5 Ways to Go Beyond Your Customers & Serve All of Your Stakeholders
Over the past several weeks, I’ve kicked off innovation projects with multiple clients. As usual, my clients are deeply engaged and enthusiastic, eager to learn how to finally break through the barriers their organizations erect and turn their ideas into real initiatives that generate real results.
Things were progressing smoothly during the first kick-off until a client asked, “Who’s my customer?”
I was shocked. Dumbfounded. Speechless. To me, someone who “grew up” in P&G’s famed brand management function and who has made career out of customer-driven innovation, this was the equivalent of asking, “why should I wear clothes?” The answer is so obvious that the question shouldn’t need to be asked.
Taking a deep breath, I answered the question and we moved on.
A few days later, the question was asked again. By a different client. In a different company. A few days later, it was asked a third time. By yet a different client. In yet a different company. In a completely different industry!
What was going on?!?!?
Each time I gave an answer specific to the problem we were working to solve. When pressed, I tried to give a general definition for “customer” but found that I spent more time talking about exceptions and additions to the definition rather than giving a concise, concrete, and usable answer.
That’s when it struck me – Being “customer-driven” isn’t enough. To be successful, especially in innovation, you need to focus on serving everyone involved in your solution. You need to be “stakeholder-driven.”
What is a customer?
According to Merriam-Webster, a customer is “one that purchases a commodity or service.”
Makes perfect sense. At P&G, we referred to retailers like WalMart and Kroger as “customers” because they purchased P&G’s products from the company. These retailers then sold P&G’s goods to “consumers” who used the products.
But P&G didn’t focus solely on serving its customers. Nor did it focus solely on serving its consumers. It focused on serving both because to serve only one would mean disaster for the long-term business. It focused on its stakeholders.
What is a stakeholder?
Setting aside Merriam-Webster’s first definition (which is specific to betting), the definitions of a stakeholder are “one that has a stake in an enterprise” and “one who is involved in or affected by a course of action.”
For P&G, both customers (retailers) and consumers (people) are stakeholders because they are “involved in or affected by” P&G’s actions. Additionally, shareholders and employees are stakeholders because they have a “stake in (the) enterprise.”
As a result, P&G is actually a “stakeholder-driven” company in which, as former CEO AG Lafley said in 2008, the “consumer is boss.”
How to be a stakeholder-driven organization
Focusing solely on customers is a dangerous game because it means that other stakeholders who are critical to your organization’s success may not get their needs met and, as a result, may stop supporting your work.
Instead, you need to understand, prioritize, and serve all of your stakeholders
Here’s how to do that:
- Identify ALL of your stakeholders. Think broadly, considering ALL the people inside and outside your organization who have a stake or are involved or affected by your work.
- Inside your organization: Who are the people who need to approve your work? Who will fund it? Who influences these decisions? Who will be involved in bringing your solution to life? Who will use it? Who could act as a barrier to any or all of these things?
- Outside your organization: Who will pay for your solution? Who will use your solution? Who influences these decisions? Who could act as a barrier?
- Talk to your stakeholders and understand what motivates them. For each of the people you identify by asking the above questions, take time to actually go talk to them – don’t email them, don’t send a survey, actually go have a conversation – and seek to understand they’re point of view. What are the biggest challenges they are facing? Why is this challenging? What is preventing them from solving it? What motivates them, including incentives and metrics they need to deliver against? What would get them to embrace a solution? What would cause them to reject a solution?
- Map points of agreement and difference amongst your stakeholder. Take a step back and consider all the insights from all of your stakeholders. What are the common views, priorities, incentives, or barriers? What are the disagreements or points of tension? For example, do your buyers prioritize paying a low price over delivering best-in-class performance while your users prioritize performance over price? Are there priorities or barriers that, even though they’re unique to a single stakeholder, you must address?
- Prioritize your stakeholder by answering, “Who’s the boss?” Just as AG Lafley put a clear stake in the ground when he declared that, amongst all of P&G’s stakeholders, that the consumer was boss, challenge yourself to identify the “boss” for your work. For medical device companies, perhaps “the boss” is the surgeon who uses the device and the hospital executive who has the power to approve the purchase. For a non-profit, perhaps it’s the donors who contribute a majority of the operating budget. For an intrapreneur working to improve an internal process, perhaps it’s the person who is responsible for managing the process once it’s implemented. To be clear, you don’t focus on “the boss” to the exclusion of the other stakeholders but you do prioritize serving the boss.
