”

A move to Austin led Travis to grad school and the local startup community. He worked closely with Ash Maurya building Lean Canvas and forming the Austin Lean Startup Circle. Around this time he joined Lean Startup Machine and began traveling around running workshops to help entrepreneurs launch their ideas. Travis pivoted to the enterprise level formalizing existing workshops and training into transformation programs for larger companies like John Deere, Cisco, and ING.

Lean Manufacturing, Design Thinking, Agile Development

For innovation efforts to be fruitful, Travis believes getting clear on what the process of innovation looks like and how it is measured is key. This means adopting an “explore” mentality over the traditional “execute” mindset.

Adopt an “explore” mentality over the traditional “execute” mindset.

In Execute mode, you assume you’re right and execution looks like a straight line to getting things done. In Explore mode, you assume you’re wrong and run experiments to gather evidence until the path forward becomes clear — this is where innovation comes into play.

To tackle the mindset shifts required for a successful transformation, Travis leverages the fundamentals of Lean Startup by incorporating aspects of lean manufacturing, design thinking, and agile development principles in his workshops.

Lean manufacturing is often omitted from corporate planning when developing innovation programs. However, it is a critical pillar providing the underlying process and commitment to continuous improvement.

Design thinking boot camps provide a hands-on immersive experience for contributors at all levels of the company to develop a deep understanding of the problem space and build enough empathy with customers to want to solve the problem.

Once there’s a clear signal that the product is headed in the right direction, agile development gives teams a method to implement in a way that’s visible and iterative while incorporating frequent opportunities for feedback on both the product and how well teams are working together.

With each method, he leverages experimentation to take learnings (what people say) and validate what people do by measuring actual behaviors.

Transformation Hurdles

When I spoke to Travis about some of the hurdles that a company might encounter during a transformation, he mentioned communication and allocation as two areas that can require some creative problem-solving.

According to Travis, “You can’t have successful collaboration until there’s solid communication in place, and that communication is going to look different for every organization.”

“You really can’t have successful collaboration until there’s solid communication in place” -Travis McCutcheon

In 2014 when Travis worked with Nike, improving communication meant making information available to the entire team through a wiki so anyone had access when they needed it rather than having information languish unused in disparate systems.

Allocation is another puzzle for companies adopting the Lean Innovation approach. Running an innovation initiative as a startup requires a fully dedicated team. “They have to be sequestered from traditional delivery. You are a team that is only responsible for vetting this idea.” This can be a tricky sell from an accounting standpoint when salaries and existing workload are considered.

But Travis believes that viewing the exploratory aspect of innovation as value-adding activities in their own right and having the patience to see them through is critical to realizing the benefits. This means dedicating your internal team to innovation initiatives even when the easier option might be to bring in outside contractors. Doing so allows organizations to show employees they value innovation enough to dedicate time and people to it. In return, organizations retain the valuable knowledge acquired and experience greater dedication to the vision behind the initiative.

Nail It — Then Scale It

Travis’ green thumb sneaks into his metaphors as he points out that scaling the Lean Innovation approach requires organizations to cultivate the soil where experiments and learning seeds are allowed to grow and seen as valuable investments.

Organizations that have the most success with transformation have a strategic initiative that supports innovation from the top with a clear vision of the problem to solve and who to bring in from outside to help provide perspective and expertise at the outset.

“Scaling it before nailing it is one of the problems that I’ve really kind of zoomed in on and tried to prevent” -Travis McCutcheon

And while scaling is the ideal, “scaling it before nailing it is one of the problems that I’ve really kind of zoomed in on and tried to prevent.” For Travis, this applies at the product level, too, where his philosophy is that having a couple of people that love your product is better than a ton who just like it.

Innovation & Leadership

Wading into the new waters of innovation where the path ahead is less clear often means moving away from the traditional management metrics of ROI and roadmaps. As Travis has observed, this may leave managers unclear on how to make valuable contributions. He advises additional support be provided as they shift from managing work product to addressing team dynamics issues and promoting a healthy culture where teams are motivated toward high performance.

Find untraditional ways to quantify how meaningful and valuable innovation is to the organization.

