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

Cheryl Reed is an organizational psychologist turned innovation catalyst with a passion for people and human behavior. She started her organizational psychology career working in the US Air Force research labs. “As an organization whose strategy was to create game-changing innovation, it was my job to help individuals and teams grow to the next level of innovation.”

Cheryl’s journey with the Air Force gave her a background in leadership development, the dynamics of teamwork, and finding agile responses to challenges with numerous constraints. “Working in the Air Force for 21 years also teaches you how to learn about new organizations very quickly, because you move every two or three years.”

As an organizational development lead for the Air Force research labs, Cheryl focused on developing the organizational structures, people, and processes that enabled brilliant researchers to execute on innovation and outpace competitors. “That was the organizational strategy, so I had to figure out what that meant, what it looked like, and how to develop the people and the processes inside the organization to do it. We started by doing innovation assessments to figure out the innovation readiness for the organization, identify our barriers to innovation and how to get around them.”

Applying her organizational psychology lens in the field of innovation, Cheryl sees the practice as a human behavior puzzle to solve. “The things that keep us from seeing new opportunities are the cognitive biases that we’ve developed based on the muscles we’ve exercised.”

Cheryl believes that these cognitive biases are what prevent some of the best companies and teams from seeing innovative opportunities when they present themselves.

“The things that keep us from seeing new opportunities are the cognitive biases that we’ve developed based on the muscles we’ve exercised.”

In innovation, the things that made an organization successful in the past are rarely what makes that organization successful in the future. Those past experiences form a mindset that creates a barrier to becoming something new. “Human beings have biases that open up possibilities or shut them down. Helping us to recognize what our own biases are and reminding each other of what these biases are, turns us into seekers of new opportunity.”

Cheryl sees the work of detecting bias and busting assumptions as a necessity for innovative solutions. She characterizes a cognitive bias simply as a particular way of thinking shaped by habits and enduring belief. Those beliefs can be developed by data, and the more powerful the data, the harder the biases are to change. The key is in testing those biases.

“Say you’re a tennis player who’s won championships ten years in a row. If I tell you I’ve got this great new approach to tennis that’s going to help you become better, one of the thoughts that’s likely to go through your mind is that there’s no one in the world that knows tennis better than you do. You’re probably going to wonder how I can teach you anything.”

Evidence Mapping

To illustrate cognitive biases for teams, Cheryl relies on evidence mapping and activities that bring an individual’s attention to their cognitive biases. One activity Cheryl uses presents participants with three scenarios, each representing a different cognitive bias and asks them to answer questions based on what they see. “We use the tool as an attention-getter. When you’re working with really smart hard-working people, it’s hard to convince them that they don’t have the answers. If you can’t convince them that there are things out there they’re not seeing, it’s hard to get them out of pure execution mode.”

Overapplication of the term innovation creates unintended barriers to change, according to Cheryl. Attempting to equate innovation that creates new value and fulfills an unserved need with an adapted product that was updated to meet new compliance regulations, can halt an organization’s progress in innovation. “The fact that it means so many different things to so many different people makes it easy for people to say they are innovating and keeps them from getting outside of box one and into box three.”

Vijay Govindarajan’s three-box model

By box one, Cheryl is referring to a focus on execution. The verbiage comes from Vijay Govindarajan’s three-box model of innovation. For companies to succeed at innovation, Govindarajan believes they need to look at it from the three boxes:

1. Manage the present
2. Selectively forget the past
3. Create the future

The first box is the execution challenge. The execution engine is a critical anchor to providing the resources, and the ever-changing need to stay alive, vibrant, and healthy. “You’ve got to execute well. Inside that bin, you can be very innovative about productivity, inventory, and supply chain — what’s inside the execution engine delivering to your shareholders. The problem we run into is most companies put 99% of their efforts into box one.”

“The problem we run into is most companies put 99% of their efforts into box one.”

Box two is about forgetting the past. All the things that make an organization successful today get in the way of adopting new things that will keep them relevant tomorrow because they’re consuming so many resources. “If you can’t figure out and get rid of those things you’re doing today, or those beliefs you hold today that are getting in your way, then you’re not going to have the time, resources, and people to pursue and create in the future.”