- Create an action plan for each stakeholder. Once you’ve spent time mapping, understanding, and prioritizing the full landscape of your stakeholder’s problems, priorities, and challenges, create a plan to address each one. Some plans may focus on the design, features, functions, manufacturing, and other elements of your solution. Some plans may focus on the timing and content of proactive communication. And some plans may simply outline how to respond to questions or a negative incident.
Yes, it’s important to understand and serve your customers. But doing so is insufficient for long-term success. Identifying, understanding, and serving all of your stakeholders is required for long-term sustainability.
Next time you start a project, don’t just ask “Who is my customer?” as “Who are my stakeholders?” The answers my surprise you. Putting those answers into action through the solutions you create and the results they produce will delight you.
Originally published on March 23, 2020 on Forbes.com
Intuition or Data: Which Leads to Better Innovation Decisions?
“We need more data.”
How many times have you heard this? How many times have you rolled your eyes (physically or mentally) and then patiently tried to explain that, when you’re doing something NEW, there is NO DATA.
There are analogous innovations, things that are similar in some ways that can be used as benchmarks, but nothing exactly like what you’re creating because nothing like it has existed before within your company.
As Innovators, we constantly balance our need for and comfort with gut decisions so we can move forward at speed with the broader organization’s need for data and certainty as a way to minimize risk.
But what role should intuition and data play in the early days of innovation?
This is exactly the question that my friend and former colleague, Nick Pineda, sought to answer in his thesis, “Are relevant experience and intuition drivers of success for innovation decision-makers? An interview-based approach”
Robyn: Hi Nick! Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. The topic you explore in your thesis is fascinating and something every innovator struggles with. I’m curious, what led you to decide to explore it?
Nick: Interestingly, the process of deciding what to write my thesis on actually inspired the topic itself.
For the capstone of my Masters program, we were told to do a consulting project but I had spent so many years in consulting that I wasn’t terribly excited about that prospect. One day, as I was walking to work, I felt this feeling in my gut that said, “Nick, this is not why you’re in the Masters program.” I shared this feeling with my professor and faculty advisor, and they were open to a different approach.
As we discussed what I could do, the same topic kept coming up – a lot of what is published about innovation, especially with Agile, is about measurement and that we need to have evidence before we take action. I don’t disagree with that but viewing things only through that lens kills the wisp of an idea that has the potential of becoming something amazing. Ultimately, we decided to focus my thesis on what happens on the front-end of the innovation process and whether intuition or evidence and data lead to success.
Robyn: And, what did you learn?
Nick: Two things, one that wasn’t surprising and one that was.
First, what wasn’t surprising is that innovation decision-makers have a really clear awareness about the role that gut feel or intuition, knowing without knowing how you know, play in their process.
Second, what was surprising, is that anyone who leans much more heavily in one direction versus another (data vs intuition), had many more failures, and struggled to process what they learned from those experiences and incorporate those learnings into future actions and decisions. Successful innovators know how to create a dance between their rational processes and their intuitive processes.
Robyn: It seems so, well, intuitive that using both intuition and data to make decisions will lead to better outcomes. However, so many innovators rely on intuition and so many companies require data, how can you encourage that “dance” that’s required for success?
Nick: You need to start small.
First with the person who’s innovating, to help them enter that inner space and recognize all the different ways that intuition can show up. It can manifest as a sensory experience, a change in temperature, even a color. It varies by person and by moment and the key is to recognize when it’s happening.
A simple way to create this awareness is to reflect on how you decide whether to trust someone. Every time you meet someone new, you have to quickly decide whether or not to trust the person. How do you do that? What is the feeling or sense that you get that leads to your decision? How often are you right?
Next, you need to create a language or process within the team to externalize the intuitive sense. In my research, I found examples of visionary leaders who were constantly able to use their intuitive sense, but their teams were constantly felt left out and wondering why they did all the work when the leader was just going to decide on gut. More successful teams were much more open about why, when, and how they were using their intuition, even specifically asking other team members to share their intuition in meetings.