To succeed in the way that Toyota has, Travis stresses the importance of finding untraditional ways to quantify how meaningful and valuable innovation is to the organization. Getting clear on the goals an innovation initiative is trying to accomplish and how to evaluate outcomes is key to starting down the right path.

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

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

Brant Cooper wishes people would stop saying innovation and start saying what they mean. He urges businesses to define what they are truly aiming for when they say this word. The definition can shift dramatically depending on the organization using it — does it mean growth, culture, new technologies, or something else entirely?

Brant is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Entrepreneur and CEO of the consultancy Moves the Needle. With over two decades of expertise helping companies bring innovative products to market, he blends design thinking and lean methodology to ignite entrepreneurial action within large organizations.

Define the “why”

Let’s return to Brant’s thoughts on innovation and why the term can be problematic: “In my keynotes, I stand up and tell people to stop using the word innovation. Don’t use the word, if you’re not going to define it. Once everybody agrees on what is meant by innovation inside of an organization, use it to your heart’s content.”

“I stand up and tell people to stop using the word innovation. Don’t use the word, if you’re not going to define it.”

The reason he pushes for a concrete definition is that there are so many different ways to look at innovation: “It’s about technology, or having a good culture where young people want to come and work. Or, it could be a marketing factor, or it’s a new business model. It’s all over the map. We have to define what it means, and then we have to define how we are going to apply it in the organization to reach our strategic priorities.” When people know if they are talking about creating new products, values, or even listening to their customers more, they can set their sights on exactly what they are going to do to get there.

Innovation labs aren’t startups

One of the things that I always ask the folks I interview is about the pitfalls they identify in innovation, especially in how it happens inside large companies. Brant talked about how companies often wrongly compare themselves to startups: “I think a lot of senior management look to the startup community and say: ‘Look at the startups like Uber and Airbnb; they’re creating these billion dollar markets, why can’t we do the same thing? We need to be more entrepreneurial.’”

The result is often internal labs, accelerators, or innovation teams. However, by comparing themselves to startups, companies run into several issues. The first is the probability of success: “Number one: there are thousands of startups out there and in maybe one out of a thousand you get a unicorn. Yet companies are hoping they’re going to get the same thing by putting five teams in their lab.”

“I don’t think breakthrough innovation comes from people sitting down and saying, ‘Okay, what are going to do that’s breakthrough?’”

The second issue Brant sees is the difference between the motivations of startup founders and an innovation group. “I don’t think breakthrough innovation comes from people sitting down and saying, ‘Okay, what are going to do that’s breakthrough?’ People tend to work on ideas that they’re passionate about, or an inspiration that has come to them or they’re solving their own problems…”

Lastly, he talked about timelines: “Often, the people setting up these [innovation] labs are not given a realistic timeline. You’re not going get the return on investment in one, two, or three years if you’re trying to do breakthrough innovation. It’s not that the people inside the labs can’t. It’s just that they’re not being set up for success.”

“It’s not that the people inside the labs can’t. It’s just that they’re not being set up for success.”

Horizon Models

Brant also talked about his distaste for businesses applying innovation to the classic three horizons of growth framework. As described by McKinsey&Company, this framework “…offers a way to concurrently manage both current and future opportunities for growth.”

Traditionally, horizon one is defined as what companies need to work on today in order to achieve growth objectives this year and next. Horizon two is what they need to work on today to lay the foundation for growth in two, three, or four years. Horizon three is what they need to be working on to ensure growth in five-plus years.

Brant said: “I’m not sure when it was decided that we should attach the level of innovation to these, whereby H1 is continuous improvement, H2 is incremental innovation, and H3 is breakthrough or disruptive innovation. You can’t lay the plans to create disruptive innovation versus incremental innovation. People are going to work on solving problems and some of them are going to take three years, some will take five years, and some are going to take seven years.”

He continued: “There are tons of things that we can’t predict. But somehow this horizon model has been co-opted by this innovation version and it doesn’t make any sense. I try to get people to reframe it back into growth because that’s what the objective is anyway. We’re not doing innovation just for innovation’s sake. We’ve got strategic priorities that we’re trying to achieve and it’s usually based upon revenue or growth.”

“By adding innovation to the horizon model, we screw up our portfolio management and how we’re going to allocate capital and resources across those time horizons.”