Box three is non-linear thinking about creating a new future. “Balancing those three boxes is challenging when you’re a publicly-traded company that has to report out to your shareholders every quarter. The urgency becomes delivering on execution. The danger lies in not taking time to figure out what part of your past you need to forget about so that you can free up resources to create a future and then protecting the resources you’re putting into creating that future.

“The danger lies in not taking time to figure out what part of your past you need to forget about so that you can free up resources to create a future…”

Protecting innovation programs and resources is something that often relies on measurement. Cheryl believes the ultimate measurement for innovation is the quality of the relationships created with customers. “If my innovation is new value that customers care about, then it shows them that you care about their success.” How to go about measuring that quality is a work in progress that Cheryl continues to think through.

Measurement is something that evolves as the practice matures. In the early days, Cheryl focuses on activity metrics which she acknowledges are never very convincing. “Then, I think the outcome metrics have to focus on how much you’re learning, rather than how much revenue you’re generating today. One of the things that we need to know is a good inventory of what we’ve learned. If we could focus on understanding what we’ve learned, measuring what we’ve learned, and keeping those learnings readily available, then we become better positioned to take advantage of new opportunities.”

To demonstrate this idea, Cheryl offers the example of a Dover concept called the I-door, a refrigerator door with an embedded media player that could play advertisement videos. “Several customers absolutely loved it, but they couldn’t quite figure out how to use it and how they would pay for it.” The team that created the concept— having realized it could be done from an execution standpoint—patented it and shut down the project due to the lack of demand. Last year, a startup looking to create an advertisement marketplace approached Dover to partner on the product after learning of the patent. “We knew what we knew. We knew where that knowledge was. We knew how to use it. And we were able to then join this company in a new endeavor.” The product went live at the National Retail Federation supported by an advertising marketplace to place and pay for ads that will be displayed on cooler doors in supermarkets or convenience stores using sensors to measure real-time conversion rates for different types of advertising.

Metaprocess

Throughout her career, Cheryl has learned that successful innovation programs depend on identifying the problem the program is trying to solve. “Creating that problem definition must involve key leaders who communicate with each other with an attitude of curiosity and a willingness to learn. Sometimes this is contrary to the decisive, action-oriented style senior executives have had to learn to be successful in their jobs.”

With the problem defined, a hypothesis is created for solving it, and experiments are run to test those hypotheses. “It isn’t a linear process but, rather, a commitment to use your innovation processes on your problem. You use the results you get on each iteration to pivot and try again.”

For Cheryl, well-executed innovation is an inverted pyramid with an organization’s culture at the top, followed by strategy, infrastructure, processes, and tools. She believes getting all of these elements lined up and identifying a target through strategy enables organizations to make some great progress.

“If you’re a traditional company with a strategy to start becoming digital, your rollout roadmap might be to first work on digital internal operations, then digital customer front end, and then digital products for the next three years. If you can keep everyone focused on that, you can make some great progress as long as you know the kind of infrastructure and tools that are going to be most effective in that scenario.”

On the other hand, if the innovation program’s goal is to change how people think that gets “pretty darn squishy.” In this case, it’s even more important to get clear on what problem you’re trying to solve. “It’s challenging getting leaders to commit to a focus area, or to commit to a problem they want to solve. Because every time they get focused on a problem, they want to solve, something comes up that causes some rethinking and re-vectoring. It’s easy to lose focus.”

At Dover, Cheryl deconstructs the problem that an innovation program solves. “I ask myself if we are fixing the difficulties of adapting to the rapid pace of change? Are we fixing the challenges we are having keeping our customers engaged? Are we fixing the possibility that our product could become commoditized in an environment where people want experiences?”

Once the problem is identified and cleaned up into its more basic form, organizations can determine how innovation brings value. “You can’t just use these processes to solve the problems that your customers are bringing to you. You’ve got to use them on yourself.”

In innovation, there is no clear path from start to finish. In place of a silver bullet solution, Cheryl sees skills, attitudes, and practices that need to become part of innovation work. “Tools can help along the way by getting people engaged and establishing a common language, but if you let the tools define your program, you will fail in creating culture.”

“Tools can help along the way by getting people engaged and establishing a common language, but if you let the tools define your program, you will fail in creating culture.”