Then, as leaders, we need to normalize the fact that we’re not always going to have precise evidence to know what the right call is and that we’re trusting what we’ve learned as leaders in this space to make a decision.
Robyn: That last point is really critical, leaders must role model the behavior they want to see and that includes using and communicating their intuition. Anything else pop up with respect to leaders and decision-making?
Nick: Ideally, leaders will go beyond normalizing the use of intuition to actively working to dismantle the organization’s bias against it.
Most organizations consciously or subconsciously, defer to the highest paid person or the most credentialed person in the room when making decisions. This is a highly rational behavior, but it doesn’t lead to the best decision. The reason is that it overlooks the fact that diversity of experience surfaces other data points and intuitive experiences that need to be part of the conversation to get to a better decision.
Innovation is a group experience and when intuition is allowed to show up in groups a group intelligence starts to manifest and the group makes better decisions.
Robyn: That’s quite a To-Do list for leaders and decision-makers:
- Manage your personal dance between intuition and data
- Normalize intuition by creating a language around it
- Create ways to tap into diverse experiences and intuition
Thanks so much for sharing these great insights, Nick!
Nick: My pleasure.
****
To learn more about intuition and innovation, Nick recommends that you:
READ:
- Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (Columbia Business School Publishing) by William Duggan Ph.D. (Paperback)
- Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer (Kindle Edition)
- The Senses: Design Beyond Vision by Ellen Lupton, Andrea Lipps
- The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram
- The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (CBC Massey Lecture) by Wade Davis
- The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness (Mariner Books) by A.R. Domasio,
- Intuition at Work (Double Day) by Gary Klein
WATCH or LISTEN TO:
- The Conversation Factory: Power, Ritual and Wayfinding with Larissa Conte
- Lightbulb Moment | Gary Klein | TEDxDayton
TAKE ACTION and Conduct an idea retrospective
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- Anchor on an idea
- Think back to a memorable innovation success or failure?
- What was the idea?
- Where did the initial idea come from?
- If you had to pick 1-2 of the most important decisions you had to make in the process of bringing this idea to life, what were those decisions?
- Did you use intuition?
- Intuition defined: Intuition is a process of rapidly recognizing things without knowing how we do the recognizing, which results in affectively charged (somatic, sensory, or emotional experience) judgements.
- To what degree was your process intuitive?
- To what degree were you aware of what your brain was doing to seek an answer / path forward?
- How did your intuition show up?
- Signals / Cues: What signals or cues did you have about which course of action to take or not to take?
- Knowing: How did the answer for which path forward to take “show-up” for you? Where were you? What did it feel like?
- Feeling: What did you feel during this process?
- Apply More Broadly
- In what ways is the way you explored your intuition in this case similar (or not) to other decisions you make in your life?
- How might you be more intentional about how to bring your personal brand of intuition into your innovation process?
- Anchor on an idea
Is Your Brain Friend or Foe? Make It Your Friend with Positive Intelligence
“If you spend a lot of time in your own head, you’re spending time in a bad neighborhood.”
I was deep in a bit of worry and self-doubt when my friend uttered that sentence. Immediately, my mind conjured an image of falling gown building, boarded up doors and windows, overgrown yards, and empty streets (basically downtown Cleveland in the 1980s).
“Man, I do not want to be here!” I said, probably a bit too loudly.
Everyone I know spends a lot of time in their bad neighborhoods. It’s a consequence of the world we live in – more demands, responsibilities, and expectations running into greater uncertainty, fewer options, and weaker safety nets.
There are lots of ways to spruce up our neighborhoods, cultivating a Growth Mindset is one. In his book, Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential and How You Can Achieve Yours, author and executive coach Shirzad Chamine, lays out a powerful framework and action plan to build your Positive Intelligence by increasing your PQ (Positive Intelligence Quotient).
Why Should I Care about Positive Intelligence?
Because research proves that a high PQ creates better results
- An analysis of more than 200 different scientific studies, which collectively tested more than 275,000 people, conduced that higher PQ leads to higher salary and greater success in the arenas of work, marriage, health, sociability, friendship, and creativity
- Salespeople with higher PQ sell 37% more than their lower-PQ peers
- Project teams managed by high-PQ managers perform 31% better
- Doctors with a high PQ make accurate diagnoses 19% faster
- People who demonstrated high PQ in their 20s (as evidence by journal entries) live, on average, 10 years longer
Better sales, better performance, better health, longer lives.