Stealth mode vs. open innovation

Another trope of the innovation and startup spaces that Brant questions is the idea of “stealth mode.” He talked about the birth of Silicon Valley and how it was a champion of open innovation before anybody even called it that: “The companies that were working to develop electronic warfare detection and electronic warfare equipment were working together under government contracts. But they were working together in order to come up with solutions. It wasn’t about being in stealth mode and hiding everything.”

“What you need is openness, inclusiveness, and diversity. It’s what actually leads to innovation.”

The emphasis on secrecy in today’s Silicon Valley might not allow for serendipity and discovery. It’s a lesson that’s relevant to current innovation teams. “I think we’re less likely to come across accidents and recognize those accidents because we tend to form innovation teams that are parochial and inside the building. What you need is openness, inclusiveness, and diversity. It’s what actually leads to innovation.”

Listen to the market

This idea of openness relates to one of Brant’s favorite anecdotes, which is that Steve Jobs was initially against opening up the app store to third-party developers. “I think the iPhone became breakthrough when it became a platform. And it became a platform when they opened up the app store to third-party developers. In the first year, it was not open to third-party developers because Steve Jobs wanted to maintain control. But, what made it revolutionary was when everybody could develop free and 99 cent apps. That’s what changed the industry overnight.”

Brant continued: “To Jobs’ credit, a year later he did open it up. To me, that’s more of what a visionary does. A visionary says, ‘The market is actually telling me something. I’m gonna change my tune.’”

“Listening to the market isn’t simply asking your customers what they want and doing what they say. There are all sorts of ways to listen to your market.”

The Three E’s

Brant is currently working on a new book and the concept is based on his belief that established companies must change the way they operate in order to survive.

“The very structure of our companies, in terms of the way we structure departments and hierarchies, is derived from an assembly line.”

He explained: “The very structure of our companies, in terms of the way we structure departments and hierarchies, is derived from an assembly line. It’s all based in the industrial age. I think the depression of 2007/08 marked the end of the industrial age. We’re in a new time and we’re going to find that companies have to be structured and operate differently.”

Specifically, this massive change means that: “Everybody inside a company needs to know how to act entrepreneurially, at some level. It doesn’t mean that we’re a startup. It doesn’t mean that everybody is acting like entrepreneurs all the time.”

“You have to define what it means to be an entrepreneur inside your organization, in your culture, in your market, in your industry. What does it mean to operate in this new way? Who are going to be the champions? Who are going to be the people leading the effort?”

But, it does mean that this new workforce, according to Brant, is going to have to know what he calls the Three Es of Lean Innovation — Empathy, Experiments, and Evidence-informed decision making. “Everybody needs to learn how to do those things and apply them wherever there’s uncertainty in the organization.”

I’m looking forward to reading Brant’s book when it comes out and learning more about the three E’s. In the meantime, I will be keeping up with him at his blog. I hope everyone enjoyed this preview.

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

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Regardless of what process religion you prescribe to, it is hard to argue with the benefits of iterative software development. Unfortunately, it is not enough to simply understand the benefits of listening and reacting to your market’s response to what you are building. Create a culture that supports continuous improvement and systems that support iteratively building and deploying software.

Many legacy projects suffer from lack of modularity and tight coupling between components. Modifying systems with these characteristics becomes more and more tedious and cumbersome as time passes. This can make it difficult to change one part of the system without introducing problems in other areas of the system. This problem is exacerbated when you lose members of the team who have special knowledge and additions to the team have to spend months mining out this tribal knowledge. Often these systems lack proper test coverage to alert you to defects you’ve introduced in other parts of the system.

When planning a new system or new product, consider how you will iteratively evolve the system.

When planning a new system or new product, consider how you will iteratively evolve the system. Ideally your architecture is flexible enough to withstand rapidly changing priorities and business objectives. Microservices is an approach to architecting software systems where components are deployed as individual distributed services. Typically, microservice deployments use docker containers to maintain component isolation and increase compute density.

Does your software architecture allow you to efficiently test new ideas while minimizing risk?

Whether you build your system as a monolith or as microservices it is most critical that you decouple your functions and features. This will limit the risk of unexpected interactions between components. Does your software architecture allow you to efficiently test new ideas while minimizing risk?

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