Open innovation

Cheryl’s favorite innovation success story began with the Department of Defense’s need to reclaim millions of dollars in fuel contaminated by flame-retardant foam following a fire. Civil engineers who looked at the problem decided it couldn’t be done, so the project was deprioritized and put out onto an open innovation platform with a tiny $10,000 budget.

“Within six months the ideation team had a prototype out in the field that was able to reclaim the fuel to a purity level that it could be used in jets. The total payout was $60,000.00 to the ideators. If we had hired a company to develop a solution, it would likely have taken years, because the whole process for putting out an RFP and developing the solution would have cost millions of dollars. Interestingly, the people who proposed the solution were not civil engineers; they were not Defense Department-type people; they were not American. We debunked a lot of different beliefs. People who participated in that became huge believers in open innovation.”

On the flip side of success, stories of failure often teach us the most. Most of the failure Cheryl has experienced has been around losing focus when there is an abundance of distractions or a lack of clarity on what outcomes to pursue. “I continually ask myself what leadership looks like under the current circumstances. How have others successfully navigated circumstances like those I am facing?”

One of the biggest challenges she’s explored is combining front-end processes with a team under pressure to execute. “Consistently, in our first year of operating, we had senior leaders present important efforts on which to execute and instruct us to do some due diligence thinking through it, deconstructing the problem, looking at options. And then they’d say we need to deliver this new capability to customers in six months. Those two pieces cannot peacefully coexist on the same team.”

Cheryl finds one of the biggest mistakes is trying to combine box one and box three activity into a single effort. “You don’t want teams to be experimenting when the house is on fire. You want to be experimenting when there’s some safety and where you can experiment without alienating customers, without interfering with your execution engine.”

Maturing innovation practices

Cheryl is excited when she hears or sees more consistent use and understanding of different processes, tools, and language around innovation. These are clues that lead her to conclude that the practice of innovation is maturing. “I think consistent use of language is what differentiates a nascent discipline from a maturing discipline. Some agreement about what works and what doesn’t. We’ve got to first anchor in a certain language so that when I say innovation vitality index and you say innovation vitality index, we’re talking about the same thing. I’m seeing more agreement than I have in the past.”

She sees this consistency in the literature that she reads in Harvard Business Review, LinkedIn blogs, and in conversation with other innovation leaders. One area she’d like to see this maturation expand is through the presence of more academic-style conversations on innovation at conferences built around the topic.

These academic conversations are better equipped to spread the learnings of organizations who seem to be getting innovation right. From the 50,000 foot view, Cheryl finds those to be the organizations who take the time to clearly define what they are trying to achieve, to align their organizations around a shared definition and approach, and stick with it through the ambiguity and uncertainty are the ones who produce valuable (though sometimes difficult to measure) results.

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

The post Organizational Psychology and Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

Navin Kunde has a knack for the bigger picture. Following the completion of his Engineering Ph.D., he took a position at Cessna Aircraft Company where he quickly learned that his sweet spot was working outside the lab on projects that were impactful at the intersection between business units and functions. Afterward, he was a consultant with the Corporate Executive Board for a few years gaining the global and cross-industry experiences that enabled him to return to industry work at Clorox with the skills and temperament to succeed. Now he focuses on the front-end of innovation, leading Clorox’s Open Innovation team

Getting inspired through purpose

Navin believes that the best solutions come from people inspired by purpose. “If you want to solicit ideas and get people jazzed about something, connecting their idea to a clear purpose or a cause is very powerful.”

In order to surface a deeper purpose, he moves beyond the specific idea a team may be considering and goes deeper into the core problem being solved. “It’s not just about getting to the right idea. It’s about the larger challenge. People are much more open to morphing their ideas, combining them with other people’s, and less likely to push back if they are focused on the problem that is being solved rather than just their idea.”

“It’s not just about getting to the right idea. It’s about the larger challenge.”

Beyond the 9 to 5

Even though we may still speak of jobs as nine-to-five, the nature of knowledge work is such that we are thinking about it 24/7 as we morph in and out of our personal, community, and career lives. “It’s very hard to come up with that extra motivation beyond daily work if you don’t have something else that is pulling you in. It can’t just be about the nine-to-five job. If it is, then you are leaving a lot of energy and passion on the table.” Giving people opportunities to make an impact by participating in passion projects adjacent to their everyday work is one way to inspire the extra energy that’s necessary to take an idea from paper to a product that can change the lives of consumers.