Seems like something worth learning more about.
What is Positive Intelligence and PQ?
Chamine defines Positive Intelligence as “an indication of the control you have over your own mind and how well your mind acts in your best interest.” Basically, what kind of neighborhood is your mind.
PQ, your Positive Intelligence Quotient, is “the percentage of your time your mind is acting as your friend rather than your enemy.” It’s expressed on a scale of 0 to 100 and research shows that a PQ of 75 (meaning your mind is your friend, or a good neighborhood, 75% of the time) is a tipping point. “Above it, you are generally being uplifted by the internal dynamics of the mind, below it you are constantly being dragged down by those dynamics.” 80% of teams and individuals score below the tipping point.
How you can increase your PQ
People with high PQs use one or more of the following 3 strategies:
STRATEGY 1 – Weaken your Saboteurs:
Saboteurs, also called Inner Critics, are the voices, beliefs, and assumptions in your head that work against you.
There are 10 and every person has at least two actively chattering away
- Judge: The “Master” Saboteur in everyone’s head. It constantly finds faults in you, others, your circumstances, and anything else it can get its hands on.
- Avoider: Focuses on the positive and pleasant to avoid dealing with difficult and unpleasant tasks, conflicts, and people.
- Controller: Takes charge, seeking to bend people to its will because it believes that the only way to get the best outcomes from people and situations is to control them
- Hyper-Achiever: Relies on constant external rewards, recognition, and praise as a way to feel self-respect and self-validation
- Hyper-Rational: Focuses on logic and reason as the sole means through which to understand people and situations, often leading to impatience or outright dismissal of anything or person deemed not logical
- Hyper-Vigilant: Sees threats in every moment and is constantly on guard and preparing for the worst-case scenario
- Pleaser: Seeks to gain acceptance and affection by constantly helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering others
- Restless: Searches for the next adventure, new thing, or adrenaline rush and distracts from the relationships and work that really matter
- Stickler: Needs perfection, order, and organization to such an extent that it makes everyone anxious and uptight
- Victim: Gains attention and affection by focusing on internal feelings, especially negatives ones
To weaken your saboteurs, first identify which one is currently active, then recognize the story its telling you (often, the story will seem helpful so this part is tricky), and then either call it out (“oh, it’s you again, making up stories) or thank it (“thank you for trying to keep me safe. I’ve got this.”)
STRATEGY 2 – Strengthen your Sage:
The Sage perspective is essentially the opposite of the Judge. Whereas the Judge finds everything that is (or could be wrong), the Sage accepts every single thing as a gift or opportunity.
OK, I know this sounds like some new-age woo, especially in the midst of COVID-19 and its impact on every single thing in our lives. Chamine’s C-Suite clients are skeptical of this too, which is why he teaches them the Three Gifts technique – write down the horrible thing then write down 3 ways it could turn out to be a gift or opportunity at some point in the future.
You can strengthen your Sage by using one (or more) of its 5 powers:
- Empathize: When strong feelings are involved and emotional reserves are running low, picture yourself, or the person or situation causing problems, as a small child and interact with it
- Explore: When the situation is complex or you want more information before making a decision, pretend to be a fascinated anthropologist and seek out info by asking questions
- Innovate: When the usual answers aren’t working, adopt an innovator’s mentality greet ideas with “yes….and….”
- Navigate: When faced with multiple options, “flash forward” and imagine yourself at some point in the distant future after having taken each path and consider how you feel in that future place
- Activate: When your Saboteurs are in control, preempt them by writing down everything they could say and recognize, respond, and thank it.
STRATEGY 3 – Strengthen your PQ brain
Your PQ brain is comprised of the middle prefrontal cortex, the right brain, the mirror neuron system, the ACC, and the Insular Cortex (these last three areas control your empathy reaction).