Innovent

At Clorox, these purpose-driven opportunities are made possible through a program called Innovent. Innovent is an internal, crowd-sourced ideation competition that involves participation from a third of the total employee pool. The competition seeks to turn the pattern of ideas-seeking-businesses on its head so that businesses seek ideas to overcome their challenges.

The Innovent process starts with an internal call for entries where businesses submit their current challenges for a chance at being selected for the competition. “We usually get 10 to 15 challenges that way. Then we narrow it down to three to four, because they have to be at the right level.”

Finding the right level of problem to solve involves a balancing act that Navin has honed over time. It begins with soliciting feedback on the problem from a new audience outside of the submitting business. “You have to find the right level of problem that gets people excited so they can quickly identify with the problem, come up with something interesting and compelling, and then people can build on it.” Challenges that are too narrow pose the problem of limiting a team’s ability to come up with a unique solution. Conversely, challenges that are too broad are hard to pinpoint and activate a team’s drive to solve.

Clorox uses a tool called Brightidea to communicate the 3–4 challenges being considered for Innovent and solicit feedback from the participant community. In selecting the appropriate challenge, Navin looks for factors like how enthusiastic the business is about actually implementing ideas that come from outside teams. “You weed out anybody who’s only interested in working on stuff that they come up with internally because it’s not going to go anywhere.”

In general, Navin looks for a group who submits their challenge with an attitude of curiosity and humility. That generally comes in the form of statements like, “Wow, we’re really hitting a wall here, but weknow there’s something there,” or “What do I know about what millennials want? I’m not a millennial.”

He helps teams narrow down broad challenges by offering buckets of solutions and honing in on what category of solutions a business might actually be able to implement. “It’s frustrating to put out a lot of your own personal time and energy into framing something up and finding out it’s out of scope. It’s our job to guide them and value their time and effort up front. Otherwise, the process will lose credibility.”

Challenges that are communicated out to the innovation community go through a commenting and discussion process. “We make sure that people from the business who submitted challenges are commenting but also other people. It’s open for anyone to comment and build on submitted ideas.”

Can’t disguise a hollow product

As someone who has a determined focus on identifying the right problem to solve and developing ideas, Navin finds the prevalence of well-marketed, mediocre ideas to be a frustrating trend in the digital space. “Mediocre marketing around a strong product always loses to strong marketing around a mediocre product.” This is especially true for some of the authors and thought leaders he’s connected with through his LinkedIn community whose strong ideas struggle to see light because they’re often side projects without a large budget for marketing. “It’s true even for actual CPG products. Sometimes, if it doesn’t take off right away, we dial back on the marketing spend.”

Clorox approaches this reality by ensuring that R&D and Marketing teams have a strong partnership. “Our marketing guys always tell us, ‘If you don’t have a strong product at the core, our marketing is just a shell. You better have a strong product and we’ll do our best to market it properly and tell the right story around it.’ If the shell is hollow, you can only market it well for so long before people find out, and you lose your reputation.”

“If the shell is hollow, you can only market it well for so long before people find out, and you lose your reputation.”

Navin shared the story of Clorox Disinfecting Wipes as a gap-fill product that wasn’t expected to be a top seller at its inception. “We didn’t put much marketing behind it because there were other products like this on the market, but the fact that it disinfected mattered to people. The fact that you could clean a kindergartner’s desk and reduce sickness by 40% mattered to people, so even though we didn’t see it, the product was so amazing, it just took off.”

Nurturing excitement and playfulness

Beyond helping teams find purpose in their innovation work, Navin believes it’s important to show appreciation and nurture playfulness. During our conversation, a colleague dropped in to confirm their lunch plans. They had recently worked on a project that had been postponed and Navin set up a lunch to show his appreciation for all her hard work.

“Innovation work is often a sidebar. It’s very personal when you are giving your own time and your energy and you’re working on something; it’s not just a paycheck. That passion and curiosity for making the world a better place…you can’t call up that playfulness on demand. You want to nurture that.”

Learning & the long game

Measuring innovation begins with first defining it. “A lot of it comes down to an internal belief that you’re solving the right problem. If you are solving the right consumer problem, and you have the conviction that this is a problem worth solving, then that itself, I think, leads to innovation. Now, sometimes the world is not ready for that solution, but if you are solving the right problem, eventually a solution like it will be successful.”

“Sometimes the world is not ready for that solution, but if you are solving the right problem, eventually a solution like it will be successful.”

While Navin believes that market success is one metric that should be considered, he sees success in a solid learning plan. “There are innovators out here whose success is the learning, not the dollars. Those innovators over time will come up with the thing that works, because eventually there will be that intersection that the learning is leading up to something that actually works in the market, and then it’ll take off.”

Navin, who lives in the Bay Area uses a sports analogy to illustrate his point. “Think about any team that’s been successful in the long-run, the Warriors basketball team, for example. The Phoenix Suns had this idea of a run-and-gun offense 10–12 years ago. They didn’t win a championship, but developed that concept of running fast and three-pointers and all that … now Steph Curry and the Warriors have won multiple championships with that same strategy. So even though the strategy didn’t work right off the bat, it didn’t get thrown away.”

Inventors vs. Innovators

Navin, who values learning, patience and humility, has found that working with inventors is an approach to innovation that lacks a few necessary elements. “Working with inventors is hard. Inventors sometimes can have unrealistic expectations of what it takes to take something to market.” The difficulty often lies in knowing the difference between a good idea and an executable idea.

“You can have a lot of people come up with ideas, but to actually get their idea to solve a problem that somebody’s willing to pay for takes a lot more effort.”

“You can have a lot of people come up with ideas, but to actually get their idea to solve a problem that somebody’s willing to pay for takes a lot more effort. A lot of inventors have unrealistic expectations that their idea is a billion dollar idea. I don’t know if it is or not. What problem is it trying to solve? What markets are we talking about here? You put some parameters around it and then they get frustrated because they think that’s your job to figure out. Then they want to be paid. Why am I going to pay anything? I don’t even know if this is something I want to work on.”

The invention versus innovation conundrum is at least as old as the story of the light bulb. A lot of people say that Edison invented the light bulb, but he actually didn’t invent it. He figured out how to make it marketable illustrating the point that the invention and the innovation are two different things. Invention is when you create it and prove that it works. Innovation is when you can extract value from that creation.

“If whatever we are working on is not actually helping the consumer, why are we working on it? What’s the point? That’s the question at the end of the day.”

“At Clorox, we are about “Making consumer lives better every day.” If whatever we are working on is not actually helping the consumer, why are we working on it? What’s the point? That’s the question at the end of the day. Making money and making margin is nice to have once you solve a problem that somebody’s willing to pay you for. Then the second piece of it is having a solution that’s easily available for the consumer. If you have something at a price point consumers can’t afford, then what’s the point? Innovation is delivering a solution to the consumer at the right quality, at the right price, in the right channels; it’s all these things.”

Curiosity and humility

The most important part of the innovation puzzle for Navin is accurately framing the problem before seeking a solution. “The problems keep morphing. They keep changing, and you’ve gotta keep an eye on that.” Once the problem is identified, Navin’s strategy is to seek external perspective and capability.

“It’s the idea that someone else out there is smarter, faster, cheaper, and better than you are. That combo of curiosity and humility to frame up the problem, be confident in your own approach, but seek external perspective and external capability as needed to build out the best solution for that problem is something that is very, very important ”

During the development of Burt’s Bees cosmetics, the company acknowledged up front they were a lip balm company with no cosmetics experience. So their strategy was to go outside the company and learn from experts in the space. “We humbly listened to outside experts and then we said ‘Okay, this is what we know from Burt’s Bees. This is what we know from outside. How can we connect those two together to come up with the best possible product?”

In the end, Navin thinks the greatest compliment he’s ever been given is that he and his team are very useful. “As a corporate innovator, that’s music to my ears because there are so many corporate innovation groups that are sort of in an ivory tower, working on something theoretical or that doesn’t matter to the business.”

He’s learned that with the right mix of curiosity and humility any company willing to put in the effort to properly identify the problem to solve can create useful solutions that improve lives.

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

The post Purpose, Curiosity, and Humility in Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.