Strengthening your PQ brain is as “simple” as focusing all of your attention on your physical body and/or the experience of at least one of your 5 senses, for at least 10 seconds 100 separate times per day for 21 straight days
Yes, 100 times per days sounds like a lot, so Chamine offers some tip:
- During Daily routines, for example when you’re brushing your teeth, focus on the feeling of the toothbrush against your gums
- While working out
- Before or when you’re eating
- As you listen to music
- When you’re playing sports (including e-sports)
- Being with friends and family
Bottom Line
The data proves that Positive Intelligence has a real and tangible impact on your performance at work, in your relationships, and in life. This book contains a variety of case stories to show the power of Positive Intelligence in action. Even better, it offers an easy to understand framework and totally do-able approach to make Positive Intelligence work for you.
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To learn more about Positive Intelligence, visit Shirzad Chamine’s site here.
To buy the book, visit you can buy it from independent online bookstores Bookshop or IndieBound, or at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Innovation Starts with EPIC Conversations
Innovation doesn’t start with an idea. It starts with a problem. Sometimes those problems are easy to observe and understand but, more often, those problems are multi-layered and nuanced. As a result, you need a multi-layered and nuanced approach to understanding them.
You need to have EPIC Conversations.
EPIC stands for Empathy, Perspective, Insights, and Connection. As my clients have experienced, conversations rooted in these elements consistently produce unexpected, actionable, and impactful insights capable of getting to the root of a problem and shining a light on the path to a solution (and meaningful business results).
EMPATHY for the people with whom you’re talking
According to Brene Brown, empathy is connecting to the emotion another person is experiencing without requiring us to have experienced the same situation.”
For example, I have a friend who struggles to stay focused and deliver on deadlines. I can empathize with her because, while I have no problem focusing or delivering on deadlines, I know what it’s like to struggle with something that other people think is easy.
Take the time to connect with people’s emotions, to understand not just what they’re feeling but also why they’re feeling that way and to connect with the experiences in your life and work that led you to feel that way, too.
See things from their PERSPECTIVE:
When we’re working on something – a project, a product, even a task – it gets a great deal of our time, attention, and energy. But it can lead us to over-estimate how important the work is to others.
Instead, ask people about the topic you’re interested in AND all the topics and activities around it. Take the time to understand where the things you care about fall into your customers’ priority list
For example, when I worked on developing and launching Swiffer, all I thought about was cleaning floors. One day, we had to decide whether to source the hair for the dirt that would be used in product demos from people, yaks, or wigs. We obsessed over this decision, debating which hair would “resonate” the most with consumers. Turns out, consumers didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing the hair in the demo dirt, they only cared that it was picked up immediately by Swiffer.
Be open to INSIGHTS
Most people use conversations to get confirmation that their ideas and recommendations are good ones. They’ll spend time explaining and convincing and very little time listening. And they definitely don’t like surprises.
This is wrong. The most successful and impactful conversations as those in which you are surprised, in which you get an unexpected piece of information and has an insight, an “a-ha!” moment.
Years ago, while conducting research with people who self-identified as environmentalists, my team spoke with a woman who had the most sustainable house I’d ever seen. Everything was reused, recycled, or composted and they generated most of their own power. But, in the garage was a huge yellow HUM-V. It would have been easy to dismiss it as an anomaly, until we asked about the contradiction and she explained that the reason she owned a HUM-V was the same reason she and her family lived such a sustainable lifestyle: her highest priority was keeping her kids safe. At home, that meant doing everything possible to help the planet, but on the roads, that meant driving around in a tank.
CONNECT with the person you’re speaking with
It’s tempting to jump right into the conversation, to ask the questions that brought you together. But that’s like proposing on the first date – you’re not going to get the answer(s) you want.
The best conversations aren’t information transactions, they’re trust building exercises. Take time to get to know each other. Make small talk, talk about the traffic and the weather, share a bit about yourself and ask about them. Throughout the conversation, share a bit about yourself, commiserate over shared frustrations, and laugh at silly stories.
By sharing a bit about yourself, the person you’re talking to will share a bit of themselves, they’ll feel comfortable admitting to things that might not make sense, and to the feelings and rationalizations that drive their behaviors.
EPIC Conversations can happen with anyone anywhere from customers in focus group rooms to employees in conference rooms. You don’t need an executive mandate to have one, so have one today and let me know how it goes!
Originally published on February 10, 2020 on Forbes.com